Book Review: Unpaid
My "What I Read in July" post is beginning to approach Zitronic length, so I decided to split out the longer thoughts into separate posts. The first is Unpaid: The Past, Present and Future of Wage Theft, by Matthew Cole.
This was a book from my inaugural subscription to Verso Books' book club. The full title is Unpaid: The Past, Present, and Future of Wage Theft. Or rather, as stylised on the cover, Unpaid: Th Past, Prsnt, and Futur of Wag Thft. I presume that somewhere a greedy capitalist lounges with a bag full of "e"s.
The book first points out the endemic issue of conventional wage theft in the US, UK and China. It was shocking how common this is and how rarely enforcement happens. It's little wonder immoral bosses steal wages when there's practically no downside – even if action is taken against them any damages are far less than their ill-gotten gains.
We also get a grounding in Marxist ideas on wage theft and property. Capitalist profits are created by the difference between the value created by a worker and the value paid to them in wages. The justification touted is that the capitalist owns the resources a worker uses to create the value, but these resources were either maintained by force during the Feudal system, or were expropriated from the commons by force. Theft is justified by more theft.
There's also an interesting point about how modern work was born of the practice of slavery. The factory owners of the industrial revolution imported the techniques and methods employed by slave owners. Treating workers like machines became widely practised, directly descended from chattel slavery. This legacy extends to modern work too, especially in more manual work like warehousing and factories.
Domestic labour also goes unpaid. The book describes a distinction between production and social reproduction – one I've not seen before. Social reproduction is the continuation of society, all the material and immaterial requirements to carry on living at the standard we do. Production is the part of social reproduction handling the continuation of our material surroundings. Other areas are distribution (e.g. marketing, sales), social maintenance (e.g. domestic work, caring), and consumption (buying goods and services).
Only production directly creates "value", in the sense of commodities. Other aspects of social reproduction which are required and desirable – such as domestic work – don't get commodified under the capitalist system. I think this is quite a good example of the limits of capitalist economy. People doing vital, necessary work to the good of us all go completely unpaid.
The chapter on Technoligarchy, a portmanteau to describe the current big-tech-dominated era, was interesting. Cole writes a lot about platform capitalism and the gig economy. Platforms like Uber or Deliveroo use legal chicanery to define their workers as "independent contractors", using this fiction to evade paying a living or even a minimum wage. The tactics used to optimise the amount of money stolen are utterly disgusting. I was especially appalled at wage discrimination, using the surveillance built in to the platforms to automatically drive down worker wages and drive up customer prices.
Technoligarchy also contained a critique of Yanis Varoufakis' Technofeudalism, which I read before I decided I needed to write more. Varoufakis argues that platforms are valuing monopolistic rents over profits from being competitive, thus transitioning away from capitalism to a more feudal system. As we all pay "cloud" rent for access to cloud platforms, we all become "cloud serfs". As technology seeps ever further into all aspects of the economy, this grows stronger and stronger, leaving us all at the mercy of a gang of tech landlords.
Cole contends that the idea of "cloud serfdom" at present is largely based on consumption, not production, so feudalism is not an appropriate system. In The Mechanic and the Luddite, Sadowski also goes to bat against Varoufakis, on the grounds that "'twas ever thus". Varoufakis' conception of capitalism based on competition without monopolies has never been the case, and the exact characteristics of Capital's stranglehold on us does not stop it being capitalism. There were rentiers before capitalism and rentiers for its entire duration.
I agree more with Cole and Sadowski, I think. I found Technofeudalism quite compelling, but always a doubt lingered. With more time and reading this doubt has grown to disagreement. There was never a "good, competitive capitalism" to be subsumed into feudalism. Even if capital wasn't founded in feudal inequality, monopolies are the end state of capitalism without government regulation. Extracting rents instead of profits has always been the end goal of capitalists.
Coming back to Unpaid, the book ends with some visions of alternatives to the current wage system. A minimalist change would be to actually enforce laws against wage theft and empowering unions to ensure all get fair pay for their work. This shouldn't be considered radical. Growth is harmed by inequality. Wealth hoarded by the rich sits in offshore accounts, while wealth redistributed among the working classes is spent and boosts the economy. If you want growth, you should support wealth taxes, fair pay, and other means of separating billionaires from the hoards.
The maximalist changes pass through several socialist ideas of abolishing waged labour. The most interesting part to me was a discussion of Chile under Allende, where there was actually some progress towards bottom-up distribution of resources based on need. Of course, Thatcher and Reagan couldn't be having that, and the regime was short-lived.
Overall I found this a very interesting read. It did have an issue of dryness at times, especially when describing alternative systems based on labour tokens. I think this shortcoming is inevitable when discussing political economy, though. The style is very readable and clear, and there's a lot to think about in there.