Here’s a partial defense of “the gig economy”:
The people I know and encounter who are broke are usually, for one reason or another, blocked from getting “normal” office jobs. Often they have a disability that makes that hard or impossible. Or they never got the educational credentials. Sometimes there are mysterious reasons (personality friction, the wrong class markers, etc) why the System just doesn’t work for them.
In another world, that could easily have been me. I had a very privileged upbringing and my brain stuff happens to be fairly mild. But I can see very clearly how it could happen if a few things had gone wrong.
Theoretically, people who are in this position could get social services, but a lot of the time that isn’t the most practical thing in the world. If you were good at bureaucracy you wouldn’t be here in the first place.
So, what I see people doing is a lot of freelancing, of various sorts; some sex work; some “serial entrepreneur” stuff; part-time jobs working for their friends; coding bootcamps sometimes. And a lot of help from family or partners or friends.
The fewer formal barriers, in terms of bureaucracy and credentialing and interviewing, it takes to get dollars into your pocket, the better.
And a lot of this stuff is illegal or is stuff people are eager to make illegal. You want to sit at home, sew your own dolls, and sell them on the internet? There is a doll cartel that will stop you! I kid you not.
The progressive response is going to be something like “Well, we should implement policies that provide better for the unemployed or underemployed.” Ok, but until you do that, people need solutions that work for them now.
“The fewer formal barriers”? Which average does Uber deactivate people at again? 4.3? 4.6?
Every progressive attack on the gig economy that I have seen doesn’t just mention a need for better social services and a more secure living, it points out that the gig economy works hand in hand with the destruction of the welfare state.
I am as annoyed as you are with the dogmatic leftist asshats that don’t at all see its benefits to the marginalized - just as the rapacious Industrial Revolution did help empower many - but libertarians should stop pretending that the gig economy is *about* “sharing” and warm fuzzy community interactions. It is so successful because many workers are put over the barrel, so those who profit most from it have clear incentives to keep the situation this way.
I agree that the traditional welfare state and the gig economy aren’t that compatible but the exact mechanisms of that “hand in hand” relationship should really be examined more deeply as it’s really relevant to know which is causing which. If the gig economy is destroying the welfare state it’s a completely different thing than if it’s just an adaptation to a situation where something else is destroying the welfare state, and most likely I’d guess that it’s a mix of both as the gig economy provides something else an excuse to keep destroying the welfare state as people are better able to survive despite said destruction thanks to the gig economy.
This is also what I perceive to be the biggest flaw of most of the traditional progressive attacks on the gig economy as they all too often (at the very least appear to) claim that the gig economy is the causative agent in the destruction of the welfare state, completely forgetting that before the modern gig economy emerged they were talking about evil neoliberal policies destroying the welfare state. In Finland I would time this tipping point at the early 90′s when the big-ass depression caused by amateurish attempts at first-worldizing combined with the collapse of the most important trading partner (to which Finland’s relationship had in some ways been almost paradoxically colonialistic, with the USSR providing raw material and export markets and finnish industries reaping the rewards; what this says about their respective economic systems is left as an exercise for the reader) and a situation where the relatively unique bilateral trade with the USSR had left them unable to compete as effectively in western markets, was responded to by austerity and structural changes decried as neoliberalism ever since, until the gig economy arrived and everyone seemed to start blaming Uber instead of liberals (in the european meaning of the word) overnight.
For that reason, I’m relatively skeptical that the gig economy could’ve acausally induced the process of the destruction of the welfare state roughly 20 years before its arrival. That’s a bit too basilisky, or alternatively it should be considered a rather non-agenty idea in the same way as people expecting renewable energy sources to become commercially viable if initially subsidized enough, makes them subsidize renewable energy and the resulting investments could contribute to making renewables profitable earlier than otherwise, or people thinking that nuclear weapons might be pretty powerful makes them develop nuclear weapons.
Thus, I think attacking the gig economy is at best a derailment from the actual important question: what are the good things we think we used to have but don’t have anymore, and why aren’t we having them anymore, and how could we actually get them. In this framework focusing on the gig economy makes about as much sense as grumbling about how “our superpower could’ve totally kicked their superpower’s ass if only these evil mean nuclear weapons hadn’t been invented and it’s so unfair”.
The thing I care about is “why did the welfare state fail?”, not “whom can we blame?”, and most importantly: “can we un-fail it in a novel way that would be resistant to the original causes of failing?”. There is a reason why the traditional welfare state failed and not having enough naive progressive thinkpieces complaining about Uber (even though Uber is evil, not challenging that, and I’m switching to Lyft the moment I can get around their phone number bullshit) is not that reason. One reason, and a pretty important one in my opinion, is the utter inflexibility of the traditional welfare state.
I’ve spent years in the limbo between different forms of welfare because the system in Finland is utterly unable to deal with lives and people that don’t fit in the DIN-standardized scripts it expects, and in the end my solution was to fuck it all and move to San Francisco when an extremely unlikely opportunity presented itself. The Social Bureaucratic Party has earned a place of special contempt in my steel heart (only shared by the Christian Theocrats who, unlike their continental mainstream conservative namesakes, are actual honest-to-YHWH paternosteralists who say they love trans people and that’s why they find it so important to exterminate us and we just don’t understand how the boot on our necks is a boot of love but fortunately Jesus is willing to waste all of his kindness on us ingrates) for its love for means-tested welfare and patronizing social programs. Compared to being killed with utterly incompetent and condescending forms of kindness, the brutally honest “no, we really don’t give a shit about the precariat” of the right is quite refreshing in comparison.
In the big picture the gig economy is just a part of a larger pattern of impersonal economic forces crushing the less adaptive and efficient opposition of welfare states that were designed for the rather unique post-war situation of hierarchies, megacorporations married to the government, and expectations of job security approaching medieval serfdom. In that sense it could be said that the difference between 1950′s USA and USSR is substantially lesser than the difference between 1950′s and 2020′s USA. We tried the fifties, it stopped working (and never did work that well in the first place, for many people), and now we need to try something stronger.
The obvious first place to try would be to remove at the very least all forms of corporate and most forms of personal welfare and to simply replace them with a big-ass UBI and a dramatically simplified tax code. If Uber is exploiting desperate workers, let’s see what happens if we remove the desperation instead of the Uber, and if the new flexibility of the gig economy is a godsend of productivity and freedom, why not enable it further by removing its obstacles?
I fully expect most reasonable libertarians to agree that this plan, assuming that the total effective public spending is kept static (ignoring mechanisms which make two variations of implementing the same end result seem dramatically different depending on whether people are paid a negative income tax, or a basic income which is then taxed away, because those differences are totally fake), is at the very least strictly superior to anything any country has now; and with an inside view from the precariat I can definitely say that all non-evil leftists should think so as well (the ones who just want to loot the working classes and value-creators of today to benefit the peculiar petite bourgeoisie of redwashed rentiers who, in their inability to create value to justify their comparably comfortable status, resort to exploiting their established political capital to try to maintain an artificially ironclad position above the lumpenproletariat until economic changes undermine their safety enough to deliver them to the underclass hell of their own creation, can just go do something anatomically impossible alongside the crony capitalist conservatives who differ in only wanting to replace the “petite” with good old “haute”).
Most importantly, it’s an actionable strategy that could deliver better outcomes than before instead of trying to bring back something that we have reasonably good (in amoral terms) reasons to have lost in the first place.
4 months ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower #not deliberately making a political manifesto #you can probably guess which one was responsible #for wanting to build a coalition of libertarians and lumpenproletariat #I know this isn't what petite bourgeoisie strictly means #but it's such a good negatively connotated name for people I don't like #so I'm recycling it onto such people for aesthetic reasons · 149 notes · source: allfeelsallthetime · .permalink
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