THE AGE OF SPECULATIVE CAPITAL AND GLOBAL CIRCULATION FIGHTS (5)

by Achim Szepanski

​The 9/11 event gave the governments of the leading countries the unexpected opportunity to place security as an absolute priority of their policies. Increasing inequality in income and wealth distribution, the dismantling of the welfare state and the increasing dependence of households on loans have been drowned out by the security campaigns of the states, while at the same time there has been some softening in the consolidation of budgets, because more of them are in the institutions national security should be invested. This had to be followed by further cuts in the welfare state and further easing of households' access to credit. As mortgage lending increased to some low-income earners, the growth of bad debts inevitably increased.

​The so-called privatized Keynesianism by increasing the issuance of consumer credit led on the one hand to the fact that these loans were fed into the processes of securitization and the creation of synthetic derivatives (CDO), on the other hand, resources were freed up for the development of the security state. This expansion was then not only due to the need for an anti-terrorist war, but also to the so-called refugee problem, which was quickly accompanied by the militarization of the external borders and the tightening of asylum laws in Europe and the United States. Whereas, before the financial crisis, the projects of the governments of the leading countries were even more geared to supporting certain sections of the population in their quest to increase the value of their human capital, thus, after the financial crisis, the austerity policy intensified and the state turned on a massive scare against refugees.

​As a result of shareholder pressure and emerging globalization, large companies began to outsource parts of their activities as early as the 1980s (through subcontracts, temporary employment contracts, and foreign direct investment), but there was also an internal reorganization of companies. The company has been replaced by a modular organization that contains relatively autonomous components concentrated around projects with a limited period of time and is now giving birth to a precariat whose members have access to fixed-term jobs, with no prospect of social improvement. However, on the part of those affected, they quickly realized that flexibility and availability should become the basic conditions for further dreary employment.)

Feher comes at the end of the book a little more detail on the Share Economy and the fighting on their fronts to speak. In contrast to the classical liberals, who see the market as a neutral space where traders and customers freely execute their transactions, the reality is different, because the digital interfaces that are today called platforms control and monitor the work all at once new labor market and set the number of service providers. The drivers Uber allows to pick up passengers are under strict control and are forced to follow the platforms' algorithms. The routes they take are dictated by the GPS, while their efficiency, availability, and interaction with the passengers is the subject of constant assessments that determine how, when and where the driver is used.

The drivers do not act as employees but as private contractors. Far from offering an alternative to precarious work, platform service providers commute between conditions of wage labor and the risk of self-employment, as well as depriving the platforms of any social security contributions. For many theorists, the big platforms are nothing but interconnected commercial contracts between a "principal authority" that can sign contracts on behalf of the company and a multiplicity of agents that value the company's capital. The platforms thus multiply partnerships based on purely commercial encounters and offering services without regulated employment contracts. (However, a number of companies in various industries are still unable to produce without employing hired workers.) Providers of services using platform offerings are affected by the repression of wage labor, but also by those with their accompanying guarantees. Thus, they seem to represent the epitome of neoliberal subjects.

​Ultimately, however, they are not dependent on their own work, but on their involvement in a network of connections, meaning that the exploitation of their labor resources and their risk management depend on the credit that they must necessarily accumulate. Promoting their self-marketing skills requires constant positive feedback from customers, which are reflected in scores, likes, friends, and followers, and tweaking those ratings is the first thing to do. The accumulation of "reputational capital", which must necessarily include an efficient credit score, serves to gain the trust of banks and insurance companies. The sustainability of service providers' operations depends much more on sponsor approval than on the entrepreneurial ethos or human capital claimed by neoliberal ideologues.

On their web pages, where providers and customers can connect, the platforms assign their users a specific set of continuously valued assets, which they must combine, move and manage as part of their "reputational capital". Some theoreticians in the management of "reputational capital" already see a major resource that the actors have to manage and cultivate in order to ascend or simply survive. Everyone will eventually have to run a Facebook hyper page that lists various referrals from friends, mentors, lenders, sponsors, customers, and service providers. These open, algorithmically designed portfolios, according to Feher, make it possible to express a person's attractiveness and trustworthiness, determine their reputational value, and thus demonstrate their ability to perform a task, line of credit, or partnership. The private asset managers must now speculate on their own "reputational capital" or follow the speculation of others on it.

For the Resistance, this means combining the social safeguards still enjoyed by wage laborers with the autonomy that users of platforms possess to develop new win-win strategies. Therefore, in the precarious battles, it is not enough simply to demand the status and safeguards of wage laborers, but to try to take over existing platforms or to found new ones in order to introduce new rules and games. In counter-speculation files, the conditions of valorization of assets and credit allocation (by governments) must be fundamentally changed. The early trade union movement has often argued that, because of the validity of the law on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the struggle for higher wages implies a moment beyond the safeguarding of the workers' costs of reproduction. And if Uber & Co's service providers go to court to acknowledge their activities as pay-based employment, the strategic concern is not primarily to sue for the status of wage-laborer, but the collapse. These brands and platforms, whose model is to attract independent contractors and generate returns from them. The battles of contingent platform workers are still in their infancy.

The new neo-liberal strategies, which rely on the integration of debtors into the financial circuits, allow increasingly nationality, race and flexibility to be considered as criteria for evaluation, thus opening the door to a new populism. The propaganda of the free movement of goods and capital, and to a conscience moment also of the people, which allegedly leads to a peaceful international community, assumed that it comes to hybridization of knowledge and skills to the successful competition under the observation of investors. Meanwhile, the governments propagandize no longer fear a world without borders. Instead, allegedly, border controls are being tightened daily due to terrorism and unbridled flows of refugees, economic patriotism is ramping up, and local people are being asked to recognize their national identity as a valuable part of their human capital. Without even the slightest effort to regulate monetary capital movements, governments are attempting to ignore the popularity of their policies (due to governance, which is mainly concerned with the stock market value of companies and thus an asset that markets can speculate on) by appealing to the fear of "migratory invasions" and increasingly to the restoration of trade protectionism. Governments' efforts to increase the per capita value of a nation's human capital serve to create governance that satisfies the interests of financial investors, who are concerned only with the usability of their assets. The own territory must be woven by the governments into a financially-friendly climate, in order to be able to spend government bonds for a not too high interest rate, and for that very reason also the austerity policy must be continued necessarily. At the same time, the productivity of their own populations must be mobilized by increasing flexibility, skills and availability, criteria that make a population financially attractive.

translate by Dejan Stojkovski

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non.copyriot