EDITORIAL PERSPECTIVES - WINTER 2000-2001 (continued)

This would be a genuinely world-class educational system for our multi-cultured children! What would it take to force our society to earmark resources sufficient to accomplish this goal? What kind of society, indeed, needs to be forced to do this?

The final example is another current hot topic: the online music trading company, Napster, and its practice of allowing users to download and play music that has been acquired through trading MP3 files (compressed uploads of commercial CDs). In effect, CDs can be freely copied and reproduced via the Internet. A Reuters story (May 19) carries the headline "Online Piracy -- Where's the Middle Ground?", which characteristically reveals both the limitation of vision and the sense of tradeoff between evils. At this writing, Napster is being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America, in the context of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the parties to the suit are poised on the brink of a legal nightmare, including issues concerning the privacy rights of users, definition of "piracy," etc. There appears to be an insoluble conflict between the rights of users of music where reproduction of the music is costless, and those of the producers and owners of the music.

Now this is a particular instance of something much more general, and profoundly subversive of capitalist property: the existence of goods that can be reproduced at zero marginal cost. For anyone other than the original producers of the product (composers, musicians, owners of recording facilities), both average and marginal cost (here, perhaps contrary to the inclinations of the SLP's Robert Bills, I draw upon concepts from mainstream social science) are zero. In this situation, competitive pricing will drive the price to zero, and the quantity to the point of saturation (unconstrained maximum utility from consumption of the product). In layperson's terms: the product is distributed free of charge, and individuals acquire for consumption the absolute amount they desire, without limitation by prices and income. In Marx's terms: to each according to need! Modern electronic technology is forcing a little bit of communist distribution down the throats of its capitalist owners -- who are, to say the least, not ready for this eventuality. (It need hardly be said that Napster is making money hand over fist from advertising and other fees, and has no interest in promoting radical visions of unconstrained bliss from music consumption.)

Now the question arises: how will the artists be compensated? (There is not a little hypocrisy at work here. The music industry is about as concerned for the fate of the "artists" as the wolf is concerned for the fate of the sheep; but that is yet another story.) And once again, there is a radical answer: don't "compensate" the artists; support them!

If the industry tries to charge users, by exacting payment for downloads, say, in a situation where duplication of the product is costless, it will engender an "arms race" of bypass and circumvention technology, countered by a welter of artificial protections -- a process that is a bit like trying to build sand barriers against the incoming tide. Instead, consider the possibility of paying musicians an annual wage, from public funds. To acquire professional musician status and access to this wage, individual artists must go through a process of candidacy in some sort of Union of Musicians. (This again involves democracy and the possibility of political abuse, but I never said there were ready-made solutions.) Above some basic minimum wage, income of musicians might be increased, in increments, in proportion as downloads occur, up to some maximum limit. The users, to repeat, get the music for free; there is no direct link between user payment and producer income.

Question: would musicians continue to produce their music, given the security of a guaranteed income, but absent the possibility of acquiring vast wealth? (Do real artists need to be "compensated" for practicing their art?) Another question: how would the music itself be affected?

Now think about the passage of time and the continued advance of electronic technology: might not the sphere of production in which marginal costs are zero (or, what is the same thing, close to zero) be gradually extended? Can we foresee a time when all labor has become like the "labor" of making music?

Until we are able to break the link between labor and income, we will never know what all of the products of human labor have the potential to become.

Questions lead to questions. Eventually, answers will begin to emerge, including progressive, if incomplete, resolutions to all sorts of quintessentially practical problems that arise in the dailiness of life in a capitalist society.

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This issue leads off with an essay by the well-known Marxist intellectual and literary historian, Alan Wald, concerning the impact of Harold Cruse on thinking about the relation between African Americans and Jewish Americans on the left in the United States. Anything but literature-for-literature's-sake, Wald's study has as a major premise the claim that the literary heritage of the left is vital, not only because it is suppressed and marginalized in the mainstream, but also because it provides an unparalleled source of insight into areas of political and social reality that are missed in the conventional documentary approach to history. Thus, the novels and stories emerging from the labor and anti-racist struggles of the 1930s and beyond grapple with real issues of feelings and relationships that affected the course of actual events, and that bring to light still-unresolved problems of implicit racism, of relations between left intellectuals and non-intellectual workers, of relations between women and men, and, of course, between whites (including Jewish Americans) and people of color.

The novels help us get beyond simplistic "heroic" fables of unity and solidarity, which sometimes mar left literary writing; they reveal the enormous complexity of the work of building movements against capitalist power, in a context of dominant capitalist culture, and show that divisions among working people stemming from cultural and ethnic difference cannot be simply wished away. They also, however, refute the simplistic positions on the other side -- as exemplified by Cruse's influential Crisis of the Negro Intellectual -- that indulge in insupportable generalizations about the "arrogance" and domineering roles of Jewish Communists, or claims that Black Communist cultural workers were naively "integrationist" and insensitive to the precise historical and psychological features of their own communities. Wald's essay is a long-overdue, and painstakingly careful, re-examination of all this. And, besides providing an important critique of Cruse and the literary canon inspired by him, it also -- if its effect on this Editor is any indication -- makes the reader want to take time off and read all of those wonderful and important, and sometimes neglected, writers!

Capitalist triumphalism sometimes takes on the abstract guise of neoliberal market ideology, and at other times appears in the form of championing of one or another specific solutions to the "social problem," as exemplified in one or another historical location. Scandinavia and Japan, for example, have both in their turn been touted as the "models" for successful capitalist development, and both models have subsequently been eclipsed. In his paper "On Two 'Models' of Capitalism," philosopher John Rosenthal addresses the contrast between "Anglo-Saxon" and "Rhenish" versions of capitalism, the former involving a weak safety net and corresponding misery at the lower levels, while the latter -- Germany here is the case in point -- provides generous social welfare and pensions. "Rhenanophiles" such as Michel Albert promote the German model. They fail to note, however, that the necessary control of the social costs of surplus population accomplished in "Anglo-Saxon" capitalism by means of starvation and ultimately Malthusian remedies is carried out in the "Rhenish" model by defining a "national community" with an ethnic-linguistic foundation, and excluding all others from the protections afforded to the "nation's" workers. Thus, "foreigners" in Germany -- and the term includes not only guest workers from outside but even the children and grandchildren of "non-German" workers born inside the country -- have restricted rights and access to social benefits, and are also subject to possible expulsion from the country.

Rosenthal describes the recent changes in German immigration and citizenship laws, and shows that these changes do not address the heart of the matter: the imposition of superior and inferior statuses based on "national" definitions. Capitalism, evidently, must impose fundamental insecurity on its working populations, by means of one mechanism or another.

The paper by Miguel Teubal, "Structural Adjustment and Social Disarticulation: The Case of Argentina," describes a similar process under way in a third-world context. "Disarticulation" occurs whenever wage earners are de-linked from the core economic mechanism, and form an increasingly marginal part of demand for goods, as a result of rising rates of exploitation and worsening income distribution. It is both "social" and "sectoral"; it occurs in both developed and underdeveloped contexts. The concept offers a new way of organizing thinking about particular capitalist experiences, and Teubal recounts the political and economic history of Argentina in its light. His data are intriguing -- and sobering.

Finally, the "Communications" section contains the second half of the symposium on "Marx, Hegel, and Dialectics," occasioned by John Rosenthal's earlier article, "The Escape from Hegel" (S&S, Fall 1999). The first half, which appeared in our Fall 2000 issue, offered contributions from Michael Williams, Maria Turchetto and Paul Diesing. In this issue we present further critiques by Tony Smith and José Arthur Giannotti, together with Rosenthal's reply to all five. No attempt will be made here to summarize or evaluate this enormously complex (and ongoing) discussion, except to observe that -- as one might predict -- those who feel that Hegel is, overall, to be embraced rather than escaped from have not convinced Rosenthal, the quintessential escapee, of the correctness of their position! An observer from outside the Hegel canon might well hope for some sort of eventual transcendence of this divide, in which we can use Hegel, and Marx, and dialectics, to grasp the contradictoriness, relationality and qualitative novelty of many natural and social processes, without doing violence to precise conceptualization, logic, and rules of argument.

D.L.

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