New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

North Carolina Repeals and Replaces HB 2

As you probably have heard, in a flurry of activity yesterday, the North Carolina legislature repealed and replaced its omnibus LGBT-hate law, HB 2.  The state was clearly moved to act by an NCAA deadline (repeal by Thursday, or no championships until 22) and an AP report earlier in the week that said the law would cost the state $3.7 billion over ten years.  Almost no one is happy with the new measure, particularly LGBTQ advocates.  The replacement law indeed eliminates the restriction on trans bathroom access, though it allows harassment of trans people under “indecency” laws.  It does not, however, as many of its advocates (who are being parroted by national media like NPR as I type this) claim “reset” the state to its pre-HB 2 status.  The replacement bill also locks into place an explicit refusal to offer employment and other civil rights protections to LGBTQ individuals in state law, and it forbids other governmental entities in the state (cities, schools, universities) from going further either on bathroom access or other employment laws.  Two clauses of the very short bill accomplish this.  Section 2 says:

"State agencies, boards, offices, departments, institutions, branches of government, including The University of North Carolina and the North Carolina Community College System, and political subdivisions of the State, including local boards of education, are preempted from regulation of access to multiple occupancy restrooms, showers, or changing facilities, except in accordance with an act of the General Assembly.”

Section 3, which is staggeringly broad if you read it literally (the literal read was apparently not intended by those who  wrote it) says that “No local government in this State may enact or amend an ordinance regulating private employment practices or regulating public accommodations.”  At the very least, cities like Charlotte are prohibited from enacting LGBTQ protective ordinances like the one HB 2 struck down.  Hence we have not returned to the status quo.  The law does sunset in 2020, but of course the legislature would be free to push that into the indefinite future.

I don’t have a lot to say here on the bill itself, because it clearly does not put the state where it ought to be.  Refusing to protect gender non-conforming individuals from discrimination is a disgrace.  It’s also bad policy to ban municipalities from raising the minimum wage (an aspect of all this that was explicitly in HB 2 and which remains under section 3, despite it getting almost no media attention), though I won’t make that case here.  It might or might not even bring the NCAA back.  I also am still not sure that it would survive a Romer-based challenge, since the clear intent is to freeze-out employment discrimination protection for LGBTQ people. 

I do want to note one thing that’s not getting a lot of press.  In signing the bill, Democratic Governor Cooper said that “In a perfect world, with a good General Assembly, we would have repealed HB2 fully today, and added full statewide protections for L.G.B.T. North Carolinians.”  In this he is absolutely right.  The NC legislature has been on a far right crusade for years and is desperate to hang on to political power as a way to continue that process.  They do that through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and efforts to control local election boards.  As I noted in the linked post above, more people voted Democrat than Republican in North Carolina in both 2012 and 2014.  And yet somehow the Republicans have veto-proof majorities in both houses of the legislature.  That outcome ought to be unacceptable because it says quite clearly that the legislature lacks democratic legitimacy.  A lot of December’s attempt to make election boards Republican has been struck down.  There is litigation pending, including a 4^th Circuit decision that said the most recent legislative maps target minority voters with “surgical precision,” and a pending order to have statewide elections in 2017 under new maps (the state has appealed this to the Supreme Court).  If the Courts get around to striking down all of this, things might get better.  But in many respects, the HB 2 debacle is also a symptom of a deeper failure of governance and democratic legitimacy.

Do Brands Produce Value? Thoughts on de-fetishizing use value

Brands are of increasing importance to capitalism.  As an insightful book by Franck Cochoy argues, this is part of the logic of commodification, which generates a perpetual demand for product differentiation.  At the point that a product becomes a commodity – i.e., at the point that it leaves the bazaar, where individual vendors measure out products like food in bulk to individual customers, and enters the process of circulation in a capitalist market – it becomes necessary to distinguish commodities from one another.  This is because the initial process of commodification first produces a necessary standardization (where weights, notions of what a given product name signifies, etc. become more uniform – in Marxian terms, where exchange value becomes measurable and money becomes the primary way by which one measures equivalence between commodities whose use value is presumed equivalent), from which producers then have to distinguish their commodities.  This demand for differentiation generates packaging, brands, trademark, and the final detachment of commodities from brands, such that brands have value that can be applied to other commodities.  A good literature from anthropology and cultural studies illustrates this process with such products as “quality” salmon, canola oil, and teak.

There is currently a lively debate in the context of the internet about whether brands actually produce (surplus) value in the Marxian sense.  The pro side is represented in a recent piece by Adam Arvidsson and Elanor Colleoni, who argue that standard Marxian notions of labor apply poorly to the generation of value in places like social media, because the Marxian notion of labor is too tightly connected to time spent laboring.  Instead, and following Negri specifically and autonomist Marxism more generally, they claim that “in effect, social media platforms like Facebook function as channels by means of which affective investments on the part of the multitude can be translated into objectified forms of abstract affect that support financial valuations” (146).  That is, prosumers produce surplus value by means of affective investment in brands (it is perhaps worth pointing out that this argument is not confined to theories about information; for a similar argument from the anthropology literature, see this piece), and this unremunerated attachment is harvested by social media companies as surplus value.

In a critique of Arvidsson and Colleoni’s claim that brands produce value, Jakob Rigi and Robert Prey argue that affect “does not produce new value but instead helps the owner of the brand to appropriate a larger portion of the surplus value produced by workers in the realm of production” (400).  They identify three primary ways this happens: (1) by allowing brand owners to increase demand for their commodity at the expense of other commodities, enabling them to sell their commodities at prices above their value; (2) by allowing brand owners to extract monopoly rents in the form of intellectual property licensing; and (3) by allowing speculative value and what Marx calls “fictitious capital” to attach to the brand via the stock market.  I want to take a closer look at the first claim here, because it comes across to me as mistaken.  At the very least, it seems to me to require more argument than Rigi and Prey supply to defeat the supposition that brands create value, even if Arvidsson and Colleoni aren’t quite right to speak in terms of affective labor (though I’m going to defend at least a version of that claim below; part of my goal here is to be able to define it more precisely.  As I’ve suggested in the context of big data (see also here), I think that the surplus value discussion here is incomplete without reference to primitive accumulation).

Squaring the Circle on Big Data, Class, Value and Primitive Accumulation

A recent paper by Hamid Ekbia presents an interesting Marxian theory of the relation between exploitation and computer networks.   The paper is intended as an intervention in to discussions of the accumulation of value in what is now called cognitive capitalism (I’ve attempted to synthesize some of that literature here).  The most interesting part of the Ekbia’s paper seems to me that he’s able to construct a coherent notion of class (or close to class – he acknowledges that it’s not quite a class in the strict Marxian sense) within those who are part of the networked economy.  In particular, he is able to locate those who are exploited and to roughly define them as a group: the “condensers.”  The problem of locating a specific exploited class is important and salient partly because there is no way for a Marxian theory of value to work unless somebody is exploited, but also because the behavior of prosumers in particular has been the subject of intense controversy, particularly on the subject of whether they produce value.  Ekbia’s contribution, it seems to me, is to show how and why some prosumers manage to be exploited.