Private capital vs. the internet commonwealth

The idea of buying and selling for a profit probably originated in prehistoric times. It was the foundation of Antiquity’s great trading cities that opposed the military empires of plunder and tribute. It also brought wealth to the merchant cities of the Renaissance. However, getting more for less was always tainted with suspicion. Was the seller being cheated, or was it the ultimate buyer? Was the first being paid less than the value of his commodity, or was the second paying more than he should? By the 19^th century it was established that the first did not get the value of his labour, while the second paid a price that fluctuated with supply, demand and state intervention (price fixing and taxes). This clarity of perception came with the progressive mechanisation of production and the increasing amounts of goods produced.

The mass production of identical goods goes back to pottery and its early standard models. Later came the supply of uniform equipment for the Roman legions. Then there was a break until printing came along. It began as wood-cuts on paper. Both technologies had come from China, via the Near-East and returning crusaders. But it was Gutenberg’s invention of movable type (1450) that started a whole new industry. Since the beginnings of writing everything had been handwritten. All of a sudden a machine was doing it better and very much faster. This new conception brought wealth to some, celebrity to others and power to a few. Very soon church and state were doing their utmost to control it. But by 1522, the Renaissance was blooming, Luther had set off the Reformation and the planet had been circumnavigated. Information (real and fake) was circulating ever faster and wider, equalling and overtaking the literary heyday of the early Roman Empire. Printing transformed human perception from hearing speech to seeing signs on a page. More information was available and it was being received differently. And the printing process, with its rapid succession of repetitive phases, was the prototype machine.

Transforming heat into movement is a very old idea (1), but it was only in the 17^th century that the first attempts were made at lifting a piston with steam. A century later James Watt put the final touches to the engine that would drive everything for the next hundred years, before being phased out by electric and internal combustion power. Watt’s steam engine was coupled to wheels and to other mechanical processes and completely modified the notions of speed and time. Going faster became a constant preoccupation. Before then, wind and running water had been harnessed, but most activities depended on human and animal muscle. From then on the power of dozens, hundreds or thousands of horses was being produced by one machine fuelled by coal. After the ownership of land and money, the ownership of machines sent capitalism into its final stage of accumulation.

Capital by definition brings in a return. This can be rent, interest, commercial profit, or industrial surplus value including copy and patent rights. In all cases it is a levy on the value produced by human activity. For land rent, where ownership gives the right to a part of the produce, the levy is obvious. As for buildings, rent is still being paid long after the construction costs have been redeemed. Interest has occasionally been banned (or brought down to zero by central banks), but in general it is paid grudgingly as an element in the financial mysteries of money and credit. Trade is usually about moving goods from one place to another, from producers to consumers, so its profitability is masked by transport and currencies. Machines add value by speeding up the production process or increasing its scale. They push, turn and lift (calculate, listen, talk and are beginning to think), but they only add their own value incrementally and that of their upkeep and fuel. They transmit value but do not create it. Human activity is bought by the hour, day, week, month, year, or for a lifetime in slavery. The price of labour is that of its renewal, and this value is added to the produce. Transforming matter and producing services add the value of their costs in land, buildings, machines and labour, but the market price includes this plus a profit, some of which goes to taxes and interest. The cost of machines and buildings, of their upkeep and fuel, is fairly constant. The upkeep of labour can vary from the direst minimum of sustainable life to something approaching affluence. It is these variable costs that allow for profits.

The difference between commercial profits and industrial profits is explained by Marx’s theory of surplus value. Commercial profit is about buying and selling at a higher price, money-commodity-more money. Industrial profit comes from extracting more added value out of labour than the wages it is paid. Working at the average rate of productivity, a labourer adds the value of his wage in say five hours, but the working day he has been hired for lasts eight hours. Those extra three hours are his employer’s profits. A merchant gets more money than he has paid. An industrialist gets more goods and services than he has paid for. The first increases the price, the second increases the number. Alongside rent and interest, both are getting more for less. This was the paradox that Marx stumbled on and was unable to resolve. If everyone, except merchants, pays more than they are being paid, where does that extra money come from? In fact the merchants lend it out. If more goods and services are being produced than are paid for, who is able to buy them? In fact they are going abroad, where they are transformed into investments (guns for oil), and credit is being granted at home.

The printing press was the first mechanism of mass production. It circulated information and spread uniform literacy, and it was the seed from which grew the Industrial Revolution. Print and mechanics created a world in their own image. It was a world of repetitive tasks in which everything was up for grabs. Print was the dominant influence on thought and reason for more than four centuries, until sound came back with gramophones, radios and loudspeakers, and images with photos, movies and television. Print’s monopoly was broken, but the system persisted with a centralised control of the new media. Nevertheless, by its very existence, the diffusion of sound and images questioned the established order. The arrival of stereo and colour was the final straw, change was in the air. The 1960’s saw upheavals just about everywhere, out of which a new perception emerged, while managing to preserve the old rules of property and profit.

Society is shaped by its technology and, as McLuhan has convincingly argued (2), that is particularly the case for technologies that transmit information, with weapons close behind. The invention of writing, especially the phonetic alphabets that are easy to learn, was not just an archive of available information, it was an organic transposition from ear and voice to eye and hand. For writing and reading, the speaking and hearing occur silently in the brain. This is not the memory of a hear sound, it is sound imagined. Writing had structured the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, then for about a millennium it congealed itself in clerical Low Latin. By the 14^th century spoken languages were beginning to be written (Dante, Chaucer), but it was printing that produced an increasing flow of translations and original writings. The printed page would model minds almost exclusively until the advent of the Electronic Age.

The 19^th century was engulfed in the silence of reading and writing. Sound did persist in conversations, in operas, symphonies and lectures for the upper classes, and in music-halls, brass bands and assemblies for the rest, but society as a whole was very subdued and the penalties for excess were severe. The four years of trench-war butchery ended in 1918 with Gabriel’s trumpet call. Sound was coming back, in telephones, radios and gramophones. Jazz and movies were driving the Roaring Twenties. After the Second World Butchery (mostly civilians this time) ended in 1945, stereo and coloured images produced a similar effect, with Woodstock as its symbolic moment. The dissemination of a new technology, especially those as radically different from the past as print, radio, television or the internet, puts people into a sort of trance. They are sleep-walkers (McLuhan). And this secondary state makes them more easily influenced. However, radio and television were from the outset, because of their means of diffusion, extremely centralised and controlled, whereas printing was going on all over the place, and internet postings can be made by everyone in images, sound and writing. The media of the 20^th century were easy to centralise and were used as means of social control, though their effects on perceptions were inherent and transformative. The 21^st century’s medium is the internet, and it has been as difficult to control as was printing. And, as with print, the strategy is a massive presence that swamps out smaller sources of content, and a growing censorship of all contents. Radio and television were owned by capitalism from the outset. That is also true for internet providers, but CNN, the BBC, Sky News, etc. make the content they emit, whereas Facebook and Google do not produce the postings they show. They can only delete them or give priority to some over others. And if a site is closed, it can come back immediately under a different name somewhere else on the net. Capital’s dominion over what people know and think is full of loopholes. Five hundred years ago, printing broke the Roman Church’s dominion. Will the internet in turn offer an alternative to profit capitalism? Will Thatcher’s claim that “There is no alternative!” be shown to be a lie?

1. An early steam turbine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

2. McLuhan’s The Gutenberg galaxy is a fascinating read.

Fake news

 

Before quitting the subject of freedom of opinion, it is fit to take some notice of those who say that the free expression of all opinions should be permitted, on condition that the manner be temperate, and do not pass the bounds of fair discussion. Much might be said on the impossibility of fixing where these supposed bounds are to be placed; for if the test be offence to those whose opinions are attacked, I think experience testifies that this offence is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that every opponent who pushes them hard, and whom they find it difficult to answer, appears to them, if he shows any strong feeling on the subject, an intemperate opponent.

But this, though an important consideration in a practical point of view, merges in a more fundamental objection. Undoubtedly the manner of asserting an opinion, even though it be a true one, may be very objectionable, and may justly incur severe censure. But the principal offences of the kind are such as it is mostly impossible, unless by accidental selfbetrayal, to bring home to conviction. The gravest of them is, to argue sophistically, to suppress facts or arguments, to misstate the elements of the case, or misrepresent the opposite opinion. But all this, even to the most aggravated degree, is so continually done in perfect good faith, by persons who are not considered, and in many other respects may not deserve to be considered, ignorant or incompetent, that it is rarely possible, on adequate grounds, conscientiously to stamp the misrepresentation as morally culpable; and still less could law presume to interfere with this kind of controversial misconduct. With regard to what is commonly meant by intemperate discussion, namely invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like, the denunciation of these weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to interdict them equally to both sides; but it is only desired to restrain the employment of them against the prevailing opinion: against the unprevailing they may not only be used without general disapproval, but will be likely to obtain for him who uses them the praise of honest zeal and righteous indignation. Yet whatever mischief arises from their use is greatest when they are employed against the comparatively defenceless; and whatever unfair advantage can be derived by any opinion from this mode of asserting it, accrues almost exclusively to received opinions. The worst offence of this kind which can be committed by a polemic is to stigmatise those who hold the contrary opinion as bad and immoral men. To calumny of this sort, those who hold any unpopular opinion are peculiarly exposed, because they are in general few and uninfluential, and nobody but themselves feels much interested in seeing justice done them; but this weapon is, from the nature of the case, denied to those who attack a prevailing opinion: they can neither use it with safety to themselves, nor, if they could, would it do anything but recoil on their own cause. In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them.

For the interest, therefore, of truth and justice, it is far more important to restrain this employment of vituperative language than the other; and, for example, if it were necessary to choose, there would be much more need to discourage offensive attacks on infidelity than on religion. It is, however, obvious that law and authority have no business with restraining either, while opinion ought, in every instance, to determine its verdict by the circumstances of the individual case; condemning every one, on whichever side of the argument he places himself, in whose mode of advocacy either want of candour, or malignity, bigotry, or intolerance of feeling manifest themselves; but not inferring these vices from the side which a person takes, though it be the contrary side of the question to our own; and giving merited honour to every one, whatever opinion he may hold, who has calmness to see and honesty to state what his opponents and their opinions really are, exaggerating nothing to their discredit, keeping nothing back which tells, or can be supposed to tell, in their favour. This is the real morality of public discussion: and if often violated, I am happy to think that there are many controversialists who to a great extent observe it, and a still greater number who conscientiously strive towards it.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, the conclusion of chapter II