I was re-reading Castell's Rise of the Network Society today, and I came across this intriguing quote:
"The new economy brings information technology and the technology of information together in the creation of value out of our belief in the value we create" (p. 160).
Leaving out the cute play of words in the first half of the sentence (where Castells again argues for the centrality of information technology in reorganizing capitalism since 1970), Castells is making a key claim about the source of value in the contemporary economy.
Leading up to this quote, Castells argues that valuation -- that is, the social determination that company X or commodity Y is more or less valuable -- has become detached from objective measurements of profit and the return of dividends. Remember, he's writing in the late 1990s. This was a world where, in 1999, at the height of the dot.com bubble, the stock of a single company, Amazon.com, was worth more than twice as much as the entire Russian economy--this despite the fact that Amazon had yet to turn a profit. What gives? On what basis does the collective intelligence of global financial markets determine the value of assets, commodities, or firms?
Castells writes that "two key factors seem to be at work in the valuation process: trust and expectations" (p. 159). If the collective intelligence of investors trusts a firm and its directions, and if they have high expectations for future gains, they express this by raising the value of the firm. This is largely a subjective process -- I say "largely" because objective calculations of profitability, costs, and returns play into the "buzz" that investors and fund managers generate about firms, products, and services. But the subjective element is there, made up of "a vague vision of the future, some insider knowledge distributed on line by financial gurus and economic 'whispers' from specialized firms, conscious image-making, and herd behavior" (p. 159).
Yet the subjective nature of value creation -- the ability to increase the value of a firm not by producing more efficiently or selling more widgets but by simply building trust and increasing expectations in a social network -- does not necessarily mean we need to toss out the Marxian connection between labor and value. As Castells writes:
"within the logic of capitalism, the creation of value does not need to be embodied in material production. Everything goes, within the rule of law, as long as a monetized surplus is generated, and appropriated by the investor. How and why this monetized surplus is generated is a matter of context and opportunity...There is a growing de-coupling between material production, in the old sense of the industrial era, and value-making. Value-making under informational capitalism is essentially a product of the financial market. But to reach the financial market, and to vie for higher value in it, firms, institutions, and individuals have to go through the hard labor of innovating, producing, massaging, and image-making in goods and services. Thus, while the whirlwind of factors entering the valuation process are ultimately expressed in financial value (always uncertain), throughout the process of reaching this critical judgment, managers and workers (that is, people) end up producing and consuming our material world -- including the images that shape it and make it" (p. 160)
Thus, the source of all value is still human labor -- whether it is the application of human energies in material production or the application of human energies in the creation of new financial instruments, innovations, processes, or the symbols used to hype these instruments, innovations, and processes.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Thursday, April 2, 2009
What's Next for the Entrepreneurial City? Urban Revitalization, post-Richard Florida
Note: This paper was delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Chesapeake Bay American Studies Association conference at George Mason University on April 2, 2009.
As David Harvey has written, the ability of firms to move production and administration functions around the globe confers upon capital the ability to play localities off one another, in search of the best possible deal.
This in turn has forced urban leaders into fierce rounds of interurban competition, with each city trying to one-up all others by presenting to mobile capital the best possible “business climate.”
And so in the last thirty years we have seen city leaders embark upon a succession of entrepreneurial strategies designed to attract tourists, investment, and jobs to their cities—everything from corporate tax breaks and enterprise zones to new baseball stadiums and underground shopping malls.
However, as we speak, one strategy for enticing investment and economic growth into urban America stands head and shoulders above the rest. We are, in short, living in the era of Richard Florida.
Florida is an urban development and public policy scholar who first ascended to superstar status with the publication of his bestselling The Rise of the Creative Class.
Most of Florida’s analysis in this book is not new.
Like Daniel Bell, Alvin Toffler and countless others, he argues that global capitalism has entered a new phase, where the engine of economic growth comes not from industrial might and control of material resources, but from human creativity, innovation, and knowledge.
In the new knowledge economy, then, human creativity is now the decisive competitive advantage.
For this reason, a new class of workers has emerged to displace the proletariat as the central subject of capitalism.
This is Florida’s “creative class”—that is, a rapidly expanding and influential class of scientists, engineers, designers, artists, and knowledge professionals who get paid to develop new ideas, new technologies, and new solutions to old problems.
In the end, those firms and industries that effectively nurture and harness the intellectual firepower of the creative class will prosper and grow, while those firms and industries that shut it down will wither and die.
So what does all this mean for cities trying to turn around their economies?
Here Florida gets, well, creative. He argues, first off, that the old models of urban economic growth are wrong. You can’t attract high-tech firms and “knowledge” jobs by giving out tax breaks or building subsidized office space.
Instead, he argues, high-tech firms follow talent, not tax breaks.
They will move to those cities that offer them the deepest pools of creative labor.
So the key to urban prosperity paradoxically has nothing to do with attracting firms. It depends instead upon attracting the creative class.
If you attract the creative class, the firms and jobs will follow.
And here Florida turns from economic analyst to urban vitality guru. Building a vital city means delivering to the creative class the bourgeois-slash-bohemian lifestyles they crave.
And what do “creatives” want?
According to Florida, they want funky and diverse neighborhoods, interesting architecture, a vibrant arts and music scene, and endless recreational opportunities.
They want cappuccino bars and bike paths. They want their authentic urban grit and their sushi, too.
So if you want to attract knowledge jobs, you need to attract the creative class. And to attract the creative class, you need to turn your city into a “bourgeois-bohemian” playground.
As Jeffrey Zimmerman put it, “be hip and they will come.”
These ideas, it turns out, are like catnip for city leaders.
They can’t get enough of Richard Florida, and so he commands five-figure speaking fees and spends much of his time consulting with local governments and chambers of commerce on how to attract creative talent to their communities.
And they are indeed eating it up.
Now, to be sure, these ideas can be critiqued on a variety of fronts.
For instance, you can object to the way they essentially advocate a policy of state-sponsored gentrification, by cajoling city leaders to do everything possible to turn their urban neighborhoods into playgrounds for a particular class of affluent workers.
But my main question today is “what’s next?” In short, what happens when these ideas fail to deliver urban growth and prosperity to cities like Milwaukee, Buffalo, and Baltimore?
And why will they fail?
First, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that Florida is just plain wrong when he ties urban economic and population growth to attracting the “creative class.”
The first broadside came when Ed Glaeser, a Harvard economist, ran an analysis of Florida’s own data, and found that population growth in US cities was unrelated to the concentration of “creative class” occupations.
Glaeser also found that having a lot of bohemians living in your city doesn’t attract population growth either.
Cities that scored high on Florida’s “bohemian index” (an index which measures the number of artists working in a city) were no more likely to grow than those that scored low. What did matter was simply the total number of college-educated people in the city: the more BA degrees in a city, the faster the city grew.
Other more recent studies have been unable to support Florida’s claims as well.
Remember that Florida argued that young creative workers will migrate to cities which sport a vibrant bohemian “scene” and where they can find a concentration of other “creatives” like themselves.
But one recent study in Urban Affairs Review found that the in-migration of young knowledge workers was unrelated to both cities’ pre-existing concentration of creative class occupations as well as the city’s rank on Florida’s “bohemian index”
Second, there is the anecdotal evidence of cities who have tried valiantly to reverse their urban fortunes by appealing to young knowledge workers, but have failed miserably to produce any tangible results.
Jeffrey Zimmerman, for example, describes how the City of Milwaukee embarked on its own “creative city” strategy to stem the population and job losses associated with rust belt deindustrialization.
However, after: (1) building a riverwalk, (2) encouraging high-end housing development close to downtown, (3) providing seed money for creative class amenities like sidewalk cafes and pet daycare businesses, and (4) funding an urban branding campaign targeting young professionals and titled “we choose Milwauke”…the city has precious little to show for all this trouble.
In fact, Zimmerman reports that job losses across the board accelerated during the years in which Milwaukee’s leaders pursued this strategy—even in so called “creative” occupations.
His conclusion was that Milwaukee’s “creative city” effort indeed increased land values in two gentrifying downtown neighborhoods, but that this basically reshuffled affluent residents from one part of town to another.
So, again, my question is “what’s next?” What will be the next big solution to urban revitalization be? And will this solution have any hope of succeeding where others have failed?
After all, the track record of revitalization strategies is not inspiring:
*Urban renewal plans of the 1950s and 1960s
*The “fantasy city” strategies of the 1980s and 1990s, when cities built baseball stadiums, festival malls, and aquariums to attract tourists and build a positive image of place.
*And now the “creative city” strategies of Richard Florida.
None of these strategies have delivered on promises of steady urban population and broad-based economic growth.
For example, the last census showed that, despite the fact that central cities have stopped hemorrhaging residents and even grew from 1990 to 2000, suburban growth still outpaced urban growth, as it has for decades.
Close to home, despite embarking on a glitzy campaign to attract young, single, affluent workers in 2003, the District continues to loose population and jobs to the suburbs.
Today, the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia command a larger share of metropolitan jobs than ever before, and, for the first time, the sprawl of the Washington metro area has come within sight of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
By any standard, these public-private urban revitalization plans have been abysmal failures.
But, then again, perhaps I said “failed” too quickly.
My cynical side wants to suggest that although each of these revitalization strategies—the aquariums, the festival malls, and now the funky gentrified neighborhoods—failed to deliver on their promise of attracting global investment and reversing their declining urban fortunes…
…they actually succeeded in at least one of their aims: bringing public money into the service of local development actors and increasing the property values of politically-connected landowners.
So perhaps my true question is a cynical one:
What’s next? What new strategies will urban developers and landowners use to attract public money to support and expand their investments in urban real estate? And how will these subsidies be sold as a means of “saving the city” for us all?
As David Harvey has written, the ability of firms to move production and administration functions around the globe confers upon capital the ability to play localities off one another, in search of the best possible deal.
This in turn has forced urban leaders into fierce rounds of interurban competition, with each city trying to one-up all others by presenting to mobile capital the best possible “business climate.”
And so in the last thirty years we have seen city leaders embark upon a succession of entrepreneurial strategies designed to attract tourists, investment, and jobs to their cities—everything from corporate tax breaks and enterprise zones to new baseball stadiums and underground shopping malls.
However, as we speak, one strategy for enticing investment and economic growth into urban America stands head and shoulders above the rest. We are, in short, living in the era of Richard Florida.
Florida is an urban development and public policy scholar who first ascended to superstar status with the publication of his bestselling The Rise of the Creative Class.
Most of Florida’s analysis in this book is not new.
Like Daniel Bell, Alvin Toffler and countless others, he argues that global capitalism has entered a new phase, where the engine of economic growth comes not from industrial might and control of material resources, but from human creativity, innovation, and knowledge.
In the new knowledge economy, then, human creativity is now the decisive competitive advantage.
For this reason, a new class of workers has emerged to displace the proletariat as the central subject of capitalism.
This is Florida’s “creative class”—that is, a rapidly expanding and influential class of scientists, engineers, designers, artists, and knowledge professionals who get paid to develop new ideas, new technologies, and new solutions to old problems.
In the end, those firms and industries that effectively nurture and harness the intellectual firepower of the creative class will prosper and grow, while those firms and industries that shut it down will wither and die.
So what does all this mean for cities trying to turn around their economies?
Here Florida gets, well, creative. He argues, first off, that the old models of urban economic growth are wrong. You can’t attract high-tech firms and “knowledge” jobs by giving out tax breaks or building subsidized office space.
Instead, he argues, high-tech firms follow talent, not tax breaks.
They will move to those cities that offer them the deepest pools of creative labor.
So the key to urban prosperity paradoxically has nothing to do with attracting firms. It depends instead upon attracting the creative class.
If you attract the creative class, the firms and jobs will follow.
And here Florida turns from economic analyst to urban vitality guru. Building a vital city means delivering to the creative class the bourgeois-slash-bohemian lifestyles they crave.
And what do “creatives” want?
According to Florida, they want funky and diverse neighborhoods, interesting architecture, a vibrant arts and music scene, and endless recreational opportunities.
They want cappuccino bars and bike paths. They want their authentic urban grit and their sushi, too.
So if you want to attract knowledge jobs, you need to attract the creative class. And to attract the creative class, you need to turn your city into a “bourgeois-bohemian” playground.
As Jeffrey Zimmerman put it, “be hip and they will come.”
These ideas, it turns out, are like catnip for city leaders.
They can’t get enough of Richard Florida, and so he commands five-figure speaking fees and spends much of his time consulting with local governments and chambers of commerce on how to attract creative talent to their communities.
And they are indeed eating it up.
Now, to be sure, these ideas can be critiqued on a variety of fronts.
For instance, you can object to the way they essentially advocate a policy of state-sponsored gentrification, by cajoling city leaders to do everything possible to turn their urban neighborhoods into playgrounds for a particular class of affluent workers.
But my main question today is “what’s next?” In short, what happens when these ideas fail to deliver urban growth and prosperity to cities like Milwaukee, Buffalo, and Baltimore?
And why will they fail?
First, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that Florida is just plain wrong when he ties urban economic and population growth to attracting the “creative class.”
The first broadside came when Ed Glaeser, a Harvard economist, ran an analysis of Florida’s own data, and found that population growth in US cities was unrelated to the concentration of “creative class” occupations.
Glaeser also found that having a lot of bohemians living in your city doesn’t attract population growth either.
Cities that scored high on Florida’s “bohemian index” (an index which measures the number of artists working in a city) were no more likely to grow than those that scored low. What did matter was simply the total number of college-educated people in the city: the more BA degrees in a city, the faster the city grew.
Other more recent studies have been unable to support Florida’s claims as well.
Remember that Florida argued that young creative workers will migrate to cities which sport a vibrant bohemian “scene” and where they can find a concentration of other “creatives” like themselves.
But one recent study in Urban Affairs Review found that the in-migration of young knowledge workers was unrelated to both cities’ pre-existing concentration of creative class occupations as well as the city’s rank on Florida’s “bohemian index”
Second, there is the anecdotal evidence of cities who have tried valiantly to reverse their urban fortunes by appealing to young knowledge workers, but have failed miserably to produce any tangible results.
Jeffrey Zimmerman, for example, describes how the City of Milwaukee embarked on its own “creative city” strategy to stem the population and job losses associated with rust belt deindustrialization.
However, after: (1) building a riverwalk, (2) encouraging high-end housing development close to downtown, (3) providing seed money for creative class amenities like sidewalk cafes and pet daycare businesses, and (4) funding an urban branding campaign targeting young professionals and titled “we choose Milwauke”…the city has precious little to show for all this trouble.
In fact, Zimmerman reports that job losses across the board accelerated during the years in which Milwaukee’s leaders pursued this strategy—even in so called “creative” occupations.
His conclusion was that Milwaukee’s “creative city” effort indeed increased land values in two gentrifying downtown neighborhoods, but that this basically reshuffled affluent residents from one part of town to another.
So, again, my question is “what’s next?” What will be the next big solution to urban revitalization be? And will this solution have any hope of succeeding where others have failed?
After all, the track record of revitalization strategies is not inspiring:
*Urban renewal plans of the 1950s and 1960s
*The “fantasy city” strategies of the 1980s and 1990s, when cities built baseball stadiums, festival malls, and aquariums to attract tourists and build a positive image of place.
*And now the “creative city” strategies of Richard Florida.
None of these strategies have delivered on promises of steady urban population and broad-based economic growth.
For example, the last census showed that, despite the fact that central cities have stopped hemorrhaging residents and even grew from 1990 to 2000, suburban growth still outpaced urban growth, as it has for decades.
Close to home, despite embarking on a glitzy campaign to attract young, single, affluent workers in 2003, the District continues to loose population and jobs to the suburbs.
Today, the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia command a larger share of metropolitan jobs than ever before, and, for the first time, the sprawl of the Washington metro area has come within sight of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
By any standard, these public-private urban revitalization plans have been abysmal failures.
But, then again, perhaps I said “failed” too quickly.
My cynical side wants to suggest that although each of these revitalization strategies—the aquariums, the festival malls, and now the funky gentrified neighborhoods—failed to deliver on their promise of attracting global investment and reversing their declining urban fortunes…
…they actually succeeded in at least one of their aims: bringing public money into the service of local development actors and increasing the property values of politically-connected landowners.
So perhaps my true question is a cynical one:
What’s next? What new strategies will urban developers and landowners use to attract public money to support and expand their investments in urban real estate? And how will these subsidies be sold as a means of “saving the city” for us all?
Friday, February 27, 2009
Utopia on Lost
Call me crzy, but what I think this country needs is a little class warfare.
While Americans are working more hours than ever, wages for the bottom 40 percent of Americans have stagnated in the last 30 years.[i] Meanwhile, the rich get richer, and even the middle class has lost ground. Between 1979 and 2003, for instance, while the income of the middle fifth of American households increased slightly in inflation-adjusted dollars from $38,900 to $44,800, the average income of the top one percent of households more than doubled, from $305,800 to $701,500.[ii]
It’s a sobering picture. Still, these numbers do little to document the struggles that working families face in everyday life—including the feelings of desperation as productivity demands and working hours continually increase, [iii] as wages stagnate and collective benefits recede, and as flexible work schedules become a privilege reserved for the affluent and the tenured.[iv]
Perhaps not surprisingly, commercial television dramas in the USA have largely ignored the accelerating pace of class exploitation—most likely for reasons that are familiar to everyone. Advertisers want a good environment for promotional messages and brand integration, not to mention an audience packed with young, affluent viewers. Programs that frankly explore class issues seem unlikely to yield either of these conditions and thus die a silent death in the Hollywood pitch-room.
But yet, as I noted in my last column on Everybody Hates Chris, sometimes even American commercial television can surprise you. And sometimes, on magical occasions, a show can give you a powerful, if refracted and distorted, glimpse into a classless socialist utopia.
This brings us to the second season of ABC’s Lost. Like many Flow readers, I’m a fan of the show. The central conceit of Lost, as most of you probably know, is that forty-odd survivors of a plane crash find themselves marooned on a tropical island, cut off from civilization, and then menaced by a band of “others” whose origins and ultimate plans for the castaways remain a central mystery in the story.
Of all the show’s intriguing characters, I like Hurley (Hugo) Raez the best. Hurley—an overweight, heart-of-gold, SoCal guy—mostly offers comic relief in this dead-serious show, and for this reason, he’s not often the focus of the narrative. But when he is, it’s usually quite engaging.
The episode in question—Everybody Hates Hugo, oddly enough—begins with a montage of Hurley in “the hatch” (an underground bunker discovered by the castaways in season one) stuffing his face with snacks, peanut butter, and ice cream.
Hurley then awakens. His feeding frenzy was merely a dream—a dream fueled, we learn, by Hurley’s concerns about his new “job” on the island. It turns out the castaway’s nominal leader, Jack, has asked him to inventory the storehouse of food they had just discovered in the hatch. Until this inventory is done, Hurley must deny all requests for food from the other (hungry) castaways.
We quickly learn that Hurley is oddly tormented by this job. He first tries to keep the food secret. When word leaks out, he tries to avoid contact with others. When his friends find him and ask for food, he panics. At one point, he even tries to explode the storehouse with two sticks of dynamite. What gives?
The episode’s flashbacks offer an explanation. In the first flashback, we see Hurley win the lottery. An instant millionaire, Hurley nonetheless returns to his job at Mr. Cluck’s (a fast food chicken joint) without telling anyone, not even his mother. At work, his belligerent boss confronts him with surveillance tape footage that shows Hurley eating an unauthorized bucket of chicken. “You owe the company for an eight-piece dark meat combo, Raez,” the manager snarls.
Liberated by his lottery winnings, Hurley discards his hair net and promptly quits. His best friend and co-worker, Johnny, then quits in solidarity, and the two friends make a day of it. They hit the record store. Hurley asks out a cute girl. They steal 100 lawn gnomes and then spell out the words “cluck you!” on their boss’s front lawn.
All the while, Hurley keeps his newfound wealth a secret. Toward the end of their adventures, Hurley turns to Johnny and says, “Dude, promise me that no matter what happens, we’ll never change. This will never change.”
His friend, puzzled, duly promises, and they steer their van into the quickie mart where Hurley bought his lottery ticket. A camera crew is there interviewing the shopkeeper, who turns and recognizes Hurley: “that’s the guy! That’s the winner!” As the scrum of media and well-wishers press in on Hurley, the camera focuses on Johnny. His face is a heart-sinking mix of shock, envy, and anger.
Cut back to the island. Hurley’s friend Rose is attempting to stop him from blowing up the food. She can’t understand why he’d do such a thing. Hurley begins yelling:
Let me tell you something, Rose. We were all fine before we had any potato chips. And now we’ve got these potato chips. And now everyone’s going to want them! So if Steve gets them, Charlie’s pissed. But he’s not going to be pissed at Steve. He’s pissed at me!...And it’s going to be “what about us?” Why didn’t I get any potato chips?” C’mon help us out, Hurley…Then they’ll get really mad and start asking “why does Hugo have everything? Why should he get to decide? They’ll all hate me!
What is most intriguing is what happens next. Hurley finishes the inventory, and then approaches Jack with a proposal. Rather than ration the food, a little here, a little there, to the weak or to the strong, let’s just give it all away. To everyone. Right now. The episode thus ends with an uplifting montage of the castaways sharing the hatch’s bounty, smiling, laughing, and slapping Hurley on the back.
Fredric Jameson once wrote that “all contemporary works of art—whether those of high culture and modernism or mass culture and commercial culture—have as their underlying impulse…our deepest fantasies about the nature of social life, both as we live it now, and as we feel in our bones it ought rather to be lived.”[v]
What I felt in my bones when I watched this episode was a yearning for the collective life of the castaways. Whatever else happens, these people are in it together. When times are bad, they are bad for everyone. When times are good—like when Hurley liberates the hatch’s food—they’re good for one and all alike. If you catch two fish, you share the other one. If you hunt the boar, the whole camp celebrates. There are no separations of wealth and class—the separations that, in the flashback, ultimately split Hurley off from his friend Johnny.
(In this regard, it is instructive that the only remaining capitalist on the island—Sawyer—is treated as an outsider for much of the series due to his commitment to private property. Right after the crash, Sawyer hoarded the supplies he pillaged from the ruined fuselage, and he subsequently made many enemies as a result.)
Meanwhile, off the island, we live in a moment of profound ideological closure. The Democratic Party has fielded eight presidential candidates thus far, and all that any of them can offer us is the promise that our same anxious, privatized lives of moving back and forth from the “home box” to the “work box” in the “car box” will yield slightly more in terms of wages and benefits. Thus is the state of the American left.
But the dream of alternatives, the dream of “from each according to her ability, to each according to her need,”[vi] remains. In this regard, perhaps the most radical thing I’ve heard on TV in recent years—far more radical that anything I’ve heard from Clinton or Obama or even Edwards—came in Jack’s monologue to his fellow castaways soon after the plane crashed:
Everyman for himself is not going to work. It's time to start organizing. We need to figure out how we're going to survive here...Last week most of us were strangers, but we're all here now. And god knows how long we're going to be here. But if we can't live together, we're going to die alone.
Of course, as Jameson would point out, Jack was really speaking to us.
To be sure, moving beyond the mere dreaming of alternatives takes more than television. It will take a political movement that links the dreaming to the doing. But somehow I find hope in the fact that even this hyper-commercialized medium can, upon occasion, help nurture collective dreams through some very lean times.
[i] In 1973, for example, a high school diploma yielded an average inflation-adjusted wage of just over $14/hour. By 2006, that wage had dropped slightly. In fact, in 2006, over 24 percent of workers earned poverty-level wages Economic Policy Institute website, http://www.epi.org/datazone/06/wagebyed_a.pdf; http://www.epi.org/datazone/06/poverty_wages.pdf
[ii] Economic Policy Institute website, http://www.epi.org/datazone/06/avr_after-tax_inc.pdf
[iii] Economic Policy Institute webstie, http://www.epi.org/datazone/06/fam_wrk_hrs.pdf
[iv] AFL-CIO website, http://www.aflcio.org/issues/workfamily/workschedules.cfm
[v] Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text, no. 1 (Winter 1979): 130-148.
[vi] Karl Marx, Marx/Engels Selected Works, Volume 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970): 13-30.
While Americans are working more hours than ever, wages for the bottom 40 percent of Americans have stagnated in the last 30 years.[i] Meanwhile, the rich get richer, and even the middle class has lost ground. Between 1979 and 2003, for instance, while the income of the middle fifth of American households increased slightly in inflation-adjusted dollars from $38,900 to $44,800, the average income of the top one percent of households more than doubled, from $305,800 to $701,500.[ii]
It’s a sobering picture. Still, these numbers do little to document the struggles that working families face in everyday life—including the feelings of desperation as productivity demands and working hours continually increase, [iii] as wages stagnate and collective benefits recede, and as flexible work schedules become a privilege reserved for the affluent and the tenured.[iv]
Perhaps not surprisingly, commercial television dramas in the USA have largely ignored the accelerating pace of class exploitation—most likely for reasons that are familiar to everyone. Advertisers want a good environment for promotional messages and brand integration, not to mention an audience packed with young, affluent viewers. Programs that frankly explore class issues seem unlikely to yield either of these conditions and thus die a silent death in the Hollywood pitch-room.
But yet, as I noted in my last column on Everybody Hates Chris, sometimes even American commercial television can surprise you. And sometimes, on magical occasions, a show can give you a powerful, if refracted and distorted, glimpse into a classless socialist utopia.
This brings us to the second season of ABC’s Lost. Like many Flow readers, I’m a fan of the show. The central conceit of Lost, as most of you probably know, is that forty-odd survivors of a plane crash find themselves marooned on a tropical island, cut off from civilization, and then menaced by a band of “others” whose origins and ultimate plans for the castaways remain a central mystery in the story.
Of all the show’s intriguing characters, I like Hurley (Hugo) Raez the best. Hurley—an overweight, heart-of-gold, SoCal guy—mostly offers comic relief in this dead-serious show, and for this reason, he’s not often the focus of the narrative. But when he is, it’s usually quite engaging.
The episode in question—Everybody Hates Hugo, oddly enough—begins with a montage of Hurley in “the hatch” (an underground bunker discovered by the castaways in season one) stuffing his face with snacks, peanut butter, and ice cream.
Hurley then awakens. His feeding frenzy was merely a dream—a dream fueled, we learn, by Hurley’s concerns about his new “job” on the island. It turns out the castaway’s nominal leader, Jack, has asked him to inventory the storehouse of food they had just discovered in the hatch. Until this inventory is done, Hurley must deny all requests for food from the other (hungry) castaways.
We quickly learn that Hurley is oddly tormented by this job. He first tries to keep the food secret. When word leaks out, he tries to avoid contact with others. When his friends find him and ask for food, he panics. At one point, he even tries to explode the storehouse with two sticks of dynamite. What gives?
The episode’s flashbacks offer an explanation. In the first flashback, we see Hurley win the lottery. An instant millionaire, Hurley nonetheless returns to his job at Mr. Cluck’s (a fast food chicken joint) without telling anyone, not even his mother. At work, his belligerent boss confronts him with surveillance tape footage that shows Hurley eating an unauthorized bucket of chicken. “You owe the company for an eight-piece dark meat combo, Raez,” the manager snarls.
Liberated by his lottery winnings, Hurley discards his hair net and promptly quits. His best friend and co-worker, Johnny, then quits in solidarity, and the two friends make a day of it. They hit the record store. Hurley asks out a cute girl. They steal 100 lawn gnomes and then spell out the words “cluck you!” on their boss’s front lawn.
All the while, Hurley keeps his newfound wealth a secret. Toward the end of their adventures, Hurley turns to Johnny and says, “Dude, promise me that no matter what happens, we’ll never change. This will never change.”
His friend, puzzled, duly promises, and they steer their van into the quickie mart where Hurley bought his lottery ticket. A camera crew is there interviewing the shopkeeper, who turns and recognizes Hurley: “that’s the guy! That’s the winner!” As the scrum of media and well-wishers press in on Hurley, the camera focuses on Johnny. His face is a heart-sinking mix of shock, envy, and anger.
Cut back to the island. Hurley’s friend Rose is attempting to stop him from blowing up the food. She can’t understand why he’d do such a thing. Hurley begins yelling:
Let me tell you something, Rose. We were all fine before we had any potato chips. And now we’ve got these potato chips. And now everyone’s going to want them! So if Steve gets them, Charlie’s pissed. But he’s not going to be pissed at Steve. He’s pissed at me!...And it’s going to be “what about us?” Why didn’t I get any potato chips?” C’mon help us out, Hurley…Then they’ll get really mad and start asking “why does Hugo have everything? Why should he get to decide? They’ll all hate me!
What is most intriguing is what happens next. Hurley finishes the inventory, and then approaches Jack with a proposal. Rather than ration the food, a little here, a little there, to the weak or to the strong, let’s just give it all away. To everyone. Right now. The episode thus ends with an uplifting montage of the castaways sharing the hatch’s bounty, smiling, laughing, and slapping Hurley on the back.
Fredric Jameson once wrote that “all contemporary works of art—whether those of high culture and modernism or mass culture and commercial culture—have as their underlying impulse…our deepest fantasies about the nature of social life, both as we live it now, and as we feel in our bones it ought rather to be lived.”[v]
What I felt in my bones when I watched this episode was a yearning for the collective life of the castaways. Whatever else happens, these people are in it together. When times are bad, they are bad for everyone. When times are good—like when Hurley liberates the hatch’s food—they’re good for one and all alike. If you catch two fish, you share the other one. If you hunt the boar, the whole camp celebrates. There are no separations of wealth and class—the separations that, in the flashback, ultimately split Hurley off from his friend Johnny.
(In this regard, it is instructive that the only remaining capitalist on the island—Sawyer—is treated as an outsider for much of the series due to his commitment to private property. Right after the crash, Sawyer hoarded the supplies he pillaged from the ruined fuselage, and he subsequently made many enemies as a result.)
Meanwhile, off the island, we live in a moment of profound ideological closure. The Democratic Party has fielded eight presidential candidates thus far, and all that any of them can offer us is the promise that our same anxious, privatized lives of moving back and forth from the “home box” to the “work box” in the “car box” will yield slightly more in terms of wages and benefits. Thus is the state of the American left.
But the dream of alternatives, the dream of “from each according to her ability, to each according to her need,”[vi] remains. In this regard, perhaps the most radical thing I’ve heard on TV in recent years—far more radical that anything I’ve heard from Clinton or Obama or even Edwards—came in Jack’s monologue to his fellow castaways soon after the plane crashed:
Everyman for himself is not going to work. It's time to start organizing. We need to figure out how we're going to survive here...Last week most of us were strangers, but we're all here now. And god knows how long we're going to be here. But if we can't live together, we're going to die alone.
Of course, as Jameson would point out, Jack was really speaking to us.
To be sure, moving beyond the mere dreaming of alternatives takes more than television. It will take a political movement that links the dreaming to the doing. But somehow I find hope in the fact that even this hyper-commercialized medium can, upon occasion, help nurture collective dreams through some very lean times.
[i] In 1973, for example, a high school diploma yielded an average inflation-adjusted wage of just over $14/hour. By 2006, that wage had dropped slightly. In fact, in 2006, over 24 percent of workers earned poverty-level wages Economic Policy Institute website, http://www.epi.org/datazone/06/wagebyed_a.pdf; http://www.epi.org/datazone/06/poverty_wages.pdf
[ii] Economic Policy Institute website, http://www.epi.org/datazone/06/avr_after-tax_inc.pdf
[iii] Economic Policy Institute webstie, http://www.epi.org/datazone/06/fam_wrk_hrs.pdf
[iv] AFL-CIO website, http://www.aflcio.org/issues/workfamily/workschedules.cfm
[v] Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text, no. 1 (Winter 1979): 130-148.
[vi] Karl Marx, Marx/Engels Selected Works, Volume 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970): 13-30.
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