'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

I'm not a fan of the argument that since the Soviet Union and its derivative states (including China) failed that there is no way to accomplish that Marxist utopic vision or that any variation on socialism has to fail.

Russia was the only real attempt. The 1917 revolution was about it, and then the coup by Stalin to overthrow Lenin and Trotsky threw out any shred of attempt to reach any kind of utopia and just turned the country into a dictatorship with a globalist coat of paint.

Russia itself can absolutely be used as an example of the failings of Marxism and Communism, but I don't think any other country can, for the sole reason that once the Soviet Union was established and the Cold War underway neither side was going to let an ideological uprising happen anywhere on Earth in isolation. Every single socialist / communist state from the Eastern Bloc countries that were conquered by Russia to puppet states in the Middle East to sponsored uprisings in South America and Southeast Asia were all done with Soviet support to create Stalin style dictatorships. I don't think for a second that Mao ever thought China would become some stateless utopia where everyone owns everything in public. Mao took power to be a king, in the same way Fidel did, in the same way Kim Il Sung did. And they all did it with Soviet support financially and militarily.

The US were well documented kingmakers in that era too. It is why most of the Middle East has such deeply instilled hatred of the US that they are willing to give their lives to attack the US. The difference is that the Soviets demanded loyalty by labeling yourself a Peoples Republic and modeling your government after Stalin's - the US just wanted puppet states that did what the US said, be they democratic or totalitarian, it didn't really matter to Washington.

But that isn't something that is going to change, either. Revolutions without foreign support always degrade into dictatorships to fill power vacuums when the unorganized hoard of revolutionaries dissipates - France, Russia, and more recently Egypt all demonstrate what happens in those circumstances. The US had a successful revolution only because it was the elite casting off a foreign power with the support of another, and without Frances help or the support of the American aristocracy the US would have never been founded. Internal wars for revolution fail, revolutions without international support fail, and new governments post-revolution that are too "different" from the global status quo also fail because the world powers will cut you off if you don't play by their rules in international trade. And you can be sure almost every government on Earth today with few exceptions function and exist with the blessings of the United States. If anyone tried to overthrow those "for the people" like the Iranian people did to their Shah you can bet the US will have nothing nice to say about the pursuit of liberty if its against American economic interests.

So no, communism doesn't work, but its not because of some tautology that you can never reach this post-state utopia, but more because nobody can change their government in isolation - the influence of foreign actors will always either push you towards their favored ideology or sabotage your attempt. The world is too interconnected now for an upstart band of ideologues to depose the king and try something new.

There's a difference between saying "Capitalism in America" vs the whole system of capitalism. That aside it's probably hyperbolic for me to claim that it "might not have even been possible."

My point is that people ignore the ugly history of capitalism but only want to talk about the ugly side of socialism. I'm sure there's equally biased pro-socialist rhetoric but since we live in a capitalist society the scale is not even remotely the same.

The last thing I want to do is ignore what has happened when countries have tried socialism. I want to be clear that horrible things have happened in socialist countries, but I don't think that is sufficient reason to throw out all of the ideas and philosophy behind socialism.

I could be wrong, but insofar as wage labor is an evolution of serfdom, it seems to press farther away from the care that the owning classes have to invest in "their" workforce.

That is, wage labor is a way of moving the conditions of reproducing labor onto the laborers themselves, and the gig economy is just another step in that same process.

I have only a base understanding of the history and a very inconsistent and loose mode of thinking about it, so I'd be stoked to get some better picture of the mechanisms.

As I understand it, serfs have rights, and in addition the feudal system itself (the owning class) had to value the reproduction of labor as part of the work. So, in order to extract value from serfs, you have to feed and care for them, or at least take that care into calculations as part of production.

Under the conditions of early capitalism the domestic labor that goes into reproducing labor is pushed from the system into the individual families, so once we have wage labor things like "feeding the workers" and "caring for children" is the responsibility of labor and no longer a concern of the people who are employing that labor.

Thus a "gig economy" is just the next iteration of the same process of externalizing as much of the process of doing work to the laborers. The end goal is to have the laborer take all the responsibility for production and the owners have no investment, only pure exploitive profit, and the gig economy is an advancement of a wage economy, which is an advancement of a serf economy, which is itself an advancement over slavery.

I write "advancement", but I only mean that from the point of view of the extracting/ owning class: if "slavery" means racist chattel slavery then that's truly a horror without end; if enslavement just means that you're working for a specific household which you're integrated within and you don't have a free hand in just up and moving to another household (as it seems to operate outside of capitalism) then the gig economy seems far more exploitive than slavery as practiced in pre-capitalist civilizations.

But like I say, I don't have a great understanding, and I'd be interested to hear where I'm wrong in terms of history or logic.

It does not have to be this way. Gig work allowed me access to earned income under circumstances where a regular job would have been impossible. It helped empower me to start solving what should have been unsolvable problems.

HN is a gathering place for people who start businesses. Yes, we need a remedy for the current abuses. But whatever Uber or Lyft or other existing companies are doing, you can be the architect of a better future by starting a company and not being a greedy bastard who feels they need billions while entry level employees don't make enough to support themselves.

The other thing that would help would be if we developed some guidelines for gig work done right.

Another thing that could help would be advocacy groups or informational sources.

I do my part by blogging about gig work that has the potential to become a middle class income and promoting businesses that do this well and are not tyrant overlords. It's a small thing and I don't have much reach. But we can choose to foster the success of gig businesses that treat workers well instead of merely labeling gig work the new serfdom and essentially assuming it cannot be otherwise.

Given my positive experience of gig work, I hate seeing the issue framed this way. I feel it throws the baby out with the bath water.

By this logic we should pay everyone to dig ditches and fill them in. The solution isn't to preserve obsolete jobs, the solution is to find an economic system that doesn't assume everyone works for a living. Easier said than done, though, and the transition is gonna be ugly.