Seizing Our Means
A public sociology
Sometimes I have to explain to people that a sociologist is not the same as a social worker. Social workers help people, sociologists formulate social theories and apply scientific rubrics to human groups. While I do try to help people, I deal with collectives—marijuana policy reformers, marijuana users, marijuana producers (both licensed and unlicensed), public policies, prohibitionists—and the social movement for the abolition of criminal prohibition. My subjects can include dozens of people in a formal organization putting on a weekend festival, or tens of millions across the country over a 30-year time frame.
My preferred methodology is Ethnography, which calls for personal involvement in the everyday lives of my research subject. It’s a lot of micro, and trying to see how that fits into the macro.
MAGA is a Social Movement
MAGA is a social movement, as is the Klan, and they share roots in sustained economic hardship among the working class. Until people are able to move the focus from blaming those with objectively less social power for their circumstances to actively addressing the sources of the economic hardships they suffer, it will maintain influence.
That task—moving the narrative—is how we went from the Drug War to legalized(-ish) marijuana. The prohibitionists called it “drugs,” until we demanded it be called “medicine.” (It was not nearly that easy and LOTS of patients died and LOTS of people went to prison, and it took years, but that redefinition changed the entire moral discussion.)
Moving narratives, redefining things, that is the culture work that will get us out from under political repression.
We need MAGA to understand and prioritize their social location as workers. Talk of tying wages to productivity; Neoliberalism destroyed what used to be close to a 1:1 relationship—it can be recreated. Rather than label a wealth tax a “billionaires’ tax” call it a “sin tax”—like those applied to drugs people use for pleasure—the sin in this case is greed.
On the other side, we are beyond the time American’s should seize their means of production—the ones the information barons have been collecting and monetizing for themselves. Everyone should own the copyright of their facial image. We have facial recognition software being used to discipline us—it can just as easily be used to prevent our faces from being pirated for money through commercial uses.
The same goes for our data. When it is sold, we deserve a fee, a commission, or some other compensation. Dare I say a capital share of the value—something on the order of 90%? Without each of us, the data does not exist. We manifest it through our sociality, which is being commodified, but not by us—Why not?
Either information is to become freely available, or we are going to have to hold those who trained AI on human-produced “content” responsible for their massive theft. They have pilfered the human past to feed their machine. Crimes are now being committed on such a massive scale that restorative justice would call for socialization of these means of production.
Marx never saw this contradiction of capital. The commodification of sociality itself renders all of us owners of a means of production. It breaks the system much more rapidly than a falling rate of profit.