The growing pains of a new rights regime

I have too much on my plate for this to be anything beyond a stray thought at the moment. I have been reading a lot on violence and unrest in historical China, on which a more complete post some time soon (I hope). In the meantime, it has me thinking quite a bit about the Occupy movement and the broader unrest of the past few decades.

Two relatively recent works coming out of the Tilly school have raised interesting questions on what we might call the early modern rights transition. Thomas Bouye's Manslaughter, Markets and Moral Economy and Ho-fung Hung's Protest With Chinese Characteristics are both attempts to make sense of the changing motivations for violence and mass protest in the mid-Qing Dynasty (18th century). Bouye splits these disputes into contractual - disputes caused by contract-based events like evictions and defaults - and non-contractual - disputes over things outside what is specified in contracts. Hung divides protests into state-engaging - seeking state assistance like famine relief - and state-resisting - avoiding state actions like tax collection. Both point to a shift, probably starting in the late Ming (late 16th/early 17th century), from a social and governmental regime founded on control over labor to one founded on control over capital (mainly land and silver). In other words, there was a shift in the most important sources of wealth and power, and both the state and society reacted by creating new means of control.

Prior to the shift, control of labor was relatively important. Labor was relatively scarce, and there was not enough liquid capital for capital-intensive techniques, or market-based control regimes. Because of this, gentry exerted their power through customary rights over bonded labor, and the state used corvee - mandated labor - as part of its tax regime. Control of land was important, but if it was not coupled with direct control over labor, it was ineffective.

The 16th and 17th centuries brought about two important shifts. First, population surged, decreasing the marginal value of labor. Second, an influx of silver decreased the frictional costs of market-based control mechanisms. Gentry began to focus more on exerting control of land, knowing that they could obtain labor on the market. The state commuted tax payments in kind (grain, textile) and in labor (corvee) to monetized payments (the so-called "Single Whip Reform"), confident in the transferability of capital. The result was the beginnings of the end of customary rights regimes with a dual focus on land and labor, and the transition to an early capitalist regime, where labor, produce, currency and land were all readily interchangeable - a regime in which control of land and currency began to trump control of land and labor. Increasingly, this control was marked contractually, rather than through customary rights.

This transition was slowed somewhat by the fall of the dynasty. Warfare, famine and epidemics reduced the population, increasing the marginal value of labor. Wartime markets were less efficient, and unrest made contracts hard to enforce. But once the Qing Dynasty was stabilized, it continued. The mid-Qing was marked by unrest and violence, demarcating the still-ragged edge of the contractual, capitalist rights regime. Initially, most unrest was directed toward resisting the new rights regime - advocating for "traditional" customary rights, resisting the new taxes, laws and contracts. Eventually, there was a transition to where unrest was largely directed toward hashing out rights within the new regime. Instead of resisting the idea of contractual labor, tenants advocated for more or better contractual rights. Instead of resisting state programs, people protests specifics of how they were implemented. Disputes were increasingly contained within the new rights regime rather than resisting its imposition and advocating for the more traditional formulation of rights.

It appears to me that we have gone through several transitions since then, from the industrial revolution's focus on light and then heavy industry, to the further capitalization of agriculture during the green revolution, to the shift from goods to services. And we are going through a similar transition now. With the rise of intellectual property and digitization, rights to traditional capital forms are changing. Capital markets have become hyper-fluid, and focus largely on profiting from the borders of outdated regulatory regimes that are now outpaced by the rate of transactions. Sectors like arts and entertainment, information technology, finance, education and services now dominate traditional productive sectors in durable and non-durable goods, let alone even more "traditional" sectors like agriculture and mining (see the chart at xkcd). Even in the "traditional" productive sectors, intellectual property has become more and more important. Agribusiness is increasingly about patenting drugs, genes and even species - bringing this most traditional of sectors into the information rights regime. Even all of these sectors put together are completely dominated by the market in derivatives. Rights and transactions in nearly pure information are replacing all the old forms of capital - land, labor, goods, services...even currency.

Through all of these innovations, most people and even the government is being left behind. In the Ming and Qing, tenants were lost until they learned to assert their rights within the new regime. The strength of the Qing at its height was in part through its embrace of the land-capital power base - taxes were denominated primarily in land, and collected in silver. It fell in part because it failed to transition to a power base in industrial capital, with the appropriate social and governmental controls.

The current unrest, at the popular level, is because individuals have not yet figured out how to assert their rights under the new regime. The way IP works now privileges giant corporations with massive legal teams. The negative outcomes of this system are felt from the web, to pharmaceuticals to agriculture and consumables, where bigger corporate entities have the advantage. Open source, creative commons and such concepts seem to be early attempts for consumers and more diffuse production groups to exert their rights under the intellectual property system. To this point, these attempts to reform within the system are most effective in the more abstract forms of information - IT and software. Because consumers are in less direct contact with producers of other goods - drugs, food, etc - it has been harder for them to recognize the links in those systems. So far, reform attempts have been largely confined to the outdated rights regime or to resistance to the new system.

Many governments are also failing, to varying degrees, because they have not adjusted their tax systems or their forms of sovereignty to account for these changes in rights regimes. Tax codes are still focused on income and corporate taxes. These made sense during the industrial period, when these were the most important factors producing profits. This is not how profits are produced today. Most people are more important as consumers than producers. Financial transactions are inadequately taxed, as are profits obtained through control of intellectual property. Media, the direct control of information, has become even more important for elections, and a combination of finance and media corporations are able to dominate these processes. Sovereignty is still theoretically defined around the individual, but it functions around the unit of information. Government ends up underfunded for critical programs, and elections are travesties of financial escalation and media domination.

Again, with the exception of a few key sectors, individuals have been unsuccessful in asserting their economic or political rights as the rights regime changes. I would argue that this is largely because resistance to the excesses of the new system are stuck in modes of resistance based in an outdated system. It is tempting to demand a return of old rights and responsibilities, but history shows that this mode of engagement will ultimately fail. If the 99% is to be recognized in the 21st century, we must advocate for ourselves within the new rights regime. This means we must continue to fight for open-source, copy-left protections - of both "traditional" goods and methods, and of new ones that are developed though a more diffuse community. We must develop awareness linking producers to consumers of goods whose chain of production is more obscure. We must convince our governments to tax the most profitable sectors of the economy, both to ensure the government remains solvent, and to put more controls on these sectors. Politically, the new rights regime strikes me as a bigger challenge. How can the diffuse masses assert control of political information against better-organized, centralized industry lobbing? How can individuals continue to assert sovereignty in a context where control of liquid capital and media is more important than social organization. For now, I will leave this question to others, because I am out of ideas.

But in short, we must recognize that individual voters, consumers and small-scale diffuse producers are being left behind by centralizing, aggrandizing control of information-capital. To resist this and reclaim power for ourselves, we must meet the new rights regime on its own terms.