By Jonathan Michael Feldman, September 8, 2021
One core feature of advanced capitalist states are morally indifferent bureaucracies. Even though publics are alienated from them, they still have within their wages (after surplus value) disposable income which can be leveraged to create a credibility tax on companies. This tax can be applied by direction action viewed as a service.
In Sweden companies like IP-only and Allente are part of an incompetent division of labor that organizes Internet Service. The Internet is like a public utility and it has been turned over the private companies which are often incompetent or morally indifferent. If the government run oversight organizations were more pro-active and competent, then we could rely on the market. The problem is that the regulatory agencies are also often indifferent or bound by laws and governance systems that are similarly incompetent/inadequate. The architects of the system are politicians who tend to know very, very little. They are influenced by a disengaged public and social movements that are weakly tied to consumer rights and advocacy, particularly in societies where it was assumed that the government would magically take care of problems. There is no point in moving from private to state-led incompetence. The key issue is the integration of knowledge and power. Politicians often lack any knowledge. People with knowledge often lack power. Social movements do not perform integration properly. Each country needs a business/policy school that studies gross incompetence and has a budget to train organizers and professional protesters [sic] who pressure incompetent companies. The mail service, the internet service, the TV service, just about all utilities are managed by sometimes or often incompetents.
This quote by Jürgen Habermas in Legitimation Crisis, Beacon Press, 1975 explains the key problem: “The motive for readiness to conform to a decisionmaking power still indeterminate in content is the expectation that this power will be exercised in accord with legitimate norms of action. The ultimate motive for readiness to follow is the citizen’s conviction that he could be discursively convinced in case of doubt.” In contrast, the consumer and citizen should have no delusions that bureaucracies will work properly especially as a key interface is a wall of highly trained call center or customer center staff. These persons are trained to take minimal information and diminish managerial responsibility and create public relations gimmicks which cover up systemic failures.
A reasonable salary for a professional protestor, including various insurance and other social costs, could be about $52,000 or 450,000 Swedish Crowns per year. This may be an arbitrary figure but I will use it to start the conversation. If you were to protest in front of a dysfunctional company or a malfeasant company (including any and all members of the oil industry and defense firms), this might require about 50 to 100 to 500 persons to generate negative flack, negative publicity which could affect stock ratings of the company. So, those 500 persons could cost as much as $26,000,000 or about 224 million SEK (Swedish Crowns) per year. I contend that this is a small price to pay to make bureaucracies work properly and speed the conversion of oil industries. I would rather pay this price than to wait around and look into the mirror saying “you need to speed up a solution to the climate crisis.”
Why is this a small price to pay? In the United States, we can assume that there are at least two million persons who probably have been screwed over by a dysfunctional bureaucracy. The number who worry about climate change and really want to speed up a solution are probably far more. The problem is these people often invest in dysfunctional NGOs who are alibi organizations, providing alibis to do zero. In both Sweden and the United States there are at least two million persons who would be willing to pay the price. But, what is the price? The price is a measly $13 a year (about 112 SEK). I would gladly pay ten times that amount ($130) to alleviate myself of screwed up internet, mail, and TV service, with the added bonus that I could vastly accelerate solutions to climate change. So, I would pay for a morality army of 5,000 persons to help solve (or accelerate solutions to) these problems. That is a very, very good deal. Proper package delivery, good internet service, and speed up a solution to dismantle big oil with a green conversion. I advise everyone to think about these benefits and a decent alternative to the dysfunctional models where we rely on passive regulatory agencies and lackadaisical NGOs. It’s a very, very good deal.
Companies outsource, under-staff, and do various things to devalue service in the name of profit. A direct action or protest army would pressure companies to be more competent, i.e. insource, hire more persons and deliver quality to de-alienate the customer/user.
