Only absolute dismantlement of property prevents activist division.

The challenge, therefore, is to articulate a counterargument that manages to remain true—and continue to expand—the liberation movements for race, gender, sexuality, prison abolition, and indigenous rights that arose in the 1960s, but to do so from a refounded form of social protection that combats the unprecedented precarity and inequality of class that is toxic to our long-term survival and inimical to our ability to maintain solidarity on any of these fronts. In short, this challenge requires dismantling the reified culture of property that remains fundamentally unexamined in American society even as we confront the resurgent reaction of patriarchal, heteronormative, white supremacy. Labor, Global Production, and Intellectual Property But as fraught as our domestic politics are, the international scene compounds them. Here, the contradictions of the social division of labor that haunt the “democratic paradox” are global in scale, harder to square with a simple move to economic nationalism, and, as suggested at the start of the chapter, tenuously secured through IPR. To illustrate this difficulty, note Secretary of Commerce Ross’s (2017) explanation of the problem the United States faces in its relationship with China on the topic of IPR: “Rather than building a globally competitive free market economy in order to compete, China has chosen instead to compel American companies that want to operate in China to turn over proprietary technology and intellectual property.” As in the Vanguard America manifesto, Ross’s understanding of the “free market” is decidedly limited, but it ironically echoes Hale’s reappropriation of the term from the libertarians of his day. The use of the word “compel” here is curious—after all, no company is forced to go to China. Until two decades ago, in fact, almost no American company did: only the very structured opening of the market internally in the 1980s and the acceptance of China into the WTO in the late 1990s made it possible. Offshoring production to China was a conscious strategy from which U.S. businesses disproportionately profited for the better part of the next decade (see Harvey 2005). Taking advantage of the cheap labor and lax enforcement of labor, health, and environmental standards was hailed as the next chapter in the ruthless genius of the neoliberal corporate playbook. It is counterintuitive to imagine that China now holds the upper hand, not because it has helped finance this expansion but simply because it has made certain demands for businesses that want to operate within its borders. As Barry Lynn (2002) has noted, the spread of skills and knowledge was the advantage supposedly accruing to countries that accepted U.S. corporate investment as part of the bargain of globalization. But even more than a decade ago, Lynn identifies the potential geopolitical and political economic outcome of this arrangement: At the end of the day, who “owns” the actual semiconductor plant [or, we should now add, the patents for those semiconductors] matters far less than where the plant is located, because whoever physically controls the production of semiconductors can paralyze thousands of the world’s assembly lines with the flick of a switch. Beijing need not even declare a blockade of Taiwan, backed by a threat to use its missiles, in order to cause economic havoc. If it succeeds in luring enough key manufacturing capacity, Beijing will need only to threaten a peaceful closure of its own border, a sit-down strike if you will, organized by the most powerful labor syndicate in the world. (Ibid., p. 40) And, at the end of the day, this power is what Ross means by “compel.” Despite the fact that Apple owns the patents to specific components of the iPhone or iPad, despite the fact that its trademarks and copyrights aid in an unprecedented tax-avoidance scheme that has accrued the company nearly $200 billion in offshore accounts, China houses the workers capable of producing its products. This labor, the supply chains in the country, the rare earth elements available in nearby mines, are all essential to Apple’s timely production of the next utopian device. And, as with the Ecuadorian film distributors or the Bolivian textile manufacturers, the only means Apple has of maintaining its superiority is through the casually enforced laws of IPR. But despite Ross’s pleadings, even this leverage will not suffice for long. The Chinese company Huawei recently surpassed Apple as the second-largest cell phone manufacturer in the world, after Samsung. This title is really a misnomer, however, because unlike Huawei, Apple owns almost none of its manufacturing capacity. Like Huawei, the tacit knowledge for the assembly of its major products resides in the minds and hands of Chinese workers. As Frederick Winslow Turner recognized in the early twentieth century—and as Ross is wont to admit today—the power of this labor confronts the corporate owners. This power, in the end, is what increasingly compels Apple, Boeing, and other Fortune 500 companies to do business in China—and to provide those workers with the technical schematics and legal permissions to assemble their products. American citizens should resist the temptation to fall for Ross’s call to arms. For in the end, the advancement of Chinese corporations and workers was supposed to be the result of the globalization process. The fact that the “knowledge economy” here at home has failed to develop at anything like the necessary scale was all but predictable for anyone looking at the ways in which the social division of labor works in any factory or factory town. Just as we should resist the impulse to side with the reactionary counter triple movement, closing borders to immigrants or deporting those formerly covered by DACA, we should also resist the attempt to use IPR to enforce a paradoxically autarkic imperialism that attempts to maintain the U.S. position at the top of the international division of labor and power. Instead, we should attempt to organize for a new, postcapitalist world, seeing the ways in which our collective labors are unjustly appropriated by corporate conglomerates across the borders between nations and the increasingly hazy division between mental and material labor, cyberspace and meatspace. As Ellen Meiksins Wood reminds us, the more cherished goal of enlightened modernity was supposed to be the improvement of humanity, not property (2002, p. 189). As we live in a world with fewer jobs available for U.S. workers, we should not attempt to wrest them back from China; instead, we should reimagine our culture of property and reorganize the distribution of the resources such that fewer people here or there need to work. Or, in James Livingston’s more succinct version: “Fuck work” (2016, loc. 44). Although the calls for full automation and a universal basic income (UBI) (Srnicek and Williams 2016) may be premature—and problematic in the ways in which they subtly maintain the very social division of labor that is the root of the problems we face—the movement for something like these changes is clearly possible. But as with the imposition of capitalism in its early days, this call is far more of a political and cultural problem than an economic or technological one. As evidence, take the recent attempt by the rabidly antilabor Wisconsin governor Scott Walker to bring a Foxconn factory—the company that manufactures Apple’s products—to his state. To facilitate the bargain, he offered the company $3 billion in tax incentives for the thirteen thousand jobs it would bring. As Reason points out, this sum is the equivalent to $231,000 per job (Britschgi 2017), or almost $20,000 per worker annually for each job paying $55,000 (Schwartz, Cohen, and Davis 2017). If the state of Wisconsin—and especially Walker, one of the most public proponents of the Tea Party agenda—can be persuaded to fork over $20,000 to subsidize workers for a Chinese corporation, then it is not unreasonable to imagine that it could be persuaded to simply give that amount (which is in the ballpark of figures suggested for a UBI) to its citizens; it is simply a matter of organizing power in that direction. On the other hand, as Qiu has extensively documented, Foxconn’s labor and human rights practices in China are some of the most reprehensible in the world: suppressing wages, threatening journalists, and doing nothing to improve “a merciless ‘flexible’ labor management regime, which [has] led to the suicide of several Foxconn workers since June 2007” (2012, p. 182). This regime of accumulation is secured by the repressive apparatus of the Chinese state and the legal suture of global IPR. How will transplanting this model of labor management to the U.S. Midwest transform it? What will be the response of the everyday culture to the imposition of what will be only the latest regime of merciless labor management? Thanks in part to Foxconn and its Chinese workers, we have more tools available than ever for organizing that culture. Even in the supposedly controlled Chinese media environment, “the new wave of labor-capital clashes was triggered by the suicides—helpless individual acts in the beginning but with powerful butterfly effects within and beyond Foxconn—the tools of everyday connectivity were converted, almost instantly, into tools of labor solidarity,” with cell phone cameras and text messaging helping workers organize strikes at a Chinese Honda factory; and concerts, folk theater performances, and “most importantly hundreds of poems expressing their emotions at the time [. . .] easily circulated through mobile phone (especially through SMS) and Internet among workers and concerned citizens” (Qiu 2012, p. 184). The key now is to penetrate that great Chinese firewall, to include those workers in our struggle and include ourselves in theirs. As Qiu reminds us: No matter how “immaterial” the iPhone culture seems to be, its material dimension is always indispensable, depending, first of all, on the physical labor of Foxconn workers. Labor is also integral to the research and development of the iPhone, the production, testing, and installation of its software, and even the consumption of the fingertip economy. Labor is not a thing. It is a perspective. Only by using this perspective can we start to treat the workers with dignity and extend this dignity though our activities online and offline. (Ibid., p. 186) IP is one tool among many for dividing not only the fruits of our collective labors but also the laboring classes, undermining our potential solidarity and legitimate demands. But with these emergent tools and platforms, the workers of the world can unite as never before, and thanks to the increasingly punitive, unequal neoliberal state, we truly have little to lose but our chains.