Author: Yeo and Schiller

Libraries Working Class

Academic Libraries in Class Society

By Yeo and Schiller

[Editor’s note (10/3/2024) Please see the comment below for additional historical context about Queens College]

A shocking disparity defines the US system of information provision.  At one extreme is the multi-trillion-dollar corporate wealth of the for-profit information industry. At the other end is the growing – and deliberately inflicted – poverty of our public information sector.  During the past half-century, capital and class together have gravely worsened this disparity.

Scholars have analyzed the depredations visited by the for-profit information industry on the information sphere in general, and libraries in particular. Corporations have enclosed and raided governmental and other public information sites, while doing everything in their power to vilify the belief that information is, and should be, a social good.[1] A recent appellate court decision to ban the Internet Archive from lending out digital copies of half a million books to the public is only the latest troubling example.[2]

Concomitantly, libraries have faced declining budgets which have forced them to significantly hollow out collection development and other public services and relinquish their traditional functions to for-profit database providers and publishers – at the same time expanding and highlighting rare and precious special archival collections to prospective donors and possible political allies as if this is the sole function of libraries.

However, a closely related second factor has also been at work: a class logic. According to Mary Jane Petrowski, associate director at the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL),[3] between 2012 and 2021, 31% of full-time librarian positions, 54% of all other paid full-time staff, have been lost in community colleges. At colleges that offer Baccalaureate and Masters degrees, 34.2% of full-time librarian positions, 55.4% of all other full-time staff have disappeared. For universities that grant PhD degrees, by contrast, the number of full-time librarians has actually increased by 13.7% (while all other full-time staff has dropped 21.7%).

Community college libraries serving mostly working-class students, in other words, have been gutted. Eliminating more than 30% of librarian positions and 50% of staff over a decade means that these libraries find it difficult to remain open.[4] And within colleges that offer Baccalaureate and Masters degrees, there is a comparable disparity. For instance, Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY), has only 9 full-time librarians including cataloging and special collections librarians serving about 16,500 overwhelmingly working-class students[5] – among them 48% are first-generation college students.[6] Since 2019, the library has lost 10 full-time librarian positions to retirement and departure. These positions remain unfilled. Thus, the library is struggling to provide adequate public services like reference and instruction, and is only able to cover the bare minimum of collection development for many subject areas – 30 out of the 58 subjects defined by the library as needed to support dozens of majors, minors, and programs have no subject specialist assigned.[7]

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Anti-Trust Laws Competition Google Monopoly

A Paradox: Corporate Power Increases As Corporate Competition Grows

By Yeo and Schiller

This is the first of an intermittent series that will focus on the growing need to impose limits on corporate power in communications and on the communications market as a whole.  In the current moment of right-wing mobilization and social polarization, it will also be important to try to examine some of the Left’s assumptions about its reliance on communications systems.

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On 6 August 2024, Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Google had maintained a monopoly in search, and therefore violated U.S. antitrust law. [1] Google said it would appeal the ruling.

After more than two decades of promoting neoliberal policies of unregulated growth for the internet sector, antitrust activism has revived among policymakers, think tanks, and academics.[2]  Starting at the tail-end of the Trump administration and continuing under the Biden administration, the U.S. government has renewed anti-monopoly investigations to rein in the tech giants. The government has sued four of them: Amazon, Google (twice), Apple, and Meta.[3] This has been welcomed across the political spectrum.

These anti-trust actions, according to Lina Khan, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), are “part of protecting the free market [to] ensur[e] that market outcomes – who wins and who loses – [are] determined by fair competition rather than by private gatekeepers who can serve as de-facto private regulators.”[4] This argument is rooted in neo-classical economics: The FTC asserts that the current market requires correction because it has “deviated” from “fair” competition, as would exist in a “perfect” market.  This view resonates among those who, on the left, embrace a critique of “monopoly capital.” [5]

This renewal of antitrust is to be welcomed, even if it is undertaken for an inadequate reason.  A stronger rationale for mounting a political attack against the titans of the internet would be anchored not in neoclassical economics but, rather, in a sweeping critique of corporate power. Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple and the rest are bad actors for a panoply of reasons. Economically, they stomp all over smaller businesses, whether customers (e.g., advertisers) or suppliers (e.g., news media). Politically, they damage democracy through lobbying, government contracts and other means. Culturally, they saturate us with commercialism, pushing away alternatives. Environmentally, their mammoth data centers force the pace of global heating. In addition to all this, their business model is built upon privacy transgressions, as it surveils and channels individuals as corporate preferences demand.

We should welcome vigorous antitrust policies, therefore, inasmuch as these make it more difficult for the tech companies to continue to have free rein, even if these policies are not based on a far-reaching critique of corporate power – and even if, paradoxically, in the real world of contemporary capitalism, corporate competition has actually intensified.

For, contrary to many accounts, corporate competition has not lessened but increased, alongside the financialization and transnationalization of the political economy. Without a clearer understanding of how competition is structured within the larger framework of today’s capitalism, we won’t be able to strategize on how to limit corporate power – via antitrust or other, more comprehensive means.

Competition is a consequence of capital’s inherent drive for profitable expansion.[6] It is in turn the feature of capitalism that spurs technological change, the search for new markets, and the re-organization of labor to be as productive as possible. In the process of competing, firms may temporarily ally with competitors out of corporate self-interest, to maximize profits.

The intensity of competition often is presumed to correspond to the number of firms in a given industry; if that number is small, then it is supposed to be less competitive.  However, this is not necessarily true. Anwar Shaikh, Stephen Maher, Scott Aquanno, and others have argued that competition is, first and foremost, over profits rather than sales or market shares (though the latter are not unimportant).[7]“It therefore takes the form of competition between investment opportunities” within and between industries.[8] Intensity of competition is in turn not a function of the number of firms; rather, it hinges on the mobility of capital regulated by profitability: “the mobility of capital implies that new investment will accelerate relative to demand in industries with higher rates of profit and decelerate relative to demand in industries with lower rates of profit.”[9]

This mobility is facilitated by finance, and by new forms of financialization, which ease the flows of capital across and within industries and countries. Financial capital is notably well-integrated into today’s tech sector.[10] The search engine industry constitutes a major example.

In 2023, the global search engine market was worth $ 205.48 billion, and it is expected to reach $507.37 billion by 2032, with a compounding annual growth rate of 11%.[11] Competition in this sector is in fact intense.

Three big asset management financial firms – BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street – are all major shareholders of Google, but that does not preclude them from also investing in new search engine companies. Even if one captures a small fraction of $205.48 billion, this is enough incentive for capital to invest, if the profit rate is high enough. A stream of search engine start-ups continues to spring up.[12]

Foremost, Microsoft Bing is still in the search engine game, as is Yahoo!, which is majority-owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Management. Apple has plenty of cash on hand to develop its search. It has spent billions of dollars building out its mapping service and app search. Amazon and Meta function as vertical search engines which index a specific domain, and they are eroding Google’s main source of ads revenue. As of 2023, Amazon is the third-largest advertising platform in the US with $49 billion in ads revenue, trailing behind Google and Facebook.[13]

Google has tried mightily to defend its market share and to deflect competition, including paying Apple $22 billion in 2022 aloneto be its default search engine, but it faces a Sisyphean task to eliminate competition. Economist Howard Botwinick explains the theoretical issue: “Within the context of large-scale enterprise, the relentless drive to expand capital value is necessarily accompanied by a growing struggle over market shares. These two dynamics, accumulation and rivalry, are inextricably bound up with one another.”[14]

In addition, competition has spiraled as firms seek to adapt never-ending new technologies to build adjacent and profitable new markets. Search, social media, e-commerce, mobile, cloud, AI, etc. appear to be separate domains, but all are in play among the major tech companies – which foray into each other’s territories while defending their existing profit centers. In each case they are competing to carve out new profitable businesses, even beyond the internet sectors, through ventures into military, automobile, pharmaceutical, agriculture, education, and healthcare markets.[15]

With AI technologies, there are still further entries into the search market. Open AI, backed by Microsoft and major venture capital, is building its own search engine and threatening Google’s core business. During the first six months of 2024 alone, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta spent $106 billion on AI capital investment.[16] As Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called Godfather of AI, puts it, now that the genie has been unleashed they have no choice but to compete in this domain.[17] Other AI entrants have also plunged into the fray. AI-based search engines Perplexity[18] and Genspark[19] have already raised millions of dollars from asset management firms and venture capital.

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Empire Geo-Political Economy of Information Palestine

Communications and Empire Around Palestine

By Yeo and Schiller

The strategic role of the Red Sea for imperial communications has been evident at least since the great Indian Rebellion of 1857 – a year before construction began on the Suez Canal, a 120-mile waterway which opened a passage from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and on to the Indian Ocean. Initially a protest by Indian soldiers against their employer, the East India Company, this anticolonial uprising took control of the old Mughal capital of Delhi and quickly spread to include peasants, artisans, and laborers.[1] Yet appeals by British colonial administrators for reinforcements, sent from Kolkata (Calcutta) on May 18, 1857 and thenceforth conveyed by both ships and telegraphs, reached London only on June 27th – a period of 40 days. This interval was sufficient for the rebellion to sweep through much of northwestern, north and central India, and to ramify across British colonies from Ireland to New Zealand. Savage military reprisals put down the rising; and, in early 1858, the English government signed a fifty-year contract with the new Red Sea and India Telegraph Company to lay a cable to speed communications between England and its South Asian colony.

This particular subsea cable failed, but within just fifteen years repeated improvements made it feasible to send a telegram from England to India in only a few hours.[2] And the strategic significance of the Red Sea route for imperial communications and, indeed, for imperialism more generally, had been amply demonstrated. For many decades to come, this area of the Middle East would intertwine communications, empire, colonial domination – and anticolonial resistance.

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Within the wider context of the inter-imperialist conflict that engulfed the world in war in 1914, the British government was determined to extend and consolidate its occupation of territory in the Middle East. British strategy revolved around military campaigns against the Ottoman Empire and Germany, struggles with France, selective alliances with Arab peoples and, crucially, support for Zionism, a political movement seeking to colonize Palestine – a region inhabited by Christians, Jews, and (mostly) Muslims under Ottoman rule.[3]

In affirming the artfully crafted Balfour Declaration of 1917 (named for the then British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour), Britain declared its official support for “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.  This was, however, not an act of benevolence. The government understood, in the words of a contemporary British leader, that control of Palestine “gives the controller the essential strategic and economic mastery of the communications between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, between Asia and Africa.”[4]

Britain lent support to the Zionist project to wrest for Britain itself informal dominance – to keep the region out of the hands of its imperial rivals, Germany and especially France.  Jerusalem is separated from Port Said – the entrance to the Suez Canal – by a distance of about 170 miles by air and 475 miles by road. Palestine offered a strategic base not only for projecting force over the Suez Canal, but also for commanding trade routes and ensuring access to the vast oil wealth of what is now Iraq.[5] Following World War I Britain gained legitimacy for its program when it was granted a mandate for administering Palestine by the League of Nations – a measure supported by the US.

For the Palestinian people, as had been forecast two decades earlier when Zionism was coalescing into a political force, all of this was predicated on violence. Palestinians repeatedly resisted large-scale Jewish colonization.  And when, in 1948, Britain’s mandate ended and the state of Israel was established, the first major Arab-Israeli War at once commenced – killing and displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians. Palestinians call it the Nakba, or “catastrophe.”

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Global capitalism meanwhile continued to mutate and, as the United States took over from Britain as the foremost global and regional power, the character of imperialism also changed – from a tendency to territorial occupation to control over exports of capital and the international circulation of commodities. This only added to the importance of the Red Sea communications route. Submarine cables had long been backbones for the transnational circulation of corporate information;[6] after World War II they began to form the infrastructure of digital capitalism.

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