The know-nothing economy posted by Richard Seymour

—	Jean-Paul Sartre, The Communist and the Peace

Labels: alienation, capitalism, dead, knowlege economy, labour, work, working class

Working for capitalism posted by Richard Seymour

Class is not a thing but a relationship, an antagonism that is situated in production. Sociologists have long tried to understand class by reference to occuptional groupings because one can only identify what class one belongs to by locating oneself within the system of production. It is not a coincidence that workplace sociologists such as Bradley et al have done some of the essential work in restoring class to its central explanatory role in the social sciences. They build on the work of a generation of radicalised social theorists such as Huw Beynon, Theo Nichols, Richard Pfeffer and Harry Braverman, in describing how class power is inherited, wielded in the workplace, and rewarded with a greater or lesser share of profits - as well as how class systems are perpetually restructured as production is reshaped, and work takes on new forms.

Some social theorists maintain a sort of apocalyptic thesis in which technology and the 'knowledge economy' are rapidly obliterating the working class. In this view, work is something antiquated and mechanical, not something that one performs with advanced information technology or, heaven forfend, with the use of skilled knowledge. The worker is a dusty old chap with a spanner, not someone in a pressed shirt sitting in front of an LCD screen. Of course, 'work' has always had a broader meaning than such revisionists allow. The 'working class' has never been defined by a particular skill set, a particular kind of consumption, a particular set of values, sartorial tendencies or gustatory propensities. Therefore the emergence of a white collar proletariat with the ability to use Microsoft Office programmes should not seem counterintuitive - recruitment agencies make a living from this phenomenon. Their class situation is predicated on their relationship to the means of production, which determines how much power and self-direction they will have in the workplace.

In light of this, consider the following talk from Dan Pink, a sort of management guru and former speech-writer for Al Gore. He introduces the topic of 'drive', of what motivates people, and affirms - in a strangely affectless, yet gushing manner - the virtues of autonomy and self-direction in the workplace. It's a mantra for hippy capitalism:



Pink's assertions about what motivates people are not without interest. However, the first thing that strikes one about this little talk is that all of Pink's examples of "cool" workplace practises, wherein workers' productivity dramatically improves upon their being freed from management and the incentives structure, are taken from the software industry. They are taken from a set of employees whose particular role in production is necessarily in some sense both directive and executive. They are an atypical group of workers in this respect. The very fact that it would be possible to give them enough money for cash not to be a motivational issue, and thereafter allow them autonomy in the workplace, means that they are closer to the professional middle class than to the working class. For Pink and those of his persuasion, (and class purview no doubt), this is the future of work. But what the Pinks of this world don't get is that management has an interest in proletarianising such workers, and thus of turning their labour into a routinised series of discrete, mechanical tasks as far as possible.

When new technologies come along, part of the struggle between workers and management takes place over the former's mastery of the subject and thus their ability to resist managerial attempts to oversee, discipline and control their working day. The more managers can get to grips with this technology, or find surrogates and auxiliaries who already have a firm grip on it, the more they can break down workers' tasks into manageable units, the better to surveille, control and extract more surplus value. These processes are already well under way in the IT sector, and in all areas where information technology plays an important role. This is because it is capitalism, and under capitalism managers will always find themselves compelled to exert more control in the workplace, and reduce workers' autonomy accordingly. This might be irrational in one sense, in that suppressing creativity holds back innovation and production - but when has this not been the case under capitalism? When have management ever allowed skills to remain on the shop floor for too long? And when has bourgeois social theory not been available to obscure this process, such that the distribution of rewards and privilege is held to closely mirror the distribution of talent and desert? Only under socialism, in a situation where industry was democratically controlled and not subject to the extraction of profit, would motivations such as creativity, autonomy and altruism be important to production.

Labels: capitalism, dead labour, immaterial labour, labour, middle class, ruling class, work, working class

The power of positive thinking posted by Richard Seymour

Capitalism demands that you change your attitude:

Labels: capitalism, class, dead labour, fun, labour, positive thinking, work

Gone postal posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: dead labour, labour, royal mail, work, working class, zombie labour

The American Working Class posted by Richard Seymour

Michael Yates:

We don’t have time today to discuss all the various control tactics used by employers: the herding of workers into factories, the detailed division of labor, mechanization, Taylorism, personnel management, lean production—all of which deny workers their humanity, their capacity to conceptualize and carry out their plans, to actually “own” what they make. However, let us look at a sampling of jobs in modern America:

Auto workers: There are about 1.1 million auto workers. Not only are they facing rapidly rising insecurity, they are also confronted every day with a work regimen so Taylorized that they must work fifty-seven of every sixty seconds. What must this be like? What does it do to mind and body? In this connection, it is instructive to read Ben Hamper’s Rivethead (1992), a startling account of working in auto plants. Hamper worked in an old plant, where the norm was about forty-five seconds of work each minute. He eventually got a job in a new, “lean production” facility. He called it a “gulag.” In her book, On the Line at Subaru-Isuzu (1995), sociologist Laurie Graham tells us about her work routine in one of these gulags. Below, I have skipped a lot of the steps, because I just want to give readers a sense of the work. Remember as you read it that the line is relentlessly moving while she is working:

1. Go to the car and take the token card off a wire on the front of the car.
2. Pick up the 2 VIN (vehicle identification number) plates from the embosser and check the plates to see that they have the same number.
3. Insert the token card into the token card reader.
4. While waiting for the computer output, break down the key kit for the car by pulling the 3 lock cylinders and the lock code from the bag.
5. Copy the vehicle control number and color number onto the appearance check sheet....
8. Lift the hood and put the hood jig in place so it will hold the hood open while installing the hood stay....
22. Rivet the large VIN plate to the left-hand center pillar.
23. Begin with step one on the next car.

This work is so intense that it is not possible to steal a break much less learn your workmate’s job so that you can double-up, then rest while she does both jobs. Within six months of the plant’s start-up, a majority of the workers had to wear wrist splints for incipient carpal tunnel. Necks and backs ache from bodies being twisted into unnatural positions for eight hours a day. Supervisors recommend exercises and suggest that workers who cannot deal with the pain are sissies.

What is true for auto workers is true for all who do this type of labor—whether it be in beef processing plants or on chicken disassembly lines where workers labor with slippery blood and gore on the floor and on their bodies. And where cuts lead to infections and disease.

Clerks: There are about 15 million clerks in the United States. Many years ago I was on a television show with former secretary of labor Robert Reich. In response to my claim that a lot of the jobs being created were not all that desirable, he said that there were a lot of good jobs available, ones in which workers had a real say about their jobs (no doubt referring to the “quality circles” so popular then). One such job was that of “clerk.” I blurted out in a loud and incredulous voice, CLERKS! I suggested that perhaps Mr. Reich had never noticed the splints on the wrists of many clerks, signs of epidemic carpal tunnel syndrome. Since that time, I have actually worked as a clerk, at the Lake Hotel in Yellowstone National Park. I describe the experience and what I learned in my book Cheap Motels and Hot Plate: An Economist’s Travelogue. Clerks work long hours; they are on their feet all day; they take regular abuse from customers; they are exposed in full view of supervisors with no place to hide; they are accorded no respect (think about customers on cell phones in grocery lines); their pay is low; their benefits negligible. After a hard day at the front desk, I only wanted a few drinks and a warm bed. The stress level was extraordinary.

Restaurant Workers: There are 11 million of these, growing in number every year. Next to personal care and service workers, those who prepare and serve our food are most likely to experience a “major depressive episode.” Restaurant workers in Manhattan’s Chinatown log as many as one hundred hours a week, for less than minimum wage. The pace of the work, the pressure of it are unbelievable. Check out the arms and legs of a kitchen worker. They are full of cuts and burns. Substance abuse is widespread.

Secretaries, Administrative Assistants, and Office Support: These workers are 23 million strong. They are poorly paid, many in sick buildings, stuck in badly designed chairs, staring at computer screens for hours, taking orders all day long (usually women from men), and often heavily Taylorized. These workers, whose working conditions are satirized so skillfully on the television series The Office, have to contend with daily degradations, including all too prevalent sexual harassment. Here is what my sister said about her work:

I, too, share some of your fears and anxieties. As one of the administrative assistants you talk about, I can relate to the long days of sitting at the typewriter (in years past) and now at the computer. I am sure that is the cause of my neck and shoulder pain and the many headaches from which I suffer. Although I basically like my job and the people with whom I work, after thirty years I am anxious to move on to something else. I look forward to retirement in about three to four years, moving to the city, maybe working part-time, and finding meaningful things in which to participate.

Security workers: Three million men and women watch over others in prisons, malls, gated communities, in occupied Iraq, and on our city streets. This is a type of work guaranteed to be stressful and to generate not only an extremely jaundiced and pejorative view of the rest of society but also an extreme, macho personality, prone to violence.

Custodial workers: There are 4 million building and grounds workers, many of them immigrants, keeping our buildings clean and the grounds swept and manicured. Often they are hired by contractors who are themselves employed by the buildings’ owners. It has taken monumental efforts by the SEIU to organize some of these exploited workers, who must often labor in close proximity to dangerous cleaning fluids, solvents, and chemical fertilizers.

Medical workers: There are more than 13 million people laboring in our hospitals, surgicare centers, and nursing homes, as well as in individual residences. With the exception of those at the top, including health care administrators and most of the physicians, health care is a minefield of poor working conditions. Even nursing has been degraded and deskilled so much that the nursing shortage could be nearly filled simply by the return of disaffected nurses to their profession. At the request of the California Nurses Association, I spoke this summer to nurses in four Texas cities. I heard many tales of woe: sixteen hour days, two weeks straight of twelve-hour days, insane patient loads, constant cost-cutting that damages patient health, demeaning treatment by administrators, etc. Conditions only worsen as one goes down the health care occupation ladder.

Labels: american working class, dead labour, work

Body Politic posted by Richard Seymour

Amid the ongoing ideological resuscitation of eugenics and genetic determinism, evidence accrues daily of the way in which class penetrates and restructures biology. The New York Times has published the results of extensive research on behalf of the US government which found growing inequality in life expectancy across the US, arranged by class and race. They attempt to offset this with reference to rightist think-tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, who assure readers that the poor are dying younger not because they are poor but because they are ignorant. However, the overwhelming evidence is that differences in opportunity, income, diet, and access to health facilities is the cause of the problem. Stephen Soldz points out that there is a PBS documentary series planned on precisely this topic, based on the "mounting evidence that demonstrates how work, wealth, neighborhood conditions and lack of access to power and resources can actually get under the skin and disrupt human biology as surely as germs and viruses."

Of course, it is perfectly obvious that capitalism structures biological processes, and not only by way of its ideological representations of the ideal human type from the eugenics models to Barbie, and the denial that it does so is increasingly untenable. A study by Inas Rashad, 'Height, health, and income in the US, 1984–2005', in the latest edition of the scholarly journal Economics and Biology scrutinises biological outcomes and their relationship, and finds that heights and body mass are closely correlated to economic performance: the taller you are, the higher your income is likely to be, and of course this is correlated to a number of other health factors such as high cholesterol, and diabetes. Perhaps the most dramatic example of the way class structures biology is the fate of human bodies in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the turbulent and callous 'transition' period between 1991 and 1994. A study for the same journal in 2006 summarised the overwhelming evidence that the 'reform' process, particularly during the worst years until 1994, had led to vastly increased mortality, especially through increased alcohol poisoning, suicide, and violent death. It produced an increase in 'stunted' and 'wasted' children (children who are too short, or too thin), reduced overall caloric intake, and reduced iron intake, thus leading to haemoglobin failure and higher morbidity. Naturally, these effects were stratified by class, so that there is a strong correlation between child stature and household socioeconomic status.

These are just a couple of examples - examples, I might add, of well-known phenomena, not at all controversial or mysterious. Of course, the idea that biological processes are partially at the mercy of sociological processes has some disadvantages. It disrupts the heroic ideologies of capitalism, which seem to oscillate between the master race doctrines in which a small number of human beings are hardwired for supremacy and the protean doctrines in which one can with sufficient will endlessly remake oneself, boundlessly improve oneself, exuberantly adapting to the dynamic conditions of the market place through sheer strength of will. You get a lot of the latter in quasi-scientific business doctrines such as Neuro-Linguistic Programming. For them, as much as for a certain specious version of 'postmodernism', the body is a discursive fiction, not in the sense that our conception of the body is itself textual, but in the sense that one can just override bodily limitations through exhortation. Thus, one can work twelve hour shifts, eating miniature sub-standard meals at one's desk, without suffering a nervous breakdown or a heart attack or ageing ten years in one month, because of one's positive attitude to work and achievement. Kapital, in its endless mysticism, just demands this much irrational belief to sustain its reproduction.

Labels: aryanism, biopolitics, body, dead labour, work

The old work-life balance. posted by Richard Seymour

Five million workers in the UK do an average of almost two months worth of unpaid overtime each year. That's worth £25bn to the rich, and five grand to each individual employee. It is probably mainly effected through unofficial pressure from the boss and the adoption of minute linguistic operations such as 'core hours', 'flexibility' and so on. Now, some people don't have much choice but to acquiesce if they want to keep their jobs. But see if you're one of these hard-working, committed team players reaching for the sky, adding value, pushing the envelope, reinventing the wheel, thinking outside the box and all of that? You're a fucking tool! Cut it out and stop making shit difficult for the rest of us.

Labels: capitalism, dead labour, exploitation, work, work-life balance

Under socialism, everyone will have to do the shit work. posted by Richard Seymour

A Znet commentary reproduced on MediaLens discusses what it calls 'balanced job complexes'. Essentially:

Every workplace is just a set of tasks. Tasks are bundled to create jobs. Currently, tasks are bundled according to their relative desirability and empowerment effects to create jobs that are quite disparate from one another. So today, we have jobs like nurse aide ad doctor, secretary and manager, or assembly line worker and CEO. A relatively small percentage of people, whom I call the coordinator class, primarily do work that increases their self-confidence and gives them a fair amount of control over their own work lives. The majority of people, the working class, do work that is deadening, disempowering, and sometimes even dangerous - not to mention commonly smashing their self-confidence, and essentially never increasing it.

And so:

[W]hy should anyone be stuck with a job which consists of only screwing sprayers, or only sitting in a cubicle, while others primarily get to do work which increases their energy and confidence? Why can't workplace tasks be apportioned more fairly, so that everyone has to do their fair share of less-desirable labor?

It is precisely this which makes a balanced job complex what it is: Everyone gets to do some tasks that are desirable or empowering, and everyone has to do his or her fair share of shit work. It doesn't mean everyone performs every task. That would literally be impossible. It just means that everyone's work circumstances are comparable to everyone else's.

Of course, this is practically unimaginable in a capitalist economy, so chalk it up to Parecon's ongoing efforts to rethink the nature of production and exchange. The idea should resonate with anyone stuck in menial work as I have been, again. This time I'm temping in the City, which is even more lowly (if slightly better paid) than temping elsewhere. While not always onerous, the work is mundane, uninspiring, and drags out the hours. What is more, in an environment packed with bouffant-haired rich boys with crystalline accents, the menials are silent and invisible (while thinking things like, 'come the revolution, you guys are soooo fucked'). As I suppose you already know, in these kinds of roles it is necessary to "switch off", which practically everyone who has done call centre work, served at the tills or worked on production lines knows how to do. To put it another way, any kind of work that does not engage your creativity at some level generates a set of automaticities, machinic glances, clockwork smiles, tics, hand movements and so on, while your mind wanders off and solves the crossword puzzle. You become a simple means of production, an accumulation of dead labour time.

Classify this post with the zombie labour collection.

Labels: alienation, capitalism, socialism, work, zombie labour