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roachboy · 01-08-2010, 08:20 AM

a basic constraint that shapes how capitalist firms operate is the need to assure reproduction of the labor pool.
back in the old days of nation-states, that meant paying people enough to live, supporting training through taxation which was applied to education and so forth. back in the old days of nation-states, there was a kind of symbiotic relation between the action of firms and the human machines they used, who sold their labor power for a wage. it wasn't much of one from the viewpoint of those who sold their labor power for a wage though. in the old days of nation-states that were the 1859 lincoln-calhoun debates, the only argument that lincoln could muster to claim that capitalism was superior to slavery was that workers, no matter how exploited, could quit their jobs in one place and go get exploited in another. so it was a kind of shitty symbiosis.

now in the glorious days of neo-liberal "globalization" subcontractors connected to production through supply chain relations are interchangeable and the problem of reproduction of the labor pool transferred to the process of bidding for contracts. so it's disappeared as a tangible matter, dissolved into interfaces and the language of supply-chain management. if "problems" arise in one space, move to another. it's all the same from the viewpoint of "procurement specialists" if there's not adequate labor power available to conform to the imperatives which are expressed through price, move to another supplier---the only relevant geography is 2-dimensional and backlit. all social relations that are intertwined with production are expressed through the pseudo-objective language of numbers.

that's why folk can discount work conditions, the politics of production, the need for working people to organize in order to have any meaningful power in the protection of anything like their own interests in the face of a production organization that still tends to reduce human beings to unreliable appendages of machines (one of the few constants in capitalist organization, visible very early in the game, central with the development of mass production).

defending that type of organization is a pure expression of exactly the ideology that enables the dissolving of production into supply-chain management interfaces.
technologies are ideological expressions.
there are consequences of collapsing a sense of interacting with the world into flat glowing monitor-spaces.
it's better to be aware of them than to simply repeat them, dont you think?

01-08-2010, 08:20 AM	#32 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	a basic constraint that shapes how capitalist firms operate is the need to assure reproduction of the labor pool. back in the old days of nation-states, that meant paying people enough to live, supporting training through taxation which was applied to education and so forth. back in the old days of nation-states, there was a kind of symbiotic relation between the action of firms and the human machines they used, who sold their labor power for a wage. it wasn't much of one from the viewpoint of those who sold their labor power for a wage though. in the old days of nation-states that were the 1859 lincoln-calhoun debates, the only argument that lincoln could muster to claim that capitalism was superior to slavery was that workers, no matter how exploited, could quit their jobs in one place and go get exploited in another. so it was a kind of shitty symbiosis. now in the glorious days of neo-liberal "globalization" subcontractors connected to production through supply chain relations are interchangeable and the problem of reproduction of the labor pool transferred to the process of bidding for contracts. so it's disappeared as a tangible matter, dissolved into interfaces and the language of supply-chain management. if "problems" arise in one space, move to another. it's all the same from the viewpoint of "procurement specialists" if there's not adequate labor power available to conform to the imperatives which are expressed through price, move to another supplier---the only relevant geography is 2-dimensional and backlit. all social relations that are intertwined with production are expressed through the pseudo-objective language of numbers. that's why folk can discount work conditions, the politics of production, the need for working people to organize in order to have any meaningful power in the protection of anything like their own interests in the face of a production organization that still tends to reduce human beings to unreliable appendages of machines (one of the few constants in capitalist organization, visible very early in the game, central with the development of mass production). defending that type of organization is a pure expression of exactly the ideology that enables the dissolving of production into supply-chain management interfaces. technologies are ideological expressions. there are consequences of collapsing a sense of interacting with the world into flat glowing monitor-spaces. it's better to be aware of them than to simply repeat them, dont you think? __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 01-08-2010 at 08:23 AM..