|
this is an interesting clip. and if you come out of a marxian background at all, there's nothing surprising about the results. what is surprising, if you think about it, is the pervasiveness of a division of intellectual labor at the center of capitalism that requires it's own ineffective implementation in order not to collapse the system as a whole---top-down command systems, fragmentation of tasks, deskilling.
the replacement of the complexity of social beings with the idiocy of profit-reward/loss-punishment hydraulics in "theories" of motivation. the main culprit in institutional terms for these idiotic "theories" is economics programs, laboratories for capitalist pseudo-science. court astrologers. charlatans. **especially** at the level of the baseline models.
since the 1970s, the period at which capitalist organization began to spill over the traditional nation-state boundaries that made of it an aspect of at least one viable-ish period of social organization (fordism) it's been important to not talk much about actual production in the backwater of the american media-scape. this because globalizing capitalism benefits holders of capital as a production process. we had to be persuaded that indices of capital circulation were indices of overall economic well-being.
remaking the image of people in the image of capital flows...wholesale subordination of human beings to money. that's where we live, sports fans. and capitalist theories of motivation are just a particular instance.
why are there artists? one of the main reasons might just be that art provides maximum space for autonomy. people make stuff all the time without money being a motivation.
the incentive systems fall off the edge of the blinkered little world of capitalist ideology. artists are a Problem.
so there's a series of claims about what motivates people that cannot account for most of the objects which surround those who make these claims, at the level of design. they cannot account for anything that the speakers take pleasure in doing for the sake of it, including, maybe, making stupid statements about human motivation.
another way--->there are two conflicts that are as old as capitalism. they get collapsed into each other in part because it was politically expedient for marx to do it when outlining what turned out to be the main texts that defined class conflict as an imaginary construction. the one is the tendency to create a mass of underpaid, brutalized interchangeable workers/wage slaves as a function of the way production is organized on its own. the other is involves skilled workers who find themselves in often protracted conflicts over the preservation of professional and personal autonomy.
this is not new that autonomy matters.
it's only surprising now in the states---maybe---because of the extent to which we live in a dysfunctional ideological context.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|