Hi Tom.
I don't know how much Marx you've read, but actually he was quite aware
different people had different skills, and that cooperation was necessary,
indeed that's sort of the basic philosophy of a lot of comunist ideas. What
marx was against however were those cases, which increasingly happen now,
where rather than a person being assigned those parts of the production of
whatever the object is that are best suited to their abilities, they simply
do one job over and over again repetitively, producing one and only one
thing.
I don't know enough about cooperative coding to give an example, but lets
take carpentry.
If you had one person who was great at the technical drawing, the measuring
angles and the spacial logic, and another who was great at the manual
dexterity type tasks, eg, the hammering, sawing planing etc, then the two of
them could be quite cooperatively successful at building furniture.
What marx was against however was the situation most large companies use
today, where for example you have five people on one production line, and
one person just!hammers the same nale in the same place each day, without
any learning, creativity or use of their skills. Accroding to my software
designer friend, the coding version of this does actually happen, which is
rpecisely why he didn't go into game design and spent a considderable amount
of time looking around for a job that would suit him specifically, even
taking lower paying jobs that offered him more creative output.
Interestingly enough this principle has actually been applied several times.
Back in the 1970's, the National health service hear in britain used to have
one nurse do one thing. Thus, you'd have one nurse on say bed making, one on
feeding patients, one on medication etc, obviously however this got a lot of
Nurses quite pissed off since manifestly if you've spent years at medical
school and all your doing is making beds all day it's not going to be fun,
for all it was an efficient system.
That's why it's now changed to the modern system where one nurse looks after
perhaps six patients, doing all jobs that need doing, and for anything
he/she doesn't know or is incapable of doing, a Seanior nurse is on hand
overseeing with more experience.
this is also a case where controls on capitalism would be really helpful, or
at least better labour laws so that people get paid reasonably for doing
something repetitive boring or strenuous, indeed I often find it morally
quite weerd how the most arduous jobs in society are the ones which people
seem to regard as worth so much less financially.
Getting back to games, another interesting consequence that Marx himself
noted however with the production line model is lack of creativity, and
according to recent reports of the games industry that is actually happening
fairly often these days.
Beware the Grue!
Dark.
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