>Perhaps, but why is he wrong? He is claiming that "they" are making "us" work longer and harder, above and beyond what is needed to keep the profits up. -raghu.
Ryan Avent. who I am not normally fond of has a good answer to this: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-markets >Over the past century the world economy has grown increasingly complex. The goods being provided are more complex; the supply chains used to build them are more complex; the systems to market, sell and distribute them are more complex; the means to finance it all is more complex; and so on. This complexity is what makes us rich. But it is an enormous pain to manage. I'd say that one way to manage it all would be through teams of generalists—craftsman managers who mind the system from the design stage right through to the customer service calls—but there is no way such complexity would be economically workable in that world (just as cheap, ubiquitous automobiles would have been impossible in a world where teams of generalist mechanics produced cars one at a time). >No, the efficient way to do things is to break businesses up into many different kinds of tasks, allowing for a very high level of specialisation. And so you end up with the clerical equivalent of repeatedly affixing Tab A to Frame B: shuffling papers, management of the minutiae of supply chains, and so on. Disaggregation may make it look meaningless, since many workers end up doing things incredibly far removed from the end points of the process; the days when the iron ore goes in one door and the car rolls out the other are over. But the idea is the same. Even if we don't accept that specialization quite as extreme as we have is needed, it is certainly one way to do mange that complexity, and a way that maximizes capitalist power and capitalist control at the firm as well as class level. That is quite enough incentive for capitalists to do things this way. They have to manage complexity to make a profit. Exttreme specialization may indeed be the only the way to make this profit, but even if it is not, it is the only way that leaves capitalists firmly in charge. So that is an answer to your question. Is it a true answer?. Neither Graber nor Avant provide much empirical support for their position. For what it is worth, my personal experience in the business world matches Avan'ts point more closely than Graeber. I've done a fair amount of research on how businesses operate, and while I've encountered a great deal of accidental waste, I've never seen anything that suggests either owners or managers knowingly create makework jobs. Possibly a modified version of Graeber's provocation (I can't really describe it as a hypothesis) could be based on the idea that coordination and management is done with extraordinary inefficiency and waste under capitalism. Indeed, I think Michael Perelman, our host, has made this case in most of his books. On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 12:45 PM, raghu <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 2:20 PM, Doug Henwood <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> >> On Aug 23, 2013, at 3:00 PM, raghu <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> > It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. [...] >> >> David's anti-Marxism is showing. > > > > > Perhaps, but why is he wrong? He is claiming that "they" are making "us" work longer and harder, above and beyond what is needed to keep the profits up. > -raghu. > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > -- Facebook: Gar Lipow Twitter: GarLipow Solving the Climate Crisis web page: SolvingTheClimateCrisis.com Grist Blog: http://grist.org/author/gar-lipow/ Online technical reference: http://www.nohairshirts.com
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