******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
Remarks on Steve Jobs as a Phenomenon [The producers of the first Jobs movie, "Jobs" kindly loaned a preprint to the Roxie Theater in San Francisco so that my old friends and Apple co-workers could have a party—which we did, wall to wall. After the showing that Thursday afternoon, here and there, I offered my opinion on the movie and its social meaning. That raised a few eyebrows and more questions. I have since been asked to explain myself, a reasonable request. Since my outlook differs a lot from that of many of us, I thought it proper to clarify what I meant when I talked about Steve as being intrinsically anti-capitalist. By that I meant that Steve was opposed to the “alienation of labor”, while the alienation of labor is intrinsic to capitalist production. The term “alienation of labor” is a technical term, and like many in philosophy and economics, doesn’t quite mean what one would think. The shortest explanation of the concept is found in Wikipedia. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation> Of course, the concept is not the property of Marx but has been part of the thinking of many thinkers since the rise of capitalism. In the Wikipedia article, there is a quotation where Marx imagines production with non-alienated labor: “… In your enjoyment, or use, of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man’s essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man’s essential nature. . . . Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature." Steve Jobs wanted his products enjoyed as expressing his essential nature, and therefore in the general sense, he was an artist with the development team and its laboratories as his studio. In the capitalist system, products are produced by workers paid in money and with tools owned by the capitalist. The sole purpose of the product is to be sold to realize a profit. This process eliminates the artist altogether. Wikipedia sums this up: In a capitalist society, the worker’s alienation from his and her humanity occurs because the worker can only express labour — a fundamental social aspect of personal individuality — through a privately-owned system of industrial production in which each worker is an instrument, a thing, not a person. So the product of labor under capitalism, the commodity, is not what Steve Jobs intended to sell. He was selling something better, something more. As far as he was concerned, profit was just fine, but not at the expense of that “something more.” I wrote the few paragraphs below without a discussion of the alienation of labor, which is an unusual social-philosophical concept. As a result of this omission, there were some misunderstandings. For example, the alienation of labor does not mean the alienation of workers. The fact that Steve was driven by his vision of beautiful products, “insanely great” as he would say, didn’t prevent us from glorying in our own contribution of non-alienated labor. I do not believe Steve grasped the notion of alienated labor in and of itself. It is impossible to imagine the tens of thousands of Chinese laborers getting any whiff of the intoxicating perfume in the air we enjoyed in the early years at Apple. ===================== Let me take on the task of explaining my view of Steve and the "First Five Years of Apple Computer." Over the years, I've listened to lots of people with theories of how Apple succeeded, what was the magic ingredient, and whether the life of Steve Jobs verified the Great Man theory of history or not. I believe that the overwhelming majority of commentators miss the point completely. This is not surprising not only because they weren't there, but also because what actually went on at Apple completely contradicts some central myths of Modern Capitalism. I will state my thesis here as briefly as I can. I will not be writing a book proving every jot and tittle on the way to a grand conclusion. However, I feel competent to defend the thesis against any opponent. The first few years of Apple Computer were remarkable because labor was not alienated labor in the Marxist sense. We were not producing commodities for the sake of profit. In many respects, even as the company grew beyond all expectations, inertia carried this extraordinary characteristic forward until the Scully era. The first three years at Apple were marked by a strong bond between all the participants, and between all of us and the product. We were building a product for ourselves and everybody throughout the world who were like us. (People tend to think everybody except the Other are like themselves in fundamental ways.) This was a product we wanted. And that was why we stayed up nights solving problems as they cropped up. Nobody in the early days was doing their job with the pay envelope in mind. Nobody. Even the production people putting Apples into boxes believed (correctly) they were sending their product to someone like themselves who would appreciate it, and more, marvel over it. We made no shortcuts whatsoever. Not one. For example, Steve had the boxes carefully marked with our name and logo in red on the cleanest of clean white cardboard. Later, we got a shipment where the ink had smeared and the boxes “looked like shit,” as Jobs put it. So without regard for the fact that nearly 200 Apples were sitting in production ready to go, Steve shipped the boxes back. Both Markkula [Chairman of the Board] and Scotty [Mike Scott, President and CEO] screamed, but they were too late; the bad boxes were gone. And the whole factory silently applauded. Again: We were in agony when the paint showed signs of peeling off the first cases, which (it turned out) were contaminated by the release compound from the molds. While orders piled up, we didn’t ship until we had stripped the paint, found a method for cleaning the cases and then repainted them. Everything that went wrong met a concentrated corrective effort. When it was clear that the cases made by the RIM (Reaction Injection Molding) method were not ever going to meet our standard, Steve and I took an airplane to Portland, Oregon to start an intensive program to make a new set of molds for an altogether new process that promised perfection (high pressure injection-molded foamed Noryl). Fortunately, our case design was suited to both the material and the process, and without dawdling we jumped right in and Steve wrote some big checks for the tooling. When quality of the product was considered, manufacturing cost was always second. I worked with Steve (cheek to jowl at times) for the first 7 years and I think I came to know him at least as well as anybody. We never had a conflict over product quality as such. I did have arguments on “features.” Take for example one dispute over the Macintosh; Steve wanted stereo sound, and for Burrell Smith who was doing the logic board design, it would take some major design changes to accommodate stereo (adding an extra shift register, another D-A converter, and making changes in the ROMs and software). So I said No. Enough was enough. The engineering department had to stop changing things; we had to wrap up the design and go to production. I convinced Burrell Smith. I convinced Andy Hertzfeld, and demobilized Steve Jobs. Then I went home late, leaving the usual half dozen perfectionists (including Burrell) working away. But Steve wouldn’t leave well enough alone. He came back to the lab late that night and convinced Burrell that stereo was essential. So, the next morning, Burrell went home exhausted with the prototype boasting stereo, and me shaking my head in disgust. But so it came to be that the Macintosh had stereo even though there was no application program of any sort that could use it and only one speaker — at that time. This sort of thing I understood, but it conflicted with my desire to get the product to the user promptly. Sometimes I could move things forward, and sometimes I couldn’t. However reluctantly I say this, more often than not, Steve’s last minute changes were the best thing for the customer. I believe that Steve was dedicated to his audience, an imaginary audience who he would simply will into existence. He wanted commodities to be more than commodities. This desire was the base for the conflicts with Apple’s Board, etc. that forced the Board to fire Steve. But somehow, the vast millions of customers understood and applauded and Steve basked in the glow. I talked with Ashton Kutcher [who played the part of Steve in the movie] at some length about Steve as the self-appointed representative of the customer, representing the people who could appreciate the quality, the thoughtfulness, and the product; that is, the product as the crystallization of what they wanted. Jobs's perfectionism was not just a quirk, it was central; he wanted to be the leader of a new wave of products—products that were more than commodities. Products, I imagine, as we might have under socialism. To my surprise, Kutcher had come to roughly the same conclusion. He had read all available speeches by Steve, read memos and listened to those who had direct experience. He was the only one in the organization, which produced “Jobs”, who had thought through the story to the point of understanding it. This is key to his remarkable portrayal of Steve. The movie clearly shows this conflict between a product made solely to be sold for a profit and a product made to “change the world”. At one point, the movie shows Art Rock, the dark side venture capitalist, explaining to Steve that the company had to make a profit, even at the expense of everything else. When Steve refuses to adapt to this edict, Scully, Rock and Markkula dethrone him and the Early Apple years end. In startling contrast, when Steve returns to Apple, the movie shows him with great intensity telling the new young designer (Ivy) “Design something beautiful that you love. I don’t care what it is.” (I believe one of Ivy’s designs became the iPod.) So Steve wins; we are left to imagine the evil capitalists slinking away. Jobs's failure to come to terms with capitalism (at least up through the first Macintosh) was due, I believe, to his willful ignorance of politics. His all-consuming idea of himself as a visionary made it impossible for him to see the contradictions. The failure of his own enterprise NEXT must have been a humbling experience. That, followed by the success of Pixar, which made him rich again, certainly must have changed him. I have no direct experience of his last 25 years, but I suspect at least his obsession with his audience (the customers) stayed with him. --rod On Aug 29, 2015, at 4:42 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote: > ******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** > #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. > #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. > ***************************************************************** > > Last night I told Gibney in the Q&A that Rod was a comrade and that DESPITE > all the crap that Jobs did, depicted in full detail in the film, Rod had the > highest regard for him. > > On 8/29/15 1:54 AM, Lüko Willms wrote: >> *Last night I told Gibney in the Q&A that Rod was a comrade and that all >>> the crap that Jobs did, depicted in full detail in the film, Rod had the >>> highest regard for him.* > _________________________________________________________ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/rholt%40planeteria.net _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
