The reason Marx developed the more advanced category of commodity fetishism was, in a way, to expose the real alienation in the fantasy that one could opt out of "alienation" by becoming a baker, bike repairman, etc. The heart of a heartless world, indeed.
I've heard people describe commodity fetishism as replacing social relationships with relationships to things you own (e.g. your car, your iPhone etc). Is this accurate?
The issue is not primarily psychological attachment to objects, but that private labor (labor carried out independently by separate producers, whose social validity is only realized through exchange) takes on the appearance of its opposite: labor in a directly social form through exchange. Through exchange, the values of commodities appear to individuals not as a relation between producers, but as a property inherent in things themselves. Use-value appears as value, concrete labor appears as abstract labor, private labor appears as social labor.
This has a ton of effects. Some of the most important: it obscures exploitation (profit appears to derive from capital/risk/trade/etc., i.e. anything but labor), it naturalizes capitalism (markets, competition, money, and wage labor seem transhistorical), it disempowers producers (alienation), and it produces ideological mystification in general (people attribute to greed, unfair exchange, moral failure, production scale, division of labor, or technologies what should be attributed to the specific historical form of labor).
So your example is probably a third-order effect of commodity fetishism.
This condensation of the concept really sucked. I suggest struggling through Capital Vol. I, Ch. 1.
Marx's concept of alienation isn't really about being removed from the product one toils on by abstraction, it was about being removed from the result of one's labour because the end to which that labour is performed is enrichment of the bourgeoisie, not personal or societal enrichment.
I think the two concepts are not easy to disentangle. It isn’t the craftsman who decides the chairs should be built in an assembly line- it’s the owner, who wants to maximize the number or consistency of chairs. And the abstraction of that assembly line is what keeps the craftsman from saying, “that is the chair that I built.”
I get the appeal of his arguments but after reading the book, it just doesn't sit right with me. A lot if it reminds me too much of fascist arguments about how all of those city liberals don't do actual labor and the only "real jobs" are farm jobs or something.
Perhaps they have that in common, but facism pushes out into directions that marxism does not. Esp wrt to class, race, and self-determination.
It helps to ask: how many of the modern fascist leaders are retreating to the farm? I see them developing and deploying tech to inceease their grip on power. I see the "farmsy-folk" as a contingent the facists have persuaded to nip at those in the middle. And the means of the persuasion is, ironically, using the Marxist argunent of alienation.
I often joke that the company I work for did the same job 100 years ago but they only had manual laborers on hundreds of locations. They made the work schedule, they did recruitment. they filled out the contract, every Friday there was an envelope with your salary in it, always the same amount.
Today we have local managers, regional managers, job agencies, cluster coördinators, quality control people, layers of hr people, doctors, instructors and lots of fancy sounding expensive titles that translate poorly. Each with their own fancy car.
So, I ask them what value they add. Makes them furious. I'm not bitter about it, I'm honest about the joke/hypothetical.
The show is much more expensive and we do the manual (actual) work with fewer people. We work much harder and if someone calls in sick all hell breaks lose among the office folk. Zero redundancy.
Some nepotism aside they all think they do important work. Say, the schedule man makes a schedule for 700 people. He works hard but the results are vastly inferior to 8 people working on one location making their own schedule. If you need a day off or want to trade shifts, you just ask a coworker or two. The office worker begs people not to call him. In the future I'm sure he can also make schedules for the office folk(?)
It is that I remember how things use to work. Otherwise i wouldn't even consider if their jobs are useless.
Sitting down for a few minutes to do some administrative tasks is really nice if you are hurling heavy objects and running from left to right all day. Rest improves productivity so it doesn't really cost time. It makes the work less repetitive and if you screw up organizing things yourself you know who to blame.
Here is a simple concept. The job agencies schedules employees, counts hours and pays salaries. After they are done multiple people at the company have to check everything they do. They are doing everything twice! It's very complicated!
With just 8 people on location any idiot can schedule, count hours and multiply by $. It worked fine for 70ish years.
I agree. I think Stardew Valley is an exhibition of pastoral fascism disguised as a liberal cozy game. A highly mystifying piece of art. I would give it more leeway if it weren't the fact that its utopian imagination is so limited; you build relationships by gifting the exact items the townspeople desire, production still market oriented, homelessness is understood as a choice, large corporations are violently negated in favor of petty production, etc.
For what it's worth, even ignoring the fact that "uselessness" is an ideologically mediated concept, and so taking his horizon for granted, Graeber's work is empirically incorrect. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067 His was the bullshit job.
I think whether you can say it's empirically incorrect depends on if the researchers measured the right thing. Measuring: “Do you think your job is useful?” was over-simplifying, and could miss the phenomenon that Graeber was actually talking about.
As someone with a EE degree followed by 12 years of SWE work, that pivot is quite daunting. A degree is just a piece of paper to get you an entry level job to do some real learning IMO
In the Windows team (back before the test org was decimated) I saw the described "class divide". Anybody who was good enough would switch from SDET to SDE [disclaimer: obviously there were some isolated exceptions]. The test team produced reams of crappy test frameworks, each of which seemed like a "proving project" for its creators to show they could be competent SDEs. After the Great Decimation my dev team took ownership of many such frameworks and it was a total boondoggle; we wasted years trying (and mostly failing) to sort through the crappy test code.
This was all unfortunate, and I agree in principle with having a separate test org, but in Windows the culture unfortunately seemed to be built around testers as second-class software developers.
I spent most of my time working on Visual Studio (in the Boston time frame) so we got to interact with pretty much every team. I absolutely hated interacting with the Windows team. Everything was a fight for no reason.
As I said above, everyone has their own experiences but the QA folks I worked with at MS were fantastic.
Not sure if you're aware but Dave Plumber now has a really good YT channel [0] where he talks about MS back in those days. It's a fun walk down memory lane.
Yes true, that is a possibility and something that's quite hard to police remotely. It doesn't feel likely, everyone's working kind of the same, booking the same hours and overtime is no different, but I can't rule it out.
It'd mean that hundreds of people would all be goofing off silently. I'd expect at least overtime bookings to decrease and they haven't - even with our strong incentives to not book o/t.
I don’t think I’ll ever be convinced that there’s some kind of fundamental “randomness” (as in one that isn’t a measure of ignorance) in the world. Claiming its existence sounds like claiming to know what we don’t know.
Why make it work with a mobile app at all? How is that even a convenience? This is an appliance you need to be physically present at to load and unload.
No disagreement there, but once you are set on a mobile app, you are going to push for it to be used.
It all probably starts benign: let's push some notifications to customer's phones (already requires a server — ahem, a cloud — and a mobile app).
Then smart product managers realize that the app is not used by anyone, and they start thinking about "value add" with the app, and quickly, you are looking at removing things from the physical unit and putting them only in software.
A PM next: look, this release has increased usage of the app 10x!
Instead of them just doing the right thing and nixing the app — but who'd advocate for cutting their own job?
I could see a remote notification that it finished being useful. That said, the manufacturers would never go for this, but a dry contact for a GPO that is asserted on the machine finishing is likely all a number of people here would ever need/want.
