• LibsEatPoop3 [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Just read the original essay. Pretty cool. I guess he expanded on it in the book by giving concrete examples?

    I particularly liked this point -

    if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call ‘the market’ reflects what they think is useful or im- portant, not anybody else.

    Also, how true is this claim about the SU -

    in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat

    Like, I’m wholly illiterate about the functioning of the Soviet economic and politics system post-Stalin. Any recs would be appreciated.

    I also don’t understand how such a system would have arisen if at every point each private capitalist was seeking to maximise their profit (and thus looking to remove the excess workers rather than hiring people who added no value).

    Clearly all that administration is necessary else businesses without them would have succeeded and grown much larger. So it seems this “meaningless work” is in the sense the same as unproductive labor that’s necessary for capitalism to function. And what we’re seeing is a growth of that labor compared to productive labor (in the Marxist sense). Both turning people into mindless machines endlessly repeating the same tasks.

    Is the claim just that these jobs are “bullshit” from a societal point of view? Which, I mean, I don’t know anyone who’d disagree with that. And yeah, under a centrally planned socialist economy with today’s level of technology and productivity, people would definitely be much more free.

    That makes me question why China also seems to be facing this problem rather than transitioning away from it. What is it exactly that they’re seeking to develop? And why did the SU fail to achieve that level of production? In fact, could Maoist China have done so? Plus, these are all humongous countries - what about the smaller ones?

    • D61 [any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat

      This feels like a weird joke... but in all seriousness: One to take the order, one to cut/package the meat, and a cashier. Seems reasonable to me.

      Like, if I go to Walmart and get some sliced lunch meat/cheese from the deli there's at least two clerks that I need to deal with. The person taking the order/cutting/packaging the product and the cashier to ring me out. Doesn't sound like that big of a deal.

      • bobby_digital [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        it seemed like an apocryphal detail and made me a little worried as i've heard Debt has been criticized for some of its historical claims, but when you describe like that it really does sound completely ordinary

    • glimmer_twin [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      When you think of it not as individual capitalists trying to maximise profit at their own individual company, and as a class as a whole, it makes a little more sense.

      Think about how Graeber starts out talking about subcontractor to a subcontractor to a subcontractor to the military, for example. Even though private contracting and outsourcing is done in the name of cutting costs, it actually costs more usually.

      So in this chain of the military, the subcontractor, the subcontractor to the subcontractor, and the subsubsubcontractor, instead of just having the military doing whatever (e.g. their IT) in-house, there’s now a chain of companies, all presumably making profit. And each of those companies has people doing bullshit jobs, basically Kafkaesque bureaucracy shit, in order to function.

      In this manner you can see how it may seem like capitalists are paying for people to do nothing, but in actuality it’s adding profit to the big ol pile of surplus value.

    • chauncey [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I also don’t understand how such a system would have arisen if at every point each private capitalist was seeking to maximise their profit (and thus looking to remove the excess workers rather than hiring people who added no value).

      It's been a while since I read the book, but he does spend some time talking about this. He doesn't have an exact answer but he points out how curious it is that this phenomenon is occurring under a system that prides itself on maximizing profit.

    • CptKrkIsClmbngThMntn [any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      He mentions that sometimes Marxists struggle with the idea that capital isn't well-allocated or that workers are being paid for something that has no use-value to the firm.

      I think flunkies are a particularly telling example - people you only need in order to legitimize your business, organization, or team's social position. It's inefficient to hire a secretary to pick up the phone for you if you have more than enough time, but picking up your own phone makes you look like a tiny one-human operation. Perhaps the secretary does provide a use-value, but in this case it's a complicated one that weaves its way through psyches.

      In all, I think the catcher is that there are emergent social phenomena that go above and beyond the brute material conditions and tie back in and around them.

      • RedCloud [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Reminds me of a part in 'Stolen' by Grace Blakeley (highly recommend) where she discusses why CEO salaries have increased so much and why they often get paid in stock these days instead of a salary. One of the reasons is that they would often make decisions not based on what was necessarily good for shareholders but what would increase their own power or status. For example, arranging a merger between two companies might not always be a very profitable idea, but it does mean that the CEO gets further ahead in the dick-measuring contest as they're now in charge of a larger business with more employees. Making the CEO themselves a shareholder helps to prevent this kind of thing happening, but for lower ranked managers or heads of departments (who are still salaried and will obviously be more involved in both the recruitment and day-to-day running of their departments in large businesses) the same incentive for inefficient, unprofitable, dick-measuring bullshit is still there. Like you said, if all the other managers have their own secretary, you're going to want one (or several), too.