• 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.