I've been thinking a bunch lately about technological increases in productive efficiency, and about some of the different ways that the capitalist pigs scheme to retain control over newfound profits through their manipulation of the means of production.

For example, I remember reading years ago that because of the increase in productivity associated with the modernization of washing machines, modern laundry detergent products are actually way more effective than they need to be (and that their marketing implies). When the bottle tells you to fill up the cap to the marked line, that's actually way more detergent than you need to use for a regular ass load of laundry. Like you literally need somewhere like a third or half of the "recommended" amount of detergent that it says on the bottle lol.

This is because the detergent producers’ profits are tailored to the status quo of their production; if consumption was suddenly halved, the company would have a crisis of overproduction that would eat into their profit margin. obviously this didn't simply happen all at once - but the small increases in efficiency created by the technological boom was not met with an appropriate rise in wages.

I want to start trying to investigate more examples of these situations and products that have been bent to the bourgeoisies' benefit rather than the proles'. I think that trying to become aware of these things is the first step to agitating around concrete ways that people can reclaim value created by these ‘hidden efficiencies,’ as I’ve currently taken to calling them. I'm also very open to suggestions for names that are more clear lol.

What are some hidden efficiencies you’ve noticed in your area of study, profession, or interest?

  • DefinitelyNotAPhone [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    10000x this. It didn't really hit me until I was dealing with enterprise software vendors, but basically every industry consists of potentially dozens of companies reinventing the wheel between one another constantly so they can market themselves as the most "complete" solution out there. 99% of their engineers' efforts goes into reverse engineering a feature someone else already made or creating some ridiculous new integration with other garbage software so their marketing department has more to work with during sales, while bugfixes and optimization work languishes in eternal limbo because the overworked engineers never have time to address them. The competition almost never derives any new innovations (or at least doesn't make anything that wasn't obvious and inevitable).

    And so tens of billions of dollars per industry goes towards redundant engineering and unproductive ends like sales, marketing, HR, administration, etc all because the goal isn't to produce functional software but to generate profits out of thin fucking air no matter how stupid the engine that does so is.

    I hate how hard it is to make other people, especially in my industry, see this. How many problems we could actually solve, how many deaths could be prevented, how much more meaningful our work could be if we just consolidated all those industries down to their inevitable monopolies and applied the extra resources to something worthwhile instead.