Anthony P. D'Costa Associate Professor Senior Fellow Comparative International Development Department of Economics University of Washington National University of Singapore 1103 A Street 10 Kent Ridge Crescent Tacoma, WA 98402 USA Singapore 119260 On Thu, 8 May 1997, Louis N Proyect wrote: > On Thu, 8 May 1997, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote: > > > > > I presume similar arguments were tossed around when Frederick Winslow Taylor > > started replacing skilled workers with "hacks" controlled through his > > time-motion studies. The quality might have gone down then and may, as > > well, go down now (for that matter, Windows 95 is a piece of shit comparing > > to Windows 3.1) -- but since when capitalists started to care about making > > quality products? > > > > Louis: One of the things that is so interesting about the software > industry is that it has resisted the deskilling process that Stanley > Aronowitz and William DeFazio wrote about in "The Jobless Future". I have > seen efforts to mechanize and Taylorize the programming business since the > mid 1970s, but it has come to naught. The latest magic bullet is something > called "object orientation" (OO). It has been a fiasco. OO tries to create > the equivalent of replacable modules, such as the kind that are found in > hardware assemblies. Companies have tried and abandoned OO because they > discover that software algorithms and data are constantly changing to > reflect new company policies. Furthermore, in a large business enterprise, > there are enormously complex interactions that defy the effort to > "modularize" them. I have been working for the past year on a project > that started in 1992 to automate the facilities management department at > Columbia using OO. I think most people realize at this point that OO > hindered things. Everybody assumed that the facilities management system > would be part of a university-wide client server OO architecture. > Meanwhile, in the last year or so Web based Intranet applications seem to > have much more promise and the architecture of 5 years ago seems sort of > outmoded. > > > > Deskilling is not about product quality but about control of labour. > > "Imported" programmers may lack the skills of their domestic counterparts -- > > but they have two highly desirable (from the management's view point) > > qualities: they are cheap, and they are alienated from the local labour > > force -- which makes it unlikely that they will organize. > > > > Louis: I don't expect Indian programmers or their American counterparts to > ever organize. This is basically a petty-bourgeois layer. One can understand the US political culture toward labor. But the Indian story is not fully captured by its petty bourg dimension. In India mobility social and economic is extremely important. These people who become computer professionals have gone through a very tough system. Most Americans will not survive. Their background is middle class, valueing education as the principal medium for mobility, but one that for many borders on lower class incomes. Having gone through a system (admissions tests for schools, entrance exams for colleges, and landing a job) successfully it would be foolish to simply throw all that way. Besides, how will they organize in the US? Most of them are on temporary visas or at best permanent residents. Their resident status itself is problematic. But more importantly, organized labor in India has had a bad rap as well. This is Fabianism in action. The Bank Unions in India considered to be the most powerful and literally brings the counry to its knees (they are all low level white collar workers) have successfully kept compterization at bay. They are good sources of employment but service and efficiency are out the day. The Indians are tired of such organization because their day to day life is made miserable. Given such a context I am not surprised that these petty bourg professionals will not organize. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to predict that such organization will not take place in India. This is another > flaw in Aronowitz and DeFazio's analysis. He believes that there is some > kind of proletarianization going on. This is ridiculous. The highest per > capita membership in the Liberatarian Party of any corporation in the US > is at Microsoft. >
