Re: Slaughter of dead labour (dead already but not again, yet)

[Tom Walker]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:27637] Re: Slaughter of dead labour (dead already but not again, yet)

All I meant to refer to was the increasingly social character of production, certainly not its equalization or de-skilling. By all means science and technology are attributes of human activity and perhaps I am splitting hairs if I don't include the effort put in by an individual in acquiring technical knowledge as effort expended in the process of production (taking into account the full course of production and reproduction of labour power), But again, that effort is diffuse and manifestly social. What I had in mind was the difficulty in many highly automated labour processes of attributing a given level of output to any individual expenditure of effort. I use a spreadsheet in my work and most of the "effort" of performing the calculations is done by the code. This is equally true if I do 100 calculations or 10,000 calculations. There's a presumption that something of what a teacher imparts to his or her students may somewhere along the line contribute to the quality of somebody's job performance but to even imagine tracking such long and loosely coupled chains is almost preposterous.   Jim, I still can't grasp what you mean by "empirical numbers". As someone who works with statistics all the time, I can assure you that there are quantitative facts and qualitative facts. It doesn't do the quantitative facts an honour to insist that qualitative facts must be represented as quantities before they can be granted equal status as facts. However, it wouldn't be difficult to produce numbers to investigate my assertion. All one has to do is develop a scale and a questionnaire and get people to subjectively rate their expenditure of effort at time 1 and time 2. Of course then you get into all kinds of issues about self reporting and whether the scale represents the same thing to people at the two times, etc. But a whole lot of the empirical numbers out there were put together that way, too. Carrol Cox wrote, Let me ask a (possibly the same) question in another way. You make two claims: (a) According to the _Grundrisse_ human labor is more and more equalized (emptied of skill) through the development of technology and the division of labor and (b) this is also empirically true of the last 40 years in the United States. Or in yet other words, Marx's quote from Edmund Burke re the sameness of the work of any 5 workers combined, became more and more the center of his whole work, and this was an accurate empirical prediction on his part. True, false, wholly off the wall?   Jim Devine wrote, either one will do, though I think that empirical numbers are quite useful in order to avoid excessively abstract predictions. I was reminded of all those folks who said that manufacturing labor was disappearing a few years ago -- but it turned out that it was moving to other countries (rather than disappearing) or was actually coming back to the U.S. in the form of sweat-shops and the like.   Also, when you say that "individual effort has come to play less and less of a role in social productivity," the usual explanation is that technology is playing a bigger & bigger role. But don't human individuals play a big role in developing technology?