[HN Gopher] Digital work and exploitation
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Digital work and exploitation
        
       Author : jrepinc
       Score  : 20 points
       Date   : 2022-12-16 09:41 UTC (13 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (thenextrecession.wordpress.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (thenextrecession.wordpress.com)
        
       | fnovd wrote:
       | Surprised to find this here, not surprised that there are no
       | comments.
       | 
       | >The COVID pandemic has triggered a new crisis in capitalism, but
       | capitalism's underlying tendencies leading towards such crises
       | are not new.
       | 
       | >In a way, Roberts reckons nothing has really changed. In the
       | post-COVID world, the intensification, through digital media, of
       | productive and unproductive labour processes continues. In other
       | words, exploitation and oppression in the paid workplace is still
       | the dominant method employed by capitalists to extract a surplus
       | from their workforce.
       | 
       | >A Marxist theory of digital technology, labour and work must
       | therefore begin with the premise that the labour process is part
       | and parcel of the capitalist mode of production and the creation
       | of surplus value through alienated labour.
       | 
       | So, everything is new, but it's also the same. Really deep stuff.
       | You can tell that someone with decades of experience in Marxist
       | Economics wrote this flowery and meandering piece. Upon reading
       | it, I truly felt as though I had read something that someone had
       | written.
       | 
       | There's so much emotional investment into the idea that
       | everything is terrible and falling apart, you can feel the
       | urgency with which the modern world is reframed into a familiar
       | context of good versus evil. Don't worry, even the world has
       | shifted in unpredictable and unforeseen ways, our dearly-beloved,
       | cryptically tautological, and relentlessly self-referential
       | epistemology of economic philosophy is still perfectly suited for
       | the task, as it has been since the days of pre-historic tribal
       | socialism.
        
         | joe_the_user wrote:
         | _There 's so much emotional investment into the idea that
         | everything is terrible and falling apart, you can feel the
         | urgency with which the modern world is reframed into a familiar
         | context of good versus evil..._
         | 
         | Or maybe you can look at the average worker is one pay check
         | from disaster, that the American expectancy has been declining
         | for several years and maybe the recent changes look more like
         | things that reinforce the problems.
         | 
         | Notably, the biggest issue for rail workers in the recent
         | dispute wasn't sick days or pay but "precision crew
         | scheduling", a system that involves workers being on call for
         | nearly hour of the day, for nearly every day of the year. [1]
         | 
         | The Marxist picture of an evil capitalist villain fits both the
         | rail road companies and Elon Musk pretty well lately. If they
         | don't want it pinned on them, maybe they should change their
         | behavior.
         | 
         | [1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/rail-strike-why-
         | the-...
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2022-12-16 23:01 UTC)