
Chomsky: Work, Learning and Freedom - robdoherty2
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/work_learning_and_freedom
======
dkarl
_What he discovered was that as these methods were devised there was a choice
– whether to design the methods so that control would be in the hands of
skilled machinists or whether it would be controlled by management. They
picked the second, although it was not more profitable – when they did studies
they found there was no profit advantage to it but it’s just so important to
keep workers under control than to have skilled machinists run the industrial
process. One reason is that if that mentality spreads sooner or later workers
are going to demand what seems obvious to them anyway – that they should just
take over the factories and get rid of the bosses who don’t do anything but
get in their way._

This is a good observation -- that management tends to take as much control as
it can get, without any regard to costs and benefits -- but his analysis
depends on some cultural assumptions about authority. In some cultures, a
person with authority over another person is a different kind of person, a
superior one. North Korea is a caricature of this attitude: Kim Jong Il, being
at the apex of the power structure, had to be wiser, a better golfer, and a
genius at every subject compared to everyone under him. In such a culture you
can speak of the workers kicking out management and taking over, because
workers and managers are distinct classes of people.

In other cultures, authority inheres not in the person but in the social role
they play. A manager is just a guy who has a certain limited authority at work
because of his role as manager. He is not assumed to be a better golfer,
dancer, or calligrapher. He may be less talented or less virtuous than the
people he orders around, and that doesn't threaten his authority as long as
the company is happy with his job performance. One expects that people
promoted or hired into management show more than typical interest and ability
at management, but other than that, if management and workers are
systematically different in any way, it is because of different patterns of
_déformation professionnelle_ due to their different job concerns.

In the latter kind of culture, the idea of workers kicking out management and
taking over makes no sense. If you kick out the guys wearing manager hats,
take away their manager hats, and give them to guys who used to wear worker
hats, then you're left with the same number of manager hats, and therefore the
same number of managers. You haven't kicked out management, you've kicked out
the guys who used to be management.

~~~
reso
Interestingly, you see very anarchic power structures in some of the world's
best software companies. Facebook, for instance, has very little hierarchy,
and nearly all the manager are engineers. Valve has literally zero hierarchy,
workers choose what they work on and decisions are made by consensus.

~~~
neumann_alfred
But: who owns Valve, and is "who gets how much from the profit" also among the
decisions made by consensus?

------
jpdevereaux
His point about the commissioned artist vs. the self-motivated artist is very
interesting to me as a freelance developer. I often feel bored/discouraged
doing projects for hire, yet when building something for myself I'll dedicate
18-hour days to it - even if it's basically the same project. A similar
psychology is likely what caused me to excel as a self-taught hacker but fail
as a student.

On a similar note, with all the hubbub about how worthwhile college is, it
seems that curiosity and self motivation are some powerful deciding factors.
Perhaps the current standard of going straight to college after high school is
not the right way to go about it.

~~~
zanny
> On a similar note, with all the hubbub about how worthwhile college is, it
> seems that curiosity and self motivation are some powerful deciding factors.
> Perhaps the current standard of going straight to college after high school
> is not the right way to go about it.

The problem is deeper in culture than that. All education as a whole should
not be about raw numbers or facts, it should be about exposure and lighting a
creative or investigative spark. We never _had_ an education system centered
around motivating interest in topics rather than route fact memorization
(insert the Einstien quote about don't memorize what you can look up vis-a-vis
the internet) but I think that has to be the end goal of education for humans
in general. You can't be content teaching a topic, taking a test, and calling
it quits. It has to be about inspiring people to persue more, and Chomsky
really hits on that.

I have the same thing you do with software. I'll spend hundreds of hours on
personal projects in a month, but for school assignments I'd do semester long
assignments the last day. It is about what you are interested in vs what
others force upon you to accomplish in that structured environment, the former
is the goal and the latter is the failure in that objective.

Mainly because on some projects in my CS undergrad I _would_ put in those
hundred hour sessions. I wrote my own shell, for example, that I spent a
combined ~100 hours on over 2 weeks, where most people did it in ~10, and I
had autocompletion, history, pipes, and primitive variable / looping
implemented. Most other people couldn't even do a proper execvP.

~~~
46Bit
I've had the similar experience, of working on personal projects quite close
to undergrad coursework yet having a huge difference in my motivation between
them. What helped me was the modules that really fit with levelling up my
knowledge (for instance a report on System/360 microprogramming).

It's always seemed to me that this kind of person should be a good candidate
for postgraduate degrees: driven in their own exploration, effort on
interesting things, etc. I've never managed to really find out the reality
though.

------
charlieflowers
I am missing something here, and I am genuinely curious what it is I'm
missing.

If a capitalist starts a manufacturing business with the goal of making money,
and if he then discovers that the business would run much more effectively by
letting the skilled workers make the decisions than by hiring a layer of
management ... then why wouldn't the capitalist go with the more effective
approach?

TL;DR rephrase -- why would a business owner maintain a layer of management if
that was truly a less effective way to go?

Is Chomsky (or Noble) claiming there's something like a "conspiracy" amongst
the "managerial class" to create _fake_ jobs for managers, merely to maintain
class power? (Or, if not, what am I missing from his argument?)

~~~
steveklabnik
> then why wouldn't the capitalist go with the more effective approach?

"Making money for me" and "making money for everyone" are not the same thing.

For example, if your business has 1MM in profits, and you own half, then you
get 500k. If you ran that as a cooperative, you made 2MM in profits the next
year, but you own 10%, you made $200k. Worse for you, better for everyone else
and the group overall.

~~~
charlieflowers
OK, that makes sense but doesn't connect all the dots for me.

I am starting with the assumption that no one gets an ownership stake for
free. You can start a business if you want, and you can either bootstrap it or
take investment. Either way, the owners are not _handed_ their ownership ...
they "buy" it with what they put in.

Is this Chomsky/Noble point of view arguing that workers should be _granted_ a
degree of ownership by virtue of the work they do?

~~~
steveklabnik
The basic tenet of socialism is that democracy is good: the traditional
corporate model is dictatorship, and it should be reformed into democracy
instead.

> the owners are not handed their ownership ... they "buy" it with what they
> put in.

Sure, but then they have it, and that's great. Being rewarded for your work is
good. Problem is, they have to do nothing to maintain it. After an initial
period of work, they have it forever. Whereas a worker who comes in afterward
has no access, and even though they also put in a lot of work, they won't get
any ownership. Those people are not being rewarded for the work that they do,
which we all agree is bad.

> workers should be granted a degree of ownership by virtue of the work they
> do?

Basically, yes. People should be in control of themselves, and their
situations. Ownership == control.

Please note that I'm painting in _very_, _very_ broad strokes here. There is a
ton of space under this tent.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_the traditional corporate model is dictatorship_

Huh? The traditional corporate model is representative democracy. Shareholders
elect a board of directors who then elect upper management, who then appoint
lower level positions.

 _Whereas a worker who comes in afterward has no access, and even though they
also put in a lot of work, they won't get any ownership._

This is false for any publicly traded corporation. Any worker can open up an
ETrade account and trade their salary for part of the corporation.

As far as I know, most workers choose not to. Why do you feel these workers
(myself included) are making the wrong choice?

~~~
steveklabnik
Please see my statement about broad strokes. That said....

> Shareholders elect

There's your error. Shareholders elect. Not workers. Maybe "oligarchy" is a
better word than dictatorship, but as I said, trying to keep it simple to get
the concept across.

Workers do not have a vote. Traditional corporate structures are not a
democracy.

> This is false for any publicly traded corporation. Any worker can open up an
> ETrade account and trade their salary for part of the corporation.

Only if that company is publicly traded. Even then, if it is, acquiring
ownership comes through spending capital, not by virtue of having control over
yourself and what you do.

> As far as I know, most workers choose not to. Why do you feel these workers
> (myself included) are making the wrong choice?

Most people do not have the ability to work in a place that's run
cooperatively because there aren't enough places that are cooperative. Even
GitHub and Valve are socialist in social structure only: Both are private
companies, but I'm pretty sure that everyone does not own a portion of the
company. I could be wrong on this.

Secondly, post-Cold War, 'socialism' became such a scare term that people
would shy away from it even if it were a rationally better choice for them.
The notion of 'ideology' is useful here.

~~~
codewright
You don't need the word socialism to make me skeptical, I'm skeptical that
democracy would produce better results in a business context. Also, I have a
hard time believing you've read any Marx. You're not doing his work very much
justice.

I don't even trust democracy in politics all that much, my state (California)
is a complete and utter failure as an exercise in democracy.

~~~
gruseom
_Also, I have a hard time believing you've read any Marx. You're not doing his
work very much justice._

I call foul. That's personal, and it's unsubstantiated, which makes it unfair
not only to the GP but to the rest of us reading the thread. If you're going
to make a comment like this, instead of being mean why don't you share with us
some of what you've learned about (in this case) Marx? I for one would be
interested to hear it.

~~~
codewright
>And the victorious party” (in a revolution) “must maintain its rule by means
of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris
Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the
armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for
having made too little use of that authority?. - Engels

>As, therefore, the state is only a transitional institution which is used in
the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one’s adversaries by force, it
is sheer nonsense to talk of a ‘free people’s state’; so long as the
proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of
freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes
possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist - Engels

Democracy is a threat to the midwife State and the final state of what Marxism
aims to achieve.

~~~
infinite8s
So what was Marx's end goal? Some sort of utopian paradox in the vein of
John's Galt, where each person is free to realize his own potential? The last
quote from Engel seems to suggest that Marx was actually pushing for something
much closer to Anarcho-Libertarianism.

~~~
codewright
Marx was pushing for a utopia somewhat opposite of Galt. Namely, communism.

Voluntary communist utopias are referred to as anarcho-communism.

Anarcho-libertarianism assumes a free market is involved.

Communism assumes all resources are pooled.

------
rdtsc
> People are supposed to be passive and apathetic and doing what they’re told
> by the responsible people who are in control.

That is the fundamental struggle -- to control the masses. Get them
brainwashed, scared, addicted, distracted. One way is to carefully control the
information they receive that was very easy up until the Internet showed up.
Now it has become a lot harder. China just built up a firewall, here it is a
bit more difficult. So it still all has to rely on sophisticated spin and
propaganda models.

Take Chomsky for example, most people might not even know who he is. They
wouldn't have seen (or at least anything positive about) him on TV or mass
media. Chances are they read something about him on the Internet or heard from
their friends. Sure there were local activist groups, underground zines, but
the cost of spreading information that way was pretty high, now the cost is
much lower.

As propaganda and media control was becoming more sophisticated it seemed like
nothing could stop it, until the Internet exploded. For example, I haven't
went searching for news to any of the popular American news outlets in years.
It is funny (or scary) that I trust some silly site like reddit.com to deliver
better news than CNN, Fox or other such thing.

------
dreamdu5t
Chomsky is incoherent and sensationalist. He consistently paints a narrative
of class struggle and weaves it into everything, ignoring any kind of
contextual reality.

What a sad, paranoid, naive old man.

~~~
gruseom
A troll, yet I feel like responding anyway.

How you get that from this interview is beyond me; it seems to me full of joy
and love from start to finish – joy of learning, love of freedom and play.

I saw your comment before I finished the article and was going to mention that
about the only thing I bet Chomsky was very sad about was the death of his
wife, by all accounts the love of his life. And then he brought it up at the
very end.

Chomsky has his issues like anyone, but it has always been plain to me that
there is something very beautiful at the core of the man.

