Deleuze & Guattari, Zizek on Arendt (More from Brennan)

[jimmyjames at softhome.net]

At 05:12 PM 1/26/03 -0800, joanna bujes wrote:
>At 07:48 PM 01/26/2003 -0500, Gar wrote:
>>So you need a class in between labor capital, a middle class, a
>>bureaucratic/technical/managerial/academic class. This class performs a
>>great many functions. There is directly policing workers to extract work
>>from them. There is shaping the work environment, both to increase
>>productivity per hour, but also to deskill labor and make it more
>>measurable, easier to police. There is the shaping of the workers,
>>suppressing some types of creativity while encouraging others - with the
>>aim of making obedient little agents, but something more than drones,
>>something that does not require micro management.
>
>One thing I have noticed over the last twenty years...as a technical 
>writer in relationship to a coordinating class/management....is that this 
>hierarchical arrangement makes work much less efficient. The managers wind 
>up making decisions about all kinds of things they don't really understand 
>because they're not doing the work. The workers are unhappy because 
>they're made to work in ways that are clearly 
>inefficient/wasteful/inferior. As companies get bigger, they add more 
>layers of management ...compounding this problem.

go Total Quality Management!


>Then, in steps "Globalization" where in addition to the multiplicity of 
>management layers you have the additional wrinkle of coordinating work 
>with people half-way around the world.....while the decision makers are 
>farther and farther away from the work itself. This may be a lot of 
>things....but efficient is not a word that comes to mind.

does a nice job of breeding hostility to management.
does a nice job of providing a career "ladder" and, thus, attachment to the 
firm.
yadda.

a look at the history of the rise of management, of management ideologies, 
and the struggles against foreman and workers, as waged by capital, would 
enlighten.

racism isn't very efficient for capitalism in many respects and yet it 
persists. clash of the forces of production and social realtions of 
production and all that, joanna.

back to the game. Go Bone Crushing!

kelley