It also grooved with another article I downloaded from NLR, from the inestimable Nancy Fraser (and another awesome one from Butler, 1998, "Merely Cultural"). In Capitalism, Feminism, and the Cunning of History, Fraser gets down and dirty with the way in which feminist liberation was co-opted by neo-liberalism, looking very specifically at things like the social relations of production. As an example, if feminist liberation called for less hierarchy, more egalitarianism, yadda, then it fit quite well with post-Fordist ideologies of new managerialism (a la Tom Peters), Total Quality Management, etc. (in software, Agile is an excellent example of how "teams" own their work, decide on their own deadlines, etc. Lucas fleshes out exactly what all that means -- the "ownership" of your work on a team, the way work is organized into ostensibly non-hierarchical teams, where Continuous Quality Improvement is supposed to be generated by "da people" (i.e., workers on the frontlines) all in the service of extracting ever more labor, ever more efficiently...
It was quite excellent, reading the two articles in conjunction. Long ago, Barbara Ehrenreich talked about the way socialist feminism found itself etherized on the operating table, with liberal/governance/power feminism as the dominant strand of feminist "movement". It was called "Life without Father" and it was included in one huge tome of a book on Socialist Feminism back in 1984 - when it was already lying there on the operating table. I can't find it on google books, but it was also published as part of another anthology of articles from Socialist Review:
Of course, Ehrenreich has already argued in Hearts of Men, that women's liberation was preceded by a men's liberation movement in the first place. So..
Anyway, here's an excerpt from the Lucas piece, Dreaming in Code:
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From our point of view, business and its needs appear as parasitic externalities imposed upon the real functioning of our use-value-producing enterprise. We are strangely tied to a certain normativity; not just that of doing the job right in a technical sense, but also that of thinking in terms of the provision of real services, of user experiences, and of encouraging the free flow of information. This sometimes spills over into outright conflict: when business advocates some tortuous use of language to hype 'the product', the techies will try to bend the stick back towards honesty and transparency. 'What goes around comes around' seems to be the prevalent attitude in web development in the era after 'Web 2.0': provide the services cheap or free, give away the information, be decent and hope that somehow the money will flow in. If business acts with the mind of money capital, encountering the world as a friction or recalcitrance which it longs to overcome, and if a tendency to try to sell snake oil follows from that, in the strange world where technical pride opposes itself to capital as capital's own developed super-ego, use-value rules with a pristine conscience; everything is 'sanity checked'to use the terminology of my bossand the aggregation of value appears as an accidental aside.
Distrustful of trade-union bureaucracy, the Italian operaisti of the 1960s hoped to discover opportunities for working-class autonomy within the production process itself, through the form of the 'worker's enquiry'. Examining the business–technical antagonism in web development today, though, yields scant grounds for revolutionary optimism. The solidarity that we develop against business, apart from providing us with respite and shelter from individualized victimization, functions as a 'sanity check' for the company itself. The contradiction between technical staff and business is a productive one for capital: the imperative to valorize prevents the techies from wandering off into their esoteric concerns, while the need for realism is reciprocally enforced by the techies as they insist on a broadly 'scientific' way of working.
There is little space left in this relation for a wilful 'refusal of work': given the individually allocated and project-centred character of the job, absenteeism only amounts to self-punishment, as work that is not done now will have to be done later, under greater stress. Apart from that, there is the heavy interpersonal pressure that comes with the role: since a majority of the work is 'collaborative' in a loose sense, heel-dragging or absenteeism necessarily involves a sense of guilt towards the technical workers in general. Nor is sabotage a creative option here; not because of the supposed pride of the skilled worker, but due to the nature of the product. On a production line, sabotage may be a rational tactic, halting the relentless flow to provide half-an-hour of collective sociability. When one's work resembles that of the artisan, to sabotage would be to make life harder. Occasionally one hears of freelancers or contractors who write confusing and idiosyncratic 'spaghetti code' in order to keep themselves in work. This technique may make sense when a company relies heavily on particular individuals; but in a typical development team, which uses feedback-centred IT management methodologies such as 'agile' and 'extreme' programming, and where 'ownership' of a project is always collective, high-quality, clearly readable code has a normative priority that goes beyond whatever feelings one might have about doing one's job well.
Of course, there is a banal level on which I drag myself reluctantly out of bed, knock off as early as I can, push my luck in terms of punctuality. I try to make work time 'my time' as much as possible by listening to my iPod, sneaking bits of reading into my working day or having discreet conversations with friends over the net. This sort of thing is the real fodder of worker's enquiry. But the bottom-line recalcitrance here is on the same level as the resistance of the human body to the indefinite extension of the working day. People will always test the permissible limits, but such actions are defined by the framework of what is acceptable in any given job. The apparent insubordination of my lateness would soon collapse if it threatened my livelihood, while the social pressures that come with the job are such that whatever time I 'claim back' through slack behaviour is more than compensated when a project deadline approaches and I work unpaid extra hours into the evening, or start work in the middle of the night to fix servers when nobody is using them.
It is only when sickness comes and I am involuntarily rendered incapable of work that I really regain any extra time 'for myself'. It is a strange thing to rejoice at the onset of flu with the thought that, in the haze of convalescence, one may finally be able to catch up on things pushed aside by work. Here illness indeed appears as a 'weapon', but one that fights its own battle, not wielded by the supposed aggressor. Yet I wonder sometimes whether it should be seen as merely pathological, a contingency imposed on the body from without. Illness can feel almost willeda holiday that the body demands for itself. Perhaps there is a continuity between 'genuine' illness and the 'man-flu' that a matronly temping agent once accused me of when I ducked out of work for a week. But if sickness is all we have, it offers little hope for meaningful resistance. <...> <http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2836>http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2836
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)