Ignorance really is bliss
Don’t get me wrong, I think Chris Dillow is ace. I’ve had a drink with him on a couple of occasions and he has a bullshit detector and an ability to distill ideas that I’d kill for.
But I have to say that this really is one of the most chilling and dispiriting blog posts I’ve ever read:
Economic success requires that talent not be unlocked, and remain unused
[...]
As Harry Braverman showed in one of the best books ever written, capitalism requires that workers be robbed of their skills.
And this is why Brown’s words are not only stupid, but perniciously stupid. In pretending that economic progress and human flourishing can always coexist – especially under capitalism – he’s ignoring one of the most important and profound trade-offs of all.
I feel like I did when I found out Father Christmas didn’t exist or when I read that Steve McQueen was a wife-beater with a penchant for coffee enemas. Talk about pissing on someone’s chips. ‘Can’t win, don’t try,’ as Bart Simpson once said.
Why, Chris, why? What next? Heroes isn’t really a documentary? I don’t think I could bear that.
Posted on September 25th, 2007 at 5:31pm under Evil of banality
Justin, the link to the post appears to be broken.
Cheers, Mike. Cut’n'paste snafu now fixed.
One could well argue that rather than workers being stripped of their talents, that the current school system (academies teaching courses in call centre training) is actually designed to ensure that those talents never even develop. I was going to post on Terry Leahy’s (http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2167132,00.html) recent speech where he complained that schools were failing to teach the basic skills adequately; the irony being that his very organisation relies on those skills not being taught properly so that it can continue to prosper on the backs of the young with no future and no hope, but who can always look forward to being able to stack shelves and scan barcodes forevermore.
I couldn’t agree more. It wasn’t so long ago we had Charles Clarke as Education Secretary saying that learning for learning’s sake was ‘a bit dodgy‘. Why not go all the way and lobotomise the bottom 95%?
Luckily, he’s mostly wrong.
I’m not sure I agree, Charlie. Elucidate, my son, elucidate.
Doesn’t it occur to you that the activities of the fat football fan and his showbiz lawyers , far from silencing the blogs has made them shout and unite in global unity.
OK a handful have struggled but will arise ,even more determined to expose the enemeies of free speech, free thought and freedom.
In the fields of adversity grow the strongest fruits.
Silence of the Blogs – Bollocks.Allons mes enfants.Aux la guerre.
It’s just wrong (and the dead giveaway is that it’s couched in exactly the same kind of overblown rhetoric that Militant used to use in the 1980s to cover up the essential lunacy of dogmatic positions even then).
The trick is simply to ask “is that what Gordon Brown means by ‘talent’”. And the answer is no, he doesn’t mean it in the sense of a footballer or a musician because, pace Piers Morgan, that isn’t what “talent” means outside the context of reality TV shows.
It just means “ability to do something”. What Brown is saying is that people should be doing work that is demanding of their ability, rather than jobs which require less cognitive, social and physical skills than they actually posess.
Chris is following Smith and Marx in saying that the factory system (later, Taylorisation, Fordism) requires that the division of labour be carried out to such an extent that each task is simplified to be so small that a flesh robot could carry it out. Thus, the incompatibility of capitalism with human flourishing.
The trouble is that this view of industry was always wrong when Smith said it, wrong when Marx repeated it and has been obviously wrong since the war. It only looked plausible in the very early part of the machine age, when humans were needed to perform repetitive tasks that automation of the day couldn’t handle.
We have real robots to make cars these days, though. The constant trend in industry has been mechanisation and the moving of human beings into jobs which require more and more involvement and “talent”. That’s why we spend so much on education these days, which is why we’re so much cleverer. It’s a process which Gordon Brown, and anyone else sane, is in favour of, and it’s possible because it’s (continually) happening.
Also remember that Chris has a real blind spot when it comes to recognising social skills as skills (he tends to file them away under “managerialism” or start gabbing about public schoolboys). If someone’s really good at talking and they spend all day in a sales job, that’s them using their talent. Creative industries, financial services plus retailing is more than half the British economy these days, and these are all full of jobs where you are basically able to do as much as you’re capable of. (ie to use all your talents).
Finally there’s a really patronising view of the working class here. People working for Tesco’s don’t just “stack shelves and scan barcodes for ever more”. Tesco has a really good record of developing its people. Similarly, the inhabitants of call centres aren’t robots and they don’t all hate their jobs. In general (and blogs are not a good source of unbiased views on this) the majority of people like their jobs and do feel like they’re using their abilities. Even Cesc Fabregas seems to have a smile on his face most of the time (and what does it even *mean* to say that he “reins in his full skills” – there’s a lot of equivocation here)
Finally, triple posting like the loon I am:
[The musician who becomes a lawyer never fully unlocks his musical talent. The cricketer who becomes a doctor lets his cricketing talent wither.]
this is just like saying that you can’t swim in two pools at the same time. It has the counterintuitive consequence that if the lawyer/musician (and I know a bunch of lawyers who are great musicians btw) was also a great cricketer, he would be an even more stunted individual because he would be failing to develop even more of his talents, which rather shows that the sense in which “it is impossible to use all our talents” is an unimportant one. Perhaps Gordo shouldn’t have said “all the people use all their talents” but it is quite hard to get depressed about Western society on the basis of a grammar flame.
(and finally, parenthetically, the doctor example is a false dichotomy. the answer is that you want the good doctor, working to the best of his ability. Not everyone produces sloppy work all the time, it is better to produce your best stuff rather than phone it in and if people don’t do this then a) it’s not Gordon’s fault or yours or mine and b) the capitalist system clearly doesn’t depend on people putting in half an effort. The Buddhists note that you can worship God by peeling a spud if you make sure you’re doing the best job you can and they are right on this, not Smith or Marx).
I want to have D^D’s babies!
Something a bit more detailed on this from me here.
I want to take potential issue with dsquared.
First, is there any reason to think this?
Maybe there’s survey evidence and I’m happy to see it if there is, but the evidence of hearing people talk about their jobs doesn’t immediately back this up.
Second, is this true?:
If someone’s really good at talking and they spend all day in a sales job, that’s them using their talent
Isn’t the point about having a skill not just that you use it, but how you use it and how you develop it? If you have a capacity to write, you don’t just write, it matters what you write and whether your skill at writing is developed, adds to the lives of other people, gives you the satsifaction that it might and so on.
Third, is not the point about mechanisation under capitalism that it seeks, more often than not, to try and reproduce processes mechanically, to make them less individual, to find out how they are done and devise processes that will do them over and again?
Four, so far from being “patronising” to the working class, isn’t it a very, very commonly heard sentiment about work that “it does my head in”? That people do find that it does not develop them and does not test them other than physically?
All these points can be challenged with good examples and need to be qualified to some degree, but I wonder whether dsquared takes them into account to the extent that he might.
Sorry, I moved it. It’s now here
I think Justin’s 1) might have been eaten by a tag but …
on 2) I agree with Charlie’s discussion of the same issue; work is pretty much definitionally what they pay you to do, but I don’t agree that this is crushing to the soul or whatever.
on 3), I think it’s pretty well established that Taylorisation is a step on the way to automation – the tendency of the economy is to simplify a task in order to remove the worker, and thus to move workers into the jobs that can’t be simplified. I don’t think anybody’s arguing that this is the state of affairs right now, but that’s the direction of progress.
on 4) I think I am on reasonably orthodox grounds in saying that the main bad thing about work is either a) not having control of your time or b) the actions of specific bastards who, it is sad to say, would probably exist and be doing just as much harm under most other economic structures.
I think Andre Gorz’s ‘Farewell to the Working Classes’ has already refuted much of Dsquared’s argument. Service jobs are often just as monotonous, often less skilled, and often more demeaning than the jobs they have replaced.
Sure; bad jobs exist and more bad jobs can always be created. Extra bad jobs came into existence today, quite possibly. The objectionable thing about Chris’s argument was his claim that bad jobs are necessary and – by implication – comprehensive reform of our system of rights is needed. I’m as uneasy as anyone about the political changes of the last twenty years or so. Because they’re unnecessary. It was working.
Ah, apologies for that. Must have been distracted. Or lazy. Anyway, my doubt in (1) was about the suggestion that people enjoy their jobs.
On (2) you may be right, but it strikes me as a differenent argument to the one that was previously put. It’s what they pay you for, sure: but that’s a very different thing to it being truly what you’re good at and what develops you as a person. Is that “crushing”? Dunno. Stunting perhaps.
On (3) it’s true to say that capitalism tends to find progressively more complex and potentially-fulfuilling work for us to do as the machines get on with (much of) the boring stuff, but it does then tend to spoil it by trying to deindividualise and mechanise it. There are all sorts of ways to view this process but personally I think it shows us our potential and then denies it.
On (4) I don’t think it’s just the bastards or the absence of control, true though both are, but it’s also the work itself. There is an interesting question that can be asked in response, to the effect that “if this is alienated labour, what would unalienated labour look like (Marx’s own answer to this is notoriously sketchy) and do you really think most of us would be able and allowed to do it?”
I really don’t understand what dsquared is on about.
As Tony Blair said back in 2005, “More than one million people on incapacity benefit wanted to work.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4224721.stm
The problem is that they are not working. Besides that, we know from The Economist for 26 August 2006 that Britain is unusually well-endowed with low-skilled young people compared with other European countries:
http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7843638
Of course, that isn’t too surprising because of this:
“Last year [2004], a report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) revealed that Britain came seventh from bottom in a league table of staying-on rates for 19 countries. Only Mexico and Turkey had significantly lower rates of participation for this age group. Italy, New Zealand, Portugal and Slovakia have marginally lower rates.”
http://education.guardian.co.uk/gcses/story/0,16086,1555547,00.html
And this:
“Only half of those on apprenticeships in England finish them, the chief inspector of adult education has found.
Although standards of training had improved dramatically overall, David Sherlock said low apprenticeship completion rates were ‘unacceptable’.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6169843.stm
No offence Bob, but being told by you that you don’t understand what I’m on about – particularly when you follow that comment with four seemingly randomly selected news stories, as usual – is a bit like being called fat by Alisher Usmanov.
Daniel – That abusive comment conveniently evades the issue of contention here but then you knew that, I’m sure. Curiously, in today’s news, even Ed Balls agrees that schools are failing to nurture talents, which is hopefully reassuring in its way if it means that reforms are really on their way:
“Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, admitted yesterday that England’s state education system was failing too many young people as he pledged a new drive to raise standards.
“A decade after Labour took office, he told the party’s conference that it was not good enough for one in five children to enter secondary school unable to meet the required level of English.
“Children from poorer homes were still only half as likely to get five good passes in GCSE exams, even though results were rising faster among pupils entitled to free school meals, he said.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/school_league_tables/article2540096.ece
Btw do see this sad news report about local education authorities in Wales:
“Two-thirds of Wales’s local authorities are not spending enough on education, according to a teachers’ union. The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) said its research shows spending by 14 of the 22 councils is below expected budget levels.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7012744.stm