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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31257 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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This is about layoffs in tech and what they underscore about modern economy.

https://blog.interviewing.io/how-much-have-2022-layoffs-affected-engineers-vs-other-departments-we-dug-into-the-data-to-find-out/

According to our data, almost half of HR people and recruiters got laid off, as compared to 10% of engineers and only 4% of salespeople.

This passage feels obvious. Of course companies will let go those employees first who contribute little to the bottom line. Of course companies will hold onto their critical resources--engineers and salespeople in this case--until the very worst moment.

But underneath this is a statement about how many bullshit jobs are there in our economy. Jobs that are merely simple busywork. Jobs that exist solely as a way to redistribute the fruits of capitalism from those who have found a way to way to produce for society and those who didn't. It's basically a giant social contract about providing for a rather large part of society that would not otherwise be able to sustain itself.

If anything, this speaks of how deep our humanism runs. Instead of sawing off the sickly branch, we embrace it with care, doing so in a way that doesn't over-infringe on the patient's dignity (Consider how powerful a mark of status it is to provide for the weak and poor--now this status-marker has been democratized).

Thus we learn something practical: don't take anything HR says or does too seriously. They play an unpopular, minor role in the fabric of a company, relegated to the equivalent of keeping the litter box clean: ensuring legal compliance, tackling on/off-boarding paperwork, and organizing company celebrations. That, and be wary of HR departments that seem to outgrow their function. A fat, active HR department is a sign that a company isn't allocating its funds efficiently. Or that it usurps power from more important departments, eg. the power to design and run the hiring process (they should only take care of the mechanical parts; the candidate qualification process should be in the hands of subject-matter experts). Either way, it's a bad sign.

There’s that famous Buffett quote about investment banks being run more for employees than for shareholders.

Excellent post, I'd also throw in that this is the original purpose of the idea of the Professional and Managerial Class as a distinct entity from the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat. The classical Marxian model of Bourgeoisie (the ownership class, or those who Hobsbawm defined in his history of the 19th century as "Anyone who employed another person") and the Proletariat (workers, the rest, who make their money from their own labor) seemed increasingly out of date when corporations seem to run not in the interests of "capital" ownership but in the interests of the managers.

seemed increasingly out of date when corporations seem to run not in the interests of "capital" ownership but in the interests of the managers.

I think the bourgeoisie allow - or are forced to allow via threat of regulation - some say into events by managers but I think that's a far cry from the argument that managers have actually wrested control.

At worst imo they are forced into the situation that Roman emperors found themselves in after coopting Christianity: powerful enough church leaders can compel or give Roman officials (even the Emperor) pause or even force them to change tack. They had to play along with the new ideology and couldn't just write it off.

But the bulk of the power remained with the Roman Emperor, especially if he was strong.

I feel the same way about capitalist today, especially in fields that don't get caught up as much in the culture war. We can all point to endless rampages by lunatics in colleges or progressive non-profits or businesses that depend on constant PR (film, fashion). I'm not sure that the situation is the same in the oil business or whatever.

Who are the bourgeoisie in your view? In the 19th century when Marx is writing (and that hobsbawm is writing about) there were individuals who owned companies, factories, ships, farms. Today the big players are pension funds and other wealth managers.

Musk, Bezos, and Gates combined barely eclipse Calpers alone. Blackrock has ten Trillion under management. The fund managers have many times the power of the owners.

I'd give the historical parallel not of the late Roman empire but of late Merovingian France. The Roi FaiNeant era, out of which emerged powerful subordinates like Charles Martel, who would slowly seize power in their own names. Or the emergence of Japanese Shogun.

The managers are already doing it. The CEO of nasdaq is no one you've ever heard of, and while she is probably very rich by ordinary standards she's not even a billionaire to my knowledge. Musk can piss her net worth away because someone asked him to support Ukraine on Twitter, and never even notice it.

Blackrock now plays by her rules, unless it specifically becomes an esg investor and refuses to use Nasdaq listed products.

You can't be neutral on a moving train. Everybody is standing somewhere, none of us are totally objective, Blackrock's very statements of neutrality are privileging some viewpoints over others.

Who are the bourgeoisie in your view?

I actually was thinking of the stereotypical business owner/industrialist. In terms of managers I was speaking more of middle managers and the HR types.

I take your point though that the first is outdated and I think I just misread how others were using the second.

The point isn't really wealth, though, it is relationships of power. To be bourgeoisie is to be engaged in relationships of exploitation, the labor of the proles supports your lifestyle. The PMC distinction is valuable not because of the money/wealth, but because of the way that the PMC obscures the relations of power it has with the proles through a variety of legal/technical innovations. A PMC liberal might claim that they personally do not exploit anyone, while their lifestyle and vocation creates and perpetuates structures that engage in that same exploitation.* Think of Uber. The 1880 Bourgeois capitalist who wanted his driver to take him home from a party had a personal relationship with his driver. If he forced his driver to work late, didn't let his driver take off on Sunday to go to church and spend time with his family, didn't pay him enough, that was all personal: it was he the capitalist doing to it to him the driver. The Uber user today, the capitalist PMC, does not personally exploit any individual Uber driver. In fact, Uber encourages the PMC to tell himself lies, that his Uber driver is an artist and this is his day job, that his Uber driver likes the flexible hours that let him do other things, etc.

A personal sideways example: an engineering firm I work with puts in their email signatures that their company is a "carbon neutral workplace." This despite the fact that they are sending me plans to cut down a forest and fill in a wetland, plans that will be carried out with diesel bulldozers and excavators. Their "firm" is carbon neutral measured as a firm; their work is a bit less carbon neutral. That to me is the essence of the liberal PMC: they don't personally exploit anyone, they're insulated from it.

  • American Psycho is IMO best interpreted as a series of hallucinations by which Patrick Bateman, the picture perfect PMC, hallucinates actually physically killing the people that the laissez-faire Wall Street Capitalism (of which Bateman forms a cog in the machine) will kill. He hallucinates stabbing a homeless man while taunting him that he can't get a job, doesn't the capitalist system he supports achieve the same thing but slower and without assigning agency in the killing to any Wall Street tycoon? He hallucinates torturing and murdering prostitutes, isn't that exactly what a system that forces women to sell their bodies to support themselves does? Bateman is insulated by layers of paperwork and legalese and subordinates from the results of his bond trading on the proletariat, he hallucinates feeling it morally as though he were actually doing it.

The saying goes, "privatize the gains, socialize the losses." What you describe sounds like "privatize[?] the harm [or agency?], socialize the guilt."

Think of it more like outsourcing your ethical compromises. Like a primitive superstitious ethical system, where direct contact with the impure makes you impure, but contracting someone else to handle the impure doesn't make you impure no matter how often you do it. As long as you never personally oppress anyone, other people doing it on your behalf doesn't bother you, you can tweet lecture everyone about ACAB while living in a doormanned building and taking private cars everywhere.

Modern legal and ethical systems recognize hiring someone to commit murder as equivalent to pulling the trigger yourself. Logically, it is ethically no different for any other ethical violation.

But then I don't tend to have the disgust reactions that many do about work. I've handled sewage all day, both literal septic tanks and reading case files for human sewage in pedophile confinement cases, and then gone out for a big meal. Purity isn't a reflex I have strongly, call it the 'tism.

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