DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] ECONOMICS HOT THOUGHT

Marx and the Death of the Author III: Your Boss Doesn't Hate You, They're Just Entirely Indifferent

I'm a Millennial. A friend of mine who works for the World Bank once told me that their demographic data would put me as a 'geriatric Millennial' since I was born in the 1980s. Just another reason for me to dislike the World Bank I guess. Also another reason to distrust discrete variables since the boundaries are assigned by people, usually arbitrarily. But that I'll save for when I talk about statistics. Today we're doing Marx, and the reason it's important that I'm a Millennial is because it's worth me highlighting that I grew up during the 'end of history', as Foucault assured us. That period in the 1990s and early 2000s, also sometimes called the 'long 90s' where the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that neo-liberal capitalism and the nominally democratic states attached to it had won history, the big Civ IV game we were all playing as a species had finished, Britain and/or America had won the cultural and economic victory, and now we were in the post-game lobby. Fascism and Communism had been fads of the 19th and 20th centuries and we should all just get on with our lives and uncritically accept that the neo-liberal economists had been right all along, and the Marxists were foolish for laughing at them proclaiming themselves scientists. Indeed, during my undergraduate degree (a bachelor's of science in economics, no less) one of my econometrics professors described econometrics as 'the physics of the humanities'.

Mind you, I was doing undergrad in the immediate aftermath of the 2007/08 Financial Crisis. Indeed, Occupy Wallstreet protests were taking place within viewing distance of the building I was taking that module in econometrics. I say with confidence, looking back, that despite the 2007/08 crisis still very much unfolding around us, neo-liberal dominance of economics departments was still so thorough that if I had self-identified as a Marxist back then (I didn't, I self-identified as a neo-classicalist. It was Chicago in 2009 in my defence), nonetheless, even a whisper of socialism in economics class rooms of this period would have been scoffed away as the foolish wishful thinking of 'some damn fool who didn't learn their lesson from the collapse of the USSR', or 'just didn't understand' the complex nuances of neoclassical economics. (Again, back then no one was self-identifying as a neo-liberal). Those poor fools, once we educated them, they would understand why our system was scientifically designed to be the most efficient means of distribution of resources.

I get irrationally angry when I think about the kind of work I was doing back then. Anyway, BSc and even my first MA in hand, I began working. This was before my second Master's and before I started by PhD, and I went into the wider world of work. Like most people of my age at the time, I assumed that Human Resources was there to protect me, the employee, and therefore I should go to them with my concerns. My first dismissal from a job taught me the hard way that HR is not there for the employee, they're there for the employer. Tellingly, I would spend a chapter of my PhD dissertation on the history of HR departments going back to Ford strike-breaking in the 1920s and moving through into the present day where Uber doesn't even acknowledge the majority of their labour force as employees. Different discussion for a different day, but there is a good book you can read, *Work Won't Love You Back* by Sarah Jaffe that outlines this more for me.

But what is HR, if it isn't for the Human Resources themselves? Well, it is about extracting as much 'productivity' from those human resources as possible. You see, it sounds nice at first, recognising you as a human and all, and then becomes sinister because you're nothing more than a resource, to be used and abused like a printer's ink cartridge until you're spent, and then the main concern will be local disposing guidelines and determining whether or not the binman will still take the bin if they see the cartridge in it, or if you should hide it a bit more. (Malicious compliance, and all that).

In microeconomics, and yes, econometrics, productivity is typically expressed as P = €/t, that is to say the value of the good or service provided over the time necessary to produce it. When you hear of certain economists talking about Britain's 'productivity crisis', this is the explicit crisis they're talking about. A crisis so technically capitalist and economic in scope that a Financial Times reporter once confided in me that she wasn't even sure it existed. (In her defence, it doesn't). Micro-economists tend not to admit they borrow from Marx, but they do, when they calculate the relationship between capital and labour, they use K and L, granted this is likely because most modern econometrics comes from German-speaking Austria, but in my heart capital will also be K because of Das Kapital, which is also where we get the words 'capital' and 'capitalism' from, in their modern meanings.

Modern orthodox economics is divided on the relationship between K and L. Autor and Salomans have spent much of the last two decades, for example, arguing over whether automation (a function of K) is labour displacing or labour replacing. This distinction is well and good, only if you assume the labourers themselves have as easy a time moving and converting as capital does. They do not, a fact that frustrates economists to no end. Nonetheless, Autor and Saloman's (and Brynjolfsson and McAfee's) obsession with automation as if it is a new phenomenon in capitalism is proof that even the orthodox economists increasingly find themselves having to address a simple fact that Marx noticed in the 1840s: employers don't actually want employees.

Graeber will say that's an oversimplification, and indeed that's the point of Bullshit Jobs, that some people like the power dynamic that comes from the employee-employer relationship. Indeed, I have hinted at this in previous posts where I've pointed out that Amazon would have spent less meeting employee demands than engaging in union-busting. The break-up of Standard Oil made Rockefeller more money than Standard Oil's monopoly did, and he knew ahead of time that would be the case, but he fought the break up anyway because the power the monopoly gave him was more important than the money. However, the robot has always been the capitalist's dream worker. Robots need maintenance, yes, but this maintenance is less than the cost of food, board, healthcare, paid time off, pensions, etc., and computers also lack sentience, so they'll never complain and never unionise or challenge the power of the employer class. Will robots ever reach the stage where they can replace employees?

It doesn't actually matter. That's what Jack Welch showed us, and what my research has shown. As long as you make money off the stock market and not from actually producing, the gimmick of AI will be profitable. You can lay-off, and indeed many companies have, tens of thousands of employees, claim it's due to automation (AI or otherwise) and that you now have a more lean-mean profit making machine, and the share holders will reward you. Because share holders and stock traders are grifters, and as far as many of them are concerned, Enron and Bernie Madoff's only mistakes were getting caught. (Enshittification goes into this). This top-down love of the perception of automation has led to what I call 'magic box thinking' amongst the managerial class. In actuality, the managerial class is part of the proletariat.

But as French Marxist Dumenil argues, they historically align themselves with the capitalist class, because they have come to believe that sufficiently aligning themselves with the interests of capital against labour will allow them to join the capitalist class. Of course, in the present era, the people most likely to be automated by computers are the managers themselves, but they have been educated, usually at specialist 'business schools' to be unquestioning of the logic of capital. Capital loves computers, not for what they actually can or cannot do, but because the dream of a factory without workers has always been the capitalist end goal, and as long as that dream can be sold to investors, the actual capacity of the machines themselves becomes secondary. British machine made textiles were inferior to their hand made Indian counterparts, but that was of no concern to the mills of Lancashire. AI slop is markedly inferior to human written content, but to the capitalist class this is of no concern as long as it can be sold. Capitalist violence against India and aggressive marketing, along with blinding patriotism and good ol' 18th century racism solved problems for the British factories of the 18th century. I will let you come to your own conclusions about AI and its relationship with capitalist gaslighting and violence today. (And if you really want to get depressed look at what the British Army did to British Luddites, even at the height of the Napoleonic War, when they should have been focusing on the actual enemy, capital has always loved to use violence against labour).

Okay, we've already brought in Graeber, Dumenil, and other Marxists, so Marx is already dead. But, pray tell, who else can we bring in? Well, Standing comes to mind. As I write this, I'm in the same park that contains the famous Royal Observatory at Greenwich. The local joke is that this otherwise unassuming London neighbourhood is either the centre or beginning of time. Indeed, aside from the Observatory and a local clock tower that denote the Prime Meridian, you'd be forgiven for not noticing that you're sitting on top of the exact spot from whence GMT/UTC are calculated. Of course, despite sitting on top of the Meridian, it's currently BST, so I'm still an hour off. This neighbourhood's importance to time comes entirely from British Imperialism. The need for a Prime Meridian arose from the Royal Navy needing better navigational gear for their expanding jurisdiction. From the Prime Meridian, came the 24 time zones, the need for which arose chiefly from the need to standardise clocks across multiple zones to adequately schedule train times. The train's global spread started in Britain, and was expanded by the ever increasing appetite for raw materials to feed the factories across Britain and other states that engaged in industrialisation. These facts are fairly widely known. Less known, however is why you're so attached to the clock on your phone, and why you had to set an alarm this morning.

For most of the human race, the modern, heavily measured concept of time was for introduced with the factory. Specifically, the concept of shifts. As factories grew, so too did the 'white collar' jobs necessary for the admin around them. Those workers, despite not being on the factory floor, found themselves working as if those factory machines still dictated the flow of their lives, because indirectly, they did. This is the key argument of Guy Standing's The Politics of Time, in which Standing argues that the modern necessity for everyone to know time down to the minute is a product of industrialisation. Further, as productivity (the equation shown above) became more central to the generation of capital for the capitalist class, the more the need to 'live every minute to its fullest' (that is, to its most profitable) became a driving force of capitalism. Plato, Socrates, and Newton all had not only the time to be bored, but the right to be bored, argues Standing, and from this boredom came their capacity to create. Part of the modern fight of labour, Standing argues, is our right to reclaim the right leisurely boredom. Standing's other work, The Plunder of the Commons argues that whilst the Magna Carta was busy creating the 'sacred right of property', it also set aside a considerable amount of Britain, 'the commons', to be used by the masses. The myth of 'the tragedy of the commons', Standing argues, has led to the selling off of public goods, once enshrined in British law, to a class that only exploits it.