Invisible Hands

Or working at Wal*Mart?

Market power vs. commodity fetishism…

…or maybe, as we Computer Science wonks like to call it, it’s just the age-old struggle between abstraction and the lack thereof?

In fact, I’d say that the Mattel fiasco is a prime example of abstraction gone wrong. Maybe it sounds good that one can buy toys off the shelf… but when these toys which are made available to us by Liberating Power of the Great Invisible Hand(tm) are found to contain lead-based paint or exposed magnets, then Smith’s rosy picture clearly has a problem.

bad Jim: I’m guessing that you’re using the word “manufacturing” in much the same sense as Bush, i.e. it includes home-cooking. :-)

Sitting having dinner in a little roadside restaurant outside Beijing what strikes me about those photographs is that except for the faces of the people and that’s the faces not the expressions they could have been taken and indeed tave been taken in every industrialized nation.
These modern factories are not brick factories manned by slave labor though that was one recent scandal in china.

I’d like to see a series of photographs of janitorial staff employed in the us university system. Those are your invisible hands.

I understand why a sociologist would want to concentrate on the relations between people, and would mistrust the “fetishization” of products. But the products are central to what’s being shown in these pictures. None of what’s happening would be happening without them. To shy away from that seems as wooly as a day-labourer’s coat.

You paint Smith as the stereotypical free marketeer. In fact he leaves the door wide open for government regulation of working conditions. From Wealth of Nations, Book 5:

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life…. in every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.

You don’t need Marx to see the workers clearly, nor to help them take practical steps to improve their lot in life.

In a perfect society, the means of production would be centrally regulated and workers could shift around at will. They could choose to be social scientists one day and toy-plant laborers the next.

One thing odd I notice about the photos is that none of the workers are wearing eyeglasses.

But is the claim about “idiocy of rural life” positively indisputable? It’s not how Pyotr Kropotkin felt:

Either the State for ever, crushing individual and local life, taking over in all fields of human activity, bringing with it its wars and its domestic struggles for power, its palace revolutions which only replace one tyrant by another, and inevitably at the end of this development there is … death!

Or the destruction of States, and new life starting again in thousands of centers on the principle of the lively initiative of the individual and groups and that of free agreement.

The choice lies with you!

Sorry to be stupid, but what is striking about the photos? This looks like any ordinary plastics factory with ordinary factory workers.

Interesting summary of an idea of Marx.

One thing I’m lost though, what did Marx think a world where commodity fetishism did not happen would look like? What would be different in a world with extensive division of labour but where the “social character of men’s labour does not appear to them as an objective feature stamped upon the product of that labour.”

Or is this an inevitable consequence of large-scale production, market system or not?

abb1:

Well, Kropotkin just successfully exhibited another form of fetishism (or abstraction): instead of summing up the vast number of people behind a wool coat as just a Product with a Price Tag, let’s instead treat the huge complex consisting of policemen, judges, clerks, lawmakers, etc. into a single Borg-like entity called The Government.

(Which incidentally is one reason why I find glibertarianism bogus.)

I think the Business Week (and other) reports were on the consequences of the Hukou system. This is the internal passport that gives everyone in China an official place of residence. If your Hukou is some remote village you do not have the right to live and work in a distant city. Millions and millions of Chinese do in fact live outside their Hukou and are vulnerable to economic pressures out of fear of police action. Internal illegal immigrants in fact.

I like the one with the worker next to the pile of dolls she just built. Piles of dead looking dolls or mannequins always makes my brain stutter for a moment.

I can imagine some xenophobic propaganda poster seeing it as evil Chinese methodically killing the future for American children.

“That’s precisely what’s striking about the photos. They ain’t evil Chinese conspirators bent on destroying the USA!”

Well, no, they’re subjects of the evil Chinese conspirators. Although IS striking that the photographer didn’t think the guard towers and barbed wire fences that typically surround such factories in China were worth photographing.

tracy w, this is from Alasdair Macintyre:

“Secreted within Marxism from the outset is a certain radical individualism. In the first chapter of Capital when Marx characterizes what it will be like ‘when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations’..”

i.e. when relations between individuals are no longer obscured by commodity fetishism, and are completely transparent…

“…what he pictures is ‘a community of free individuals’ who have all freely agreed to their common ownership of the means of production and to various norms of production and distribution. This free individual is described by Marx as a socialized Robinson Crusoe; but on what basis he enters into his free association with others Marx does not tell us.”

News from another dimension. The things they make are meaningless beyond any redefining, empty artifacts, like money printed out with no backing – supported by the believers in it, it becomes central, essential, paramount to the dying age. The things that give meaning to their lives are twitch and jerk responses no different from rhesus primates clamped in laboratory hells. How they got there was a series of logical sensible seductions.
But each step in is swept clean and made invisible, until there’s nothing left but freeways and birdless forests.
Listening to the dementia of the last of their kind seek some way through, but there is no way through. That was the message at the beginning and it hasn’t changed.
You can’t go this way. If you do go that way, this will happen. When that happens you must turn back. If you don’t turn back, this next thing will happen.
And there you are.
Bloix #22 represents the preterite world now. What’s bizarre and inhuman about these images?
Maybe they illustrate your inability to imagine a full 24 hour cycle in those worker’s lives.
Who the fuck was Daniel Boone? Red Cloud?
Vercingetorix? Whaat?
The Neanderthals gathered flowers. Presented them to each other.
I promise you this is true.

William Morris had it right in News from Nowhere: wages inversely proportional to job satisfaction.

There are no wages in News from Nowhere, and most people have completely lost the knowledge of the concept. I enjoyed thouroughly this comparison of Smith and Marx.

Will – thanks for explaining.

In the first chapter of Capital when Marx characterizes what it will be like ‘when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations’..”

I think Marx was overconfident. He was writing before electric fridges. I understand how fridges and freezers work, but they still strike me as fundamentally cheating.

More generally, if we are to understand everything in our economy or in the 19th century economy (“perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations”) we would need not merely a political revolution but a massive increase in the speed in which information can be passed from one head to another.

abb1:

“What, you find concepts like ‘statism’, ‘individualism’ or ‘collectivism’ completely useless because they are too general?”

I do, actually — they’re even worse than “government”. (I mean, if a word like “collectivism” can refer to anything from out-and-out fascism to Bakunin’s anarchism to social democratic liberalism, how can it not be useless?)

“Can’t abstraction be useful to some extent?”

Yes, as long as they’re not simplistic to the point of being wrong. “Government” isn’t some sort of undifferentiated Borg-like mass of oppressors, just as Smith’s “invisible hand” isn’t just a soulless entity that gives you exactly what you want every time.

I agree that an one-line caricature is usually pretty useless, but people like Smith and Marx, and even Proudhon and Kropotkin, wrote thousands of pages explaining their ideas in a more nuanced way.

Later some of their one-liners became symbols the whole body of their works, thus we often hear “invisible hand”, “proletarians of the world, unite”, “property is theft”, etc. But obviously Adam Smith had much-much more to say than just “invisible hand”, otherwise he would’ve only needed to produce a single-page pamphlet or even a fortune cookie.

My point was, writing thousands of pages doesn’t really make one more “nuanced”.

Hmm, I don’t really understand why this “divided government” thing is so terribly important that everyone must acknowledge it or else.

I can easily see how one could argue (as he apparently does in your quote in #46) that, divided or not, the essence of government is the same: coercion, exercising power of one group over another; the difference being only in the degree and the contents of these groups.

Of course, clearly, someone else could also (convincingly) argue that point is in finding compromises between the groups and individuals, yet it doesn’t make the anti-government angle logically unsound. I suspect most people would subscribe to the view of government as a “necessary evil”, so a guy looking for ways to make it un-necessary doesn’t strike me as totally unreasonable.

Chris Bertram:

Let’s go back to that quote again:

The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life….
That doesn’t seem to me to be an accurate picture of the moral condition of the typical industrial worker.

Maybe, but that’s not what Smith is trying to describe. What he is trying to describe is the condition of the typical industrial worker “unless government takes some pains to prevent it.”