What is the fucking point of this?

Is this shit even necessary for capitalism to function

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bump. sorry its a big blogpost-y but I really want to know how in the fuck does anyone, even porky, benefit from this stupid shit

welcome to the efficiencies of capitalism

Capitalism is the most efficient allocation of labor imaginable, fool.

Thats what they do. Capitalism is an abstract concept, and as such requires abstract work for it to function. The concrete necessities of life and actually doing shit is something that goes on with or without capitalism. What screws with daily life is conformity to capitalistic tendencies for the convenient sake that everyone else does it.

nobody benefits from this

it would be less work for them to let you do your job, but they have to keep running IAmMyJob.exe or else klaxons erupt in their minds

they can afford to be inefficient in their jobs like this

these experiences are so ubiquitous under capitalism that I hope some people are actively archiving worker griping. discussions of ideology often veer towards "the ideals you argue for doom the human race" - but "the ideals you argue for will reduce the human race to janitors wishing they could simply be allowed to janitor" is more compelling to me than that debate club "moral calculus" hogwash (that extracurricular set the recond for number of times I got to declare Stalin/Mao/Ho Chi Minh did nothing wrong and there were ancap assholes in the class who could never figure out what level of irony anybody was on so all in all it was worth it)

sorry for reddit spacing, I'm procrastinating doing my essay

Can you explain again in simpler terms

im stoned it probably wasn't real english

capitalism sucks

Basically, where work doesn't exist, it's nessecary to create it. Unemployment is good for individual capitalists as it lets them reduce wages and conditions but structural joblessness begins to erode the foundations of capitalism and lead towards collapse.

now I understand

Because you're not directing the flow of your work yourselves, your boss and managers are, and for them things like workplace discipline and the certainty that they'll get their part of the bargain, a lovely 1/3 of your life, are more important than results.

With some type of workplace democracy and social ownership you guys would be working to generate a profit you'd be making, so you'd probably be more focused, more efficient and driven towards commonly understood objectives instead of just trying to spend time.

Yes. As automation makes capitalism more unneeded than it already is, jobs will become mostly busywork that doesn't really do anything in order to keep jobs around to float the capitalist system. Think of it like keeping a mouse in a wheel so he's too tired to realize he lives in a cage.

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Same shit in Pyongyang

what I mean is that their obsession with viewing workers as parasites inteferes with the truth underlying the situation, which is that you are doing your job and preventing damage to equipment, generating surplus value by avoiding all sorts of problems in the facility. and clearly they don't mind staring at the place all the time and focusing on 'trimming its fat' - they just don't walk around and fix it themselves because ThatsNotMyJob.exe
have you considered arranging plastic soldiers in hidden places while concealing your actions from the cameras? could be fun. they can't get angry at you for running around and peering into nooks and crannies, right? sorry if this is too cute, but I do shit like this to keep myself sane at work. (I also lift a little bit of merch here and there, but that's just because I started leveling up the Thief class recently and I'm a bad person (I'm also poor but I'm not gonna pretend that's why)

Are capitalists a monolith or what?

no, but they run the same operating system and always want to have good ideas - the best ideas - you've got to find the best people to get their ideas to get the best ideas - and everybody knows the best people make plenty of money

Yeah, this always bugged me. I remember when I used to be union there was AN ENTIRE TEAM dedicated to finding work us union guys could do. Once they devised a plan where we'd go around government building and manually test all the walls for creeping moisture

They were really excited about it because it meant they created a shitload of hours for everyone.

And then one of our most intelligent dudes stood up and explained how you could do moisture tracking with a thermal camera and it would only take a couple hours per building. Needless to say everyone got butthurt at him for mentioning that

And in the meanwhile we don't know exaclty on what to work, so we're kind of lost to ourselves.

A lot of the time that is Official Work-Time(TM) people have nothing to do and pretend to be busy. If your job is at a desk, you can just read things that interest you. But if your job is physical, you have to move around and this act of pretending to be busy can be almost as stressful as normal work. And it's not that you are shirking work, you are assigned to certain tasks and how long these tasks take depends on a lot of factors, the real activity isn't as homogenous as its formal representation suggests, and then there is suddenly a phase with nothing to do, and it's not your fault, or maybe it is your "fault" because you were too fast, so the jerkoff managers will call you a shirker when they see you standing, or give you more to do than the average for no more pay.

Another fun thing is when the workers know what goes into the formal representation of your productivity, so when there is a pile of things to do, there is a scramble for picking the things that will make you look good. This scramble is a drag on total productivity. If the workers have some sense of fair play, they apportion the tasks among themselves in a way that the formal representation of your pile of activities roughly corresponds to how hard it actually is, but this too takes some time. This wouldn't be an issue if either the formal representation were more accurate or the tasks were done out of a sense of duty with informal reinforcement by your colleagues through bullying comradely criticism.

What makes the gap between formal representation and actual work so big is lack of planning in society at large and separation of doers and planners. The extreme social hierarchy also feeds into delusions when analysing productive activity. When there is a chain of activities with the first being a necessary step for the second which is a necessary step for the third and so on, the overall flow is set by the bottleneck. So what happens at the bottleneck is important, whether you have mentally marked the people there as unimportant or whatever.

I'll have you know I'm straight up collectivizing your thoughts

my cousin is working in a supermarket with a neutered puppy union and it's so hard to get him to stop hating on himself when "all he does is stock shelves"

but, like you said, the real activity isn't as homogenous as its formal representation suggests, and I feel like if I can concatenate some of your expressions about how the work flow gets fucked by fake productivity incentives and the like, I can get him to stop oscillating between "wow fuck this dumb supervisor whore and her piercings" and "fuck me for being a useless piece of shit who can't even work a grocery store"

stay fucking woke

Pretty much the same where I work. They use CCTV to look at whether or not you're working, and I don't recall once them using it to track theives at all. I just sit in the blind spots when there's nothing to do until they come out every so often.

Porky wants to reduce employment because they know that it doesn't take however many people are on staff to do that work. You're under the microscope because they need an actual excuse to fire you (to avoid lawsuits). Their ideal scenario is having exactly as many people as are needed to do the job and working for exactly as long as necessary. They're just stuck in a situation where there isn't someone obvious to fire right now, like with the guy who was browsing the internet at work. They're hoping someone slips up so they can reduce the cost of payroll.

Well I mean they clearly already fired the last guy. If they didn't want SOMEONE doing that work they would've just not hired op in the first place.

Thanks man, this is a really good analysis

welcome newfriend

the guy you quote, >1493154
sounds a bit idealist. Capitalism yes, is a system chasing an abstraction (value), but it is not (only) the abstraction it is trying to chase, nor is it our theory about what capitalism is or why it does what it does. We only know what we know about capitalism by internally critiquing its history and practices. I am also stoned

this is a pretty terrible post and I am sorry. I did not explain immanent critique. try this instead

empyreantrail.wordpress.com/2016/09/12/dialectics-an-introduction/

I'm honestly confused how to explain this from a perspective of dialectical materialism. The boss doesn't really gain anything from having the worker tire and stress himself doing busywork, and in fact this lowers the worker's morale, and hurts the boss' interests.

Can someone explain why this is done? There's a lot of stoned people in this thread, trying to explain, but I have no idea what they're trying to say.

Dialectical materialism isn't really the best at explaining individual cases I think?

Yeah, but I've seen this often from people that their bosses make them do this so it seems widespread to me. Idk maybe I'm misconstruing how common it is.

Arguably better explained by dialectical naturalism, since it's more of a matter of hierarchy and domination.

It doesn't have to have any material reward, it's simply a matter of reinforcing the system of domination. That in itself is justification.

Dialectical materialism not always applicable

If one assumes that work contracts specify everything the worker does and compliance with what is in the work contract is guaranteed, then unproductive activity that doesn't contribute in any way to what the company sells seems illogical. Nobody states these assumptions explicitly, and I guess nobody actively assumes it, but they do not actively assume the opposite either. As with things we don't focus on in general, this means for the gap between the vague contracts and what is actually done that it is taken as something given and fixed.

The boss can't simply vaporize an uppity underling by snapping fingers, the assertion of hierarchy happens in day-to-day activity and rituals. And how can one assert one's higher position in the hierarchy by ordering lower persons to do something that the lower persons are about to do anyway, because it makes sense to them? On the contrary, it has to be something stupid and pointless in the context of actually producing the product or providing the service for what the company officially exists for, so it can work as a signal of domination. And you carrying out the stupid order is the confirmation of your submission.

Add to the picture the differentiation between owners and managers in big companies, and you have another reason for why decisions don't tightly correspond to profit-maximizing principles.

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