Chomsky: Work, Learning and Freedom

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/work_learning_and_freedom

by robdoherty2 • 14 years ago

122 76 14 years ago

His point about the commissioned artist vs. the self-motivated artist is very interesting to me as a freelance developer. I often feel bored/discouraged doing projects for hire, yet when building something for myself I'll dedicate 18-hour days to it - even if it's basically the same project. A similar psychology is likely what caused me to excel as a self-taught hacker but fail as a student.

On a similar note, with all the hubbub about how worthwhile college is, it seems that curiosity and self motivation are some powerful deciding factors. Perhaps the current standard of going straight to college after high school is not the right way to go about it.

zanny• 14 years ago

> On a similar note, with all the hubbub about how worthwhile college is, it seems that curiosity and self motivation are some powerful deciding factors. Perhaps the current standard of going straight to college after high school is not the right way to go about it.

The problem is deeper in culture than that. All education as a whole should not be about raw numbers or facts, it should be about exposure and lighting a creative or investigative spark. We never had an education system centered around motivating interest in topics rather than route fact memorization (insert the Einstien quote about don't memorize what you can look up vis-a-vis the internet) but I think that has to be the end goal of education for humans in general. You can't be content teaching a topic, taking a test, and calling it quits. It has to be about inspiring people to persue more, and Chomsky really hits on that.

I have the same thing you do with software. I'll spend hundreds of hours on personal projects in a month, but for school assignments I'd do semester long assignments the last day. It is about what you are interested in vs what others force upon you to accomplish in that structured environment, the former is the goal and the latter is the failure in that objective.

Mainly because on some projects in my CS undergrad I would put in those hundred hour sessions. I wrote my own shell, for example, that I spent a combined ~100 hours on over 2 weeks, where most people did it in ~10, and I had autocompletion, history, pipes, and primitive variable / looping implemented. Most other people couldn't even do a proper execvP.

46Bit• 14 years ago

I've had the similar experience, of working on personal projects quite close to undergrad coursework yet having a huge difference in my motivation between them. What helped me was the modules that really fit with levelling up my knowledge (for instance a report on System/360 microprogramming).

It's always seemed to me that this kind of person should be a good candidate for postgraduate degrees: driven in their own exploration, effort on interesting things, etc. I've never managed to really find out the reality though.

cma• 14 years ago

Philip K. Dick has some interesting views on this topic at topic near the beginning of this interview (his time in college with mandatory ROTC):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXqHJYz8NXo

steveklabnik17• 14 years ago

There's lots of research to support this: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html gets posted just about every other day, but it's worth repeating.

dkarl5• 14 years ago

What he discovered was that as these methods were devised there was a choice – whether to design the methods so that control would be in the hands of skilled machinists or whether it would be controlled by management. They picked the second, although it was not more profitable – when they did studies they found there was no profit advantage to it but it’s just so important to keep workers under control than to have skilled machinists run the industrial process. One reason is that if that mentality spreads sooner or later workers are going to demand what seems obvious to them anyway – that they should just take over the factories and get rid of the bosses who don’t do anything but get in their way.

This is a good observation -- that management tends to take as much control as it can get, without any regard to costs and benefits -- but his analysis depends on some cultural assumptions about authority. In some cultures, a person with authority over another person is a different kind of person, a superior one. North Korea is a caricature of this attitude: Kim Jong Il, being at the apex of the power structure, had to be wiser, a better golfer, and a genius at every subject compared to everyone under him. In such a culture you can speak of the workers kicking out management and taking over, because workers and managers are distinct classes of people.

In other cultures, authority inheres not in the person but in the social role they play. A manager is just a guy who has a certain limited authority at work because of his role as manager. He is not assumed to be a better golfer, dancer, or calligrapher. He may be less talented or less virtuous than the people he orders around, and that doesn't threaten his authority as long as the company is happy with his job performance. One expects that people promoted or hired into management show more than typical interest and ability at management, but other than that, if management and workers are systematically different in any way, it is because of different patterns of déformation professionnelle due to their different job concerns.

In the latter kind of culture, the idea of workers kicking out management and taking over makes no sense. If you kick out the guys wearing manager hats, take away their manager hats, and give them to guys who used to wear worker hats, then you're left with the same number of manager hats, and therefore the same number of managers. You haven't kicked out management, you've kicked out the guys who used to be management.

chipsy• 14 years ago

I'm reading your line of reasoning and coming to the opposite conclusions.

In the North Korean power structure, superior authorities need to be depended on to improve the "helpless" masses, and a takeover would not be believed to be an improvement because the new leaders would be, at best, equally as strong and wise as the old.

But in more egalitarian societies, the idea of "do it yourself" and "fixing the system" is taken seriously, and the corresponding societal myths reflect this - "The Emperor has no clothes", for example.

dkarl5• 14 years ago

Yep, both cultures reinforce and stabilize themselves. That's why new cultural perspectives can be revolutionary. If Americans came to believe leadership should be based on superior personal virtue, then they might reject democracy, a la Plato and Confucius. If North Koreans came to believe that there is not a single "virtue" that makes a person superior at everything, that different people can be good or bad at different things, such as good at seeking power and bad at ruling justly, then they might demand institutions to protect themselves from the weaknesses of their leaders. They might decided that executive leadership is just a job that should be done by someone who is good at that particular thing, and that ordinary citizens are as qualified to choose their leaders as anyone else.

lyudmil3• 14 years ago

First, it's important to note that this isn't Prof. Chomsky's analysis. You are actually quoting Chomsky quoting David Noble.

Going a bit further, the concern you raise regarding the plausibility of worker self-management is absolutely a valid one. There are a number of people doing work on the matter. I'm familiar with only a fraction of it, but enough to assure you that the problem is quite nuanced and more involved than you could intuit. There are at least hypotheses about what causes the problems you gesture to and there are proposed solutions. If you're interested, I can point you to Michael Albert's work on the subject.

dkarl5• 14 years ago

It isn't formatted as a quote. It may be Noble's idea, but it's Chomsky saying it, in his own voice, so at the very least he agrees with it.

When you say a solution to the problem I raise, what do you mean? I don't regard it as a problem if the idea of overthrowing management only makes sense in some contexts and not in others.

Avshalom• 14 years ago

Yes, but you're leaving the managers in the same place in the power hierarchy. Imagine instead a company where the manager had roughly the same responsibilities: coordination, planning, assigning work. BUT hr shit like hiring, firing, raises, etc was done by a quorum of workers/employees/machinists.

That is to say keep managers as a job but remove their real power over workers, put managers in the position of employees instead of employers.

They can wear their managerial hat but it's now much much more difficult for them to take as much control as they can get without any regard to costs and benefits.

It's (theoretically) one of the features of a worker's co-operative.

reso• 14 years ago

Interestingly, you see very anarchic power structures in some of the world's best software companies. Facebook, for instance, has very little hierarchy, and nearly all the manager are engineers. Valve has literally zero hierarchy, workers choose what they work on and decisions are made by consensus.

neumann_alfred2• 14 years ago

But: who owns Valve, and is "who gets how much from the profit" also among the decisions made by consensus?

nickpinkston2• 14 years ago

Not to take away from your point because I think it holds, but I've read this "Forces of Production" book. It mischaracterizes what the true struggle was. It was CNC vs. "playback" technology (where it recorded the XYZ axes movements by a trained machinist) - the latter produced inferior parts and was very laborious to reprogram (you had to start over, not change a variable, etc.).

There were a lot of points / quotes in the book with management talking about reducing / commodifying labor, but I'm not sure this book is the best to cite as support for this. I suspect Chomsky is taking Nobel at his word, but the book is noticeably biased toward Marxist thinking in thinking everything is a class struggle whereas the technology actually was superior.

Funny enough the operator-programmer lines are blurring today as CNC code is now generated on essentially a compiler/debugger that simulates the machine. Machine programmers are scarce and now (even sans unions) are actually able to demand high prices in the same way a web developer can in our business.

calibraxis• 14 years ago

I have a copy of the book too. It carefully discussed the tradeoffs of both record-playback and CNC technologies. A dry, scholarly read. No such book is "objective" (those claiming to be objective generally don't analyze the dominant ideologies they promote), but at least Noble is clear about his perspective.

I think you can see some of the struggles even in programming. I've spoken with managers who are honest about wanting replaceable coders, and won't willingly choose a technology which swings the balance of power away from them. (Which means they'll likely prefer Java over certain other contenders, even if they actually happen to believe this replaceable-cog strategy costs them more time and money, thereby lowering profits.)

(That's why many are attracted to startups; some of these counterproductive constraints are relaxed, due to the sheer difficulty of success.)

steveklabnik17• 14 years ago

> You haven't kicked out management, you've kicked out the guys who used to be management.

"Boss" and "worker" are social roles. You're not abolishing 'management' you're abolishing 'managers,' which is a subtle but important difference.

Autonomy over your own destiny is important to humans. How many people want to 'do a startup' because it allows them to 'be their own boss'? Same basic need here.

rdtsc3• 14 years ago

> If you kick out the guys wearing manager hats, take away their manager hats, and give them to guys who used to wear worker hats, then you're left with the same number of manager hats

Maybe the distinction is between ownership and non-ownership and also having the ability to control corporation. Have a say in the future direction and also being compensated proportionally to the total profit made. I think that's the distinction, not as much talking about middle managers per se.

dkarl5• 14 years ago

I think you're right. Control is what people are after, and ownership is the right way to get it. Getting rid of management is a just knee-jerk reaction against management that isn't accountable to the interests of all employees. Nobody really wants to face the horrifying complexity of running a business without management and hierarchy, unless the business is extremely small. Allocation of personnel and resources among departments, choosing which business opportunities to pursue, choosing vendors, deciding to ax one product line in favor of another, performance reviews, hiring, firing, promotion, salary adjustment, how in the world would all that get done democratically? The first thing any democratic assembly of employees would do is start delegating authority so that decisions could be made in reasonable time and people could do their jobs instead of sitting in the assembly all day. What's the point of dissolving one bureaucracy if you're inevitably going to create another to replace it?

What workers want is ownership. The idea of kicking the bosses out is a holdover from the days when ownership and management weren't divorced, as they typically are today. Management serves at the pleasure of the owners, and if the workers are really able to "take over the factories," then management serves at their pleasure, which is a much simpler way of making management accountable to employees.

neumann_alfred2• 14 years ago

If you kick out the guys wearing manager hats, take away their manager hats, and give them to guys who used to wear worker hats

Who suggested that? Nobody. The idea is for workers to manage themselves while being workers, not for some of them to turn into the new managers.

charlieflowers6• 14 years ago

I am missing something here, and I am genuinely curious what it is I'm missing.

If a capitalist starts a manufacturing business with the goal of making money, and if he then discovers that the business would run much more effectively by letting the skilled workers make the decisions than by hiring a layer of management ... then why wouldn't the capitalist go with the more effective approach?

TL;DR rephrase -- why would a business owner maintain a layer of management if that was truly a less effective way to go?

Is Chomsky (or Noble) claiming there's something like a "conspiracy" amongst the "managerial class" to create fake jobs for managers, merely to maintain class power? (Or, if not, what am I missing from his argument?)

steveklabnik17• 14 years ago

> then why wouldn't the capitalist go with the more effective approach?

"Making money for me" and "making money for everyone" are not the same thing.

For example, if your business has 1MM in profits, and you own half, then you get 500k. If you ran that as a cooperative, you made 2MM in profits the next year, but you own 10%, you made $200k. Worse for you, better for everyone else and the group overall.

charlieflowers6• 14 years ago

OK, that makes sense but doesn't connect all the dots for me.

I am starting with the assumption that no one gets an ownership stake for free. You can start a business if you want, and you can either bootstrap it or take investment. Either way, the owners are not handed their ownership ... they "buy" it with what they put in.

Is this Chomsky/Noble point of view arguing that workers should be granted a degree of ownership by virtue of the work they do?

cloudhead• 14 years ago

Because in general, the people with experience in the sectors he talks about will want a position of power, and aren't interested in working with their hands. Business owners want to hire these people (I won't place a judgement on the decision itself) and therefore need to have the open positions.

Things are changing though, at least in the tech sector.

dreamdu5t• 14 years ago

Chomsky is incoherent and sensationalist. He consistently paints a narrative of class struggle and weaves it into everything, ignoring any kind of contextual reality.

What a sad, paranoid, naive old man.

gruseom3• 14 years ago

A troll, yet I feel like responding anyway.

How you get that from this interview is beyond me; it seems to me full of joy and love from start to finish – joy of learning, love of freedom and play.

I saw your comment before I finished the article and was going to mention that about the only thing I bet Chomsky was very sad about was the death of his wife, by all accounts the love of his life. And then he brought it up at the very end.

Chomsky has his issues like anyone, but it has always been plain to me that there is something very beautiful at the core of the man.

rdtsc3• 14 years ago

> People are supposed to be passive and apathetic and doing what they’re told by the responsible people who are in control.

That is the fundamental struggle -- to control the masses. Get them brainwashed, scared, addicted, distracted. One way is to carefully control the information they receive that was very easy up until the Internet showed up. Now it has become a lot harder. China just built up a firewall, here it is a bit more difficult. So it still all has to rely on sophisticated spin and propaganda models.

Take Chomsky for example, most people might not even know who he is. They wouldn't have seen (or at least anything positive about) him on TV or mass media. Chances are they read something about him on the Internet or heard from their friends. Sure there were local activist groups, underground zines, but the cost of spreading information that way was pretty high, now the cost is much lower.

As propaganda and media control was becoming more sophisticated it seemed like nothing could stop it, until the Internet exploded. For example, I haven't went searching for news to any of the popular American news outlets in years. It is funny (or scary) that I trust some silly site like reddit.com to deliver better news than CNN, Fox or other such thing.

Chomsky: Work, Learning and Freedom

Related Stories