Re: AUT: Re: Proletariatization of the "professional" fields...

[pvh@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Peter van Heusden)]

On 1 Feb 2002 at 15:37, commie00 wrote:

> > Well, it can, but speaking as a computer engineer, I
> > know that within the rank of engineers, there are
> > aspiration of breaking off and starting your own
> > company (especially during the BOOM)...
>
> i don't know if this is effectively any different than many people
> dreaming of and working to starting their own business of some sort
> (nearly everyone i've ever worked with, esp. in factories and
> warehouses, have been working on this... or at least dreaming of it).

There are a lot of similarities, but I think there is also an important
difference, in that IT workers are told they have the possibility to
REALLY strike it rich, become millionaires, etc.

I recall an article on venture capital in one of the IEEE journals last
year, where an engineer wrote about his experience of venture
capital in very forthright terms. He described how VC firms moved
in and seized control (and the intellectual assets) of firms he had
worked for, meanwhile extracting lots of unrewarded labour from
the workers involved. His solution, however, was that since some
engineers *did* strike it rich, engineers should pool their money
and use it to replace VC.

The assumption underlying the article was that engineers are
somehow a different breed of person - innovators, as opposed to
the (non-innovative) users - and that if they looked to each other, a
virtuous cycle of profit and innovation would ensue.

Post-dot com boom, I'm not sure what's going to happen to
engineering ideology, but the kind of 'engineers populism' which
I've described above is a powerful force in leading IT workers
down blind alleys, and separating them from other people's
concerns and any broader sense of class struggle.

Peter


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