[Marxism] Reification and the multitude in software engineering

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

Louis wrote:

"Object orientation, for example, is strongly influenced by Aristotelian
hierarchical thinking."

Quite. But quite often the concept of hierarchy masks the reality of an
ordered (temporal) sequence. An example of this is Maslow's hierarchy of
needs. In reality, it is not a hierarchy at all, but an ordered sequence,
whereby the satisfaction of one need presupposes the satisfaction of
another. A logical sequence of steps can easily be turned into a conceptual
hierarchy however by conceiving the steps as logical levels.

My interest in this topic is partly related to the discussion about
"productive labor" in services, the modifications of the division of labor,
and the social consciousness (mentality) which it engenders.

To put it simply: the imposition of the commodity form on services (real
subsumption by capital, as Marx puts it) requires the redefinition
(categorisation and classification) of services as "products" (specific
"outputs" as budget items) which are marketed or given access to, only
within a certain ownership relationship and property rights, which define
exactly what is bought and sold. Do ut des, do ut facias, facio ut des,
facio ut facias, but in a specific pattern.

Marx defined services as "the useful effect of a use-value" and the
use-value involved is really living labor itself. In defining what the
"product" is, however, the "useful effect" is itself transformed into a
saleable object, to which a value is attached, and the point is that this
object is an outcome or result specifiable independently from particular
producers; it is defined from the standpoint of the consumer buying it.
Thus, the transformed service exists as saleable product, independently from
any particular producer of that service. Thereby it is no longer a personal
service, but an impersonal or objectified service.

This is another case of a "real abstraction" or reification, in which
commoditisation practically requires the objectification of labor, in such a
way that a saleable, alienable product results. The ability to sell a
service as a product requires not simply a demand for the service, but on
access and property rights which prevent the consumption of the service,
other than through buying it in the specific form in which it is profitable
to the enterprise offering it.

But this also means that the value-hierarchy or value-structure of service
products very directly depends on the property relations involved, i.e. on
legally conditions of access, not just on the production-cost of the
service. As soon as there are multiple alternative sources for obtaining a
service, the value of the "product" is subject to competition, and its value
declines.

This then suggests among other things:

(1) that generally the value of a service greatly depends on its real or
perceived uniqueness, scarcity or exclusivity. But this uniqueness, scarcity
or exclusivity may not inhere in the service itself, but rather in the
socially established access rights governing its supply and consumption, or
in the necessity to buy it. Thus, the "fetishism of services" involves the
attribution of a value to a service as its intrinsic characteristic, rather
than a characteristic which exists only because of property relations
defining its condition of supply, or a social need generated for it because
of property relations.

(2) the capitalist service economy vitally depends on the elimination of
free (gratis) goods and services through privatisation of access and
enforcible private property relations, i.e. restriction of access to that
which can be bought and sold by private property owners, but also
simultaneously also on the existence of monetarily effective demand which
gives consumers the ability to buy them.

(3) real subsumption of services by capital implies the elimination of
natural co-operation in favour of co-operation conditional on the cash
nexus, which recasts a co-operative social relation as a transaction between
private transactors.

Hardly a profundity, except... worldwide about 830 million or so people work
in service-occupations, in which the transformation of formal subsumption
into real subsumption by private capital is steadily occurring.

"The chief changes undergone by the subject and object of the economic
process are as follows: (1) in the first place, the mathematical analysis of
work-processes denotes a break with the organic, irrational and
qualitatively determined unity of the product. Rationalisation in the sense
of being able to predict with ever greater precision all the results to be
achieved is only to be acquired by the exact breakdown of every complex into
its elements and by the study of the special laws governing production.
(...) (2) In the second place, this fragmentation of the object of
production necessarily entails the fragmentation of its subject. (...)  He
finds [the work process] already pre-existing and self-sufficient, it
functions independently of him and he has to conform to its laws whether he
likes it or not." - Gyorgy Lukacs, History and class consciousness.

"In the master, the servant feels self-existence to be something external,
an objective fact; in fear self-existence is present within himself; in
fashioning the thing, self-existence comes to be felt explicitly as his own
proper being, and he attains the consciousness that he himself exists in its
own right and for himself. By the fact that the form is objectified, it does
not become something other than the consciousness moulding the thing through
work; for just that form is his pure self existence, which therein becomes
truly realized. Thus precisely in work where there seemed to be merely some
outsider's mind and ideas involved, the servant becomes aware, through this
re-discovery of himself by himself, of having and being a "mind of his
own" - G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind.

Jurriaan




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