Re: Lenin on immigration and Taylorism

[Mike Ballard <swillsqueal@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

--- Joanna Bujes <jbujes@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Although I picked up the 674 page "Lenin on the
> United States"....> >


> Thanks for forwarding those. On a personal note, I
> just received an email from one
> of the officials of the National Writer's Union
> warning me about the impending
> migration of technical writing jobs to India. (I am
> a tech writer.)  A lot of
> programming jobs are already on their way there and
> enrollment in computer science
> programs are reportedly declining rapidly as a
> result.
>
> My sense of this is that capitalist "logic" is
> working itself out and that Capital
> has no more interest in protecting "brain" work than
> it has to protect factory work.
> To agitate politically in order to keep these jobs
> for American workers doesn't
> really make sense. So long as capitalism is the
> prevailing economic form of
> organization, this stuff will happen. At most, we
> can slow it down a bit. But, so
> long as Capital is in the saddle, all this will
> happen not as a result of evil but
> as a result of the way Capitalism works.
>
> We must work to replace it, not to reform it. You
> can't improve greed.
>
> Joanna
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The way I see it, most worker's (both brain and hand
types) self-interest has been successfully
disconnected from their class interests.  To
paraphrase the bearded ones: the dominant ideas of any
era are ever the ideas of the ruling class.

The mental trickery of reification insulates us from
class consciousness (Ford makes cars) as does the womb
to tomb 'nuturing' of  authoritarian character
structures in our psychologies.  Therefore, I'd argue
that we need to find ways to engage our individual
'greed' to our class interests.

Product to the producers,
Mike B)

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"The sheep feels best, safest, and happiest in the flock,
where it has nothing else to do but graze, grow wool,
and give birth to lambs.  Once the new office workers
had reached that stage, when their intellectual capacity
and their ambition had become like those of sheep in a
flock, that was when they had begun to be useful
and reliable pillars of the Company they worked for
and which paid them their salary."

from B. Traven's TROZAS

http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal

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