What a 19th-century rebellion against automation can teach us about the coming war in the job market
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Did @rodolfo really say that?
Indeed they did. I vehemently disagree. The mechanics of actualising that disagreement are complex, to say the least, but just saying, ‘no, they don’t have the right’ is straight-up horseshit. Of course we do. Why the fuck not?
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Nah - it’s a blank void!
Really unworldly comment by the author then!
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Yes. He comes across as a troll, but maybe he’s just completely ignorant of the history of Ned Llud and Captain Swing, I dunno.
Cottage industries are, as Queen Victoria certainly understood, a great way to build a resilient, prosperous nation. With no great vertical concentrations of labor under a single command, and pay determined by skill and outputs rather than by hours spent toiling or management favoritism, there are few weak points for enemies (within or without) to exploit. When things like GM exist, things like Flint will exist. When things like banks with hundreds of thousands of employees exist, “too big to fail” makes those banks more powerful than governments and elections. Zaibatsus are anti-human; cottage industries are, by contrast, highly meritocratic.
I’ve been told (don’t know if it’s true) that the Germans began converting back to cottage production when Allied strategic bombing had made large factories impossible to keep running near the end of WWII, and actually worked out how to build complex high tech like fighter aircraft without the use of large factories.
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What the fuck is up with my computer? Gah. I’ve now deleted my ETA AND ETA MkII. @codinghorror, Wha g’waan?
Yes. All one has to do is look at the differences between corporations owned by stock holders/board of directors, etc, and a company owned by the workers to see the differences on a larger scale. It’s even better in smaller, localized scales.
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I’m not sure I agree. Is there a reason that you used the term “zaibatsu” in this context rather than “corporation”? One of the defining features of zaibatsu (and their modern equivalent, the keiretsu) is a collectivised workforce that is able to organise across all the constituent companies that are linked to the zaibatsu’s central bank. This collectivisation is one of the main reasons that Japan is pretty much the only country in the G20 that still has a concept of “jobs for life” and directly contributes to one of the lowest CEO:median worker salary ratios in the world.
Cottage industries, by contrast, are almost impossible to regulate and safeguard, have no ability to organise and are intensely competitive, all of which lend themselves to exploitation and perilous working conditions.
Imagine if, for example, all the cottage workers who contributed textiles to a given factory were allowed to negotiate with the factory as a group and secure what they felt were fair wages/piece rates, had a say in the factory’s management and their collective working conditions and could ask the factory’s bank for loans to improve their production capacity, while still competing with each other in terms of efficiency, output and quality. That’s essentially how a zaibatsu/keiretsu works.
By contrast, meritocracy is a nice concept but it almost never works in reality unless you include wealth, connections and willingness to engage in corruption in your definition of “merit”. I don’t see how a group of people working as individuals and opening themselves up to the exploitation this engenders is somehow more “human” than the zaibatsu/keiretsu model. Cottage Industry is perhaps more “human” than production in a shareholder-owned limited corporation, but in the cottage industry model it is the end purchaser, rather than the workers, that holds all the power.
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Britain built DeHavilland Mosquitoes in small piano factories and houses!
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only thing my “betters” are owed from me is my foot right in their balls! With golf shoes!!
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So according to @Rodolfo, I shouldn’t have the right to clean water, clean air, healthcare, a working infrastructure (roads, power, etc), laws to protect me, the opportunity to educate myself? What if I get in a car accident tomorrow and get paralyzed? Should I just ask the doctor or nurse to kill me because I don’t have the right to be “comfortable”?
Geeze, that’s next level d-baggery there.
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I’d sooner burn the whole thing down than accept that some people are inherently “my betters”. Fuck that noise.
Some (many) have more money than I do, but that doesn’t make them any better than the rest of us. And, I respect someone who is better than me at DOING something, but that inherent superiority bullshit has got to go.
And anyone who thinks they are better than the rest of us? I want to be right there with, you kicking them in the balls.
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Thank you for the informative correction! It led to a lot of interesting reading.
I was using 'zaibatsu" as it’s [mis]used in cyberpunk novels; to designate a profit-motivated super-national organization that is subject to no rule of law, due to its economic power and ability to subvert national governments. I will not do so in the future.
If you examine the production model of recreation medieval armor, you will see a modern cottage industry. Merit is determined solely by the buyer and price is determined by market evaluation based on ability to meet a user’s needs. There is no tool-controlling Simon Legree forcing workers to put in equal amounts of work hours or effort regardless of quality or quantity of output - if you make a better gauntlet in less time, you can choose to work less or earn more. There is no unionization or buyers clubs distorting the marketplace or production floor; it’s all merit-based.
This is not to say that the putting out system can’t be abused, nor to say that wage slavery and shoddy goods are the inevitable output of corporate vertical integration - but I contend that these are the tendencies of the two models, as demonstrated by history, including the history that the original topic references.
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That’s horrible of you to say! Wouldn’t the spikes be better on the TOP of the shoe. Such an easier kick.
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