What Do (Digital) Bosses Do?

tags

Automation

Increasing share of the economy being dedicated to largely un-automatable "service work" means increasing need for unproductive supervisory work, which turns out to be easier to automate.

cf What Do Bosses Do?

Notes

his truck cab came equipped with “an unbelievable level of automation and surveillance.”

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Trucking companies justify their fully-wired cabs in the name of safety. But such oversight necessarily doubles as a disciplining device,

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In the truck cab, your boss is your co-pilot: not a god, but hardly human.

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While we often think of automation and A.I. as developments that will eventually replace workers (think of Tesla’s partly automated tractor-trailer), those tools are already in heavy use in the workplace. And they haven’t replaced workers; they’ve simply been brought in to manage declining working conditions.

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penetration of these apparatuses into fields once prized for the relative autonomy they afforded workers. More specifically, these technologies allow employers either to observe and dictate behavior in situations where laborers are no longer concentrated in factory-like environments or, when they are confined to dense, controlled workplaces, to observe and measure their activity without direct human oversight.

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The service sector includes all those laboring activities that do not create a material object as an end product.

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Supervisors do not participate in the production process, even indirectly. They are, instead, tasked with monitoring and disciplining workers. They manage the labor force, not the labor process.

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Such supervisors occupy a double, or divided, position within the class dynamics of the workplace. On the one hand, they are workers who are paid wages and represent a part of an employer’s labor costs. On the other hand, they represent and enforce the interests of business owners, when those business owners do not directly oversee the labor they hire. Supervisors perform the labor of exploitation.

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The labor of supervision, however, is employed not in view of the production of a use-value, but in order to compel the creation of a maximum amount of surplus value from a given quantity of labor-power. It is not a technical requirement of a complex production process. The labor of supervision is an example of what Marx calls unproductive labor.

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one of the developmental tendencies of the capitalist mode of production not fully spelled out in Marx’s mature thought is what we can call, following Paul Mattick and Fred Moseley, the rising ratio of unproductive to productive labor employed.

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Since unproductive labor does not itself produce value, it represents a cost to capitalists, who must pay for it out of the surplus value created in the production process. This cost is therefore paid out of the profits of business owners; it represents a drag on capital accumulation.

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unproductive activities are those functions necessary solely for the accumulation of capital and, as result, represent the differentia specifica of the capitalist mode of production. Unproductive activities are the material embodiment of a particular social form of production: the production of commodities by means of the employment of wage labor.

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a large fraction of the labor activity taking place in the advanced capitalist economies “produce” an output measurable in money terms but produce no use-values at all, in Marx’s sense.

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The category of “services” is next to useless for our considerations, however, because the term describes the nature of the product, rather than the part played by the labor employed in value production. Many services, but by no means all, produce use-values. Teachers and masseurs do; cashiers, insurance agents, and security guards do not.

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“artificially” stimulating aggregate demand in periods of pronounced recession or depression. Yet these expenditures, which remained elevated even during the post-war boom, have had the long-term effect of slowing down accumulation, creating the conditions for the very crises they are meant to hold off or offset.

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The explosion in circulation labor, on the other hand, is an unavoidable consequence of the rapid rise in labor productivity in the industrial core, on the one hand, and of the extension of markets, on the other. As more and more output is produced by the private economy specifically to be sold on the market, more and more market transactions occur. Insofar as the “productivity” of this circulation labor lags behind that directly employed in production, an increasingly large share of the total labor force will be required to perform labor which represents an outright cost to capital.

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only in societies in which the social product takes the form of commodities is the labor of circulation necessary.

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Insofar as the machinery employed in the labor process embodies, in material form, the dictates of the owners of that machinery, the need for supervisory labor is diminished.

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To this labor I have here opposed the labor of management, which carries out the planning and integration of complex labor processes that is a requirement of all collective labor.

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It is not, however, hard to envision scenarios in which these two imperatives would enter into conflict, and in which the owners of the means of production would prioritize workplace discipline and control over efficiencies in the production process.

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such labor is necessitated solely by the “antithetical” character of capitalist production relations.

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Automation, Crisis, Control

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It is in just such situations, in which labor-power is employed without the mobilization of large amounts of fixed capital—in labor-intensive, low-wage service work in particular—that the opposition or antithesis between capital and labor is heightened, and so with it the need for supervisory labor.

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a qualitative leap in the nature of oversight, offering real-time monitoring of the bodily movements of laborers—including something as “inward” as attention itself—to a degree never before approached in the history of workplace discipline.

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On the one hand, the expansion of low-wage, labor- intensive sectors of the economy means that employers must hire more and more supervisory staff—far more than in highly industrialized settings.20 On the other hand, significant labor productivity gains are difficult to come by in this low-wage sector, since it employs little labor-saving machinery. Confronted with this dilemma, business owners find themselves compelled to automate not the labor process itself, but the supervisory labor overseeing it.

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The digital boss arises in crisis conditions peculiar to the twenty-first century, in which productivity gains are more often than achieved not through the automation of more and more workplaces, but through leaps in the extent and intensity of workplace surveillance.

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The rise of the automated or digital boss proposes no emancipatory horizon; the sensor-studded truck cab will not be liberated from its antithetical capitalist character. The factory system represented for Marx both the complete realization of the capitalist form of social production and the promise of a form of cooperative labor planned and carried out by the producers themselves. The new regime of work being implemented in the trucking industry, the Amazon warehouse, and elsewhere is far bleaker. The digital management of cheap labor, whether in the service sector or in poorly paid, labor-intensive occupations that store and move goods, represents a form of not relative but absolute surplus value extraction, whose limit is finally the capacities and frailty of the human body itself.

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whereas the use of technological innovations to raise productivity has no intrinsic limit, the intensification of labor encounters a limit in the broken bodies of the laborers.

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the hidden, dark side of the automation narrative launched in the wake of the 2008 crisis, maybe even what Hegel would call its “truth.” What it expresses is a fundamental dilemma for the capitalist class, who preside over mature capitalist economies which have, since the 1970s, exhibited little to no dynamism: no growth in GDP, labor productivity, real wages, and so on.

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The antithetical relations between capital and labor in the workplace, in a world dominated by low-wage, low-skill service labor, have intensified,

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