Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

this was so damn spot on, i couldn’t believe it. Ruthless Critic, who reads LBO and will send stuff to people offlist (I guess b/c he’s not subsribed)., sent me the link. He’s from India, here in the States as a student - from what he’s said. Anyway, one day he sent me this link to the latest NLR with a piece about the life of a programmer from a left perspective. There’s a lot of good stuff in the article (Dreaming in Code - Rob Lucas), but the best part was the way he got at precisely something I’ve been thinking about since forever: you can’t get away with “stealing” time back from your employer in this environment. The reason is, whatever you steal, it will almost always bite you in the ass somehow. In other words, if I spend all day today doing the final edits on the SAQ essay, I will just pay for it tomorrow, or next week, or whenever.

I happened to read the Lucas article in conjunction with a Nancy Fraser piece at NLR, Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History. Fraser’s argument is one that socialist feminists have made before, she just gives it a particular and sustained inflection. Fraser argues that there was a radical impulse with women’s liberation movement. However, it was co-opted by neo-liberalism. What Fraser does is flesh out how. She doesn’t just assert it, she illustrates. One way feminism was co-opted: feminism was opposed to hierarchy, right? The big push for more democracy and egalitarianism? Right? But that got taken up in the changing social relations of production — with the new workplace crap: like Tom Peter’s “new managerialism,” total quality management, Continual Quality Improvement. Under the guise of increased workplace democracy, worker input into the production process, valuing the knowledge of workers on the frontlines — all in the name of extracting profits — there was an alignment of post-fordism with feminist impulses to greater democracy and egalitarianism.

Lucas’s article demonstrates precisely how that works:

From our point of view, business and its needs appear as parasitic externalities imposed upon the real functioning of our use-value-producing enterprise. We are strangely tied to a certain normativity; not just that of doing the job right in a technical sense, but also that of thinking in terms of the provision of real services, of user experiences, and of encouraging the free flow of information. This sometimes spills over into outright conflict: when business advocates some tortuous use of language to hype ‘the product’, the techies will try to bend the stick back towards honesty and transparency. ‘What goes around comes around’ seems to be the prevalent attitude in web development in the era after ‘Web 2.0’: provide the services cheap or free, give away the information, be decent and hope that somehow the money will flow in. If business acts with the mind of money capital, encountering the world as a friction or recalcitrance which it longs to overcome, and if a tendency to try to sell snake oil follows from that, in the strange world where technical pride opposes itself to capital as capital’s own developed super-ego, use-value rules with a pristine conscience; everything is ‘sanity checked’—to use the terminology of my boss—and the aggregation of value appears as an accidental aside.

Distrustful of trade-union bureaucracy, the Italian operaisti of the 1960s hoped to discover opportunities for working-class autonomy within the production process itself, through the form of the ‘worker’s enquiry’. Examining the business–technical antagonism in web development today, though, yields scant grounds for revolutionary optimism. The solidarity that we develop against business, apart from providing us with respite and shelter from individualized victimization, functions as a ‘sanity check’ for the company itself. The contradiction between technical staff and business is a productive one for capital: the imperative to valorize prevents the techies from wandering off into their esoteric concerns, while the need for realism is reciprocally enforced by the techies as they insist on a broadly ‘scientific’ way of working.

There is little space left in this relation for a wilful ‘refusal of work’: given the individually allocated and project-centred character of the job, absenteeism only amounts to self-punishment, as work that is not done now will have to be done later, under greater stress. Apart from that, there is the heavy interpersonal pressure that comes with the role: since a majority of the work is ‘collaborative’ in a loose sense, heel-dragging or absenteeism necessarily involves a sense of guilt towards the technical workers in general. Nor is sabotage a creative option here; not because of the supposed pride of the skilled worker, but due to the nature of the product. On a production line, sabotage may be a rational tactic, halting the relentless flow to provide half-an-hour of collective sociability. When one’s work resembles that of the artisan, to sabotage would be to make life harder. Occasionally one hears of freelancers or contractors who write confusing and idiosyncratic ‘spaghetti code’ in order to keep themselves in work. This technique may make sense when a company relies heavily on particular individuals; but in a typical development team, which uses feedback-centred IT management methodologies such as ‘agile’ and ‘extreme’ programming, and where ‘ownership’ of a project is always collective, high-quality, clearly readable code has a normative priority that goes beyond whatever feelings one might have about doing one’s job well.

Of course, there is a banal level on which I drag myself reluctantly out of bed, knock off as early as I can, push my luck in terms of punctuality. I try to make work time ‘my time’ as much as possible by listening to my iPod, sneaking bits of reading into my working day or having discreet conversations with friends over the net. This sort of thing is the real fodder of worker’s enquiry. But the bottom-line recalcitrance here is on the same level as the resistance of the human body to the indefinite extension of the working day. People will always test the permissible limits, but such actions are defined by the framework of what is acceptable in any given job. The apparent insubordination of my lateness would soon collapse if it threatened my livelihood, while the social pressures that come with the job are such that whatever time I ‘claim back’ through slack behaviour is more than compensated when a project deadline approaches and I work unpaid extra hours into the evening, or start work in the middle of the night to fix servers when nobody is using them.

It is only when sickness comes and I am involuntarily rendered incapable of work that I really regain any extra time ‘for myself’. It is a strange thing to rejoice at the onset of flu with the thought that, in the haze of convalescence, one may finally be able to catch up on things pushed aside by work. Here illness indeed appears as a ‘weapon’, but one that fights its own battle, not wielded by the supposed aggressor. Yet I wonder sometimes whether it should be seen as merely pathological, a contingency imposed on the body from without. Illness can feel almost willed—a holiday that the body demands for itself. Perhaps there is a continuity between ‘genuine’ illness and the ‘man-flu’ that a matronly temping agent once accused me of when I ducked out of work for a week. But if sickness is all we have, it offers little hope for meaningful resistance.

I can’t even begin to tell you how Lucas has perfectly captured it - exactly. I mean, I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the agile software development methodology. You read it, it’s a manifesto, and all the hoo ha about how the team works together, set their own deadlines, have a lot of input into the development of the specficiations, etc. this is all because the idea is that workers on the frontlines have a lot of knowledge that can be put to use to make the software development lifecycle more efficient. Which is what Total Quality Management is all about, too. Which would be find under another set of circumstances, a totally revolutionized set of social relations of production. But under capitalism, it turns back on itself and implodes into just another way to extract ever more work out of labor.

Even as I totally edited my article in all kinds of spaces I liberated from my boss yesterday and today, it doesn’t matter. if I’ve made myself behind, unable to meet the deadline, that time will be snatched away anyway. I will either have to work overtime to make up for the slack OR I will have to work at such a frenetic pace, with nose to the grindstone, rushing from one thing to the next and never ever feeling like you’re done and how my god what next. I mean, under that pace, you get extraordinarily efficient, extraordinarily attentive to the teeniest detail so that nothing gets introduced that will distract and stop you from the flow of the constant, continual, never ending work of code, debug, QA; code, debug, QA; code debug QA; code.debug.QA. codedebugQA. downtime. documentation. lull. bang! start it back up again, hop back on the spinning wheel and run!