Comments on: History and Struggle

By: blogal villager

blogal villager — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

This is an interesting discussion, thanks for sharing it: I’m writing a piece for KairosNews on the Web as a space for writing that makes use of Negri and Hardt’s notion of “immaterial labor.” You might be interested in Negri’s essay Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo. Also, Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed on overcoming class division in the teacher-student relationship.

By: Rayne

Rayne — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

In regards to economic power and category identification, isn’t a fundamental key to today’s “hi-tech laborer’s insecurity” commodification? At one point blue-collar labor was merely a fungible, something one could add or remove like any other bulk component (Add x number of hours to WIP to calculate finished widgets); now, knowledge workers are commodified, little more than numbers (Add X number of developers to Y number of projects and products to get Z yield or ROI over T time). Further, the educational process which creates these new commodities is a commodity itself; one can shop around for education, but education is becoming increasingly undifferentiated, more similar from place of certification to place of certification. Education adds value to a human fungible, but it’s still a human commodity, a swappable head. Much of social life reinforces the level of commodification as well (ex: a project manager who’s never traveled for personal reasons is a slightly less valuable commodity as s/he will need greater resources to become successful at business travel).

As I see it from my rather naive point of view, class stratification is based on commodity/ differentiated commodity/ non-commodity/ differentiated non-commodity. (I know I certainly feel like a white-collar differentiated commodity, just another prairie dog to add to the cube farm.)

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

Villager, thanks for the references. I’m familiar, as many compositionists are, with Freire; as appealing as his work is, and as informed as I consider my own pedagogy to be by composition’s version of critical pedagogy (you might check out the huge swipe taken against critical pedagogy in Sharon O’Dair’s recent College English essay [PDF link]), the frequently-acknowledged fact of the matter (by Freire and others) is that there are many elements of his pedagogy that simply cannot transfer to the American university. I’ll definitely check out the Hardt and Negri — thanks!

By: Curtiss Leung

Curtiss Leung — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

The question about stock ownership as a mitigating (or mediating?) factor for people who otherwise work for their livings is a good one, although I think that actual facts of stock compensation for those who aren’t members of senior management have been obscured.

Warning: Anecdotal Evidence and arguments from impressions ahead!

In my experience, out and out stock grants as compensation are extremely rare. Option grants are much more common, and these are given as part of bonus, i.e., year-end discretionary compensation. Furthermore, the options are not tradable, although their expiration date may be much greater than tradable options–perhaps as much as 5 or 10 years if you stay with the company. Even so, that much time may not make up for options with a bad strike price: a friend who was working for a small software firm in the midwest that was bought by Cisco received what seemed like a generous option grant after his first year with Cisco. The exercise price was Cisco’s current price, and based on the way Cisco had been going up, up, up, he figured he’d have a hefty downpayment on a nice house in about two years.

He received the grant in early ‘00; the strike price was in the 60s. You can see what happened to his house downpayment here.

On the other hand, you have somebody like Larry Ellison of Oracle, who seems to be manipulating his company’s stock price to allow him to exercise his option grants in his favor. To be fair to Ellison (the pain! the pain!), many other firms regularly buy back their own stock or perform similar market operations to support share prices. I remember (but can’t find) a story of Ellison having the strike price of an option grant changed so he could exercise it in his favor. Nice work if you can get it.

One has–or at least I have–an intuitive sense that this is chicanery and should not be allowed. But it’s surplus value extraction only indirectly, if it all. Still it shows that senior management can make claims on their firms revenues–the the securitizations thereof– that those further down the org chart can’t.