My friend Murray is Jewish, as are a lot of friends of mine from RPI, because RPI gets a lot of smart kids from the northeast, especially New York City, Long Island, and Philadelphia. Murray’s father, Meyer, was originally from Poland, spent the last part of WWII in a Soviet labor camp (a lucky thing, considering the alternative), and had the sense to stay on the last train out of Poland at the end of the war, rather than going back home to the last Polish pogrom. You thought that only the Nazis were killing Jews in 1945?
Once, during one of my extended visits with Murray, his brother Sol decided to do an oral history of the family and got out a tape recorder to get some of Meyer’s stories down for posterity. Because I was the only one in attendance who hadn’t heard the stories, Meyer basically told them to me, which I’ve always considered quite a privilege. One of them, for reasons that will be obvious, always stuck in my mind.
It was from the Soviet labor camp, a frontier post out in a Siberian forest, cutting trees to supply wood for the war effort. The conditions were as brutal as you might imagine, though, since timber output was the main purpose, the camp wasn’t deliberately for the purpose of killing people. Nevertheless, no one in authority cared much when someone died, and sometimes the prescribed rules had that effect.
One particularly pernicious rule was the timber quota/food ration rule. Basically, if a work gang didn’t meet their timber quota, their food rations were cut. Since the rations were barely subsistence anyway, cutting them would render the workers even weaker, more sluggish, less able to work, than before, which would result in more lost quotas, more cuts, etc. spiraling downward into starvation and death. So the quotas had to be met at all costs.
The problem was that the quotas kept being increased, until finally, even fully healthy workers would have been unable to meet them. Again, this wasn’t done with the express purpose of killing anyone; it would just have had that effect.
However, Meyer was the straw boss, and he concocted a plan. The crew would work until noon, cutting as many trees as they could. During the brief lunch period, Meyer would count how many trees had been cut, and calculate how many more they needed after lunch to meet quota. Then, after lunch, the crew would go back over the previous day’s cut logs and saw off the very ends of the logs—where the inspectors had stamped the previous day’s logs with a mark to indicate that the logs had been counted. The log ends would go onto the camp fires, and the inspectors would go over the day’s cut and double count the trees whose marks had been removed.
Now obviously there were probably some inspectors who figured out what was happening, but no one said anything. It wasn’t their jobs to say anything; their jobs were to count the logs with no stamps and to stamp the logs. Nothing more. If they piped up, they risked having their superiors get angry, since all their superiors were interested in was making the quotas as well.
“The whole system was like that,” Meyer said. “If they tell you they have a million tanks, don’t believe them. They have one tank; they count it a million times.”
Showing posts with label socialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label socialism. Show all posts
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Marxists
[another post pertaining to a WAAGNFNP discussion.
One of the things that surprised me the most when I first began to have significant contact with people in the actual business world was how many of them were Marxists.
Not that they were hankering for the revolution, mind you, nor expecting the establishment of the "dictatorship of the proletariat." Indeed, they very much wanted to avoid having the "workers of the world unite." But they had bought into the entire theory of exploitation and class warfare. In fact, they thought it their jobs to exploit workers for the good of the company, or more accurately, for the good of themselves.
Once you get this sort of mindset going, you get all sorts of pernicious effects. Replacing high-wage workers with low wage workers or replacing a receptionist with a security badge lock on the door, those become the goal, whether or not it actually adds to profitability. Now I admit, often the accounting makes it look like you've saved money doing these things, but often you've just replaced a fully accounted cost with a hidden cost, such as the reduction in security and convenience that goes with getting rid of the receptionist, or the increased management overhead that happens when you outsource the job to Bangalore.
Investors and market analysts also hold to the Marxist theory. They look at a company, suggest that it has too many workers, and hold the price down until the firm lays off some large fraction of its work force. Often, this actually causes substantial loses to the firm, alibied by saying that the "write-offs" are "short term" and the "restructuring" will lead to long term profitability. Of course these are untestable theories; if the company instead goes into a death spiral because it lost the workers that were needed to continue the organization, the investment analysts instead blame the firm for not having laid off the workers soon enough.
But these action do have a more general effect: that of continuing the ongoing "commodification" of labor. Managers hate to be in the situation of selling commodities, but they love to be in the position of purchasing commodities, especially when the commodity is labor. It’s much easier to manage people who are afraid of losing their jobs, much easier to negotiate when you’ve got the threat of moving the factory to Mexico.
Yet I have seen, time after time, poor management decisions bailed out by the quality of labor expended, where a damn fool plan managed to scrape by because the people tasked with carrying out the plan were smart and flexible and managed to invent work-arounds and clever schemes for bailing the thing out. Of course it was still the managers who took the credit for success, and who blamed underlings when something failed. The phrase "kiss up, kick down" certainly rang the bell, didn't it?
I've also known quite a few good managers in my time. I respect the job enough to have tried to avoid managerial responsibility practically every time it has been offered to me. I don't have the temperment and dedication to be a good manager, and I don't have the stomach to be a bad one. I do know that the most important thing about good management is that it is not bad management, and that the class-war managers I've encountered have been among the very worst.
One of the things that surprised me the most when I first began to have significant contact with people in the actual business world was how many of them were Marxists.
Not that they were hankering for the revolution, mind you, nor expecting the establishment of the "dictatorship of the proletariat." Indeed, they very much wanted to avoid having the "workers of the world unite." But they had bought into the entire theory of exploitation and class warfare. In fact, they thought it their jobs to exploit workers for the good of the company, or more accurately, for the good of themselves.
Once you get this sort of mindset going, you get all sorts of pernicious effects. Replacing high-wage workers with low wage workers or replacing a receptionist with a security badge lock on the door, those become the goal, whether or not it actually adds to profitability. Now I admit, often the accounting makes it look like you've saved money doing these things, but often you've just replaced a fully accounted cost with a hidden cost, such as the reduction in security and convenience that goes with getting rid of the receptionist, or the increased management overhead that happens when you outsource the job to Bangalore.
Investors and market analysts also hold to the Marxist theory. They look at a company, suggest that it has too many workers, and hold the price down until the firm lays off some large fraction of its work force. Often, this actually causes substantial loses to the firm, alibied by saying that the "write-offs" are "short term" and the "restructuring" will lead to long term profitability. Of course these are untestable theories; if the company instead goes into a death spiral because it lost the workers that were needed to continue the organization, the investment analysts instead blame the firm for not having laid off the workers soon enough.
But these action do have a more general effect: that of continuing the ongoing "commodification" of labor. Managers hate to be in the situation of selling commodities, but they love to be in the position of purchasing commodities, especially when the commodity is labor. It’s much easier to manage people who are afraid of losing their jobs, much easier to negotiate when you’ve got the threat of moving the factory to Mexico.
Yet I have seen, time after time, poor management decisions bailed out by the quality of labor expended, where a damn fool plan managed to scrape by because the people tasked with carrying out the plan were smart and flexible and managed to invent work-arounds and clever schemes for bailing the thing out. Of course it was still the managers who took the credit for success, and who blamed underlings when something failed. The phrase "kiss up, kick down" certainly rang the bell, didn't it?
I've also known quite a few good managers in my time. I respect the job enough to have tried to avoid managerial responsibility practically every time it has been offered to me. I don't have the temperment and dedication to be a good manager, and I don't have the stomach to be a bad one. I do know that the most important thing about good management is that it is not bad management, and that the class-war managers I've encountered have been among the very worst.
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
The Apex
[Another "lottery" example. Originally posted to my newsgroup, Dec. 8, 2006]
As I usually do before I write one of these essays on some subject where I can be caught in an error (as opposed to those reminiscences where it’s my word against anyone else and I’m sticking to my guns, Jack), I did a little background research on the subject of the Anaconda “Copper Wars.” Imagine my delight to discover that Don Rosa based an incident in “The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck” on the situation.
The situation was this: part of the mining law of 1872 was a thing called the “extralateral right,” more commonly called “The Apex Law,” which said that someone who owned mining property where an ore vein came closest to the surface had the right to follow that vein in mining, even if the vein ran beneath someone else’s property.
There’s some irony in the story (my taste for irony being well-known by now), in that the law was written in part with the Comstock Load in mind, and several of the participants in that mining enterprise were behind the Amalgamated Copper Company, including George Hearst (father of William Randolf Hearst). But the law that had been written in part for them was then turned against them by a rascal named Frederick Augustus Heinze (nicknamed Fritz). Heinze was a geologist who first familiarized himself with the area of Butte, Montana, the location of the Anaconda mine. Then he made two important purchases, a small mining claim that had not been part of the Amalgamated consolidation, and a District Judge by the name of William Clancy.
The actual geology of the Butte area copper deposits was far more complex than the law had envisioned, but with Clancy on the payroll, Heinze obtained favorable rulings and then began basically looting the Anaconda mine. This led to more-or-less open warfare, with the Amalgamated interests obtaining rulings and injunctions from their own tame judges, Clancy overruling them, then gunplay and bloodshed taking place above ground between different law enforcement agencies, and below ground between miners for the different companies.
Eventually, Amalgamated bought out Heinze, who took his winnings east, where he was cleaned out by stock market swindlers. He died of drink at the age of 44.
Obviously Rosa had to omit a number of facts in adapting the tale for Scrooge McDuck.
The “Apex Law” has as its philosophical basis the good old American “winner take all” philosophy, leavened with the interesting notion of how hard it is to keep it all, what with all those unscrupulous characters running around. Another bit of background for this piece came from a paper “THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN RESOURCE ABUNDANCE” by Paul A. David and Gavin Wright, which notes first, that the mineral resources of North America in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries were exploited much more rapidly than elsewhere, and second, that a great deal of this exploitation was assisted by obviously unscrupulous behavior, such as the sale of “mineral” lands as cheaper farmland by corrupt Federal agents, thereby avoiding legally required royalties.
Similar behavior allowed for the exploitation of coal reserves in West Virginia and Kentucky, where farmers sold “mineral rights” at a time when shaft mining was all that existed. Then strip mining was invented and it was held by the courts (populated by men like William Clancy), that the mineral rights contained an inherent easement that allowed their exploitation by any means. So some farmers then had their farms literally ripped out from under them.
A few years back on the Compuserve Sci-Math Forum, a geologist noted that there was now practically no “hard rock” mining east of the Mississippi, essentially because practically all the property east of the Mississippi is in private hands, and people have learned from the example of the West Virginia farmers. NIMBY is the most primal form of environmentalism, and it’s the one with the most steam behind it. You can decry NIMBY all you want, but you need to think long and hard about the MY part of it. It’s interesting how many people who are against environmentalism (and sneer at NIMBY), also claim to be in favor of private property. Maybe they’re just in favor of corporate property, which would explain a lot.
In the West, hard rock mining continues, but here’s another little irony: it’s almost exclusively on public lands. This makes American mining basically a socialist enterprise that is primarily conducted for private (corporate) benefit. Indeed, like logging operations, it’s not uncommon for the expenditure of public money (for things like logging road or environmental remediation) to exceed the franchise fees paid to the government for the mining rights.
So if you hear an old Trotskyite uttering the platitude “Socialism for the rich; Capitalism for the poor,” that’s part of what they’re talking about.
As I usually do before I write one of these essays on some subject where I can be caught in an error (as opposed to those reminiscences where it’s my word against anyone else and I’m sticking to my guns, Jack), I did a little background research on the subject of the Anaconda “Copper Wars.” Imagine my delight to discover that Don Rosa based an incident in “The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck” on the situation.
The situation was this: part of the mining law of 1872 was a thing called the “extralateral right,” more commonly called “The Apex Law,” which said that someone who owned mining property where an ore vein came closest to the surface had the right to follow that vein in mining, even if the vein ran beneath someone else’s property.
There’s some irony in the story (my taste for irony being well-known by now), in that the law was written in part with the Comstock Load in mind, and several of the participants in that mining enterprise were behind the Amalgamated Copper Company, including George Hearst (father of William Randolf Hearst). But the law that had been written in part for them was then turned against them by a rascal named Frederick Augustus Heinze (nicknamed Fritz). Heinze was a geologist who first familiarized himself with the area of Butte, Montana, the location of the Anaconda mine. Then he made two important purchases, a small mining claim that had not been part of the Amalgamated consolidation, and a District Judge by the name of William Clancy.
The actual geology of the Butte area copper deposits was far more complex than the law had envisioned, but with Clancy on the payroll, Heinze obtained favorable rulings and then began basically looting the Anaconda mine. This led to more-or-less open warfare, with the Amalgamated interests obtaining rulings and injunctions from their own tame judges, Clancy overruling them, then gunplay and bloodshed taking place above ground between different law enforcement agencies, and below ground between miners for the different companies.
Eventually, Amalgamated bought out Heinze, who took his winnings east, where he was cleaned out by stock market swindlers. He died of drink at the age of 44.
Obviously Rosa had to omit a number of facts in adapting the tale for Scrooge McDuck.
The “Apex Law” has as its philosophical basis the good old American “winner take all” philosophy, leavened with the interesting notion of how hard it is to keep it all, what with all those unscrupulous characters running around. Another bit of background for this piece came from a paper “THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN RESOURCE ABUNDANCE” by Paul A. David and Gavin Wright, which notes first, that the mineral resources of North America in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries were exploited much more rapidly than elsewhere, and second, that a great deal of this exploitation was assisted by obviously unscrupulous behavior, such as the sale of “mineral” lands as cheaper farmland by corrupt Federal agents, thereby avoiding legally required royalties.
Similar behavior allowed for the exploitation of coal reserves in West Virginia and Kentucky, where farmers sold “mineral rights” at a time when shaft mining was all that existed. Then strip mining was invented and it was held by the courts (populated by men like William Clancy), that the mineral rights contained an inherent easement that allowed their exploitation by any means. So some farmers then had their farms literally ripped out from under them.
A few years back on the Compuserve Sci-Math Forum, a geologist noted that there was now practically no “hard rock” mining east of the Mississippi, essentially because practically all the property east of the Mississippi is in private hands, and people have learned from the example of the West Virginia farmers. NIMBY is the most primal form of environmentalism, and it’s the one with the most steam behind it. You can decry NIMBY all you want, but you need to think long and hard about the MY part of it. It’s interesting how many people who are against environmentalism (and sneer at NIMBY), also claim to be in favor of private property. Maybe they’re just in favor of corporate property, which would explain a lot.
In the West, hard rock mining continues, but here’s another little irony: it’s almost exclusively on public lands. This makes American mining basically a socialist enterprise that is primarily conducted for private (corporate) benefit. Indeed, like logging operations, it’s not uncommon for the expenditure of public money (for things like logging road or environmental remediation) to exceed the franchise fees paid to the government for the mining rights.
So if you hear an old Trotskyite uttering the platitude “Socialism for the rich; Capitalism for the poor,” that’s part of what they’re talking about.
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
A Moral Equivalent of Socialism
So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation. –William James
A couple of jobs ago, in another example of cubicle hell, I visited one of my co-worker’s desk, to get something or other, I forget what. She was originally from Afghanistan, and on her wall was a map of the area of that country and its surrounding neighbors, and each country had a little legend giving population, birth rate, mortality rate, literacy, life expectancy and so forth. It was very, very apparent which countries had been a part of the old Soviet Union. Those were the countries with the high literacy rates, while the other countries, out allies in the Cold War, had much lower literacy rates, particularly among women.
In my earlier bit of research on mortality rates of professions and countries, I happened to check on a statistic that I’d heard some while back and found it to be true: Cuba has the lowest infant mortality rate in Latin America and the Caribbean (with a few low population exceptions such as Aruba). In fact, Cuba’s infant mortality rate is lower than the U.S. although this slight difference is probably because the U.S. has more low-weight births, i.e. babies that would not have come to term in Cuba do so in the U.S. and many of these die. Nevertheless, the low infant mortality in Cuba is a sizable achievement; if it were the same as the surrounding countries, there would be over 2,000 additional infant deaths per year in Cuba.
The analysis in which I found the explanation of the U.S. low weight birth phenomenon, there appeared a disclaimer about how the author certainly was no fan of Castro or Cuba, and I’m should probably echo that disclaimer here. McCarthy may be long dead, and the Soviet Union is no more, but if one can be accused of being a communist, or a socialist, or a liberal, a sizable section of the populace breathes a sigh of relief and ceases to listen. One must, of course, stipulate that authoritarian states such as the Soviet Union and Cuba are Bad Things. Certainly there are many countries that manage to avoid authoritarian governments that nevertheless manage to achieve high literacy and low infant mortality. There are also many authoritarian states with low literacy and high infant mortality that nevertheless manage to remain “allies” of the U.S. and other western powers.
Still, the idealists who turned to socialism in the 1930s and at other times had some things in mind and I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that public education and public health services were probably very high on that list. In fact, I’ll suggest that countries that fail in those areas have failed “socialism,” however else one chooses to identify socialism. Under that schema, North Korea is not socialist, but rather an authoritarian monarchy. China seems to be slowly losing whatever socialist credentials it once had, at least insofar as there has been a reported decline in its public health services, though avoiding such horrors as the Cultural Revolution probably still counts for something.
The idea of state ownership of the means of production has always struck me as a pretty bad idea, though the current U.S. situation of having the means of production owning the state does not strike me as being a much better idea. Nevertheless, I don’t see anything in the idea of respecting private property as automatically implying that all organizations must benefit some select private individuals. Surely there is a place for public education and public health services in the idea of a nation. Why then the current hostility towards those institutions?
Let me just say in closing that my own idea of “winning” does not require that there be losers who are sick and ignorant. If that’s what it takes to be a winner, I don’t think that winning is a good thing.
A couple of jobs ago, in another example of cubicle hell, I visited one of my co-worker’s desk, to get something or other, I forget what. She was originally from Afghanistan, and on her wall was a map of the area of that country and its surrounding neighbors, and each country had a little legend giving population, birth rate, mortality rate, literacy, life expectancy and so forth. It was very, very apparent which countries had been a part of the old Soviet Union. Those were the countries with the high literacy rates, while the other countries, out allies in the Cold War, had much lower literacy rates, particularly among women.
In my earlier bit of research on mortality rates of professions and countries, I happened to check on a statistic that I’d heard some while back and found it to be true: Cuba has the lowest infant mortality rate in Latin America and the Caribbean (with a few low population exceptions such as Aruba). In fact, Cuba’s infant mortality rate is lower than the U.S. although this slight difference is probably because the U.S. has more low-weight births, i.e. babies that would not have come to term in Cuba do so in the U.S. and many of these die. Nevertheless, the low infant mortality in Cuba is a sizable achievement; if it were the same as the surrounding countries, there would be over 2,000 additional infant deaths per year in Cuba.
The analysis in which I found the explanation of the U.S. low weight birth phenomenon, there appeared a disclaimer about how the author certainly was no fan of Castro or Cuba, and I’m should probably echo that disclaimer here. McCarthy may be long dead, and the Soviet Union is no more, but if one can be accused of being a communist, or a socialist, or a liberal, a sizable section of the populace breathes a sigh of relief and ceases to listen. One must, of course, stipulate that authoritarian states such as the Soviet Union and Cuba are Bad Things. Certainly there are many countries that manage to avoid authoritarian governments that nevertheless manage to achieve high literacy and low infant mortality. There are also many authoritarian states with low literacy and high infant mortality that nevertheless manage to remain “allies” of the U.S. and other western powers.
Still, the idealists who turned to socialism in the 1930s and at other times had some things in mind and I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that public education and public health services were probably very high on that list. In fact, I’ll suggest that countries that fail in those areas have failed “socialism,” however else one chooses to identify socialism. Under that schema, North Korea is not socialist, but rather an authoritarian monarchy. China seems to be slowly losing whatever socialist credentials it once had, at least insofar as there has been a reported decline in its public health services, though avoiding such horrors as the Cultural Revolution probably still counts for something.
The idea of state ownership of the means of production has always struck me as a pretty bad idea, though the current U.S. situation of having the means of production owning the state does not strike me as being a much better idea. Nevertheless, I don’t see anything in the idea of respecting private property as automatically implying that all organizations must benefit some select private individuals. Surely there is a place for public education and public health services in the idea of a nation. Why then the current hostility towards those institutions?
Let me just say in closing that my own idea of “winning” does not require that there be losers who are sick and ignorant. If that’s what it takes to be a winner, I don’t think that winning is a good thing.
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