Marx and the Information Age

In Greek mythology, Procrustes was the giant who stretched or cut his victims to make them fit his bed. Today, the eponymous term refers to a person who imposes conformity without concern for individuality. This, of course, is what Adam Smith’s capitalism meant in the Industrial Age.

In his TED talk on keeping people motivated at the workplace, Dan Ariely describes how Smith’s capitalism placed emphasis on efficiencies, which meant breaking down things into steps, and then creating specialists for each step. Eventually, everyone becomes a cog in the wheel and doesn’t know the big picture, or how they contribute to the final output. At which point they stop caring.

Fast forward to the Information Age. Now worker alienation can be costly. As Ariely describes it:

“And you can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they thinking about labor on the way to work and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.”

It is possible to derive the non-financial benefits of work that Ariely describes today since the “means of production” (software tools or most of the stuff on the Internet) are either very cheap or totally free.

Even people like Bill Gates never really adjusted to this era, as exemplified by his (in)famous rant on open source (free software) as a form of communism! Well ok, Marx did believe communism to be the state where “labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want”. In other words, people worked because they liked to, not because they had to. Isn’t that what Wikipedia and most of the Net are, a labour of love? Aren’t most apps for your smartphone written by individuals for free because they just wanted to?

I am amused by how Karl Marx may have had the right message…but for the wrong age; and how his message was fulfilled by capitalism, not communism!