Neo-Stakhanovism

Unfortunately, this is not the case. For all the fine rhetoric cooked up in relaxed West Coast offices, the organizational changes that they are actually promoting fuel exactly the opposite dynamic. Karl Marx pointed to the possibility of an increase in the expenditure of labor, in a time that remains the same, thanks to “a heightened tension of labor-power, and a closer filling-up of the pores of the working day, i.e. a condensation of labor.” Philippe Askenazy now describes the same phenomenon as neo-Stakhanovism.

In the warehouses of Amazon or Lidl, in call centers, in the cabs of semitruck drivers, or at supermarket checkouts, information technologies are making it possible to smoke out all idle time, to impose new demands on workers, and introduce means of surveillance that reach far into their private lives. The rollout of voice-direction systems is an extreme illustration of the increased constraints that logistics employees have to cope with.

Using voice recognition software to communicate directly with the central computer unit, Amazon’s order pickers follow step-by-step instructions given over their headphones by a digital voice. Each time that a worker picks a parcel, she validates it by reading into the microphone the numbers corresponding to the quantities concerned — thus producing the data that will inform her assessment and decide whether she will be awarded a productivity bonus.

This is a brutal system. One worker, Arthur, remembers his first time working with it:

I nearly got the hell out of there right away! I thought it was really creepy. Honestly, it’s kind of spooky. . . . The voice and everything, which goes “repeat, this word is not understood.” Especially at the start, when you aren’t doing it properly, it happens all the time, you go nuts.

Sociologist David Gaborieau, who gathered this testimony, observes that this voice direction drastically narrows the worker’s ability to reappropriate time. While playful subversion strategies and small acts of resistance make it possible to keep a certain distance from such a violent dispossession of one’s own self, the margins of individual and collective autonomy are limited in the extreme.

Digital Foremen

Developments in the organization of call center work provide another example of the effects of present-day technological innovations on work organization. Since the early 2000s, management have gained a much greater control over call center employees’ activity, as a result of the combination of the computer and the telephone.

Firstly, automation means that working hours can be controlled much more closely. Workers log in when they start their working day and log out when they stop. Their breaks are automatically timed. As with lateness, any excessive breaks are reported directly to the supervisor.

What is more, computerization makes it possible to record and process a whole range of data on individual performance, putting quantitative, decontextualized information in the hands of managers that is difficult for employees to challenge. And secondly, the introduction of artificial intelligence programs in call centers is leading to a further intensification of this control.

We are all familiar with the messages from customer service departments telling us that a conversation may be recorded for quality control purposes. This is the case for 1 to 2 percent of calls. But Microsoft partner Sayint is now offering much more than just checks via sampling: it has developed a technology with which “you can be sure that your employees are meeting your requirements 100 percent of the time.”

The software records and analyzes all conversations in full. The algorithms deal with making sure that the rules have been followed, monitor the sentiment that the two parties convey in their diction and intonation, and give a score to each performance. If a problem is detected, it is immediately reported to the supervisor.

The machines are thus tasked with monitoring, evaluation, and, indirectly, decisions affecting workers’ pay. This development opens up a deep well of questions for trade unions and presents traps that human resources departments risk falling into. In any case, it takes us a long way from the Californian dream of newly convivial workspaces.

Paradoxes of Innovation

With his notion of creative destruction, the economist Joseph Schumpeter formulated one of the most influential economic ideas of the last century. Following in Marx’s footsteps, and setting himself against approaches based on equilibrium, he insisted that capitalism’s dynamism relies on a tumultuous process of change in economic structures: the “fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumer goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.”

The theory of economic growth that gives the Silicon Valley consensus its scholarly underpinning has taken up this concept and integrated it into its models. Its credo: innovation drives growth by disseminating new technologies and eliminating obsolete methods. Yet, if we do take such a perspective, the trajectory of capitalism today can only appear as a paradox.

On the positive side, various examples of the development of digital technologies testify to a proliferation of innovations, and a multiform, qualitative change in the ways in which production, consumption, and exchange take place. In short, there are signs of renewed vitality.

On the other side of the coin, however, are other tendencies: the slowing of GDP growth and productivity, an increase in the deadweight of the financial sphere, persistent underemployment, and, last but not least, a rapid deterioration in ecological conditions. These phenomena, added up, all point to decline.

Since the 2000s, the ideas of innovation and competition have played a central role in public policies designed to rejuvenate productive structures deemed increasingly outmoded. In one sense, these policies have succeeded. They have contributed to a qualitative transformation of the techno-economic landscape.

The emblematic firms of the digital age are topping the global list for stock market capitalization, even though most of them have been in existence for less than two decades — and they are extending their lead over the former big hitters of the twentieth century. This represents a real upheaval in this elite group, long dominated by a small number of multinationals. But the surprising thing is that this techno-organizational disruption has not renewed the dynamism of the engine of capitalism.

Destructive Creation

Philippe Aghion, one of the most prominent growth economists, has to admit this, albeit only grudgingly. In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, he notes, on the basis of standard data on patents, that “we are indeed seeing an acceleration of innovation, not only in quantity but also in quality.”

He goes on to ask: “Why is this acceleration in innovation not reflected in growth and productivity?” The answer for Aghion is that this is “essentially a problem of measurement,” linked to the fact that innovations, especially those that result in the creation of new products, take time to be taken into account in the statistics.

The technical discussion on the measurement of productivity and growth raises important questions. However, in terms of the issues of interest here, namely the dynamics of contemporary capitalism, there is no doubt about the trend. Contrary to what Aghion suggests, the decline cannot be explained in terms of a measurement problem. Reassessing the impact of innovation would not change anything: productivity and growth are slowing.

Yet more interesting, statisticians also point out that many of the effects of digital innovations are not captured by market exchange and the corresponding accounting. This is obviously the case with Wikipedia, which reduces market production by replacing the output of encyclopedia publishers. But it is also true of the services provided by Google, social networks, and many applications that are only residually commoditized through advertising.

Advertising revenues are integrated into the calculation of market production, as intermediate consumption by advertisers, but there is no direct attribution of services rendered to consumers. This may be surprising, given the major benefits to users. But the statisticians are right to say that “gains in non-market production appear too small to compensate for the loss in overall wellbeing from slower market-sector productivity growth.”

The fact that the most powerful and useful effects of digital technology largely escape the grip of the market economy ought not be overlooked. It is one of the symptoms of the fragility of contemporary capitalism.

Surely, there are conceptual and empirical difficulties in capturing the quality of economic activity within a system of prices — crucial though this is. Still, it is clear that the stagnation of the 2010s was not simply a statistical artifact that conceals the (supposed) real dynamism of the market economy. The financial and macroeconomic shock of the 2008 crisis, endemic underemployment, and the ever-increasing debt burden were all symptoms of deeper ills.

The Schumpeterian refrain can here be turned around, so that we can speak of a destructive creation. For the efforts to roll out the new techno-economic paradigm are accompanied by a breakdown in the social relations characteristic of the previous phase; and they are also making the economic dynamic more fragile in terms of the reproduction of its material and political conditions.