Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 16:09:35 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Reality Check


G'day Chuck,

Just one point on your 'reality is experience' argument.  You point to your
success as a consultant.  Well, here in Oz, the neoliberals have been
disembowelling the public sector for a decade now.  Jobs once done by
permanents are now done by consultants.  Those consultants (hitherto often
the former public servants themselves) make a killing.

All true.  But thousands have been sacked where only hundreds have become
consultants.  What of the 'reserve army' component?  What are they
experiencing?

And what of the fact that many (but not all) public sector projects seem
(to the project managers themselves) to be costing more than they might
have during the job-for-life days (not just in terms of spiralling
consultancy costs, but paying also the price of trying slavishly to apply
universalised fads in particular situations - just now, Oz is outsourcing
its public information business on the basis of advice from US consultants
- yet the latter have assumed wage costs below extant Oz minimum wage
settings!)?

I notice also that the consultancy industry is rationalising.  The largely
US-based shops are taking over, either reproletarianising many of our local
consultants or simply driving 'em straight into the reserve army with their
erstwhile colleagues and a few hundred thousand others who once had jobs.

Cheers,
Rob.

You'd written:


>Carroll, I think you miss the point. The companies themselves are not only
>well organized, so is the entire capitalistic enterprise -- at least as it is
>practiced in the western nations. I think the Marxists do not give the
>capitalists enough credit for being good at what they do. Nor do I think many
>Marxists know what really goes on in the everyday life of people who have to
>deal with the corporate world.
>
>This is what motivated my outburst: the feeling of surrealism I get every time
>I hear a marxist talk about the world I am supposed to inhabit. Let me give an
>example: many marxists and leftists are against the movement towards the use
>of consultants and contractors  among large companies. this is supposed to be
>the demise of the working class and a threat to my financial stability. Yet, I
>can say now that being a consultant can be very very lucrative. I do this and
>I make a pretty good living; more than I would if I were to go permanent. I
>can, in fact, make much more money as a consultant than I can as a permanent
>employee. Now, the point of this exercise in reality is that what I know from
>my work experience does not correlate in any way with what I hear from the
>leftist or marxist camps.
>
>Could it be this starry-eyed surrealism from the Marxist camps that makes most
>of what they say _irrelevant_?




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Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

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'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

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