[consulting] Unionizing Drupal

[Victor Kane]

On Sat, Aug 7, 2010 at 8:52 PM, Jeff Greenberg <jeff at ayendesigns.com> wrote:

> "Both communism and socialism are failed experiments in perpetual
> motion, the latter fueled by the inertia of propaganda, and the latter
> by other people's money." -Ben Avram
>
>
I don't think wars, famine, disease, the ruination of the environment, loss
of freedom, loss of a neutral internet and the clarity that capitalism is
utterly incapable of solving any of the problems facing mankind right now is
a context in which you can flippantly throw around quotes like this. It is
Capitalism which is attempting to thrive in its death throes with other
peoples lives, children, money, everything, and needs to be replaced.

Yes, we need to be thinking about socialism, the simple idea that workers
(not a Stalinist bureaucracy) internationally control democratically the
plan of production on the basis of people's real needs, and the distribution
of what is produced, with the aim of creating an excess capable of filling
everyone's needs.

So as developers of open source software we need to think of how we can
emancipate our project and make sure it continues to fulfill the needs of
individuals, communities, organizations, small businesses, and we need to
think how to defend our income from the current attack on those working for
a living, as the crisis hits deep into the US for the first time since the
1930s.


> Unions serve their purpose, which is primarily to protect workers of
> rote. Unions have never been a force in fostering outwardly-facing
> innovation. Most Drupal developers, and most freelancers in general, are
> innovators, not rote programmers.
>

Workers create everything you see around you, and solve an innumerable
number of creative problems in the process of production in every factory,
in every shop, in every place goods are created and services are offered. It
is the bosses who spread the racist (class hatred) lie that workers are
rote, in order to justify lowering salaries and wages and in order to
justify their own parasitical existence. And don't kid yourself, we as
developers, even if we slave away in our homes feeling that sense of freedom
from the office, are workers too. We don't accumulate capital and we don't
extract surplus value from the work of others. We have nothing but our hours
of socially useful work to bank on. And we are at the mercy of huge forces
at work.


>
> Odesk seeks to treat programming as a commodity, an hourly wage for an
> activity no longer differentiated by talent or innovation, so ensured by
> keeping framed diaries of activity that must fit into the single-tasking
> mold rather than a value-priced product. The Odesk model applied
> elsewhere would have us pay for a meal based solely on the time spent
> preparing it.
>

We should be paying for a meal based on the effort put into it and nothing
else. And our work is a commodity otherwise it would not have a price. But
the commodotizing that oDesk does is not that, it is programmed to lower
wages and place all the advantages at the doorstep of the employer, and none
at the door of the worker.


>
> I am an artist, not a manufacturing line worker or a plumber.


My plumber Joe is Picasso. Viva Joe the plumber (in the best sense of the
word). Have you ever looked over a broken bathroom, taken the requirements
of the end users, decided upon the architecture (which artifacts, which kind
of piping, etc) and then implemented that, making changes as you go along
based on input? Christ yes we are plumbers. We are exactly plumbers. In a
context in which the biggest corporate plumbers (BP) are showing their
inherent ineptitude of their model.

"You're still fucking peasants as far as I can see" -- John Lennon


> Like
> painters, sculptors, writers and architects, my rate is based on the
> final product, the innovation, quality and skill I bring to its
> creation, not how many lines of code I generate per hour, and that's
> what clients here prefer.
>

Same as every worker, mate. Please don't feel insulted. I am proud of the
name I chose for my Drupal blog.

Victor Kane
awebfactory.com.ar



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