Today I will introduce one more concept critical for understanding of how the manufacturing industry has evolved over the last few decades. It is the shift of technological knowledge from esoteric to exoteric
In the pre-digital era, manufacturing used to be mysterious, esoteric
To visualize how the manufacturing worked in the pre-computer/early computer age, imagine the atmosphere of magic, mysticism, enigma. That would be not very far from truth.
To illustrate the idea, I will give you one simple, straightforward example. The train car production.
Train production is a very, very rare example of a Russian machinery industry that survived through the post-Soviet collapse. Of course, it contracted. Of course, it suffered losses. Still, it made it through, while most of the Soviet machinery sector was simply wiped out.
The year 2003. You a private investor who just bought an old Soviet train car plant. There's a positive surprise. The plant you have purchased is actually making trains, and selling them, for money. Unbelievable.
(As I said, it was not the case for most Soviet machinery plants)
In a heavily railroad centric country, the rolling stock producers had more or less guaranteed demand on the entire 1,520s mm gauge space (red). Demand that could not be that easily satisfied by competitors from the 1,435 mm countries (black), such as China.
So, they survived.
So, you bought a plant. And the plant is making trains. And these trains can roll (& sell). Cool.
The problem, however, is that you, as an investor, have very limited understanding of how your plant works. Honestly, you have little idea of what does your plant even do, exactly.
Like how would you even know, what is your plant is doing to make the rolling stock roll? What are all the workers, technologists, engineers doing exactly?
In theory, you could scroll through the technical documentation. In practice, it sheds very limited light on that.
In theory, the entire production process must be described on the technological cards, step by step.
In practice, you find that to not be the case.
First, some of the technical documentation is simply false. Sometimes, it describes the production processes as they used to work years and years ago (and were never updated ever since). Sometimes, it describes them as they might have never ever worked in the first place.
Much more often, it is cryptic. What you have is the laconic notes your engineers, technicians, workers made for themselves. They can get it. No outsider, including the owner, can.
Imagine deciphering the hieroglyphs. Now your task can be way more difficult.
Furthermore, all the documentation you have, whether it is accurate, inaccurate or somewhere in between, whether it decipherable, indecipherable or somewhere in between, is very inexhaustive.
Few pieces of a puzzle at best. Not enough to make a picture.
Add to that, that it is all very difficult to navigate through. It is not impossible that the specific piece of information you are looking for, is perfectly documented. You are just not going to find it.
Long story short, the functioning of your plant is not codified clearly, exhaustively, accurately and in a sufficiently structured way for an outsider to understand it.
It's a black box to pretty much everyone, including the new owners and the new management.
Still, your plant makes the rolling stock that actually rolls. You can observe it rolling. Which means that your engineers, technologists, workers all collectively hold the knowledge of how to make a rolling train car.
It's just their knowledge is not really codified.
When they document the knowledge, they primarily document it for themselves. In practice, that means they own this knowledge. Documentation (if it exists) requires a key, and only the insiders would have it.
If a key employee retires or dies without training a replacement, some pieces of knowledge may very well be lost. An outsider (like a fresh graduate, or a hire from another structure) will not be able to reconstruct what is lost based on the existing papers
As the critical knowledge does not exist anywhere except for the employee's brains, some of them hold a significant leverage. This includes the top technical workers, such as the Chief Design Engineer and the Chief Technologist
It's all in their heads, or much of it
Now why would anything of that be a problem in the eyes of investors?
First, the lack of transparency. Owners want to see it all through to optimize it all financially
(While their employees may not want to)
Second, the irreplaceability of key knowledge holders. If irreplaceable, they have too much power. The owners would like to see everyone replaceable.
(Which their employees certainly don't want to)
Third, the lack of the overall manageability, especially by the outsiders.
(Which may very well be preferable from the employee's perspective)
To put it simply, the old, esoteric organization of knowledge favors insiders, especially the key technical employees. And vice versa, codifying it in the most structured, transparent and exoteric way possible favors outsiders, especially the investors and professional managers.
There is a clear and obvious conflict of interests here. The class conflict, I would say. This may be the key reason why the exoterisation of knowledge can never grow "naturally", from below. It can only be imposed from above, breaking the opposition of qualified labor.
The end
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What I am saying is that "capitalist reforms" are a buzzword devoid of any actual meaning, and a buzzword that obfuscated rather than explains. Specifically, it is fusing radically different policies taken under the radically different circumstances (and timing!) into one - purely for ideological purposes
It can be argued, for example, that starting from the 1980s, China has undertaken massive socialist reforms, specifically in infrastructure, and in basic (mother) industries, such as steel, petrochemical and chemical and, of course, power
The primary weakness of this argument is that being true, historically speaking, it is just false in the context of American politics where the “communism” label has been so over-used (and misapplied) that it lost all of its former power:
“We want X”
“No, that is communism”
“We want communism”
Basically, when you use a label like “communism” as a deus ex machina winning you every argument, you simultaneously re-define its meaning. And when you use it to beat off every popular socio economic demand (e.g. universal healthcare), you re-define communism as a synthesis of all the popular socio economic demands
Historical communism = forced industrial development in a poor, predominantly agrarian country, funded through expropriation of the peasantry
(With the most disastrous economic and humanitarian consequences)
Many are trying to explain his success with some accidental factors such as his “personal charisma”, Cuomo's weakness etc
Still, I think there may be some fundamental factors here. A longue durée shift, and a very profound one
1. Public outrage does not work anymore
If you look at Zohran, he is calm, constructive, and rarely raises his voice. I think one thing that Mamdani - but almost no one else in the American political space is getting - is that the public is getting tired of the outrage
Outrage, anger, righteous indignation have all been the primary drivers of American politics for quite a while
For a while, this tactics worked
Indeed, when everyone around is polite, and soft (and insincere), freaking out was a smart thing to do. It could help you get noticed
People don’t really understand causal links. We pretend we do (“X results in Y”). But we actually don’t. Most explanations (= descriptions of causal structures) are fake.
There may be no connection between X and Y at all. The cause is just misattributed.
Or, perhaps, X does indeed result in Y. but only under a certain (and unknown!) set of conditions that remains totally and utterly opaque to us. So, X->Y is only a part of the equation
And so on
I like to think of a hypothetical Stone Age farmer who started farming, and it worked amazingly, and his entire community adopted his lifestyle, and many generations followed it and prospered and multiplied, until all suddenly wiped out in a new ice age
1. Normative Islamophobia that used to define the public discourse being the most acceptable form of racial & ethnic bigotry in the West, is receding. It is not so much dying as rather - failing to replicate. It is not that the old people change their views as that the young do not absorb their prejudice any longer.
In fact, I incline to think it has been failing to replicate for a while, it is just that we have not been paying attention
Again, the change of vibe does not happen at once. The Muslim scare may still find (some) audience among the more rigid elderly, who are not going to change their views. But for the youth, it is starting to sound as archaic as the Catholic scare of know nothings
Out of date
2. What is particularly interesting regarding Mamdani's victory, is his support base. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that its core is comprised of the young (and predominantly white) middle classes, with a nearly equal representation of men and women
What does Musk vs Trump affair teach us about the general patterns of human history? Well, first of all it shows that the ancient historians were right. They grasped something about nature of politics that our contemporaries simply can’t.
Let me give you an example. The Arab conquest of Spain
According to a popular medieval/early modern interpretation, its primary cause was the lust of Visigoth king Roderic. Aroused by the beautiful daughter of his vassal and ally, count Julian, he took advantage of her
Disgruntled, humiliated Julian allied himself with the Arabs and opens them the gates of Spain.
Entire kingdom lost, all because the head of state caused a personal injury to someone important.