Working in crews and teams within physical and industrial processes tends to punch holes in the totalizing idea of the homo economicus through daily experience. There are plenty of ways to punch holes in this idea, but even in the economic and productive arena, where the idea originates and dominates, there are numerous problems.
Who is being paid to do what? A good crew with good chemistry may include a few individuals who work slower and are less competent, but their presence is needed for the good cheer, good conversation, or some other effect that they have on the group that is less quantifiable and thus goes unrecognized and unpaid by capital.
The resent of harder working peers is largely a myth, and where it appears it is usually just situational. People tend to be satisfied when the peers they care about are working alongside them and contributing alongside them, and where there is not some burdensome hardship arising in the workplace.
This all changes as individuals are put under greater amounts of stress and atomized, particularly when under processes of neoliberalization in which capital - as embodiment of the homo economicus - seeks to transform the living systems it claims into replicas of itself. Where atomization grows, fear and resent of a greater swathe of living things grows with it, including peer performance and all the rest, and the crew chemistry breaks down and the quality of product degrades with it.
This problem is temporarily fixed with production rationalization and mechanization, and is externalized in the form of environmental degradation and human alienation, and even the upstream products of mechanization and rationalization degrade over time as those vibrant creations eventually become colonized, instrumentalized, and atomized under capital.
