Enrique, there is a book Engineering Labour, ed. Peter Meiskins (Verso); I would like to read it before continuing our discussion
Jim, as I read Galbraith's book, I took a couple of days to learn about cluster analysis. The best short intro I found, which was adequate to follow his arguments about how to minimize euclidean distance, etc., was in a Canadian medical biostat book. The sad thing is that now I have forgotten th mechanics of cluster analysis less than two months later. Galbraith's own appendix is very helpful. But I will get back to it before the pkt discussion begins. But my memory was fresh when I wrote the short comment on Galbraith's book for this list.
I just want to reiterate the argument I was drawing from Marx.
I was suggesting how capitalism as both a unity of the technical and valorization sides of production requires and imposes as a natural law on labor the need to develop in a many sided way in the course of continuous revolutionisation of productivity, in the consequent slow down, contraction, elimination and birth of whole industries, and in the gales of creative destruction; while at the same restricting the development of labor to easily trained and replaceable cogs in the machinery of production and thus immersing labor in the habitus of a listless proletariat.
This is yet another manifestation of the contradiction between the technical and value sides of capitalism, between the development of the productive forces of which labor itself is the ontological center and the exploitative relations of proudction. Technological unemployment is more severe under specifically capitalist relations of production because of the limits relations of exploitation put on the many sided development even as Modern Industry comes to require such variability ever more.
Pasinetti ignores the limit to labor mobility and the self development of labor's many sided capacities imposed by exploitative relations of production themselves. Yet this is one of the many reasons that Marx reaches the conclusion that proletarian revolution or, to put it another way, the self-abolition of the proletariat would be the greatest productive force of all.
I would like to give a critical look to a new book by David Ashton and Francis Green, Education, Training and the Global Economy.
best, rakesh