>ps. the thesis that we get more alienated the more complex a society
>becomes strikes me as a dodgy kind of primitivism. (someone pass me the
>cold towel, i'm agreeing with yoshie as well.) though, i still have a
>penchant for the way in which the frankfurters took up the critique of
>instrumentalist reason and certainly wouldn't rule out the importance of
>that.
>
yeah the guys i was referring to are "primitivists" but i think they have a point. I never said their thesis was "we get more alienated the more complex a society"; rather i said: "characteristics of capitalist social relations, such as commodification... are inescapable in industrial society even if the economic structures were not capitalist in the Marxist sense"
I think these are quite different thesis; and let me try to sharpen this latter claim: that the economic relation of exchange (commodification) is unavoidable if you want to create a modern (say at least the last 75 years) industrial infrastructure (e.g. those of communication, transportation, health etc.).
To build these kind of instructures you need to have standard parts and standard measures; and also standard measures of costs. Thus inevitably products (the results of productive activity) are assigned cost and become interchangeable, and costs can't be ignored -- even if the classical market place doesn't exist. As the scope of these infrastructures in grow in terms of range of human activity encompassed (for example, consider the evolution of mass media) so does the scope and depth of the standardization and commodification of the output of that activity.
-- adam