the new common sense

[Charles Brown]

Rakesh,

Hasn't the Marxist paradigm always taken account of the fact that all labor is a combination of mental and physical labor , with some labor being predominantly physical and other labor predominantly mental ?  In _Capital_ Vol. I, Marx uses the Bible as an example of a commodity. Predominantly mental laborers can be wage-laborers as much as predominantly physical laborers. Thus, though the information technology revolution may increase the proportion of mental to physical labor in some sense overall, doesn't Marx's fundamental analysis of commodity production and wage-labor remain valid with respect to information?

Seems to me that the revolution in communication and transportation permits a geographical scattering of the points of production relative to the periods of the Industrial  Revolution and Fordist organization of production or division of labor. This is changing the international division of labor as you mention, such that we have "world cars" and the like. 

However, most new information workers are objectively new proletarians, n'est-ce pas ? Most do not own the basic means of production. They do not own the basic information technology that they use in their work. The basic CAD/CAM technology, automated machinery,  critical trade secrets in information technology, satellites, etc. are still the private property of a tiny elite. The end product of the work of the information workers is still a commodity, analyzable as Marx analyzes commodities in _Capital_.

Marx and Engels noted this trend of proletarianization of predominantly mental workers in _The Manifesto_. 

Charles Brown

>>> Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU> 07/12/99 07:43PM >>>

>Of course both the focus "cognitive ability" and on education are varients
>on "information society" ideas.

Fine point, Joe. There are so many questions about how the division of
labor is being reinforced or transformed in informational or tech-driven
capitalism: the division between intellectual and manual labor within
computer mediated workplaces; the possible dissolution of the recent
division between the unit of work and the unit of reproduction with
homeworking, telecommuting; the effects that information technology will
have on the boundaries of firms; the possible dissolution of the old
colonial division of labor of core control of mfg and periphery
specialisation in agriculture/raw materials (see McMichael in special MR
issue on food)

This is indeed  one of the great questions in Marxist social science: the
historic development and cross cultural variation in the division of labor.
And it seems that the intellectual/manual labor split has been given a new
lease on life in the information age with all this talk about the
increasing informational content or demands of information processing in
new jobs. Pryor makes that argument in his last book on Economic Evolution.


And now to digress:

One of the other great questions that comes to mind is the (ir)relevance of
modern conceptions of the economy to the ancient world (Max Weber, Karl
Polanyi, Moses Finely, Ellen Wood). There is no other way to understand the
specificity of capitalism as a social form.

So as Marxists we find ourselves interested in the nature of the division
of labor and the historical specificity of capitalism. Those are big
questions on which our interest remains focused. In short, the social form
of labor remains the chief object of focus.

yours, rakesh