technology (Re: Horowitz's center)

frances bolton fbolton at chuma.cas.usf.edu
Wed Mar 10 08:55:17 PST 1999


Rakesh writes:


>(SNIP) The greatest innovative force of production would be proletarian
>revolution itself.

Hey Rakesh--

Are you assuming that this proletarian revolution is somehow going to have different sorts of technological innovations than a captalist system? I'm not so sure about this, Rakesh. Technological innovations are advances on previous technologies and previous assumptions of technologies, right? And those technologies themselves have political and economic values built into them. Those don't go away when one replaces a widget with four widgets, or whatever. And the very nature of many technologies is authoritarian--that's not going to change just because a worker's council is making one go to work at 8am instead of a capitalist making one go to work at 8am. Engels made this point rather well in his paper "On Authority." And I should like to remind that Lenin was a great admirer of Taylor, and thought revolutionary Russia needed Taylorism. My question comes down to, yeah, maybe there would be tremendous technological innovation as a result of a proletarian revolution, but so what?

frances



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