>>> cgrimes at tsoft.com 09/15/00 02:57PM >>>
Of course it addresses the issue. It's the only issue, if you want to consider how a particular group of capitalist social relations are worked out in the concrete. Labor possesses the knowledge and skill base to make things. Capital hires Labor to produce, and then hires managers and engineers to figure out how to appropriate that skill and knowledge base from Labor and turn it into some combination of devices and production systems to cut out or cut down Labor.
Then at the other end of the process, the consumer buys the product. At some prior stage, the product was raw: flour, shortening, salt, yeast. The consumer put these together with their knowledge and skill to make bread. Okay, dot, dot, dot, now we have sliced bread. After a generation of consuming sliced bread, making bread is no longer part of most people's standard skill set (remember the packaged tortilla thread a couple of years ago on Bad? Eleana wrote me off-list to say she still made her own). All that bread or tortilla making skill and knowledge has been appropriated into some production system. Your only skill set as a consumer is to use your finely honed and highly educated critique of the meta-narrative to figure out what brand you like best. You no longer possess the fabrication skill because it has been transfered into a production system.
In order to maintain that production system and secure the integrity of Capital's means of control and domination, after a certain point, it becomes necessary to insure that whatever skill and knowledge went into creating that production system, remains firmly in the hands of Capital. Hence, it is important to design systems that can not be re-appropriated or re-invented by Labor or by the consumer base. Failing those methods which are the engineering of ignorance by design, there are of course legal means like intellectual property law and direct government prohibitions.
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CB: Makes a lot of sense to me. The dialectics of the alienation and reification skill.