Scarcity

[Forstater, Mathew]

nice, small, simple questions, Doug!  actually I am sympathetic to the view that
technologies cannot be separated from the social relations of the society that
gave rise to them ( a view nicely articulated by Dickson in his _The Politics of
Alternative Technology_). But I am also sympathetic to the view (represented by
Bookchin, for one, see his "Toward a Liberatory Technology" in _Post Scarcity
Anarchism_) that they may be separable to some extent, or at least that there
are ways of utilizing then under different forms of social organization or
adapting them to such.  I think this is one area where there aren't general hard
and fast laws that are universally valid, but rather the specific conditions and
cases involved determine the outcome. So whether or not a technology developed
under one set of social relations can be utilized under another set depends on
the specific nature of the technology, the specific sets of social relations we
are talking about, etc, etc.

As far as "lifting the bits" it is not so much lifting as learning. Good example
is the ways in which traditional societies managed common resources.  The
'tragedy of the commons' is bunk.  Social institutions mediated access and use
of resources and in many cases what we really have is the tragendy of
privatization. But it is not that we will lift the exact ritual practices but
the general lessons to be learned. Of course in the case of a lot of sustainable
agricultural practices there are specific practices that can be more or less
directly applied. All kinds of indigenous knowledge about certain crop
combinations that can take the place of chemical pesticides, etc.

I'm not sure if I get the festishism question, but let's also not fetishize
capitalism. Again I recall Gibson-Graham's point from "How to Smash Capitalism
While Working at Home in Your Spare Time?"-- there is an (understandable)
tendency to overstate capitalism's all-pervasiveness into every nook and cranny
of society, so that while there is certainly an important political economy of
medicine, e.g, I think we can assume that socialist society should be able to
utilize certain vaccines, e.g., without devolving into bourgeois decadence. Or?

These are definitely important questions. And I do think that many experiments
in socialism overestimated the degree to which technologies can be separated
from the social organization in which they were developed. MANY machines
developed under capitalism were developed with control of workers in mind,
without regard for deleterious phsyical effects on workers, and also without
attention to issues such as alienation, etc.  But I think also that socialist
experiments underestimated how much we can learn from noncapitalist societies
that preceded capitalism's rise.

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Henwood [mailto:dhenwood at panix.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2001 11:26 AM
To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
Subject: RE: Scarcity

Forstater, Mathew wrote:


>but name anyone who has ever supported the position that we go back to
>'becoming' 'pre-capitalist' not using any technology, medicine, 
>knowledge, etc.
>discovered in the interim? not even the most romantic golden agers take this
>position. but we can learn lots about both capitalism and post-capitalism by
>studying noncapitalist modes, as well as gain insights into things like
>sustainable ecological practices, institutional forms of 
>cooperation, etc.  much
>more than both many marxist and bourgeois scholars recognize.

But how completely can you separate "technology, medicine, knowledge, 
etc." from  the modes of social organization - large-scale 
enterprise, to name just one - that make it possible? And how can you 
lift the bits you like from non- or precapitalist societies? Isn't it 
fetishizing both technology and social organization to treat them as 
so easily separable, even in thought?

Doug