James Heartfield:
> But as I read it Marx thought that the tendency for capitalism to
> engender new wants, substituting social needs for natural ones, was a
> good thing, something he called, without irony, the civilising aspect of
> capitalist society, the creation of the many sided-individual.
Or the de-civilizing aspect, if one regards city-building and other activities of civilization to have been founded on slavery.
> That is quite different from the moral critique of consumerism, as one
> finds in Veblen or Packard, to the effect that these wants are
> artificial *and therefore false*. For Marx, by contrast, the creation of
> new needs is artificial and also positive.
My impression is that he is not sitting in judgement on the value of capitalist development in that particular passage. Rather, he is describing things as they are and as they must be dealt with -- a mode noticed here in the discussion of Marx's ethics.
Yoshie Furuhashi:
>>> Walter Benjamin wrote: "One of the most remarkable characteristics of
>>> human nature, writes Lotze, is, alongside so much selfishness in
>>> specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays
>>> toward the future. Reflection shows us that our image of happiness
>>> is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own
>>> existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse
>>> envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we
>>> could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us.
>>> In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with
>>> the image of redemption" (at
>>> <http://iwebs.upol.cz/kw/texts/history.htm>).
Gordon:
> >In effect, then, technology, etc. etc.
> >
> > 'Production produces consumption: (1) by providing the material
> > of consumption; (2) by determining the mode of consumption;
> > [and] (3) by creating in the consumer a need for the objects
> > which it first presents as products' (Marx, A Contribution to
> > the Critique of Political Economy, Progress 1970, p. 197).
> >
> >So, as I said, scarcity turns out to be a product -- a
> >product which is produced and sold in order to maintain the
> >class system.
Yoshie Furuhashi:
> I believe so, though the tricky thing is that since all of us have
> lived under capitalism & most of us have experienced no other mode of
> production, many of us are quite deeply committed to the idea of
> "innovation" for the sake of "innovation" that capitalism demands,
> whether we articulate this commitment or not.
Since we observe a certain amount of innovation in the non-human world, even culturally-mediated innovation (among primates), we can suppose that innovation is not entirely created by social artifices like slavery or capitalism. However, these social artifices tend to be totalitarian in the sense of absorbing and ordering almost all innovative energies in their political realms. Therefore, under present conditions, all technological advances appear to be capitalist technological advances, and it is difficult to even begin to think about alternative means of development except in marginal areas like the arts, although we can reasonably guess that they would exist.
This indicates that the opposition of capitalist or quasi- capitalist development, as in the Soviet Union, to frozen primitivism, as some kind of obvious, settled fact, is a mistake (to put it most politely).
However, the long reign of authoritarianism over our communities and cultures have caused most of us to lose not only our autonomy but our technological imaginations. Where these are not lost they are generally shattered into fragments convenient for the purposes of the ruling class, its intentions, and its structures of control, as one would expect. That being the case, I think it might be reasonable to consider ourselves to be sufferers of injury, involuntary addicts, so to speak, and consider different, non-destructive, non-authoritarian methods of (self-) detoxification and rehabilitation so that we can get back in control of our lives and once again use technology recreationally and imaginatively. Under _those_ conditions, the pace of development might not be as rapid or directed as is the case with capitalism and its imitators, since a monomania for aggrandizement would be replaced by a variety of motives and paths; but there is no need to suppose that it would disappear altogether.
> >"We" do not have authority and hierarchy in
> >order to produce complexity; "we" produce complexity, and
> >the scarcities thereof, in order to have authority and
> >hierarchy.
> Complexity, authority, & hierarchy in the above need to be defined
> clearly; whether the above makes sense depends on the definitions of
> the three terms.
Suppose we say that we can measure the complexity of a thing by the informational content of a minimal description of the thing. That is, the longer the string of symbols required to fully describe the thing, the more complex it is. This means that complex objects contain more information and therefore require more energy to create than less complex ones, all other things (such as size) being equal. In more common- place terms, it's easy to see that as a rule the building of more intricate machines requires more time, energy and personal and social experience than the building of simple ones. However, the resultant machines will be more powerful (assuming correct design, i.e. good or "real" information).
In order to bring larger amounts of any resources, including energy (human, animal or mechanical) to bear on an item of work, it may be _convenient_ to subjugate and hierarchicalize workers, but clearly it is not _necessary_, because the workers could agree to assemble the necessary resources and organize themselves voluntarily (and sometimes do). Therefore, it is obviously not the case that complexity _requires_ authoritarianism and hierarchy.
On the other hand, it can be shown that authority (in the sense of coercive power) at a certain stage of its development (capitalism) ought to be strongly motivated towards the increase of complexity. That is because, in order to maintain their social power, capitalists need scarcity and, since nature does not produce enough of it, must produce what they need artificially, in ever-increasing amounts as, at the same time, they destroy scarcity through production. Because complexity, as we have observed, uses, binds, and finally releases power, Capital is attracted to its front end as a production sink and therefore scarcity-producer, and to its hind end as subsequently produced power, running from one to the other depending on the needs of the moment. When all goes well, the labor of increasing complexity maintains scarcity, while its output power increases addiction. (Of course I'm just touching the surface here.) Capital stays in power by balancing constantly increasing production and consumption.
We can observe this pattern in the world in the case of many technologies, such as electric power, telegraph and telephone, automobiles, and computers. Needless to say, the processes have little to do with most human needs and desires, since they are directed by particular minorities, ruling classes, with particular powers, talents, interests, and agendas which are different from those of most people. This disadvantage is coupled with the disadvantage of entrainment in a poorly damped positive-feedback loop which, like all positive- feeback loops, must blow up in some way -- in the 20th century, in the form of several large wars and other great social catastrophes.