My two bits: I doubt there's any necessary connection between coercion and high technology. Technology can be developed either to genuinely help workers and raise productivity or it can be developed for management's benefit which often includes a deskilling of the workers who use it and maybe even a loss of productivity.
In a recent interview Hitchens had with the Seattle Stranger, http://www.thestranger.com/current/logo.html he suggests that we have recently gone through a technological revolution, something I'm not sure about. "And so [Marx and Engels] just thought that [capitalism] would in its turn give way to something more rational and more revolutionary. And that was, in its way, not a bad bet. In a certain way, you could even say it's been vindicated in certain periods of history. Certainly there were points where capitalism seemed to stall out and it was they, the capitalists, who had no alternative to propose... except fascism, say, or empire. But none of that is now true. Largely, I think, because, so it seems to me, it's been able to generate another industrial revolution, a technological revolution. Which has created a different kind of labor for us."
I can't see David Horowitz replying in the following manner either, Seattle Stranger: In Letters to a Young Contrarian and in several interviews you've done recently, you've said that your days as a socialist are more or less gone, and that so perhaps are the days of socialism itself--or of "a general socialist critique of capitalism." Would you elaborate both on that declaration and on the apparent sadness or reluctance that accompanies it? HITCHENS: Sure. It's more the latter of those two things, by the way. It was more that I felt that there was no such position really to occupy. I still feel it like I'm missing a limb, but for example if you look at what's happened, say, in Argentina in the last few weeks--which is a country I know slightly, and where I have in the past worked with the Left, worked against dictatorship, and so forth. I mean, there it is: There's been a complete meltdown. It's quite clear there's been some kind of failure in neo-liberal economics down there. But the situation is passed into the hands of the Peronists, at least for the moment, who I'm sure will do their usual stuff of sort of debauching the treasury, trying to renationalize the currency, maybe impose tariffs and so forth, but it won't work."
Is he a pessimist or a realist? And back to this thread about technology, the left and the "anti-globolization" movement, I agree with Hitchens's caution about the conservative elements in the movement but I think he's too harsh on Seattle '99 or at least you could say he's not trying to ingratiate himself with one of its hometown papers.
Seattle Stranger: Given your passion for dissent and demonstration, I was surprised to read your views of the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, which you identified as having "a very conservative twinge in the sense of being reactionary." You called them "a protest against modernity."
HITCHENS: Yes, that's true of the ones that I've seen. These demonstrations occur in Washington, D.C. as well, and elsewhere. And what it reminds me of very much is the Port Huron Statement [by Students for a Democratic Society, 1962], which I don't know if you've read lately, but I don't think you'll correct me when I say that a lot of that old critique was actually a protest against scale, against bigness. And the corollary seemed to me to be, in that statement and in some of the ones that I'm reading or hearing about now, the better society would basically be more agrarian, more organic, more traditional. And I'm not at all sure that that's true, and I'm quite sure it's not feasible. But the idea that the sort of social model would be something like the Cherokee--which as you know isn't that much of an exaggeration about some of these people [protesters]--seems to me to be, even if admirable, definitely conservative, and very unlikely to be feasible. So, it meets most of my tests of reactionary utopianism, and therefore, you have to allow me to be unimpressed when people say, "Hey, look at the broad-based coalition of people dressed up as turtles and protectionist labor union leaders." You know, I'm sorry, it doesn't move me at all. I don't want to be a part of that. Don't feel myself to be part of it at all. I mean, look, of course I'm as sickened as anyone else if I go to Damascus or something and find a McDonald's. But that's to do with my feeling against the lack of variety that comes with monopoly, and with the integration of those sort of economies of scale.