>I don't know Bill, I'm reading what ChuckO is writing too and I'm not getting this at all. Of course technology is not netural...a short-handled hoe is not a long-handled hoe, a nuclear power plant is not a solar cell panel, and the concept of eternal human progress founded on ever-expanding industrialization presupposes a certain relation to nature which threatens life on earth. It's good to be warm, fed, have clean water, health care...but our techno fantasies have gone way beyond that and it's certainly not clear to me that they have brought any kind of actual "progress" in their wake.
I think industrial methods of production have brought some progress, but aside from that I agree with you. I have no argument with the proposition that technology is not neutral, the question hardly bears thinking about.
My quibble with Chuck, if we can ever get him to state his position unambiguously, will be that he is wrong to assert that, because industrial production requires society to be organised along class lines and specifically in a capitalist mode, then we shall have to throw out the baby (industrial methods of producing essential goods and services) along with the bathwater (capitalism).
I would argue that the premise is wrong. That a socialist society does not necessitate abandoning all modern technological methods of production. Rather, modern methods of production make it not only necessary to replace the capitalist system of social organisation, but also are what makes it POSSIBLE to end capitalism.
So an end to industrial production would necessitate a return to more primitive forms of social organisation than even capitalism. What's more, advocating such an idea is effectively an endorsement of the ideology that capitalism is the end of social progress. That its all downhill from here. A clever bit of capitalist black propaganda, if we let him get away with it.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas