> 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.
>
>
This is an area where we can go in all kinds of interesting directions.
One could argue-- even invoking Marx-- that the period of capitalism and
industrialization is a _necessary_ phase on the path to socialism. For
example, if someone said that the rise of industrialism and the rise of
capitalism are co-dependent upon one another, I could see some good
reasons for accepting that argument-- especially if the argument
continued to say that the rise of both of these create the necessary
conditions for a more egalitarian, socialist society.
Here's what bugged me about Chuck's argument. If we placed the blame for certain technologies on capitalism, rather than industrialism, then we have to ask whether better technologies would have arisen under a different kind of industrialism. Could anyone actually make a good case that, under an anarcho-syndicalist industrialism, they'd have avoided coal and gas power entirely, and gone straight to solar and wind power? Probably not; after all, we started using gas and coal power long before we started to understand the impacts of such technologies.