James Heartfield wrote:
> Forgive me, Joann, but I think this is quite wrong.
My name is Joanna actually.
>
> It seems to me that Marx demonstrated 138 years ago not only that
> technology (or 'forces of production') can be distinguished from
> 'relations of production', but that they must be, if socialism is to
> be a possibility.
Sure. OK.
>
> He showed that the *illusion* that capitalism and technology were
> synonymous was one of the central ideological claims that served to
> shore up the existing society.
I never said they were. But some tools were developed before capitalism; some after. Some of the tools that were developed after capitalism (notice I said "some," not "all") were developed ONLY in order to rationalize production in such a way that workers could have less and less power over (and knowledge of) the work they were doing. This tended to exacerbate the division between mental work and physical work, to wipe out the artisan/craftsman, and in many cases to seriously lessen the quality of the products of labor. These tools are not "neutral" and in the event that we could actually construct a socialist world, we would need to look at their use and the effect of their use in a detailed and serious way.
>
> Furthermore, he gave a compelling account of how, under capitalism
> relations between people assume the form of relations between things,
> giving rise to the illusion that people are put out of work by machines.
The problem is not that people "are put out of work" by machines. The problem is why this is happening -- it's not automatically a good thing or a bad thing. The problem is what happens to those people. The problem is that both work and the product of work under capitalism are simply a means to an end (profit) and become totally disconnected with why people work, why work is good or bad, and how we should organize our work in order to have a decent life.
>
> It was Marx who criticised the luddites for blaming technology for the
> ills of capitalism. 'It took both time and experience before the
> workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment
> by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material
> instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are
> used.' (Capital I, p 404, Progress ed.)
Look. Marx taught me how to think and how to read history, but I don't worship him and the Luddites apparently were quite selective in what machines they were to destroy. John Thorton has more on this. Also, suppose workers around the world decided to destroy nuclear weapons. Would that be a bad thing? Are weapons not also an example of technology?
> Sadly the insights of the labour movement in the nineteenth century
> were a high point from which we have fallen back. The disappointed
> Marxists Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse imagined that they were
> enriching, and making more sophisticated Marx's analysis. Drawing on
> the Nazi philosopher Heidegger, they argued that alienation was
> implicit in the technology itself.
Well, I'm not thrilled with A, H, & M, but I don't think their work was useless either. As for the illusions of the hippies -- that's a thread in itself.
Joanna
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