<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1"> <title></title> </head> <body> <br> <br> James Heartfield wrote:<br> <blockquote type="cite" cite="mid001001c5ac21$1134d320$59532352@D6F2G31J"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; "> <meta content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.2722" name="GENERATOR"> <style></style> <div></div> <div> <font face="Arial" size="2">In my mind that is to conflate the two simultaneous processes, production of goods, production of profit. Under capitalism new technologies, being legal property of the capitalist, are presented to the labourer as an alien power. But of course they are his own power, alienated from him in the exchange of work for wage. Under those conditions, the technology itself appears to be the reason that the labourer loses control, the production process presents itself, fantastically, as subject, seeming to reduce the labourer to object. But it is the social relationship, not the technology that does it. Once ownership of the means of production pass from capitalist to labourer, technology becomes what it truly is an enhancement of the power of labour, not a diminution of it. Rationalising production, i.e. reducing the necessary part of the working day, under capitalism creates the basis for profit. Under socialism it creates the basis for free human development.</font></div> </blockquote> I completely understand what you're saying, but the proposition is on a totally abstract level. A new technology can be a lot of things. It can be a computer which, theoretically, could put the world's knowledge base at the fingertips of every human on the planet. It can be a washing machine, which saves women the labor of washing clothes; or it can be an assembly line which breaks a task into a million meaningless tasks requiring no skill and creating an army of bored, depressed, stressed workers whose mental and physical life is degraded every day by having to do such work. There are real differences between technologies.<br> <blockquote type="cite" cite="mid001001c5ac21$1134d320$59532352@D6F2G31J"> <div> </div> <div><font face="Arial" size="2">On the artisanal loss of quality etc.. I don't believe it. Even under capitalism, consumer goods just are phenomenally better than they ever were under craft production. There's not a person on this list who would willingly spend the rest of their life under the technological conditions of, say, the fifteenth century (let alone the debilitating social conditions that accompanied them).</font></div> </blockquote> I belive it and I have experienced it. I have been sewing for forty years. The clothes I sew and the sweaters I knit last about ten times longer than those I can get commercially.  The buildings we're building today will NOT be around a hundred years from now. I guarantee it. Mostly because we're building cheap, and fast, with very unskilled labor. Most medieval cathedrals, however, are still standing one thousand years later.<br> <br> Joanna<br> <br> </body> </html>