Are you implying, as someone does later in the discussion that my critique of the concentration and centralization of IT software, the utterly irrational bloat embedded in most operating systems, the ridiculous anarchic proliferation of ever-more commodified and privately held knowledge and the general failure of modern computing systems to take advantage of the myriad, and far more efficient, opportunities for cooperative and democratic models of network processing, storage etc. is anti-technology? (I know Doug kinda did in his response to my note but my sense was that the responses to his snark/fun indicated others didn't read my post that way... even though there were some empirical shortcomings to its claims.)
Are you suggesting - as others have implied in other threads - that environmental forms of socialist politics are inextricably rooted in pastoral and romantic agrarian politics? If so, on the basis of whose work do you make such a claim? Certainly, Joel Kovel's not anti-tech, John Bellamy Foster's not anti-tech, David Harvey's not anti-tech, Jim O'Connor's not anti-tech (though he's somewhat irrationally anti-computer at least in part because a terminal caught fire and destroyed his condo ~20 years ago), Mary Mellor's not anti-tech, Donna Haraway's not anti-tech and the list goes on and on and on.
I've run into this for a long time. Why is it that a strong push to democratize the production of nature and science, to democratize the reproduction of bodies and medicine, and/or to democratize the production of culture and space is so often assumed to be based in romanticism? What ever happened to the dream of socialist appropriate technology - a great deal of which would _not_ be at the often anarchist-advanced and communitarian "human scale"? What would be so wrong with a more stable, rich and creative life under conditions of technological innovation slower than the insanity of the pace of the contemporary turnover time of global capital? (I think, on this, Philip and I agree.)
Every Marxist know who is critical of modern technology is not a technophobe but wants technologies that are more technically, ecologically, bodily, and culturally efficient and sees one product of that efficiency as the reduction of socially necessary labor time in the realm of commodity production (I don't know why Carrol keeps on conflating commodities-as-exchanged-use-values with commodity-exchange-driven-by-the-law-of-[abstract/surplus]-Value) and more socially engaged labor in the realm of personal and social fulfillment.
On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 5:14 PM, Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com>wrote:
> When precisely did Marxism become so fanatically opposed to technological
> progress? We're a long way from Lenin's conception of soviet power plus
> electrification.
>
> My sense is that this shift towards technophobia is basically a
> rationalization of failure, the result of making a vice into a virtue.
> Really existing socialism proved to be less productive and inventive than
> leading capitalist economies on the whole - so there comes a point when
> instead of trying to compete Khrushchev style with the West, you just throw
> up your hands and claim that it was never your intention to continue the
> development of the productive forces after all.
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>