> Do you just look back at history and put everything bad in
> the capitalist category and everything good in the independent
> science/tech one. How do you insure that your ideological
> predisposition doesn't color your enquiry? What guarantees that
> someone that holds the opposite view, like a bourgeois economist
> couldn't just say every thing bad that happens is not capitalism's
> fault but everything good is? Isn't your view just an inversion of the
> neoclassical ideology?
I seriously don't know where you get this moralistic notion about what I'm saying. I'm not saying capitalism is bad or even that everything bad is caused by capitalism: I'm just saying that there is a slim possibility that technological and scientific advances aren't the sole preserve of that mode of production. It's a pretty simple claim, as I made it at the end. If it sounds like I'm making the opposite statement to that of a bourgeois economist, that's probably because I'm arguing with you.
>
> I am not an expert on the English transition so I don't know about
> your specifics. How about we take my example of the development of
> the mechanical reaper in the US. Was it a product of capitalist
> innovation?
I guess so. I don't know anything about the invention (though it's cool of you not to pick the cotton gin). But it would seem the idea of the reaper has been around for centuries. Then two different people on two different continents came up with it within a few years of one another. The first was a priest who didn't patent his invention, which he came up with on his father's farm: instead, according to the free innovation wikipedia, he chose to leave it to benefit all of posterity. The second was a US inventor who seems to have done inventing as a profession. I guess his was more of a product of capitalist innovation, but I still don't know what that means. Both of them lived in what you've termed "the capitalist era of social relations" but one was just fiddling around on his dad's farm and wanted to make it easier; the other was an inventor of sorts (living, its worth noting, in the US south, pre civil war so that's sort of a difficult call).
I can't really say what relationship this has to capitalism per se except to reiterate my point that if the issue is the profit motive pushing people to invent things, I would argue it is definitely a mixed bag here and I don't have nearly enough information. Your point, at least as I understand it, would be that this was invented BECAUSE of capitalism. But it seems more like it was invented BECAUSE two different guys were building on some other innovations at relatively the same time. One of them had some interest in making his life easier (which is how a lot of innovations happen) and another had an interest in making other people's lives easier (and making a buck in the process.) Would we have the mechanical reaper without capitalism: maybe. Is it possible it could have been invented by a priest working on his dad's farm at some other point with some other set of incentives: maybe. Is capitalism therefore responsible for this innovation: I guess you could argue that, but I don't see why it is important to have it as an isolated cause.
> Based on that was it good or bad?
Do you really believe I'm judging innovations based on whether they were invented in "the capitalist era of social relations?" I am increasingly confused as to what you're even arguing. Is it that inventions are generally good and capitalism is responsible for inventions and therefore if I critique capitalism, I critique inventions? I feel like you're having this argument with someone else at this point--maybe some straw man between Alan and myself.
Surely it reduced the
> amount of sweat and child labor involved in the wheat harvest.
Awesome. I guess it also made it less likely that people would need to buy slaves to support the plantation economy of the Southern US at the time. that's swell too.
> However, it also caused indebtedness and led, along with a few other
> things, to the transformation of independent family farmers into petty
> commodity capitalist producers. This them forced them to innovate or
> fail. Some good, some bad. I guess you would have a different
> history of this process.
why would they be forced to innovate or fail? Were all the farmers who used this cash crop farmers? Were all other farmers cash crop farmers? Was it possible to continue to grow food on your land in order to eat or were you forced to produce only for the market and then buy your necessities through the exchange of your crops? Were people who bought the reaper then beholden to the inventor of the machine, having to pay that inventor every year for the privilege of using that machine?
I would love to hear it. I would like to
> know where the reaper came from, including the innovations in pig iron
> need to produce it, the means of transportation to deliver the
> reapers....
Oh this is clever. It is becoming much more apparent what your position is and I'm getting tired of this "I, Pencil" kind of crap. Fine, you win. Capitalism is the best thing since sliced grapes and every third world person that's thrown off their land and forced into dept peonage should thank their lucky stars to (not) be exploited by its (non-existent) industrial revolutions in their home countries. Progress, technology, dildos, etc. "Just wait, guys: you'll see."
> But the generalization of the innovative techniques was surely the
> result of communicative innovations and, in fact, a technological
> innovation itself. No?
In the case I was discussing the communicative innovations in question were things like "writing" and "meetings" and "state coercion." I guess those happen a lot in contemporary capitalism, but I don't see them as being the sole result of that system. Pig iron on the other hand...
> Oh, I think I am quite in line with what Harvey says, at least in
> Limits (which is an excellent example of a dialectical nuanced
> analysis of capitalism, non of this everything is bad stuff...).
oh this is just tiresome.
Alan
> has said some useful stuff and I see, thanks to his critique that I
> don't quite of a good response to the issue of population. So hold
> away.
will do.
> no shit socialized things are different
> than capitalist things. Wow.
yeah. wow. It's difficult to see how this squares with your idea that any innovation that happens in "the capitalist era of social relations" is ipso facto caused by capitalism, but I'll take what I can get .
> By claiming that it is a force of technological change I am not
> dismissing the 'purity of or how determining that mode of production'
> are. I just don't know how you do that. And again, that is what
> bourgeois economics is all about: denying the bad as precapitalist
> remnants and accepting the good as being caused by capitalism. They
> and you are wrong, you take the good, you take the bad, you take them
> both and there you have the fact of capitalism, the facts of
> capitalism.
yeah, if it happened nearby, must have been capitalism. Without capitalism: wouldn't have happened. Best keep it indefinitely. Or...
> Sean:
>> we aren't able to say what causes these things with any finely
> grained analysis, instead simply saying, "if there was capitalism
> within 50 yards (or 50 years) of that innovation, we can reasonably
> claim it as a capitalist innovation"...well this just seems like
> boosterism for the system, full stop. If you don't have an analytical
> way of talking about this--of separating out the capitalist formations
> from the state capitalist formations from the feudal formations--well
> then it seems like a waste of time for anyone other than blowhards
> like Thomas Friedman whose only analytical categories are a Lexus and
> an Olive Tree.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> No it isn't boosterism. I am not saying it just causes good. Your
> theory leaves open the possibility that it only causes good =
> boosterism. You can separate out various roles of different aspects
> at different times and under different eras. But that does not mean
> that innovation comes from somewhere other than were Marx says it does
> under capitalism.
In the current context, it is boosterism since the question is whether the world would have progressed in any possibly way without capitalism or if it might have been possible to have a different kind of social relations attached to the more innovative elements of the productive system: I'm saying it could have been possible to have a different set of juridical and political priorities attached to it--you know, something more socialist--and still produce a modicum of the innovations based solely on the fact that people were working together and generating new ideas.
> Yeah, Brenner is wrong in a lot of ways, so is Wood. That doesn't
> mean everything the ever wrote is wrong. What exactly is your theory
> of technological change under capitalism?
I think Wood is right a lot of the time. And I'm sick of telling you what my theory of tech change is: if you haven't figured it out by now, me saying it again won't help.
> Sean:
>>I don't think it is a problem to support people in
> conserving their livelihood in the present circumstances since I don't
> think there is anything self evident about the idea that pure
> capitalism of the neoliberal variety does anything to produce better
> outcomes for the majority of the people it impacts. It's sort of like
> people who've stuck with XP through multiple "innovations" in the
> windows OS: if switching to a new one would be a disaster, might as
> well hold on to the one that's working relatively well.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> This explains alot. Do you really think that neoliberalism is pure
> capitalism?
it is more like the "pristine culture of capitalism" Wood describes than in the previous era. obviously the state plays a crucial role in this system, but it is supposed to *act* like it doesn't have a role and therefore limit the democratic demands on it in relation to the economy. If you don't think privatization, deregulation, and the removal of capital controls and trade barriers aren't principles associated with capitalism as a mode of production, well then "that explains a lot."
> Do you think that the state is less involved in the
> economy under neoliberalism? Do you think capitalism can exist
> without the state?
Have you stopped beating your wife? These are pedantic (word check please, James) questions.
> I think that you are wrong about whether or not
> neoliberal capitalism has improved some peoples lives, it has. That's
> not boosterism, that's reality.
Oh do tell! I'm excited to find out what they are. Wait, let me guess: is it those people in the top 1% bracket of income in the US? Yeah it's worked out stunningly for them. I guess I was thinking about a few other people benefiting from an economic system, but, hey, I can be demanding.
It has also created huge problems.
> Again you want to hang all the problems on capitalism but none of its
> positive aspects.
Boo hoo, poor capitalism: it can't ever get a break!
This is the mirror image of bourgeois ideologues.
> It is romanticizing of the past and not based in reality. The past
> was not better than the present, we don't want to go back to
> precapitalist social relations, we want socialism.
I didn't say it was better; but I also don't see any reason to romanticize the system as some elegant mechanism when in fact it is a brutal, bloody mess. Do positive things emerge from it? Sure. But does that mean we should somehow romanticize it as a system and say that all good things--all scientific and technological innovation, for instance; all changes to the world food system that make population growth possible, etc.--flow directly from it. Er, no. Or...
> No, I'm not. I'm saying capitalism is not, alone, responsible for
> good things. And to accept the proposition that capitalism, alone, is
> responsible for "good things" is to deny the basic creativity of the
> human species.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> No it isn't denying the basic creativity of the human species. Just
> because capitalism increases innovation does not mean that people
> where not involved. People in a capitalist society are still people
> and in fact, they created and reproduce capitalism and its
> innovations.
yes--capitalism is democratic too. I always knew this about it!
Yes, you are trying to have it both ways: blame
> capitalism for global warming and starvation, but not for innovations
> that have helped people. This is exactly the critique I one could use
> against bourgeois boosters, only inverted.
brad, you're getting a bit annoying. I never blamed capitalism for global warming. I never said a fucking thing about it. I might have mentioned starvation but, hey, that's part of the game. Am I supposed to think it's really swell that, at the same time that millions of people were dying of starvation in India, someone living elsewhere in "capitalist era" invented the mason jar.
Fine. I'm so happy I can have put a lid on my jar: it was definitely worth 30 million dead Indians. My life is so fulfilled because of it.
There is no other social system that could have produced the wonders of the mason jar. All good things I enjoy are only and always the result of the capitalist profit motive adjusting people's incentives so that they will innovate things that will make my life more pleasurable. Only capitalism could have invented such a thing:
http://www.asia.si.edu/collections/zoomObject.cfm?ObjectId=4750
A jar shaped so that it will allow for a screw top to store whatever the fuck I want to in it: damn how many Indians is that worth? I say 30 million is small potatoes. Especially since I can buy as many of them as I want. I can just buy stuff in jars and throw those motherfuckers away it is so cheap. That is awesome and the corpses of 30 million dead Indians are a small price to pay for that kind of luxury.
Happy?
s