Although others have weighed in as well, I’d like to stick for a minute with the original interchange between Carrol Cox (CC) and SA on the role played by a highly-developed/complex division-of-labor – rather than other aspects of capitalism – in social processes “operating independently of human will.” A summary of their interchange thus far:
CC: Capitalism operates independently of human will because of its specific social-institutional features.
SA: Capitalism operates as such not b/c its social relations but b/c of a “large-scale division of labor,” and “any society with a large-scale division of labor will find itself vulnerable to processes independent of will.” (Why this is so is explained shortly.)
CC: We need to distinguish between a “social” and a “technical” division of labor. The former we need to overcome; perhaps we can’t and if so we’re fucked.
SA: The kind of division of labor that is relevant to this issue is “technical” not social. It is one where production requires input of thousands of people far too separated to directly coordinate among themselves. That sort of division obtains today and must for “technical” reasons that “eliminate the possibility of face-to-face coordination.” And thus “technical division of labor would have to be abolished to eliminate the independent-of-will phenomenon.” The reasoning for this comes, to roughly, that the technical complexity of modern production involves such a high number of people and decisions that it is simply inconceivable to imagine direct democratic coordination. And thus, their resolution will be “independent of the will of most people.”
It seems to me that a number of important ideas are being run together in the above, which require careful separation, revolving around three concepts which are related to each other and contain within them a series of important distinctions: (A) alienation of human power/agency, which is reduced/overcome to the extent to which central features of social organization are the result of conscious human/social purpose; (B) “cognitive” alienation, which is reduced the extent to which social relations are “transparent” to the individuals enmeshed within them and, perhaps, the extent to which the “built environment” is comprehensible rather than opaque to the individuals inhabiting it; (C) alienation of persons from persons, which is reduced the extent to which social-relations don’t embody structural antagonisms, so that while conflicts between persons no doubt continue to arise, there are not deep and persistent ones that necessarily generated by contradictory interests rooted in social roles. There are other alienations relevant to Marx’s critique of capitalist markets, but these seem to be the other relevant here and, in particular, to the issues raised by potentially problematic “social” and “technical” divisions of labor.
Now it seems to me that (A) is what is primarily at issue here, but that it is getting conflated here with issues closer to (B) and (C). That is, of the various things that may be meant by the notion of society “operating independently of human will,” I assume that both CC and SA mean to refer to something like the following: “central features/dynamics of the organization of social life result from processes over which no person or group of persons has conscious control, in the sense of being the result of their reflection, deliberation and coordinated actions.” In other words, regarding central features of the world that are in fact comprised of human action, there is an absence of “conscious human/social purpose” and this is a bad thing.
If I am right in my assumption of what CC and SS primarily mean, then I think the primary reason this kind of alienation of social powers under capitalism is a problem is that the mechanisms which centrally determine the pace and direction of our “interchange with nature” and our needs – i.e., how much we collectively work to satisfy consumption needs versus engage in activity to satisfy needs for fulfilling work, social recognition, etc. vs pure leisure; what is the overall large-scale composition of our productive output; who gets what? – these are determined “behind our backs” so that we become the playthings of alien forces. In other words, subjecting issues like the following to some kind of social-deliberative process is the key aim of disalienation in this dimension: hey everyone, last year we increased productive capacity by 5% - how much should that go to increased output of the current composition of products, vs exploration of new possible products vs a leisure dividend vs a green dividend, etc.? And for that to happen does not require attenuating much if at all current technical or social divisions of labor at the production-process level. Rather, it means taking macro-allocative and distributive questions out of determination by the market while leaving open a wide variety of possible roles for the market in other ways, not to mention leaving in place a highly complex division of labor. Having said that, we may well have other grounds for reducing the degree to which people are slotted in particularly drudgerous or order-taking roles in any social division of labor, or too one-sided in the capacities that their work life develops. Or increasing the extent to which social production processes and outputs are cognitively accessible to people more widely. But those are somewhat different issues, I think. Nelson Goodman
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