> Somebody: I know it's fun to over-intellectualize matters. However, when it
> comes to technology, the first and foremost question is this: does the
> ensemble of technological developments that comprise what we call progress
> today improve the lot of the greater mass of humanity on balance or not?
>
what's your threshold, mr utilitarian? and what's your standard, mr ethnocentrist? how do you operationalize "on balance"? what's your time frame, mr. surely-technology-will-solve-technology's-contradictions? what's you spatial reference, mr. the-desperate-plight-of-the-increasingly-large-population-of-global-poor-means-little-cuz-they-can-read-and-live-longer-than-their-ancestors?
It must be nice being you.
has the Cold War/USAID/World Bank/Ford Foundation-driven Green Revolution (and doubling down on it with contemporary forms of agbiotech) increased food production enough to counter the utter obliteration of peasantries and once self-sufficient agroecologies around the world? an obliteration coincident with massive displacement, endemic diseases, slumification, the further disempowerment of women, population growth, irreversible soil erosion, mandatory (often historically unnecessary but now necessary) fertilizer applications and the overuse of bioaccumulating pesticides? is it so straightforward to you that "the greater mass of humanity" has had their lives inescapably and sustainably improved by the social technology of private property rights in land, capital and knowledge? I am not anti-science, anti-technology or anti-health, -education or -welfare or even anti-efficiency but your blithe dismissal of the ways that technoscientific production and trajectories are primarily driven in the direction of increasing the efficiency and rate of the turnover time of capital and the intensification of the divergence between a minority of the rich and the majority of the rest of us verges on the irresponsible.
like Woj, you treat technology as if it were a thing - as if forces and relations of (re)production were unrelated, as if cooperation wasn't both a force and relation of production - and attempt a simple, informal, utilitarian, ahistorical and aspatial calculus of positive and negative utiles to determine for yourself whether any critique is worthwhile... staggering for a "leftist".
I'll restate and reformulate a question I asked earlier: how much of your calculation of the improved lot of "the greater mass of humanity" (a phrase as icky as "the Muslim world" as presently bruited about on TV and radio) takes into account the displacement of ecological, health and infrastructural crises in space and time?
If you passively accept the technological imperative capitalists argue for: "Look at all the hungry, sick, uneducated, unskilled, and oppressed people in the world! We have to produce more food, more medicine, more science, more industry and more freedom for these people!" as non-problematic, much less contradictory and self-defeating, it is hard - once again - to figure out what you are doing on this particular list, beyond trolling and provoking. The difference between you and me appears to be that when I approach these kinds of issues (most of the time, and here I am thinking of Doug's quite proper corrective to my overstated positions earlier) I am looking not only at what technologies do, and who they serve, but a) the politics behind what they are designed not to do (or the alternatives to technological solutions) and who they are designed not to serve and b) the ways they feed the production of the very kinds of problems they are superficially intended to solve... you, on the other hand, live in a bizarre realm in between Panglossian optimism and utilitarian pragmatism. The approach I take tends to stimulate critical thought and action, the approach you take tends to generate smug self-satisfaction and political passivity... 'cuz, heck, "technology" has already made the world a better place for the great mass of humanity, it is unimaginable that it won't continue to do so.
> I do get the impression that some on the left resent the idea that the
> working class could possibly achieve a greater degree of happiness without
> having installed a regime in it's own name. The implication to me is that
> most people are really more interested in their own particular political
> means than they are in the ends. As for me, I try as best as I feebly can,
> to focus upon the ends, political implications be damned. The test of right
> and left, capitalist and proletarian is how far they advance the lot of
> mankind. Nothing else in the end matters, not urbane obscurity on a mailing
> list, not political correctness, and not heroic contrariness.
Since you are clearly writing about me, it is very clear that your impression is pre-formed and your capacity to read (as well as focus) rather feeble. Do you have absolutely no sense of how the working class generated the force behind the technological and political mediations that have actually improved the lot of "mankind"? Have you read "The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844"? Have you ever engaged accounts of urban living before Progressivism or wondered (much less read) how much of Progressivism was a very very conservative reaction to the struggles of the working class? Have you ever thought that, maybe, social democracy, occupational safety and health, the forty hour work week, cost of living increases (when they were around), suburbanization, environmental regulations, civil rights legislation, gender equity legislation could be rooted in the actions of the working class? Not everyone here treats the working class as if that category means only unskilled, non-union, industrial and service workers around the world... but it is easier for you to operationalize that impression than to take seriously what people actually right.
I am glad you think I am urbane though you might ask my students if I am politically correct (but then again you'd have to operate on some other level than impressions based on not thinking about what I've written here) and I am no hero (just ask my wife and friends). What I am is critical and rather than obscure, well-prepared in the things I write about... If you think JD Bernal, Radical Science Journal or Science for the People are obscure, that reflects not in the slightest on me but on your willingness to write with supreme self-satisfaction and utterly unfounded confidence about things the history and politics of which you know little or nothing about.
But in any event, keep on focusing on unspecified and uncritically accepted ends while writing about the planet in the most reified and abstract terms ("great mass", "humanity", "ends", "mankind") otherwise you might end up uncomfortable and less snide. Was that insufficiently obscure?