He didn't blame that on the managerial class - quite the opposite, actually. He considered capitalism - and its increases in productivity - a necessary historical step towards full Communism, which to him meant the state becoming superfluous and man only working out of his own free accord, dissolving the division of labor.
The core bit translated to English:[In full Communism I shall be able to] hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening, critique after dinner as I please, without ever becoming a hunter, fisherman, cattle herder, or critic by trade.
After you've found a proper translation of this and read it, you'll note that he is indeed imagining a state without work not motivated by pleasure, ie what today we would call a post-scarcity society. The presence or absence of computers is a triviality.
I am well aware of Marx's theory of historical progression, but that's not what we were discussing. The question was whether or not Marx could meaningfully conceive of automation post-scarcity, at this point being compared with both the utopian socialist communes and Marx's own "scientific" views of what life would be like once the state has withered away.
The presence of computers changes
every dynamic here. Obviously everybody and their comrade has their own imagination of what Marx subjectively felt the experience of Communist living was, but the things he actually wrote were about the liberation of labor. The managerial class exists to ensure the bourgeoisie can retain effective control over the means of production, as any labor lacking this would rapidly turn against the owners of capital by exposing their place as the sole beneficiaries of their labor. By contrast an automatic system has no human labor at all, or while being developed rapidly diminishing capacity for labor.
And so, to get us on track here, my point is that Marx wouldn't have considered a non-human system as an approach because that's impossible. His entire theory of labor relies upon human participation, as you can see in Max's quote from him regarding the "conscious linkage" that workers provide to machinery. It's a paradigm of technology we had not yet reached even in foresight. This can also be seen in others. 1984, Brave New World, The Iron Heel, all of these relied upon the
suppression of humanity because the upper class still needed the labor of the working class. Only once you establish the modern idea of the automaton in computers does it become clear that computers can perform the labor of humans better than humans do.
Non-sequitur? Hardly. 95% of what's floating around today as political and economical thought on the left is either not thought at all, or of a highly utopian type. Prove me wrong: Show me one alternative economic system for a full-blown industrial society - and yes, that's what Marxian Socialism and Communism were supposed to be - that isn't passé or just composed of wishful thinking.
It's still a non-sequitur because that's not what we were talking about. And given what you said up above about "no work not motivated by pleasure" in Communism, I don't see how that isn't wishful thinking either.
I have my own ideas about what the future of economy should be, but that'd be going way outside the margins here.
That's where the Left's weakness is coming from: No ideological backbone! No framework to work in! No vigorous new concepts that want to meet their baptism of fire! Instead there's a cult of personality, ideas that in Europe were implemented around the time my parents were born or even earlier, and millions of bright folks lapping this up as 'a revolution'. And they're abusing the word 'socialist', to boot! That's an attack on the clarity of language - and clarity of language is one of the very few things that are holy* to me, right up there with my family, beer, good food, and being able to talk shit about whatever I like, as long as I've got a point. It's disgusting to me on a very fundamental level. If they all got off their asses and dug into their philosophy and econ and sociology and history textbooks, I probably still wouldn't agree with them - but hell, at least there'd be something to talk - and think! - about!
*I'm completely serious about this, by the way. An attack on the clarity of language is an attack on communication itself, and thus on the existence of mankind as anything more than a mass of lumps of flesh.
Since you mentioned the American left in the ramp-up to this, I assume that's what you're talking about. I also wish it to be recognized that this is a new discussion and has nothing to do with what we were talking about re:could Marx think of modern automation.
Fact is man, you don't have the monopoly on language. All the socialist parties of Europe aren't participating much in revolutionary struggle, so it's every bit as legitimate for them to drift as it was for American political thought to drift in a different way. Socialism for Americans, in a general sense, is joined at the hip with social liberalism and the establishment of government policy to support the working class. I know you don't agree with that, but it really doesn't matter, no more than it matters when Brazilians say they should be called Americans too because they live on the American continent. The functional definition is the end-all.
And as someone who's lived in this time, trust me, the American left may have problems but it's sewn itself back together from Reagan and Triangulation about as fast as possible. Most people would be happy to do better than emulating other nations improvements in healthcare and education, but that's plain just not possible most of the time. You kind of have to, you know, win. Everybody wants a new method, which is itself a great accomplishment. It wasn't set in stone that the new generation was going to go astray from all being miniaturized randroids.
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Topic: The Unpopular/Controversial Ideas Thread. (Read 81810 times)