(1) At the end of her message she asked: "As to our recent story about
gender and technology, can we be more specific about what technologies we
are discussing? "
I raised this issue with reference to the disproportionate representation of
males in advanced computing classes (i.e., computer languages and
network/system design and management) and electronics, specifically the
digital electronics that are the basis of all computer systems. These two
technological areas are the areas that show the greatest gender disparity in
the community colleges I have studied, and I know from reading that this
situation is common everywhere in the U.S. These areas require highly
developed formal, symbolic logic skills as Manna and Waldinger write in "The
Logical Basis for Computer Programming": "A knowledge of logic is becoming a
daily necessity for the computer professional." All of the occupations and
activities you mentioned have little to do with the work of computer
professionals but are comparable to the work performed by the workers in
British textile factories in the early 19th century--they are semi-skilled
occupations requiring little technical understanding of the instruments of
production.
(2) In this context I think the discussion of Luddism is relevant not only
to the way that history gets used ideologically, but also since it provides
a window into one of the most neglected areas of activity theory: the
technical division of labor and its relation to power relations. Kathryn
wrote:
"last week in Vancouver, a
local newspaper ran a column on "de-technologizing" reminding us of who the
Luddites were. They were the technological elites of the weaving artisan
culture, and their destruction of the power looms, which they were
proficient with, was not anti-technological revolt, but as Mary reminds us,
was an early example of organized labour resistance against the
concentrated monopolization of resources, human degradation and physical
mutilation, destruction of local family structures as artisan units and
the ultimate de-skilling of artists/workers as enfleshed machine parts."
I'm not sure where the newspaper in Vancouver got its information but a very
good source for the history of Luddism is found in E.P. Thompson's classic
study "The Making of the English Working Class".
Thompson writes:
"Luddism proper, in the years 1811-17, was confined to three areas and
occupations . . .Of these three groups, the croppers or shearmen were
skilled and privileged workers, among the aristocracy of the woolen workers;
while the weavers and framework-knitters were outworkers, with long artisan
traditions, undergoing a deterioration in status. The croppers come closest
to the Luddites of popular imagination."
It is surely this group to which the newpaper article referred. The
croppers rebellion was in fact centered around resistance to the
introduction of machinery, the gig mill and the shearing frame, that would
mechanize the specific activities that they carried out in the textile
manufacturing process. These machines threatened to change them from the
highest paid, least manageable workers in the industry into "an order of men
not necessary to the manufacture." They did not base their rebellion around
the "resistance against the concentrated monopolization of resources, human
degradation and physical mutilation, destruction of local family structures
as artisan units and the ultimate de-skilling of artists/workers" as the
Vancouver article apparently states. In fact, they appealed to a Statute of
Edward VI (1537-1553) that prohibited the use of the gig-mill on the
grounds that it produced only "the coarsest cloth, tearing and overstraining
the cloth of finer quality." The croppers were defending their privileged
position in the manufacturing process on the basis of appeals to the epoch
of non-manufacturing organizations of production in order to prove the
indispensability of hand skill. They used both parliamentary appeals to
their rights and when these failed they destroyed the machines.
But Thompson points out that the croppers were not the first or the most
important of the three groups for stimulating the Luddism that flowed
directly into the labor reforms of the 1840s. This came from the framework
knitters who worked in truly proletarianized conditions i.e., they
increasingly didn't own their own frames, and were increasingly subordinated
in every respect to capital). But Thompson points out "The greivances of
the stockingers were complex " and demand "a minute attention to the details
of the trade."
Thompson concludes that Luddism must be seen as a resistance on the basis of
the abrogation of rights that derived from paternalist legislation that
prevailed prior to the development of laissez faire political economies. It
was not a self-conscious rebellion of labor against expanding capital; the
development of that consciousness would gestate for 20 years after the
demise of Luddism proper. Their demands looked backwards to the era of
artisan production but "contained within them a shadowy image, not so much
of a paternalist, but of a democratic community, in which industrial growth
should be regulated according to ethical priorities and the pursuit of
profit be subordinated to human needs."
I can't help but feel that this level of examination of the division of
labor in the productive process as it relates to social movements and their
consequences should be more fully examined from an explicit CHAT
perspective; specifically the emergence of computer assisted and computer
directed applications that progressively supplant labor processes that were
previously carried out manually.
The use of such detailed attention as Thompson calls for would certainly
help avoid the vicissitudes of letting ideologies influence our theoretical
understanding of the relationships between the technical division of labor
and the relations of domination/exploitation with which they are associated.
Paul
"Opposition is True Friendship"
-Wm Blake (Muggletonian precursor of the Luddites)