Andy,
I have been wondering how, if ever this discussion of Hegel would wend back
to Peter's paper and I think you have brought up a suitable topic for such a
reorientation. The entire symbolic artefact "proletariat" that underlies
"worker's culture" and other notions that seem so out of date nowadays is a
direct product of the industrial society -- the introduction of machinery
into the productive process that Marx analyzed so incisively.
Marx saw (the then) modern industry based on the steam engine as an
indispensable co-condition of the development of capitalist productive
relations in any branch of production. The steam engine replaced physical
power. Hence the image of the proletarian. But what happens when
everything in a given branch of production become totally mechanized?
Capital seeks out new branches of production, branches that have not been
fully subsumed into the sphere of capitalist relations in order to promote
the capitalist organization of production. Such areas might include
medicine and education. But the issue concerns whether the technology now
exists to replace certain kinds of "mental power" that differ quite
importantly from the "physical power" that Watt's steam engine replaced.
But even so, does this change the underlying dynamic?
You say that the transformation of note is the change from devices that
"imitate manual labor" to those that "manipulate the forces of nature" with
purely symbolic code. A couple of things: do you think that there is a
qualitative difference between Watt's manipulation of steam and current
technologies that control forces at the molecular/atomic level or is it
simply quantitative? The steam engine per se didn't "imitate manual labor"
it simply provided a non-human source of energy, specifically physical
force, that was then harnessed (primarily with belts that represented the
near extinction of the american bison) to numerous machines that "imitated
manual labor"--leading of course to the factory system that represented
levels of production that no manual labor could possibly imitate. Wasn't
this the historic subsumption of labor to industrial capital: labor
abstracted from in two ways? Has that changed? Are the forces of nature
being harnessed today different in terms of political economy from the
"natural forces" that were harnessed as forces of capital through the wide
scale application of Watt's steam engine to diverse branches of production.
Perhaps the technology leading to the description of the genome, for
example, will allow the development of techniques of industrial capitalism
(mass production) that will totally penetrate the field of health care,
eliminating increasingly the control of individual producers (ie doctors and
doctors guilds) over the production process, a development of capitalist
relations already prepared for socially through the wide scale penetration
of the health insurance/HMO organization of productive labor in the health
care industries. But this trade off of technologization and the
subordination of the doctors to capital has been going on for a while.
Is there a qualitative difference between the "forces of nature" being
harnessed today and the "force of nature" that Watt's governor allowed
humanity to harness, or just different technologies being developed in
response to the need to continually expand the domain of capitalist
relations of production. (who said that everything couldn't be reduced to
economics? certainly not the capitalists!)
I'm unsure as to whether the proletarianization of "mental labor" will have
the same outcome as the proletarianization of manual labor. I can't see why
not. Could it bring renewed vigor to the struggle against the dominance of
exchange value in our multiple activity systems? I sure hope so.
Paul H. Dillon
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