Well, I do have thoughts, as we all do I imagine, on how this change in the
nature of the labour process forces us to re-read _Captial_ and gives new
force to the need to reject stereotypical "workerist" conceptions. My own
thoughts are in gestation at http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/cap&lab.htm -
before I got re-absorbed in hegel, ...
but what I had in mind in my post was this issue of production of "models"
all of which miss the materiality of human social life, while this
life-process itself creates material things which express humanity (i.e.
the tools we use), ... and intelletuals then pick up these products and
call them "models". i.e, the Watt'sovernor was a product of a certain type
of society, before sopmeone picked it up (so to speak) to use as a "model"
of the thinking of that type of society. Meanwhile, we collectively have
made a "more perfect" model.
Andy
At 00:29 26/06/2000 -0700, you wrote:
>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"worker's culture" and other notions that seem so out of date nowadays is a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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