[P2P-F] technology-science, universal labour, general intellect, class war, information (was: Internet Social Forum)

[Orsan]

Quote below from 1999, N. Dyer-Witheford's Cyber-Marx (pp. 3-7), is more then worth to recall here:

"Marx and Babbage

To establish some of the issues and conflicts central to this study it may be useful for a moment to look back in the past, to the `actual' Babbage and Marx. In fact, the  opposition between Babbage--capitalist-computer-savant--and Marx--insurrectionary revolutionary--which Gibson and Sterling propose is well founded in the historical archive. Although Babbage's pioneer attempts to develop machine intelligence collapsed, partly because of the limits of 19th century engineering, partly because of his managerial conflicts with the craft-workers crucial to the production of the "engines," his influence was far in excess of that normally associated with a failed inventor. As Simon Schaffer has recently shown, Babbage was an eminent member of a coterie of radical utilitarian thinkers, including such figures as the political economist Andrew Ure, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham and his brother Samuel, and industrialists such as Marc Brunel and Henry Maudsley, all dedicated to the scientific organisation of a nascent industrial capitalism.3

Indeed, Babbage himself wrote a book in this tradition of Ricardian political economy --- On The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures--which in its argument for the deskilling and fragmentation of labour is now recognised as anticipating Frederick Taylor's system of "scientific management."4 Babbage's search for mechanical means to automate labour--both manual and mental--were the logical extension of the desire to reduce and eventually eliminate from production a human factor whose presence could only appear to the new industrialists as a source of constant indiscipline, error and menace. And this in turn was only part of wider project of industrial planning which foresaw the society-wide mobilisation of theoretical knowledge in the service of manufacture, overseen by a "new class of managerial analysts," such as Babbage himself, who would become "the supreme legislators of social welfare" and be rewarded with "newfangled life peerages and political power."5 In such schemes, the mechanical maximisation of capitalist profit mercifully coincided with the highest theological aspirations, for Babbage believed that, "machine intelligence was all that was needed to understand and model the rule of God, whether based on the miraculous works of the Supreme Intelligence or on his promise of an afterlife."6

Marx, Babbage's contemporary, read his work. And what he found in its pages was not evidence of the ineluctable march of progress, or an approach to divine wisdom, but a strategy of class war. Writing in London, within living memory of the Luddite revolts that had seen hundreds hanged or transported and vast sections of England subject to martial law, Marx analysed the introduction of machinofacture as a means by which the bourgeoisie strove to subjugate a recalcitrant proletariat. He alludes to Babbage's writings in the great chapter of Capital --"Machinery and Large Scale Industry"--where he describes how the factory owners' relentless transfer of workers' skills into technological systems gives class conflict the form of a "struggle between worker and machine."7 He cites, as evidence of the political economist's technological strategy, the work of Babbage's colleague, Ure, who in the conclusion to his 1835 The Philosophy of Manufactures declared "when capital enlists science into her service, the refractory hand of labour will always be taught docility."8 "It would be possible" Marx observes, "to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working class revolt."9

Later, in a section of volume three of Capital entitled "Economy Through Inventions," Marx again footnotes Babbage. Commenting on capital's ever-increasing use of machines, he notes that "mechanical and chemical discoveries" are actually the result of a social co-operative process that he calls "universal labour":

Universal labour is all scientific work, all discovery and invention. It is brought about partly by the co-operation of men now living, but partly also by building on earlier work.10

The fruits of this collective project are, Marx argues, generally appropriated by the "most worthless and wretched kind of money-capitalists."11 But the ultimate source of their profit is the "new developments of the universal labour of the human spirit and their social applications by combined labour."12

Marx had already discussed this tension between the social nature of technoscientific development and its private expropriation by capital--in the final pages of the notebooks for Capital, the Grundrisse. Here, he again makes passing reference to Babbage as, in some of the most volcanically brilliant of all Marx's writing, he foretells the future technological trajectory of capitalism.13 At a certain point, Marx predicts, capital's drive to dominate living labour through machinery will mean that "the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed" than on "the general state of science and on the progress of technology."14 The key factor in production will become the social knowledge necessary for technoscientific innovation-- "general intellect."15

Marx points in particular to two technological systems whose full development will mark the era of "general intellect"--automatic machinery, which, he predicts, will all but eliminate workers from the factory floor, and the global networks of transport and consolidation binding together the world market. With these innovations, Marx says, capital will appear to attain an unassailable pinnacle of technoscientific power. However- -and this is the whole point of Marx's analysis--inside this bourgeois dream lie the seeds of  a bourgeois nightmare. For by setting in motion the powers of scientific knowledge and social co-operation capital undermines the basis of its own rule. Automation, by massively reducing the need for labour, will subvert the wage relations--the basic institution of capitalist society. And the profoundly social qualities of the new technoscientific systems-- so dependent for their invention and operation on forms of collective, communicative, co- operation--will overflow the parameters of private property. The more technoscience is applied to production, the less sustainable will become the attachment of income to labour and the containment of creativity within the commodity form. In the era of general intellect "capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production."16

Babbage and Marx were alike prophets of today's information society. But their prophecies are radically opposed--one promising the technoscientific consolidation of market relations, the other the dissolution of that rule. Both spoke, as befits nineteenth century men of science, in tones of confident certainty. After the catastrophes and surprises of the twentieth century, such teleological certainty should no longer be available to any one. Nevertheless, the predictions of both Babbage and Marx are alive and well today, present as vectors of struggle, antagonistic potentialities meeting in a collision that I term `the contest for general intellect.'

But surely this must be a joke? Are not Marx and Marxism now so thoroughly discredited, so fatally consigned to the dustbin of a history which has itself been dispatched to postmodernist on-screen trash-cans, that any attempt to re-invoke their memory can only be an exercise in speculative dreaming or historical nostalgia? Since Marxism, assailed from all quarters, is generally deemed to have died the death of a thousand cuts it is important, at the very outset, to take difference with this prevailing view." 


O.

> On 19 jun. 2015, at 10:58, peter waterman <peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Woops! I originally addressed this only to Michel. Pls forward to anyone I may have missed out!
> 
> P
> 
> 2014. From Coldwar Communism to the Global Justice Movement: Itinerary of a Long-Distance Internationalist. http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/from_coldwar_communism _to_the_global_emancipatory_movement/ (Free). 
> 2014. Interface Journal Special (Co-Editor), December 2014. 'Social Movement Internationalisms'. (Free).
> 2014. 'The Networked Internationalism of Labour's Others', in Jai Sen (ed), Peter Waterman (co-ed), The Movement of Movements: Struggles for Other Worlds  (Part I). (10 Euros).
> 2012. EBook: Recovering Internationalism.  [A compilation of papers from the new millenium. Now free in two download formats]
> 2013. EBook (co-editor), February 2013: World Social Forum: Critical Explorations http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/
> 2012. Interface Journal Special (co-editor), November 2012: For the Global Emancipation of Labour 
> 2005-? Ongoing. Blog: http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.???. Needed: a Global Labour Charter Movement (2005-Now!)
> 2011. Under, Against, Beyond: Labour and Social Movements Confront a Globalised, Informatised Capitalism (2011) (c. 1,000 pages of Working Papers, free, from the 1980's-90's).
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: peter waterman <peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com>
> Date: Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 10:56 AM
> Subject: Re: [NetworkedLabour] Internet Social Forum
> To: Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>
> 
> 
> My two-cents worth in this exchange:
> 
> Whereas it may not be only technology that defines us as human, it is the case that the subtraction of technology would return us to the stone age.
> 
> I repeat a quote from the US left feminist, Donna Haraway, 'I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess'. 
> 
> I have not re-read Haraway since her 'Cyborg Manifesto' first came to my notice, a couple of decades ago. But it should surely be a point of reference for any serious consideration of ICT and social emancipation. It can be found here:
> 
> http://www.egs.edu/faculty/donna-haraway/articles/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto/
> 
> Best,
> 
> P
> 
> 2014. From Coldwar Communism to the Global Justice Movement: Itinerary of a Long-Distance Internationalist. http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/from_coldwar_communism _to_the_global_emancipatory_movement/ (Free). 
> 2014. Interface Journal Special (Co-Editor), December 2014. 'Social Movement Internationalisms'. (Free).
> 2014. 'The Networked Internationalism of Labour's Others', in Jai Sen (ed), Peter Waterman (co-ed), The Movement of Movements: Struggles for Other Worlds  (Part I). (10 Euros).
> 2012. EBook: Recovering Internationalism.  [A compilation of papers from the new millenium. Now free in two download formats]
> 2013. EBook (co-editor), February 2013: World Social Forum: Critical Explorations http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/
> 2012. Interface Journal Special (co-editor), November 2012: For the Global Emancipation of Labour 
> 2005-? Ongoing. Blog: http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.???. Needed: a Global Labour Charter Movement (2005-Now!)
> 2011. Under, Against, Beyond: Labour and Social Movements Confront a Globalised, Informatised Capitalism (2011) (c. 1,000 pages of Working Papers, free, from the 1980's-90's).
> 
>>> On Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 9:30 AM, Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 11:25 AM, Ariel Salleh <arielsalleh7 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Michel, it is profoundly telling that you believe ”the use of technology is what defines being human”.
>> 
>> yes indeed, I don't think that before the use of stone tools, humanity was that different from other primates .. many other animals use tools, but none develop it so crucially as humanity, hence, the absurdity of 'anti-technology' stances, as the discussion can only be, 'what technology, and for whom'. One legitimate stance is to 'halt' technology (more or less), as a conscious choice, to protect community for example, as with the Amish. Or to actively return to a earlier stage, as the neoprimitivists want, and while it is true some of them (john zerzan I believe)  see the 'original fall' in the technology of language, it seems to me a very absurd proposition to attempt to abolish it.
>> 
>> Michel
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org  
>> 
>> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net 
>> 
>> Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>> 
>> #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
> 
> 
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