----- Original Message -----
From: Bruce Podobnik <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Sunday, November 28, 1999 12:17 PM
Subject: NYT on the Future
> You may find this editorial from the New York Times interesting.
> It addresses Marxism, Gandhi, and forecasts of the future.
>
> The Next Big Dialectic
> New York Times Editorial
> November 28, 1999
>
> By KURT ANDERSEN
>
> At this end of this century, as we bask happily and stupidly in the glow
> of
> our absolute capitalist triumph, no long-range historical forecasters
> are
> considered more insanely wrong-headed than Karl Marx and Friedrich
> Engels. Yet the death of Communism makes this moment a fine one to
> consider the emergence of Marxism 150 years ago as a historical
> phenomenon, economically determined, rather than as the social and
> moral debacle it became. In fact, looking back, Marx and Engels seem
> prescient about the capitalist transformation of life and work. Writing
> about globalization in "Principles of Communism" in 1847, Engels sounds
> very 1999.
> "A new machine invented in England deprives millions of Chinese
> workers of their livelihood within a year's time," he wrote. "In this
> way,
> big industry has brought all the people of the earth into contact with
> each
> other, has merged all local markets into one world market, has spread
> civilization and progress everywhere and has thus ensured that whatever
> happens in civilized countries will have repercussions in all other
> countries."
> In "Das Kapital," Marx also foretold the present cyber-age, in which
>
> computers design toasters and skyscrapers, and software is designed by
> other software: "Modern industry had therefore itself to take in hand
> the
> machine, its characteristic instrument of production, and to construct
> machines by machines. . . . Machinery, simultaneously with the
> increasing
> use of it . . . appropriated, by degrees, the fabrication of machines
> proper."
> Marx and Engels were right in the middle of the transformation. Just
> before their births, during the final years of the 18th century, a
> handful of
> machinists and tinkerers -- John Wilkinson, Richard Arkwright, Eli
> Whitney, a few others -- had ignited the Industrial Revolution with
> their
> amazing devices to cut screws, pump water, spin wool and gin cotton.
> Those machines, hitched to James Watt's steam engine, begat factories
> and steamships and railroads, which begat industrial capitalism on a
> frenzied new global scale, which, just a half century after the first
> revolutionary mechanical marvels, begat Marx.
> Now, during the final years of the 20th century, a handful of
> scientists and
> tinkerers -- William Shockley, Jack Kilby, Robert Noyce, Jim Clark,
> Tim Berners-Lee, a few others -- have ignited the current technological
> revolution with their amazing new devices: the transistor, the
> integrated
> circuit, the microcomputer, the World Wide Web. The PC and the
> Internet begat a new fluidity of capital and information, which is
> begetting
> postindustrial capitalism on a frenzied new global scale, which will
> surely
> beget some radical and infectious critique of this radically new order.
> In other words, the 21st century will have its Marx. This next great
>
> challenger of the governing ideological paradigm, this hypothetical
> cyber-Marx, is one of our children or grandchildren or
> great-grandchildren, and he or she could appear in Shandong Province
> or Cairo or San Bernardino County. By 2100, give or take a couple of
> decades, it's a good bet that free-market, private-property capitalism
> will
> be under siege once again, shaken as in 1848 and 1917 and the 1930's
> by the tremors that the magnificent and ferocious system itself
> unleashes.
> History does not always repeat itself, but as Mark Twain may have said,
> it rhymes.
> What will this next great "ism" look like?
> The ascendant revolutionary ideology of 2100 won't be Luddite.
> Theodore Kaczynski was the Ned Lud of this cycle, an angry, violent
> lunatic of no real historical significance. Marx, for his part, was not
> opposed to the new technology of the Industrial Revolution -- it was the
>
> steam-powered weaving machines and railroads and all the rest that were
> going to allow his collectivist utopia to emerge.
> In "Das Kapital," he wrote that "improved communications" had been
> the
> key to increased productivity and prosperity, that the "last 50 years
> have
> brought about a revolution in this field . . . the entire globe is being
> girdled
> by telegraph wires . . . the time of circulation of a shipment of
> commodities to East Asia, at least 12 months in 1847, has now been
> reduced to almost as many weeks . . . and the efficacy of the capital
> involved in it has been more than doubled or trebled." It seems
> improbable that the next great world-historical agitator will demonize
> technology qua technology.
> The poor are always with us. The unequal distribution, among nations
> and classes, of digital resources -- hardware, software, communications
> bandwidth -- will help shape the early versions of the revolutionary
> ideology. Today's self-justifying optimists in Redmond and Silicon
> Valley
> claim that the price of computers and telecommunications will continue
> to
> fall to the point that everyone on earth, rich and poor, will share in
> the
> millennial bounty. Maybe. Eventually. But for the next couple of decades
>
> it's going to be ugly as the computer-rich get much richer and the
> computer-poor even poorer.
> The present money moment won't last. As the digital age finally has
> its
> first and second (and third and fourth and fifth) financial busts over
> the
> next half-century, the particular magic spell of circa-2000
> laissez-faire
> hyper-capitalism will be broken. The computer revolution won't be
> turned back, but the financial giddiness will subside.
> On this classic economic idea, late-20th-century Wall Street bears
> and
> 19th-century communist pioneers agree. "Ever since the beginning of this
>
> century," Engels wrote, "the condition of industry has constantly
> fluctuated between periods of prosperity and periods of crisis; nearly
> every five to seven years, a fresh crisis has intervened, always with
> the
> greatest hardship for workers." After a few periods of serious
> 21st-century hardship, with I.R.A.'s and 401(k)'s reduced in value by
> half overnight, alternative social and economic arrangements might not
> seem so preposterous.
> The great new philosophical and political schism of the 21st century
>
> will concern computers and their status as creatures rather than
> machines. In my lifetime, the sentimental regard for computers' apparent
>
> intelligence -- their dignity -- will resemble that now accorded
> gorillas
> and chimps. And it will not stop there. In his book, "The Age of
> Spiritual
> Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence," Ray Kurzweil,
> the computer scientist, quite convincingly predicts that around 2030
> computers will begin to seem sentient -- that they will "claim to be
> conscious." And by the end of the century, he writes, there will no
> longer
> be "any clear distinction between humans and computers."
> I find his scenario altogether plausible. And as it unfolds, I am
> certain that
> this astonishing new circumstance -- machines that think, machines that
> feel -- will provoke political and religious struggles at least as
> profound
> and ferocious as the earlier wars over Christianity, human rights and
> abortion. A machine-liberationist movement will arise. And by 2100, the
> 21st century will have its Gandhi, too.
>
> Kurt Andersen is the author of "Turn of the Century," a novel.
>
