A few veterans of this list will remember me trying to get a book club
started. I suggested reading David Noble's Progress Without People: In
Defense of Luddism. Noble argues that luddites smashed machines because
their children were starving. Would you do likewise? I heard a women on
T.V. last night, a protestor in Seattle, worrying about feeding her
children. She lost her job because of downsizing, globalization, WTO ...
blah, blah, blah
Noble's an interesting academic. He gets fired because of what he writes,
says and does. Here is a brief bio.
Brian McAndrews
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Progress Without People
By: Russell Mokhiber
January 4, 1999
MIT Professor Noam Chomsky makes the point that if you serve power, power
rewards you with respectability. If you
work to undermine power, whether by political analysis or moral critique,
you are "reviled, imprisoned, driven into the
desert."
"It's as close to a historical truism as you can find," Chomsky says.
Let's test Chomsky's theory of power and respectability with the case of
David Noble.
Noble is a historian of corporate control over our lives and institutions -
-- from technology to universities.
Forces of Production (Knopf, 1984), for example, is a detailed history of
the automation of the metalworking industry. In
that book, Noble shows how technology, in its design and deployment,
reflects class and power relations between
workers and owners.
Noble started out his academic career in 1978 at MIT. His first book,
America by Design (Knopf, 1977), focused on the
rise of the science-based industries, the electrical and chemical industry,
and how universities essentially became corporate
research centers for these new industries.
Noble believed that corporations should be kept off of university campuses.
In the late 1970s, he wrote a series of articles
for the Nation magazine, including two classics, "Ivory Tower Goes Plastic"
and "Business Goes Back to College."
Then in the early 1980s, Noble wrote a series of articles in praise of
Luddism for the now defunct journal Democracy.
(That series has since been pulled together in book form (Progress Without
People, Between the Lines Press, Toronto,
1995).
In addition, while at MIT, he teamed up with Ralph Nader and Al Meyerhoff
and started an organization called the
National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest.
MIT, a model of education in the corporate interest, was not pleased. In
1983, MIT fired Noble.
"It was a political firing," Noble told us. "I sued MIT in 1986." After
five years of litigation, Noble forced MIT to make
public the documents shedding light on the firing.
"I got all of the documents and turned them over to the American Historical
Association, which then reviewed them for a
year and then condemned MIT for the firing," Noble said.
Next stop: Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian wanted Noble to be a
curator for an exhibit on automated
technology. Noble went to Washington for two years and produced an exhibit
highly critical of technology. He includes a
hammer used by the Luddites in the 1800s to smash machines in England.
George Lucas donates robots R2D2 and C3PO
from the first Star Wars movie. Noble calls the exhibit "Automation
Madness: Boys and Their Toys," in which he
documents a history of resistance to automation beginning in the 1800s. Not
what the Smithsonian had in mind. They too
fired Noble.
Most people think that the Smithsonian is a public institution. It started
out that way, but has slowly been taken over by
big corporate interests.
When Noble arrived at the Smithsonian in 1983, he figured he would have a
budget to work on projects. No such luck.
"What I had to do was go out and hustle -- to the National Association of
Manufacturers, to the Chamber of Commerce, to
various companies, to get money to put on exhibits," Noble said. "At that
time, the fundraiser for the National Museum of
American History was the wife of the president of the National Association
of Manufacturers."
Noble then spent five years at Drexel -- protected with tenure -- and then
headed North to the University of York at
Toronto, where he is also protected by tenure.
Noble doesn't use e-mail or the Internet, but last year after The Nation
magazine turned down an article he wrote called
"Digital Diploma Mills," he published it and two subsequent pieces on the
Internet . The articles describe how
corporations are using digital technologies to gain control over university
course content.
He believes that the Internet can be a useful way to disseminate
information, but not to teach students.
"You can't educate over the Internet, because education is an interpersonal
process," he says.
And he laughs when asked whether the Internet will level the playing field
between activists and their corporate
adversaries.
"Have you noticed that -- any leveling the playing field?" he asked
incredulously "Wake me when it is over. It is a joke."
"The key thing about organizing is trust," he says. "You have to have
relations with people, especially if you are asking
people to put themselves on the line in any way. There is no real way of
establishing that over the Internet."
Whether Noble continues to get into trouble with the masters of the
Internet or universities, depends on whether he
changes course mid-life and decides he wants some respect from the powers
that be.
Looks like Chomsky is right again.
Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the
Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor.
Analysis
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