====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
>> It is only those technologies that can be employed responsibly and for the benefit of all the living species, which can save the earth from the impending environmental catastrophe. To conclude, technologies have to be always looked at in proper social context. All this might sound familiar and repetitive to many comrades, but I would like to highlight the fact that we in the poorer nations look at technology more or less in the way described above. << Vijaya Kumar Marla Comment The state of the United States of North America is the basic organ of violence in the hands of our imperialist bourgeoisie. Our state is the international hangmen of revolution and the enemy of the people of earth. The advanced capitalist countries have forever lived at the expense of and mired the majority of humanity in slavery, poverty, colonial genocide and wars of extermination. Some support this state of affairs. Revolutionaries do not. I agree . . . . "There can be no worldwide social revolution, unless it involves this vast majority." Without question the "World poor . . . will see their real emancipation as and when a revolution occurs." "Real emancipation" - a wonderful expression, or "final emancipation" is bounded by and expressed on the basis of the development or evolution of the division of labor. The signpost riveting and defining "real emancipation" as a material force is to be found in the material factors of production or what Marx describes as ending the "enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor." Political emancipation cannot transcend the boundary manifesting the division of labor in society. The Soviet workers won their political emancipation in 1917. Then the real struggle for emancipation began. The standpoint of the material power of productive forces is my preferred lens and preferred narrative. although I do love real time narrative of unfolding struggles. During the epoch of domination of bourgeois property, qualitative changes in the technology regime EMBED within means of production; embed within commodities; embed within services and distribution chains are by definition deployed to benefit capital reproduction, or the bourgeoisie as ruling class. Thus, I agree that means of production (with their embed technology) are deployed on the basis of reproduction of capital and serve to create an expanded value at the expense of the human and the life of the earth. Yes, the bourgeois power has widened the metabolic breach (environmental terrorism by the bourgeois power). II. The automobile industry in India and most certainly China and South Korea, is being built up based on a new technology regime, post 1970. The technology clusters embed in an automobile produced in 2010 is different from the technology clusters deployed in the automobile produced in Henry Ford's 1914 factory. In this way of looking at matters, the automobile is not a technology but a complex machine embed with a distinct technology. How automotive production and transportation systems are applied in India is important and worthy of a separate discussion, possibly under the heading "world automotive production," and the fallacy of developing "auto" as the engine of industrial growth and development in the era of electronics. On the level of systems (distinct primary mode of production) new classes, new class fragments and new forms of classes are constituted (arise) based on (through) the introduction of qualitatively new productive equipment. That is, by the reorganization of the production of the means of life. One way or another, qualitatively new means of production express a more robust (efficient) form of deployed energy as measured on a continuum that begins with the individual human body/human energy and simple instruments. In America we are two generations removed from the sharecropper as a concrete expression of class and one generation removed from the industrial worker of the front curve of Fordism. What set the stage for the destruction of the sharecropper as a class and the small family farm was mechanization of agriculture and growth of industrial production. The sharecropper was emancipated by mechanization or rather mechanization of agriculture was the condition for the emancipation of the sharecropping class. The industrial form of the working class created on the basis of Fordism has been displaced by a new kind of worker living out their live activity in a regime of advanced robotics and computerized systems. This process of displacement is the essence of social revolution. III. "Real Emancipation" is bound up with development of means of production. To state such is to open oneself to accusations of denying the subjective aspect of human life and political tasks. In my mothers generation the washing machine did more to emancipate women than a thousand proclamations and the Equal Rights Amendment. In a maturing bourgeois society the value content of women labor is expressed in and realized through her dependence on the male producer/consumer. Not all women without exception but most certainly millions of proletarian women - as a class/caste, outside the direct production of commodities. Someone had to wash the clothes, which in less developed countries continue to take up an inordinate amount of the life activity of women. Someone has to cook so the microwave becomes another device/machine in overcoming women's enslaving subordination to the division of labor. The serf achieved his final emancipation by through the destruction of everything that made him a serf in the first place. Serf is simultaneously a property description and state of development of means of production, as these means are deployed. Real emancipation involves being kicked out of a historically evolved social position in a division of labor, which cast one as individual/class. No different with the proletariat born of the industrial epoch. In fact we are witnessing this process in real time. Can Technology Bring on a World Wide Social Revolution? Nothing else within the field of human relations brings on social revolution other than qualitative changes in the means of production or the emergence of a new technology regime. A new technology regime compels society to reorganize itself around the new means of production. The new technology regime gives rise to new classes or new forms of classes and ushers in a new division of labor in the technical means of the material building blocks and in the social sense of property. Now that the new social revolution is well underway, our political task and line of march is along the path of the revolution in the means of production. WL ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
