G'day Penners,
Got some bloody good posts out of my attempt to get a thread going here -
so I'm going to push my luck.
Let's go, for a speculative moment, with the discontinuity line. A new
complex of social relations is coming into being as exchange-focussed
enterprise shifts the balance of its energy from goods to ever more
commodified information. As Morris-Suzuki has it, automation shifts the
variable capital component from the floor to the office (and I'd like a
discussion on the potential information has to qualify as something other
than constant capital too), new firms come in to flog new design and
software to extant firms, and much more department 2 information too (ie.
not only more, but more of it commodified).
In so much of this shift, we see the capitalist benefitting from socially
produced information (as knowledges already inculcated in workers) - it
comes almost gratis, yet manifests as commodities. The bigger a 'producer'
you are, the more you stand to gain from either a fixed quid's worth of
intellectual labour, or, for now at least, the 'free good' info that is
still there for the taking. Morris-Suzuki suggests (a) be aware the age of
'information capitalism' is upon us; and (b) be aware modes of exploitation
are being transformed, effectively relocating us in a qualitatively new
complex of social relationships.
Some points that strike me straight away - as I lapse ever further down the
road of grand speculation) are:
1. intellectual workers will have to be given more autonomy (ie less
taylorisation') so that the capitalist can benefit from cooperation among
workers - this creates a great cleavage in the proletariat (industrial v.
information prols), makes planning difficult for managers, and puts
Galbraith's 'technostructure' thesis at the head of the queue of 'ways we
might qualify Marx'.
2. Some of you may have heard me speculate elsewhere that the
international trade of information (reproducible at costs approaching zero
- testing old-fashioned surplus value calculations to the limit?) for real
old-fashioned OCC commodities (primary and secondary stuff) exacerbates
core/periphery differentials, intensifies underconsumption potentials viz
the third world, and will put first world farmers and small industrial
capitalists out of the picture (why support 'em when their numbers are
diminishing 'em as a political force and third world goodies cost next to
nothing?)
3. A politicised first world lumpen proletariat is forming, able to sell
their labour only in areas where cheap imports can't compete (real lawn
mowing, real blow jobs, real house cleaning - and in the USA, you've always
got the wetbacks for even these chores), without the economic significance
to assert themselves in the way Trotsky thought even the very small Russian
proletariat might be able to.
4. The periphery of the core grows and starts to cost the core of the core
in the less obvious ways (well, less obvious to Americans anyway - where
you spend more on gaols than you do on schools, and garden fences are
starting to approximate security walls) - as threats to security and smooth
running. This will manifest as exacerbated mutual racism, as it's not hard
to predict where the initial cultural comparative advantages lie, esp. in
American society.
5. The periphery of the periphery can, I suppose starve at relatively low
cost to the system for a good while, but then fundamentalist Islam might
probably show the way there - starting with Malaysia and Indonesia, I dare
say.
6. The natural limits already implied are exacerbated by a new
manifestation of the commodification of information; in the form of
'scarcified' education - suddenly all that free social knowledge starts to
dissipate ... as, of course, does recognisable society.
7. All of which implies we have to take Luxemburg's 'socialism or
barbarism' warning to heart and start thinking of new ways to characterise
our problems and our options. Plenty of the canon still there, but with
new modes of exploitation and new dynamics upon which to apply the logic.
Waddya reckon?
Cheers,
Rob
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Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.
Phone: 02-6201 2194 (BH)
Fax: 02-6201 5119
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'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.' (John Stuart Mill)
"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital." (Karl Marx)
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