Hello Ian,
I do know Willem Vanderburg, but I know his own teacher
Ursula Franklin a bit better. I think she’s more sympathetic to
my ideas than Prof. Vanderburg, at least enough to write an
endorsement for my book. I think I’m a bit more Marxist than
either, with my focus on productive forces. How do you know of
Vanderburg?
>>I definitely don’t mean post-technological. By postindustrial, I mean
possibilities created by the industrialization of culture to replace
physical resources and cog-labour (the key elements of classical
industrial development) with human creativity.
>Don't we have too much industrialization of culture and especially
education? Lots more civic forums and the time for citizens to actually
participate in the ongoing development of the political economy would make
a
great project of the 21st century.
I wasn’t really advocating industrialization, just describing a
process which has already taken place. Industrialization, like
the socialization of labour, doesn’t just stay the same; it moves
into new realms, and the industrialization of culture is a way
various writers have described the rise of intellectual labour,
white-collar bureaucracy, new forms of service, etc.
My point is that, even though the profit motive drove the
industrialization of culture, it opened up a whole Pandora’s Box
for capitalism: it signaled a permanent crisis of overproduction,
on one hand; and, on the other, an “overproduction of working class
power”. Class depends on the cultural dependence of the lower
classes, but by creating more educated and sophisticated work
forces, capitalism contributed to potential working class autonomy.
(Taylorism, and ultimately Fordism, is to some degree an attempt
to offset this growing latent autonomy of the working class,
creating new forms of dependence).
>>As people like Fred Block (1979) and Martin Sklar (1969)
have pointed out, a key threshold was in the twenties…
>We've always been a knowledge economy. I'm just for more people having the
opportunity to be creative where they "work". That means totally
transforming the system of industrial and post-industrial relations. The
smashing of the employer/employee hierarchy that make for wage slavery for
hundreds of millions.
I don’t think we’ve always had a knowledge-based economy (and
actually, I don’t think we even have one now under capitalism,
just the potential of one). Under classical industrial capitalism,
the main inputs were cog-labour and physical resources; that really
began to change by the twenties. But capitalism is defined by
cog-labour and its material focus, so after WW II, it had to find
ways of artificially recreating cog-labour as well as to define mass
consumption in totally materialistic ways.
I don’t think a true knowledge-based economy can exist
without prioritizing all-round human development. The knowledge
base of the capitalist information economy is narrowly confined
to a fairly small sector of the work force. It stifles human
development, and not incidentally is incredibly wasteful.
>>n the case of new possibilities for human work, for new levels
nonmaterial-qualitative “consumption”, and even of providing for
everyone’s material needs, capitalism, and its quantitative forms
of development, have suppressed these potentials because capitalism,
like all class societies needs scarcity to exist…
>Yup, although I don't think we can alleviate or anticipate any and all
forms
of scarcity; actual or potential. I'm anti-Malthusian, but I do accept
human
finitude. Most, not all. capitalists deplore many forms of scarcity as
well.
My basic point is that we live in a system that, through
massive waste of resources and human potential, systematically
creates scarcity. Recognizing this is, I think, a crucial
step in social change advocates really moving on an
alternative agenda and building new forms of power. Much of
the mainstream of environmental movement continues to act as
if the basic problem is affluence in the more developed
countries. I think recognizing the reverse--that the problem
is effluence, not affluence--gives us a standpoint to really
start building a new world.
I think when one appreciates the total irrationality
and inefficiency of capitalism, even just from a narrow resource
point of view, ways of building alternative power become much
more clear.
Brian Milani
Eco-Materials Project, Toronto
Green Economics Website
http://www.greeneconomics.net
