Angelus Novus pointed to the following url:
http://negativepotential.blogsport.de/2006/12/03/exit-marxism-enter-
emancipation/
This contains an endorsement of a passage from Goff.
But in fact, much of his subsequent reasoning is impeccable, and he
makes conclusions that other perceptive radicals have independently
arrived at:
“the Marxist method of inquiry that exposes the fetishism of the
machine — the idea that technology is innocent of the social system
that produced it, and that a factory under socialist control works
differently than one under capitalist control, even though the
spirit-murdering machinery of capitalism remains unchanged. It was
Lukacs theses on reification that gave rise to the most radical
version of Western feminism, which also called the Man-Nature
dualism to account. And these were summarily rejected by the
“organized” left.
“These are not incidental errors. The theories of socialism that
stumbled again and again through the world system of the 20th
Century were fundamentally shaped by these basic assumptions, and
the rejections of the basic premises necessarily implies at least
the dramatic reformulation of the whole theory. Marxism is
effective to study one dimension of capital accumulation; and
Marxism has provided some valuable interpretive instruments, like
fetishization, like reification, like commodification. But as Myles
Horton said, Marxism is a good tool box, but a bad blueprint.”
Bullseye!
But in Marx the development of "technology" - of "forces of
production" - objectifies the development of mind and the development
of mind expresses and is expressed by the development of "the social
system" so "technology" is transformed by the full development of
mind made possible by the actualization of the the ideal social
relations that define the ideal social system.
"... productive capital and skilled labour are [...] one." "Capital
and a labouring population are precisely synonymous" ([Hodgskin,
Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital, London, 1825,] p 33.
"These are simply further elaborations of Galiani's thesis:
"... The real wealth ... is man" (Della Moneta, Parte
Moderna, t. III, p. 229).
"The whole objective world, the 'world of commodities',
vanishes here as a mere aspect, as the merely passing activity,
constantly performed anew, of socially producing men. Compare this
'idealism' with the crude, material fetishism into which the
Ricardian theory develops in the writings 'of this incredible
cobbler', McCulloch, where not only the difference between man and
animal disappears but even the difference between a living organism
and an inanimate object. And then let them say that as against the
lofty idealism of bourgeois political economy, the proletarian
opposition has been preaching a crude materialism directed
exclusively towards the satisfaction of coarse appetites."
<http://www.marx.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/
ch21.htm>
The full development of the individual made possible by an ideal
social system is reflected in the labour process - including the
technology - of the "realm of necessity" of that system, i.e. the
realm in which activity is instrumental rather than an end in itself.
"It is self-evident that if time of labour is reduced to a normal
length and, furthermore, labour is no longer performed for someone
else, but for myself, and, at the same time, the social
contradictions between master and men, etc., being abolished, it
acquires a quite different, a free character, it becomes real social
labour, and finally the basis of disposable time - the time of labour
of a man who has also disposable time, must be of a much higher
quality than that of the beast of burden."
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-
value/ch21.htm>
"The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time,
i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn
reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the
greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct
production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed
capital, this fixed capital being man himself. It goes without
saying, by the way, that direct labour time itself cannot remain in
the abstract antithesis to free time in which it appears from the
perspective of bourgeois economy. Labour cannot become play, as
Fourier would like, [5] although it remains his great contribution to
have expressed the suspension not of distribution, but of the mode of
production itself, in a higher form, as the ultimate object. Free
time - which is both idle time and time for higher activity - has
naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he
then enters into the direct production process as this different
subject."
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm>
As is claimed in the passage from the German Ideology, the much more
productive forces of production of the ideal social system require
for their creation and appropriation what, in Capital, Marx calls the
"totally developed individual." An essential aspect of this is
that, as is claimed in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, "the
enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor,
and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor,
has vanished."
"That monstrosity, the disposable working population held in reserve,
must be replaced by the individual man who is absolutely available
for the different kinds of labour required of him; the partially
developed individual, who is merely the bearer of one specialized
social function, must be replaced by the totally developed
individual, for whom the different social functions are different
modes of activity he takes up in turn.
"One aspect of this transformation, which has developed
spontaneously from the foundation provided by large-scale industry,
is the establishment of technical and agricultural schools. Another
is the foundation of "écoles d'enseignement professionnel", in which
the children of the workers receive a certain amount of instruction
in technology and in the practical handling of the various implements
of labour. Though the Factory Act, that first and meagre concession
wrung from capital, is limited to combining elementary education with
work in the factory, there can be no doubt that when the working-
class comes into power, as inevitably it must, technical instruction,
both theoretical and practical, will take its proper place in the
working-class schools. There is also no doubt that those
revolutionary ferments whose goal is the abolition of the old
division of labour stand in diametrical contradiction with the
capitalist form of production, and the economic situation of the
workers which corresponds to that form. However, the development of
the contradictions of a given historical form of production is the
only historical way in which it can be dissolved and and then
reconstructed on a new basis. 'Ne sutor ultra crepidam' — a phrase
which was the absolute summit of handicraft wisdom, became sheer
nonsense from the moment the watchmaker Watt invented the steam-
engine, the barber Arkwright, the throstle and the jeweller, Fulton,
the steamship."
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm>
So, "the idea that technology is innocent of the social system that
produced it, and that a factory under socialist control works
differently than one under capitalist control, even though the spirit-
murdering machinery of capitalism remains unchanged" isn't Marx's.
Marcuse makes a similar interpretive mistake.
"Necessary labor [in an ideal social system] is a system of
essentially inhuman, mechanical, and routine activities; in such a
system, individuality cannot be a value and end in itself." (Eros
and Civilization pp. 195-6)
Ted
