-----Original Message----- From: Jim Devine [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 1999 10:05 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:8170] Re: Re: information revolution? Rod Hay wrote: >The real question of "Info Revolution" is not wheither it generates an >accelerated growth rate for a few years, but wheither it changes the >relations of production, or social relations. I think there is some evidence >in favour but that it is inconclusive. And certainly is something that can >only be judged in a longer time frame. I should stress that I don't see the InfoRev, if it is indeed happening, as an unmixed blessing. If it raises labor productivity, it could simply boost profits, causing a steep rise in the profit rate of the sort that hit the US in the 1920s, which made the economy ripe for a fall. (The 1920s were a period of a previous technical revolution, indicated by a "kink" in labor-productivity data in about 1919, with productivity growing faster afterwards, all the way into the 1960s.) Also, the change in social relations due to an InfoRev could easily be bad for workers, given the current weakness of labor and thus its inability to mold the rev. to serve its interest (at least in the US). Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html Plus, possible "info overload" and lost productivity due to scanning porn sites, sending jokes etc while at work. You all know that my employer Clark College (actually the State of Washington) has summarily ruled that my missives (much more infrequent now) to pen-l are not related to my professional duties, are a waste of State resources, constitute some form of subversion and actually take me away from my real job and productivity--preparing future human and social capital cogs [inputs] for profitability and expanded reproduction of capital and capitalism. Then there is the social capital argument. The info "revolution" exposes to all sorts of information, debate, opinion etc that potentially undermine the requisite "social capital" of capitalism--the requisite myths, traditions, symbols, institutions, power relations/structures, mystifications, imperial power projections/justifications, etc of expanded reproduction. Jim C
