Special Edition, 10/20/24
The Left and Technology
Again, the subject is The Left and Technology. The focus is the latest episode of What’s Left?
The Left’s Love Affair with Technology, What’s Left?, 10/19/24, an hour and 16 minutes.
"Bo and Vincent join “What’s Left?” discuss what is up with the revolutionary left’s fascination and commitment to Capitalist technology even at the expense of the workers who are displaced by it and even alienated by it. What does this fascination reveal about the Left and about Marxism?”
Links follow. They include the article that served as the focus of the discussion.
A critique of automation, cybernetics, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Vincent Kelly, 1/19/22.
My comments. Thanks a lot, Andy, Bo and Vincent.
There’s a LOT to chew on. Here are a few pieces. Starting with the techno-fetishism which Vincent pointed out in Marx’s own work, which has been part of the inheritance of “Marxism.” As was pointed out, the young Marx was less enamored with technology. But what was not pointed out that in his older days, particularly post 1871 Paris Commune, he re-connected with a lot of the sensitivities of his younger days. This became more and more apparent with his Ethnographic Notebooks, which were not released in English till the 1970s, were notes rather than a book, and hence require diligent reading to get through. An excellent introduction to them is “Marx and the Iroquois” by Franklin Rosemont, 1989.
A key problem is that Marx was not quite aware of the domination of the entirety of scientific inquiry in capitalist society by the mechanistic materialism paradigm, a model of understanding of material reality which sees all real material world phenomena as describable. understandable via the metaphor of the machine or mechanism. Socialists accepted science as a social values-neutral field of inquiry, when in fact it wasn’t and has become ever less so. Piercing through this veil was i felt an important contribution of the work of David Noble in the late 20th Century, which Vincent brought up. See in particular his book “Progress Without People.” An excellent discussion of this paradigm from the perspective of someone who is also well-versed in Marx’s own work and its fundamental contradiction with this paradigm is the 1995 work “Nihilism Incorporated: European Civilization and Environmental Destruction.” A free PDF is available here.
As all three of you pointed out, this contradiction came out in force over the last four years. The revolutionary left’s basic acceptance of established science rendered it completely incapable of seeing the core deceptions. Even what you articulated regarding the jabs and other mandates and the failure of the “left” to resist doesn’t quite go far enough in questioning the assumptions behind the “left”’s view of public health, though we have had the likes of people identifying as “Marxists” question virology and contagion theory, people such as T Mohr who guested twice on What’s Left? in early 2023, when he had a series of articles posted online regarding “Virology as Ideology.” This is Part 3, bearing the same title as the series, it has links to Parts 1 and 2.
In the last ‘70s and first half of the ‘80s, i was a participant in a milieu in the San Francisco Bay Area consisting of people who had come from anarchist, Situationist and libertarian communist perspectives. We in general believed in a global takeover by the working class of the industrial/tech system as it was and changing it to a society run via directly democratic means of decision-making, like hi tech workers’ councils. I increasingly came to question this perspective by the late ‘80s as i came to a greater understanding of the degradation and ecological destruction inherent in the global industrial/tech system and its inherent dictatorial nature. I am now in the ranks of the “anti-industrialists,” people such as Miguel Amoro, whose speech about the subject can be found in the Not Bored and Daily Battle webpages. The latter is here, Scroll down to the fourth item “What is anti-industrialism and what does it want?,” which has an introduction i co-wrote, and links to both the original in Spanish and the translation which is at Not Bored.
One item i disagreed with: It’s simplistic, reductionist to say that the Bolshevik state was not forced into imposing hierarchical control over workers because of the invasion by counter-revolutionary armies.This shift began in December 1917, 8 months before that invasion started, by which point it was already far reaching. See "The Bolsheviks and Workers Control, 1917-21" by Maurice Brinton, 1970.
Overall, an excellent discussion.