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>From: Bob McDaniel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
Thomas
Wonders never cease. As I read my newspaper over the last several days, I
find the Jubilee Project of forgiving Third World Debt is going ahead in
substantive ways - who would have guessed a short year ago that this would
happen, it seemed like a pipedream of some of the Church's - no rational
government could or would put that hole in their accounting systems that
debt forgiveness would require.
So to, with concepts like a Basic Income as a response to the problems of
automation. In Europe, I read that a number of countries are finally using
the tax system to nudge us toward a more sustainable energy future - who
would have thought it a year ago. It seems like economies of scale in
solar, wind and geothermal power are producing electricity at or below
fossil fuel and nuclear rates, who would have thought it a year ago. In the
Citizen Paper, a few days ago was a most interesting article on an Aircar,
which I mean to download and post when I have a moment. It is run by fans,
not wings, using a rotary engine and is posited as easy to drive as an
automobile. Final approval is targeted for 2002, a whisper away. Imagine
if we can design a "Jetson" type of air transportation system that would
eliminate the massive amount of ashphalt, that is used on a road system, to
say nothing of potentially destroying the suburbs.
Along with all the doom and gloom, I am prone to focus on, there is a
possiblity that the futurists and free marketers are right and we will
change and evolve with new products to solve old problems. It's a thin
line though - a horse race - will a major disaster, financial, ecological,
or unknown hit us hard enough and require us to use our resources for
survival and repair or will we continue to slip under the wire and have the
surplus's we need, along with wisdom to stay ahead of the tidal wave.
>> Bob McDaniel wrote:
>>
>> >Never mind just the poor: How will anyone qualify to partake of the
>> >fruits of automation? That is one of my favourite areas of speculation.
>> >Take it to the reductio ad absurdum - everyone is put out of work!
>> >I find it hard to believe that the automated factories will simply
>> >continue to churn out stuff when no one can buy it. What kind of
>> >allocative system may emerge?
>>
>> Bob may be surprised to learn that by assuming the answer lies in the
>> emergence of a different "allocative system" he places himself squarely in
>> the camp that Moishe Postone characterizes as "traditional Marxism".
>
> Actually, no; I'm not surprised. I've been aware for some time that the
concept
> of "emergence" was consistent with Marxian thought and figured it wouldn't be
> long before someone brought this to my attention. I would view the method of
> Marxist thought as a useful tool (dialectics) and as such applicable to many
> situations and producing different results depending on the sociotechnological
> situation being analyzed.
>
>> Postone
>> argues that Marx saw the real dilemma of capitalism as not the disjunction
>> between the production system and the allocative system but as occurring
>> within production itself. Thus under capitalism we could never arrive at the
>> "reductio ad absurdum" where everyone is put out of work because capitalism
>> requires that people do more and more *superfluous* work as a precondition
>> for the necessary:
Thomas:
As I mentioned in an earlier post, James Galbraith posited service work at
80% of the labour force. As I recall, we had an agrian work force of over
80% at the turn of the century. However, as JG pointed out, even though the
above statements are true, the facts are the capitalistic system sees labour
as a cost and has reduced the wages of most people in service work and in
some cases lower than the cost of living, giving us the euphenism, "the
working poor", which is contractiction to neo con thought which states that
everyone must work for their share of societies wealth. The double binds
are endless.
>
> Well, that would appear to explain the failure of automation to increase
> unemployment. But it does strike me as rather tautological to argue that
"under
> capitalism we could never arrive at the "reductio ad absurdum" where everyone
> is put out of work" because it is in the nature of capitalism to employ
> people, whether producers or superfluous. Anyway, while a new system may be
> emerging dialectically (thru a clash of diametrically-opposed views), it is
> probably not something we would want to label "capitalism".
>
>> I have posted the revelant passages of the Grundrisse at:
>>
>> http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/grundris.htm
>
> Thanks. Look forward to reading them. It would be useful if all list
> contributors would post their sources and archive their contributions on
> Web-accessible servers. A number already do, of course, and their efforts are
> much appreciated.
>
> --
> http://publish.uwo.ca/~mcdaniel/
>
