Greetings Economists, As I've pointed out about Ravi's point earlier, Ravi shows what I would characterize as a confusion about language in his discussion of science. I think it would be helpful then to point to some implications to help define the debate. I'll use some of my favorite metaphors, autism, women's work, Wittgenstein.
What I am arguing for is to clearly distinguish between kinds of mental work so we better know what to do. Let's take Autism. The general description of Autism is a difficulty in communication via language because early on the ability to ground language skills goes awry because Autistic children won't look at parents. Their emotion structure inhibits them from social connection. So they engage in other kinds of mental labor. Some like Newton by coincidence end up doing mental labor we can recognize as important. For example Newton invented the calculus. Which just illustrates my point that if we confuse language with math work we are making a fundamental error. There is a well known social problem that women do not participate in math like men. At the same time women do language work in general more proficiently than men. If you see what I'm driving at here then we could just look at say a common communist party branch. What is the main mental work process? Is it language work? Is the labor automated or mainly still human direct labor? This question relates to this model. How big is the party branch? Is it limited in size? Do we see that work process in the same way as we see shop floor work processes which often are not mainly language mental work? Does automation imply a bigger branch structure? If the main work is language mental work what represents an increase in production? What is the structure of the production process? Can we generalize and apply this to women's work? Can we say that the whole society process of language work (social network connection) is in question here? If we look at Wittgenstein's work, one immediately gets the impression from how he writes that his language skills are somehow askew from 'normal' writing skills. In effect Wittgenstein explores language skills but not with how the work is done. Which I think calls into question the validity of his project. Back to the party branch. The branch is manufacturing human networks that are trying to do certain sorts of social work. Equality for example. I've increasingly called into question in my mind the term democracy. It means a sort of language work in a community. Democratic Centralism was successful at doing a certain kind of language work. It means on a big scale for a whole nation or in the case of the Russian experiment a whole group of states the party structure manufactured language mental work to gain certain specific goals in human social organization. So for example why are branches limited in size? I suppose one could say security issues prevail, but I think the language work process has not been adequately automated so much larger scale social units might work together in qualitatively more powerful ways. The example is sharing a common language seems to contribute to social organization abilities on large scale nations, that language barriers inhibit in the nation building process. If so why or what is there in the language mental work that causes this plus for a single language? Not to see this as an excuse for a chauvinism, but to ask for clarity about language mental work itself. If we look at corporate organization their work groups 'silo' rather than unite. Big business looks for ways to break the 'silos' down to share information (Google). So we are looking at the capitalist development of work processes producing information in language mental work that are stretching what the labor process in a party branch is limited by. That is party branches are kinds of silos where the whole of the party process meets a kind of language mental work production barrier. The democratic part is up for re-definition because the 'democratic' example sees language as a face to face community gab sessions to decide common community mental work. The bottleneck is the face to face process. I look at network computing as an information work process in which we don't adequately understand the kinds of mental work processes that we are constructing. So that social networks in my view are primarily language work. So that we don't get why women are not adequately represented in socialist organizations we don't get what language does, or could be reformed to do on a large scale. Whereas the automation of information work goes willy nilly along saying this math 'language' is language mental work when it is clearly even to the math challenged distinct from language work. thanks, Doyle Saylor
