Registration Key For Capitalism Lab Manual
Matt Dreher
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Among authors who are critical of capitalism, one group treats the new technologies as simply more of the same: '"information capitalism'" (to use Morris-Suzuki's phrase) is the same old capitalism with the same old exploitation. Other critiques are concerned with the class-partisan qualities of technology, examining, for example, how and why certain technologies develop, or considering how new forms of social control are made possible by technological development and deployment. Another genre debunks the "emperor's new clothes" attitude of the apologists, pointing out the shortcomings of the technologies and their negative social consequences. Still another genre has seen the end of class struggle in the post-Fordist "information society," and retreats into personal politics and the endless fragmentation of social struggles.
Our concerns with respect to technology are different. We enthusiastically welcome the promise of technology for ending material scarcity and for creating a foundation for higher forms of human fulfillment. Yet we suspect that the application of electronic technology within the framework of capitalism will not only fail to accomplish these ends, but exacerbate the misery and poverty in which most of the world already lives.
... we have here arrived at the absolute inner limit of the capitalist mode of production. This absolute limit ... lies in the fact that the mass of surplus-value itself necessarily diminishes as a result of the elimination of living labor from the production process in the course of the final stage of mechanization-automation. Capitalism is incompatible with fully automated production in the whole of industry and agriculture, because this no longer allows the creation of surplus-value or valorization of capital. It is hence impossible for automation to spread to the entire realm of production in the age of late capitalism. 1
The present situation is obviously very far from the state of total automation which Mandel depicts as the limit of capitalism. But if we accept his view that automated enterprises can make profits only parasitically, by absorbing the surplus value created in other parts of the economy, and that the rising level of automation must therefore be accompanied either by increasing exploitation of the remaining labor force or by falling average levels of profit, then it would seem that major capitalist economies are rushing towards their doom like Gadarene swine.
I accept Mandel's statement that total automation of all productive activity (including services) is incompatible with capitalism. We cannot even be certain that it would be compatible with human society of any kind. But I believe that high levels of automation in manufacturing can exist within the framework of an economy which is capitalist in the sense that it is centered on the privately owned corporation and the exploitation of wage labor. A highly automated capitalist economy, however, would have special features which will need careful analysis if we are to understand both the dynamics of the system and its potential for transformation. And if, as I believe, such economies are not merely a theoretical possibility, but are actually appearing before our eyes, the task of analysis and debate acquires very real importance and urgency.
The separation of knowledge from labor and machinery, and its emergence as an independent commodity and element in production has been a gradual process dating back to the very beginnings of capitalism. Essential steps in the process were popularization of the printed book, and later the creation of patent and copyright systems. These latter measures were crucial because the special properties of knowledge (its lack of material substance; the ease with which it can be copied and transmitted) mean that it can only acquire exchange value where institutional arrangements confer a degree of monopoly power on its owner.
Ever since the beginnings of capitalism competitive pressures have pushed firms in the direction of innovation. But the fact that, with automation, innovation becomes the core of the company's profit-making activity is illustrated in a recent description (by two IBM executives, Mike Kutcher and Eli Gorin) of the enterprise of the near future. 12
Mandel, after setting out his views on the economic impossibility of fully automated capitalism, went on to state: "It may be objected that automation eliminates living labour only in the production plant; it increases it in all those spheres which precede direct output (laboratories, research and experimental departments) where labour is employed that unquestionably forms an integral part of the 'collective productive labourer' in the Marxist sense of the term." 20 His principal answer to this objection is that "a transformation of this kind would imply a radical suppression of the social division between manual and intellectual labor. Such a radical modification of the whole social formation and culture of the proletariat would undermine the entire hierarchical structure of factory and economy, without which the extortion of surplus-value from productive labour would be impossible. Capitalist relations of production, in other words, would collapse ... For reasons of its own self-preservation capital could never afford to transform all workers into scientists, just as it could never afford to transform all material production into full automation." 21
Here it seems to me that there are two key concepts which may at first appear to resemble one another, but which need in fact to be examined separately. The first is the "radical suppression of the social division between manual and intellectual labour" and the second is the transformation of "all workers into scientists."
The first process, it could be argued, has been occurring within capitalist economies for many decades. Braverman, for example, described it when he observed the historical transformation of office work from an integrated middle-class profession to a routine low-paid occupation more "manual," in a real sense, than the jobs of many factory workers. 22 The second concept, that in the automated economy workers would become scientists, depends crucially upon the multitude of images conjured up by the word "scientist." A scientist is not merely someone engaged in the production of scientific knowledge. A scientist, at least in the majority of nineteenth- and twentieth-century societies, has been someone highly educated; belonging to a privileged social stratum; possessing rare and valuable knowledge which gives her or him a considerable measure of economic power; performing coherent, meaningful and at least partly self-directed work. A society consisting entirely of such people would not be a capitalist society as we understand it. But, I would argue that the perpetual innovation economy is more likely to result in the disappearance of the scientist (in this sense of the word) than to cause the transformation of all workers into scientists.
The illusion that work which does not involve direct manual production is necessarily intellectual and creative is one eagerly propagated by the ideologues of the information society. But in fact, recent experience reveals a quite different reality. As the commodity production of knowledge has become more central to corporate profit-making, so the urge to improve the efficiency of workers in this field has led to an increasingly fine division of labor, and to the growing fragmentation and routinization of tasks. Here the complex information network and database systems play a role in some ways comparable to the role of the conveyor belt in factory production. They make possible the breaking down of previously complex integrated tasks into a series of small, isolated components which can be performed by less skilled workers.
The mass production of knowledge does not result in the equal deskilling of all jobs. Some, in spite of intensive computerization, continue to require individual judgment and initiative. What emerges, therefore, is a hierarchy of knowledge-producing occupations ranging from the highly trained scientific researcher or the long-term planner, who retains some independence of action (and identifies in part with the goals of management), to the data compiler whose work is as routine, as alienating and as poorly paid as that of most skilled manual workers.
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