Reading the “Red stack attack!” article, I was struck by the way Terranova talks about utilizing current technology to build a post-capitalist system of governance. I find particularly the praise of Bitcoin a bit hasty… particularly since there seems to be a lot of speculative furor around virtual currencies at the moment.

This reminded me of a passage from David Harvey’s Companion to Capital v. 1 that makes a lot of sense to me. Wondering what anyone else thinks about the idea that technology can bridge a transition between capitalism and socialism (or post-capitalism) – or does technology merely replicate the economic system in which it was created?

Harvey says (p.218) – in relation to Chapter 15 of Capital vol. 1:

“Marx seems to suggest here that the problem is not machines (the technology), but capitalism (the social relations). It may be inferred (wrongly in my view) that machines are in themselves neutral, that they can therefore be used in the transition to socialism. It seems to have been historically true that the workers themselves gave up on indiscriminate machines breaking in favor of targeting those capitalists who were using machine technology in the most brutal manner. But this seems to violate the spirit of Marx’s general line of argument, particularly given my reading of the fourth footnote, in which technologies and social relations are integral to each other. Under this reading, there is bound to be a problem with machines, too, since they have been designed and set up in such a way as to internalize certain social relations, mental conceptions and ways of producing and living. That workers are being turned into appendages of machines is not, surely, a good thing. Nor is the deprivation of mental capacities associated with capitalist machine technologies. So when Lenin praised Fordist techniques of production, set up factory systems for production similar to those being created by US corporations and made the argument that the transformation of social relations wrought by the revolution was what fundamentally mattered, he was treading on dangerous ground. Marx himself appears ambiguous in these passages. Elsewhere, he is more critical of the nature of the technologies through which capitalism has found its own basis. The technologies discussed in this chapter are those suited to a capitalist mode of production. If you take the technologies of a capitalist mode of production and try to construct socialism with them, what are you going to get? You are likely to get another version of capitalism, which is what tended to happen in the Soviet Union with the spread of Fordist techniques. In the same way that Marx critiqued Proudhon for merely instantiating bourgeois notions of justice, so Marx is in danger here of endorsing the instantiation of capitalist technologies. “

Reading the “Red stack attack!” article, I was struck by the way Terranova talks about utilizing current technology to build a post-capitalist system of governance. I find particularly the praise of Bitcoin a bit hasty… particularly since there seems to be a lot of speculative furor around virtual currencies at the moment.

This reminded me of a passage from David Harvey’s Companion to Capital v. 1 that makes a lot of sense to me. Wondering what anyone else thinks about the idea that technology can bridge a transition between capitalism and socialism (or post-capitalism) – or does technology merely replicate the economic system in which it was created?

Harvey says (p.218) – in relation to Chapter 15 of Capital vol. 1:

“Marx seems to suggest here that the problem is not machines (the technology), but capitalism (the social relations). It may be inferred (wrongly in my view) that machines are in themselves neutral, that they can therefore be used in the transition to socialism. It seems to have been historically true that the workers themselves gave up on indiscriminate machines breaking in favor of targeting those capitalists who were using machine technology in the most brutal manner. But this seems to violate the spirit of Marx’s general line of argument, particularly given my reading of the fourth footnote, in which technologies and social relations are integral to each other. Under this reading, there is bound to be a problem with machines, too, since they have been designed and set up in such a way as to internalize certain social relations, mental conceptions and ways of producing and living. That workers are being turned into appendages of machines is not, surely, a good thing. Nor is the deprivation of mental capacities associated with capitalist machine technologies. So when Lenin praised Fordist techniques of production, set up factory systems for production similar to those being created by US corporations and made the argument that the transformation of social relations wrought by the revolution was what fundamentally mattered, he was treading on dangerous ground. Marx himself appears ambiguous in these passages. Elsewhere, he is more critical of the nature of the technologies through which capitalism has found its own basis. The technologies discussed in this chapter are those suited to a capitalist mode of production. If you take the technologies of a capitalist mode of production and try to construct socialism with them, what are you going to get? You are likely to get another version of capitalism, which is what tended to happen in the Soviet Union with the spread of Fordist techniques. In the same way that Marx critiqued Proudhon for merely instantiating bourgeois notions of justice, so Marx is in danger here of endorsing the instantiation of capitalist technologies. “