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BrendanMulliganFirstPaper 13 - 09 May 2010 - Main.EbenMoglen
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< | Ready for review. Comments and criticisms welcomed. | | |
The Counterculture Movement And Computers: Despite Similarities And Corporate Influence, Historical Materialism Suggests That This Time May Be Different | | | Karl Marx's theory of historical materialism suggests that societal changes are an outgrowth of changes in production. Essentially, capitalism arose because the forces of large scale industry production required it to. As a corollary, class structures in society and the class struggle are determined by the forces of production. In “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” Marx said, "Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out." The development of the computer and internet provided for the ready availability of zero marginal cost goods. This changed production profoundly, in a manner not remotely similar to production changes which precipitated the counterculture movement. Although the freedom of the modern computer shares ideologic, social, and political similarity with the counterculture movement, the underlying production structures are now entirely different. If we can buy into historical materialism, there is reason to believe that this may be a real social revolution, that the computer revolution may have a more than cultural effect. | |
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> | I think this is an
interesting and complex essay. It has some problems that arise from
trying to cover too much ground, but without its ambition it wouldn't
have its value.
Marx's form isn't the only species in the genus of historical
materialisms, by any means. I tried to show in
the dotCommunist Manifesto
why the analysis offered by Marx and Engels is particularly valuable
in thinking about our contemporary situation, but the point you are
concerned with, namely the consequences of a shift to significant
economic reliance on production of goods with zero marginal cost,
will be of overwhelming importance to any social historian,
regardless of the nature of her outlook on historical materialism.
One wouldn't need to be deterministic to assume the epochal nature of
the consequences of such a change.
So I think the question from my point of view about your conclusion,
like that of commentators below, is why you don't try to think more
specifically about the social changes that result from this shift.
You can afford much less windup here to get to that pitch, but we'd
like in the end to see it thrown.
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