| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="PoliticalEconomy" |
|---|
When we talked today about political economy, I started thinking - I must confess, as I am prone to do - what would Marx make of this? | | |
| |
<
< | I share Lizzie's concerns, and add that I remain unconvinced by Eben's answer to my question today in class. As much as I agree that "increasing the quantity of human knowledge" is important for increasing class consciousness, I nonetheless feel that this revolutionary prescription departs from Marxist canon, the persuasiveness of which relies on its intimate marriage with the really existing material forces that govern human existence. | >
> | Shay
Eben
Lizzie | | | | |
>
> | I share Lizzie's concerns, and add that I remain unconvinced by Eben's answer to my question today in class. As much as I agree that "increasing the quantity of human knowledge" is important for increasing class consciousness, I nonetheless feel that this revolutionary prescription departs from Marxist canon, the persuasiveness of which relies on its intimate marriage with the really existing material forces that govern human existence. | | | You did hear me point
out that I'm not in fact a Marxist, right? I don't depart from the | | | quantity. These are the things I said, and which I think. Perhaps
you think something else, and that would be the place for us to
resume the conversation. The rest of this schematic below doesn't | |
<
< | seem to be responsive to what I said at all, wherever it comes from. | >
> | seem to be responsive to what I said at all, wherever it comes from (note: referenced schematic has been removed) | | |
| | | For what it is worth - and in the interests of intellectual honesty - I do identify as a Marxist. Not dogmatically; perhaps a little instinctively, in that I can't find anyone with a more convincing set of analytical tools for understanding the world, even if we can argue endlessly about their application. So if that just makes me a thinker and a politician so be it. What I would say is that Marxist thinking, in my view, certainly is not simply concerned with materialism. It's about bread and roses. | |
<
< | [If anyone has a better method for formatting this, please be my guest.] | | | *sorry this sounded patronising - I don't know what goes on in your mind, but I think you've simplified it nonetheless.
| |
<
< | Eben - I apologize if the below is unclear, but its intention is to demonstrate that one of the most important implications of "the idea we call 'Marx'" is that the ultimate constraint on human freedom is the struggle for subsistence. Your response demonstrates exactly what I take issue with. How can you on the one hand invoke Marx's name and on the other argue that reducing human illiteracy is more socially productive than investing directly in expanding access to food, water, or (as I hope to do) energy? The children of the world are not exploited because they use the incorrect software. They are exploited because they do not possess sufficient resources to survive. The anxiousness and fear resulting from that insufficiency convinces them to engage in a system of production that is fundamentally exploitative and directs their labor time to frivolous endeavors. | >
> | Eben - I apologize if my previous comment was unclear, but its intention is to demonstrate that one of the most important implications of "the idea we call 'Marx'" is that the ultimate constraint on human freedom is the struggle for subsistence. Your response demonstrates exactly what I take issue with. How can you on the one hand invoke Marx's name and on the other argue that reducing human illiteracy is more socially productive than investing directly in expanding access to food, water, or (as I hope to do) energy? The children of the world are not exploited because they use the incorrect software. They are exploited because they do not possess sufficient resources to survive. The anxiousness and fear resulting from that insufficiency convinces them to engage in a system of production that is fundamentally exploitative and directs their labor time to frivolous endeavors. | | | The United States is one of the most literate nations in the world, and how do American prodigies use that literacy? By building Facebook, iPhones, and Tinder - precisely the sort of innovations you condemn. The most talented, successful and well-educated should be spending their time solving the problem of subsistence. As I see it, the Revolution should begin there - not by hoping that others will do it for us. | |
<
< | .
The production of human knowledge has two requirements. The first requirement is that human beings actually exist, else there would be no one to create knowledge. To exist, a human being must produce the means of her own subsistence. "By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life." Karl Marx, The German Ideology Ch. 1. A human being that does not produce food, water, etc. will not exist for long and will therefore not produce knowledge. Unfortunately, too often the global economic system organizes itself around the production of useless luxuries and frivolous intermediaries for the conversion of capital into itself. This reality impedes the pace with which human beings produce their material subsistence, which in turn impedes the existence of human beings, which in turn impedes the production of human knowledge. Thus, a central priority for the advocate of human knowledge production should be the redistribution of resources, labor, and capital from frivolous production to the production of the means of subsistence - the expectation being that once humans have the means to survive, they will do so long enough to engage in creative production.
The second requirement is that human beings possess time enough in their daily routine to produce creative work. Unfortunately, to survive in a capitalist society, proletarians are forced into a system of labor relations that alienate them from the the product of their work and inhibit their freedom to participate in creative production. A central priority of the human knowledge advocate should then be to liberate individuals from oppressive labor relations - the expectation being that freedom from exploitation will unlock creativity. | | | | |
<
< | Ask yourself: what is biggest impediment to creative expression for the worker who spends 80 hours a week behind a desk to feed her family? For the young child in Mumbai who goes to bed hungry? For the wife of a cancer patient, who spends her life fearing she will wake up a widow the following morning? Are IP laws and Facebook news feeds really the biggest obstacle to their freedom? Color me unpersuaded. Ask any of these individuals, and they will be more than able to articulate the source of their exploitation, free software educational system or not. The Revolution need only reach them, through any means necessary. Through this lens, are Twitter, Facebook, etc. substantially less effective means to disseminate the language of freedom than, say, Diaspora? The former requires us to relinquish our right to privacy, but as larger networks they also allow us to reach more comrades. Why could it not be the case that through these exploitative systems, capitalism is "carry[ing] the seeds of its own destruction"? Karl Marx, Address to the Communist League. | >
> | Lizzie - I don't think we actually disagree, My position is that the primary barrier to change is that labor and capital are not being directed to their proper use. The solution is to begin directing labor and capital to their proper use. That necessarily involves politics and technological change. I am unconvinced that it necessarily must involve fundamentally altering the software we use to communicate and acquire information. | | | | |
<
< | To be clear, I do not dispute that use of free software is a valid expression of freedom or that in Utopia all creative material will be distributed freely and outside the influence of centralized power brokers. My qualm is with the implicit contention throughout these lectures that the Revolution turns on free software, when it has always been clear to me that the central problem is one of resource allocation. When humans can live without existential anxiety or fear, everything else follows naturally. That means the primary objective, rather than the secondary goal, should be to address the really existing material problems that plague humanity: starvation, disease, etc.
I will of course keep an open mind over the remainder of this class, but this is the current state of my thought development. I fear that our working theory requires us to spend too much time building a "new" box in which to accumulate human knowledge rather than filling in the boxes to which we already have access. We already possess the means to condemn the hypocrisy of those in power, even if the software, learning systems, networks, and tools are less than perfect. What prevents us from simply using what we have?
-- ShayBanerjee - 23 Sep 2015
| >
> | |
|