Well, he would probably think he was right. Such thinking fits neatly with his thinking: the spread of machines, or the creation of the all-encompassing, pervasive neuro-anatomy of the internet reminded me of a quote from the Communist Manifesto: 'the need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.'

Such prescience is characteristic of Marx. (Speaking of which, when I googled that quote, it actually returned this. But I digress.)

So then, how would Marx agree that the consumer driven economy as a method of resolving the problem of surplus? (o be honest, I'm not sure he would accept that this resolves the problem, which arguably was better managed by the destruction of capital via two World Wars. Perhaps the reliance on a consumer is mere temporary management of the chaotic nature of capitalism rather than its resolution.

For Marx in that sense, then, does the creation of the internet - like the industrial revolution, or the proletarianisation of Chinese peasants, say - pave the way for revolution? Is this what transforms the working class into the revolutionary class (like the bourgeois who now dominate)? Or is that age passed now? Is there another class of people who are the lynchpin to production (and consumption) that have the power to transform society? It leads me to an uncomfortable possibility that this class may in fact be techies and nerds. I doubt it, I still think it's the working class - the people who make and consume things - that make the world go around. I'd be curious to know if others agree.

-- LizzieOShea - 17 Sep 2015

You could take my contribution to this rumination to be the dotCommunistManifesto of 2003, I suppose.....

Yes I like this! And if anyone ever needed a justification for the abolition of property in ideas, surely this serves that purpose. Imagine a world where this was renationalised or re-appropriated!

My concern is that if we do think that 'the creators' are the revolutionary class (and this probably needs greater analysis) I'm a bit worried that this will go awry. There are so few people with knowledge and understanding of the web and how it works that a key project must be to develop such literacy more broadly, kind of like general literacy. The Rights of Man was read aloud in pubs because people couldn't read - so there are ways around it. But I'm concerned that the creators do not have political grounding (or a developed political culture) that protects against cooptation or compromise. There is no real movement to hold them accountable. Many techies I meet also think that technology will find a solution to many of these problems, like surveillance, data accumulation etc. That seems fundamentally to misunderstand the world we live in.

So we need more people who can speak their language to argue about these points and more people who speak the language to orient toward mass movements, away from power and privilege. Obvious really, I guess, just hard to put into action.

I share Lizzie's concerns, and I will add that I remain unconvinced by Eben's answer to my question today in class. Call me stubborn, but as much as I agree that "increasing the quantity of human knowledge" is important for increasing class consciousness, I still feel that this revolutionary prescription divorces too far from Marxist canon, the persuasiveness of which relies on its intimate marriage with the really existing material forces that govern human existence.

One who argues for the production of human knowledge must accept two premises. The first premise is that a human being actually exists, 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 by 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 toward more efficient production, most likely through state intervention.

The second premise is that human beings possess the time necessary to produce creative work. Unfortunately, to survive in capitalist society, proletarians are forced into a system of labor relations which alienate them from the the product of their work and inhibits their freedom to participate in creative production on their own accord. A central priority of the human knowledge advocate should then be to liberate individuals from the labor relations that stand in the way of their freedom.

Ask yourself: what is biggest impediment to creative expression for the worker that spends 80 hours a week at her 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? Patent law and time spent searching through the Facebook news feed? Really?

Ask any of these people, and I guarantee they will not need a free software educational system to explain the source of their oppression.

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 attempting to build a box in which to accumulate human knowledge and not enough time filling in that box ourselves. We already have the means to condemn the hypocrisy of those in power, even if the software, learning systems, and tools at our disposal are less than perfect . What prevents us from simply using what we have?

-- ShayBanerjee - 23 Sep 2015