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 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 canon, I make off with it. In fact, I'm not a Marxist any more than Marx was. I am also a historically-oriented social theorist, with a set of concerns that take their root in political economy and technology. I'm no philosopher, as my co-author was no computer programmer at all. Neither of us follows one another's doctrine, of which there isn't any. We are thinkers and politicians who are part of the long struggle for freedom of thought. I think the idea we call "Marx" along with the idea we call "Darwin" and the idea we call "Freud" are the greatest intellectual achievements of the period from the French Revolution to the First World War that we call the Nineteenth Century. Comprehending the implications of those ideas is what it means to have attained intellectual culture in our time, from my point of view: being "against" one of them makes no more sense than being "against" Isaac Newton or Pablo Picasso. But I'm not a Newtonist or a Picassist, either.

I didn't say increasing the quantity of intelligence was important for increasing class consciousness: I said it was important for solving the myriad hard problems that collectively constitute the problem of subsistence. I said that from my point of view there is no point of investment of social force where one can achieve as many advances as one can here. I was then and I am speaking of advances on the problem of subsistence: how, as I said, to make a human population as large as the carrying capacity of the planet itself live without poverty and deprivation. I think, as I said, that the point of attending to the brains growing within the network is that the brains thereby liberated think about the problems of survival and welfare of the people around them. By multiplying the quantity of human intelligence we multiply the intelligence devoted to human survival and welfare, which does not scale by quality, but by 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.

So I think you're being at once too functionalist and too idealistic, Shay. We have the productive capacity to feed everyone in the world (a gift, shall we say, of the industrial revolution, though it is a more recent capacity) and yet we fail to do that. We also now have the infrastructure in place to allow people to read and learn and think in a way that simply wasn't possible fifty years ago. And yet people can't read and write. These problems are as much a function of politics as technology. The the current capacity of technology is limited by politics. How do we transform that into a society that has food, clothing, shleter but also knowledge? Wresting control of technology from the current power brokers is a necessary step. It's not just a matter of the revolution reaching people. That sounds nice but I think you've simplified it in your own mind. How does that work? Where would it start? Would it not look like taking control of technology? Would it not look like more time to learn, less working, more health care, less profiteering from pharma? etc etc

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.]

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.

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.

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