Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 10:12:08 -0600 (CST)
Subject: Re: AUT: The Dark Satanic Mills


On 26 Feb 2002, Tahir Wood wrote:

> >>> ledpup-AT-optusnet.com.au 02/23/02 03:34PM >>>
> But it still hasn't clicked with me as to how machines benefit the
> production of surplus value.
>
> No it's about the need of capitalists at a micro-economic level to
compete with their rivals. Only new technology enables a given capitalist
to get ahead of the pack, whereupon all the others have to get the same
technology or better, or else perish.
> Tahir

This is the traditional orthodox Marxist explanation for the difusion of
innovation, drawn, for the most part, from Chapter 12 of Volume I of
Capital. Unfortunately, taken in isolation it abstracts --in what I find a
most unacceptable manner-- from understanding capital in terms of the
antagonistic relations of class struggle.

This abstraction can be partly overcome by recognizing that from a class
point of view this is not just a story of the relationship among
competing capitalists, but a larger story about one of the methods by
which capital reorganizes itself to gain more power vis a vis the working
class. The capitalist who innovates and cuts costs or creates new products
more successfully wins the competitive struggle and tends to take over
(via mergers and takeovers) a larger role in the management of the working
class. Inversely, inept capitalists lose the competitive struggle and lose
their job managing the class relation.

Once we examine innovation itself, however, as something achieved by
living labor, i.e., by workers, within the context not just of competition
(one form of capitalist command) but of the larger framework of class
conflict we are led to much more complete understandings of technological
change. There is much to be said about this but I'll confine myself to one
point made by Marx: capital encourages and adopts innovations by workers
that will give it more control over labor at the point of production. In
section 5 of chapter 15 of Capital volume I, Marx notes that "It would be
possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for
the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working class
revolt." True then (1867), true today.

H.
............................................................................
Snail-mail:
Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
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http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
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