cyRev Online Journal

Cutting Edge: Technology, Information Capitalism and Social Revolution (page 3 of 3)
By Jim Davis, Tom Hirschl & Michael Stack

A third question is very practical: how will capitalism end? What strategies might be employed to forestall it? No one is suggesting that it will collapse on its own from its internal contradictions. The question of agency -- who will do the deed -- must be raised.

The second set of essays looks at social implications and responses. Beyond the consequences for labor, capitalist deployment of new technologies has deindustrialized metropolitan urban centers, created a bio-engineered, industrialized world agriculture system, and restructured the world economy around high speed transport and telecommunications. In addition, manufacturing heads to the periphery, and the international currency market dominates national monetary policies. These economic transformations have forced a fundamental struggle for survival upon large sections of the population, and especially those workers cast into the ranks of the marginally employed and permanently unemployed.

In this climate, "jobs" are a major political issue for governments, and various options for expanding employment have been advanced, from more education to government-financed jobs programs to job-sharing. The intensity of the contradiction between technological development and property relations can be gauged by the unemployment crisis. The upward trend in unemployment since 1973 in both the industrialized and less industrialized nations calls into question the capacity of capitalism to provide adequate employment over the long-term. This policy crisis is openly acknowledged by organizations such as the "G-7" group of industrial nations, and the International Labor Organization. Sally Lerner provides an overview of the (mostly failed) employment policy strategies advanced by governments of the U.S. and Canada.

The policy debates around unemployment are often framed in terms of globalized production and globalized labor markets. Some argue that further globalization is a solution to unemployment, while others assert that globalization is a primary cause of unemployment. Our reading of the evidence suggests that this debate is miscast. The higher levels of global integration of the economy are not independent of the new technologies -- rather, the pace and quality of globalization today is only possible because of new transportation and communication technologies. Global market dynamics (e.g., trade, investment and labor migration) are able to allocate unemployment across a much wider geography.

The struggle for jobs is just one dimension of the social response. Nick Witheford, drawing on the work of the autonomous Marxists, describes how, as capital maneuvers to contain the working class, the working class repeatedly recreates the class struggle in new ways. In "high technology capitalism", these struggles are being recreated in ways that exploit what new technologies make possible. Witheford catalogs this new class struggle emerging in the "social factory" at the various moments of the "circuit of capital": production, circulation, reproduction of labor, and the "(non) reproduction of nature." The struggle takes new forms as labor is pushed out of the factories and offices and into the streets. Ramtin proposes that our understanding of "alienation" must correspondingly change. Confrontation will occur less on factory floors populated by robots, and increasingly within the political domain, in direct confrontations with the State.

Since the technology revolution, and the restructuring around it, is a global phenomenon, the collection would not be complete without a discussion of the less industrialized areas of the globe. For A. Sivanandan, we are "caught in the trough between two civilizations: the industrial and post-industrial." Through "communities of resistance", a new kind of class struggle is emerging in the new technological climate. Gerard Otero, Stephanie Scott and Chris Balletto analyze recent developments in Mexico in light of agricultural and biotechnology trends. Abdul Alkalimat looks at the concept of class struggle in Africa. Although rich in natural and human resources, Africa is a continent of the poorest of the poor, bound to the centers of capitalism as a source of mineral resources and exotic agricultural products. Within Africa, the deepest contradictions of technology and social destruction can be observed. As people are driven out of a meager existence in small-scale agricultural production, they completely leap-frog the "working class" (for there is, for all practical purposes, none) and, Alkalimat argues, land into a "new class being formed in the forbidden zones, areas within cities, rural provinces, refugee settlement camps, and even entire countries that have become economically unstable, consumed with violence and crime..."

So another possible avenue of exploration is in the relationship of broad technical stages of history, and class formation. The formation of a capitalist class and a working class was inextricably linked to the development of key technologies in manufacturing, transport and communication over a period of a few hundred years. With today's qualitatively new technological environment, can we make projections about the development or formation of new classes in some kind of relationship to the new technologies? For example, could the broad margins of the working class, dismissed as an "underclass" or maligned anachronistically as a "lumpen proletariat," be in fact a new class-in-formation? Could this new class be, not a working class, per se, but a new proletariat, in the Roman sense of the term, being forged in relationship to technologies that destroy the use-value of their labor power? Historically, new classes have had to struggle to recreate productive relations that would accommodate them. How does this shape our understanding of "class struggle" today? That is, the "end of work" may suggest the "end of the working class" as we have known it, but not the end of class struggle. Nelson Peery looks at these questions in a talk reprinted here.

Unfortunately, this volume can only hint at the possibility of a world free of want, where the promise of science is fulfilled, and where knowledge is unleashed as a social force. We believe that such a future is visible on the horizon of history. For this vision to seize hold, it must be taken up, struggled over, articulated, popularized, and made into a material force.

The questions we are posing here we think are the proper questions. They will take us forward, not just towards understanding the world that we live in, but towards changing it. For too long, the debate about social change has been bound up with old concepts of a world fast disappearing. A sharp edge of new ideas is needed to cut through the accumulation of exhausted ideas. These essays are a contribution to that effort.