<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><br></div>Dear All,<div><br><div><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Palatino"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">Christian Fuchs tangentially brought up Marx's theory that wages = the cost to the laborer of “reproducing” him or herself, so as to be able to keep working for the capitalist. This would include not only obtaining sufficient food, clothing and shelter, but procreation (the raising of the next generation of workers — who in Marx’s day would be child laborers) and whatever recreation, which would include play, to permit the worker to come to work sufficiently mentally rested and physically exercised to keep doing assigned tasks as efficiently as possible. Thus this play is a sort of work, done for the needs of the capitalist rather than the worker. (Play — and reproduction in Marx's sense in general — is still different from labor in that worker has some and generally a large range of choices and inventive possibilities in how it is carried out.) There is no difficulty stretching this concept to include all forms of relaxation and amusement, from on-the-job bantering, to coffee-breaks to vacations, and even to the time after retirement, the promise of which would presumably give the worker the motive to keep working efficiently until that date arrives. That is, there is no trouble stretching the concept if one believes capitalism is (still) absolutely dominant. In that case, all play would be “playbor,” and no real distinction could be drawn between what happens on the Internet and what happens everywhere else.</span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Palatino"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">Therefore, what is really of interest in this context is the extent to and the ways in which capitalism is less than totally dominant. First, labor has struggled with some success against at least the worst tendencies of capitalism. Second,individual workers do not lose all connection to other possibilities than being an instrument for capital. Third, capitalists are not all seeing and all knowing; they cannot arrange things just as they would want; they often have only the shortest range of plans, thinking little about long-term consequences, and they don’t all want the same things — which is related to Marx’s view that capitalism remains full of contradictions. Fourth, just as European feudalism gave way (over hundreds of years) to capitalism, a case can be made that capitalism is now giving way (considerably faster) to a post-capitalist class society, which has different kinds of class relations and offers new sorts of openings, as well as some new negatives; this is what I mean and have meant by the attention(-centered) economy. In this transitional period, a variety of alliances, resistances, self-identifications ,etc., take place between the two new classes (net attention receivers, or stars, to be brief, and net attention payers or fans, again to be brief) and the two old classes of capitalists and workers. Fifth, It is also far from impossible that through new connections via the Internet we might have a chance to move towards some sort of humane socialism. </span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Palatino"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">To take it for granted that despite quite new kinds of interaction, whatever happens is still “capitalism” at work is just extending a term in a way that leads to great analytic confusion and little else. Instead each of the above aspects has different implications for the analysis of the relationship between work (and, certainly, wage labor) and play, on the Internet as well as elsewhere. One is that when capitalist firms or individual consultants make claims to other firms about how their services such as data collection and/or analysis would aid sales, etc., these claims should never be taken at face value. The target firms usually know this, but a surprising number of comments on this list seem to me not to take such skepticism adequately into account. For example, firms that try to develop advertising gimmicks for use on Facebook, are now bemoaning a declining “click-through rate”, which is the main measure of success. [In the interest of full disclosure: As a result of a gift, I may have a small financial interest in one such firm.] </span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Palatino"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">As to the possibility of socialism, technology matters. The title of the conference, “The Internet as Playground and Factory” is certainly a wonderful trope, but how seriously should we take it as a simile — especially the factory part? While much work now relies at least partly on the Internet, or is done in connection with it (as does much recreation) very little of that work has the routine character of factory labor. To see just how different, consider the experience of someone I know who worked for several years on a Ford assembly line. During that entire time his sole job was to sand a paint undercoat on the right rear fender of white Ford Mustangs — in all, an eighth of a million of them! I doubt that anyone actually on the Internet must engage in anything like this routine, nor in anything so constantly and repetitively physically demanding.</span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Palatino"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">To expand on the importance of this distinction, I will now quote few passages of some earlier work of mine that is probably not familiar to most conference participants. </span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Palatino"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">Years ago, and well before widespread use of the Internet, I wrote that “The Marxist tradition has produced diametrically opposed theories of technology. Social-democratic and Soviet Marxism have tended to see technological innovation as essentially independent of social relations and as leading inevitably toward further social transformation— to culminate in socialism or communism. Apart from ‘deviant’ exceptions, technological progress was linear, and entirely to be encouraged. In this view the search for the ‘motor of history’ became the history of motors: Marxism was reduced to little more than technological determinism.</span></p><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Palatino; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"> “The failings of orthodox Marxist theory and the obvious miseries of both capitalist and socialist industrialization led to the second view. Technology came to be seen as shaped by the dominant social class primarily to perpetuate its domination. Both in production and consumption, technology reduces contradictions, at the extreme bringing about a "one-dimensional" society. Technology robs workers and others of creative roles, of critical consciousness, and of sensuous relationships with nature or fellow humans. Socialism will somehow have to build an entirely different science and technology.”</span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Palatino; min-height: 19px; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Palatino; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">“If the first view retains the nineteenth-century bourgeois faith that new technology promises everything, the second view looks back with nostalgia to nineteenth-century life as lived under bourgeois domination. Both draw sustenance from the very attitudes and realities Marx was opposing. Yet neither view is completely without validity. A theory of technology must re-capture, in the light of concrete historical analysis, what is correct in both these views, and clarify the tension between them.</span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Palatino; min-height: 19px; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Palatino; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">“ While necessary to the advance of capitalist societies, technology has not developed exactly as capitalists might wish. Far from submerging contradictions, technology has played an increasingly contradictory role. And this is ‘inevitable’ in the sense that contradictions arise from the very features that render this form of mental labor desirable to capital in the first place. Thus a theory of technology must be a theory of contradictions, because such a notion is indispensable for making sense of current developments.”</span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Palatino; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">[“Politics and Technology” Socialist Review, No. 52, July-August, 1980, pp. 9-32]</span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Palatino; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">More recently, I wrote the following, headed by this quote from Marx:</span></div><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 20.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Palatino"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">" ‘Society with the handmill gives you the feudal lord, society with the steam mill gives you the industrial capitalist.’</span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 20.0px 0.0px; text-align: right; font: 14.0px Palatino"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">- Karl Marx in “The Poverty of Philosophy”</span></p><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Palatino; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">……..</span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Palatino; min-height: 19px; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br></div><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 20.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Palatino"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">“Despite having remarked that the factory [steam mill} ‘gives you the industrial capitalist’ Marx ignored the implications of this. Most of his successors, certainly including Lenin and Stalin, later completely lost sight of the issue. In fact the industrial factory came to be seen as the necessary incubator of socialism, while it was the market that was to be scrapped. This was a fatal mistake. Nineteenth-century industrial capitalists, whenever possible, could be utterly ruthless in their suppression of worker independence or sovereignty within their factories, but in general their actions were restrained by the larger society. The Soviet Union, run in essence as one single, monopolistic [one seller] and monopsonistic [one buyer] industrial corporation, unrestrained by any external force, extended this very same ruthlessness to the larger society. As long as they were trying to ground socialism on the industrial (in essence, capitalistic) factory it couldn’t have been otherwise.</span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 20.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Palatino"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">“The factory model also requires an attitude towards dedicated work. To live, in a factory-dominated society, one must have an income, and that generally means a job (or at least a worker in the household). To lack a job is to be on the margins, unemployed, looked down upon. The more oppressive conditions in the factory become, the higher the pressure required to force people into factory work, the worse the conditions and attitudes that must face the unemployed. Equally, the worse it is to be unemployed the easier it becomes to move people into oppressive factory jobs. If socialism is to be based on the factory model, yet distinguished from capitalism by everyone having work, the most obvious way to achieve this is to create more and more factories and factory-like settings (e.g., collective farms), but not to make any factory too efficient, since that might lead to its needing fewer workers, and thus to its managers having less power. The end of oppressive work remains an entirely unimaginable and unrealizable goal in such a system. So does a really pleasant life for everyone outside work.</span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 20.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Palatino"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">“So three seeming paradoxes stymie socialists who favor wide-scale social equality, a sense of community and concern for the common good, and a substantial degree of both democracy and individual self-determination. (1)To create socialism, some completely new kind of technological order would have to be established, presumably in advance of the adoption of the new social system. (2) Even if this new technology can be envisioned, standard capitalism would seem utterly unsuited to bringing it forth, since capitalism’s values should still be expected to dominate. (3) Further, if socialism is predicated on some degree of material abundance, so that everyone may live without crushing want, the kinds of efficiencies provided by the factory would apparently remain essential, thus assuring that the conditions for socialism can never really obtain.</span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 20.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Palatino"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">“These paradoxes seem to imply that the best that can be hoped for is an ameliorated capitalism as provided by Western European-style Social Democracy. There, capitalism holds sway but is constrained from its worst excesses by an active state, while at the same time basic necessities such as housing, health care and education are provided to everyone, and human rights also are carefully protected. Social democracy thus ameliorates considerably, but still basically leaves in place the oppressive monotony of most people’s typical work life, while leaving those who are not so employed to [a} kind of shadow existence.</span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 20.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Palatino"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">“Until quite recently, that would have been pretty much the end of my story. Not anymore. For the first time, with the Internet the technological climate looks fairly propitious for the emergence of genuine socialism. I must hasten to add this is not the socialism Marxists have envisaged, precisely because the latter view was so closely tied to romances of worker control of factory production. This new socialism instead extends and enlarges the freedom of the market, turning the factory inside out.” </span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 20.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Palatino"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">[Values, Technology, the Internet, and a New Opening for Humane Socialism (unpublished draft, 2003) </span><span style="text-decoration: underline ; letter-spacing: 0.0px color: #000099"><a href="http://www.well.com/user/mgoldh/Technosocialism.html">http://www.well.com/user/mgoldh/Technosocialism.html</a></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"> ]</span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 20.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Palatino"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">In subsequent sections of that paper, I use a theory of how values are incorporated into technology that I had previously elaborated in my book “Reinventing Technology” (Routlege, 1986 ). In the paper, I explore in some detail how the antecedents of the Internet significantly turned out to be compatible with those of humane socialism, and strikingly different from the factory. </span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 20.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Palatino"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px">While the understanding of our society as basically capitalist, and therefore profit driven retains wide sway, and is thus taken uncritically by many to apply to the Internet, in any careful analysis this should not be taken for granted as correct. The very substantial difference between Internet and factory, even metaphorically, I believe, should always be borne in mind. </span></p><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Palatino; min-height: 19px; "><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Palatino">Best, </font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Palatino">Michael</font></div></div><div>_____</div><div apple-content-edited="true"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Michael H. Goldhaber</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="mailto:michael@goldhaber.org">michael@goldhaber.org</a></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="mailto:mgoldh@well.com">mgoldh@well.com</a></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">blog <a href="http://www.goldhaber.org">www.goldhaber.org</a></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">older site, <a href="http://www.well.com/user/mgoldh">www.well.com/user/mgoldh</a></div><div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span> </div><br></div></body></html>