RE: [ox-en] Visions of a full-scale peer production
- From: Paul Cockshott <wpc dcs.gla.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:45:44 +0000
-----Original Message-----
RV: Yes. And I think that the transformation of the unpleasant productive tasks, that can not be automated, into pleasant ones is not a secondary priority, something that can be postponed in the process of construction of a PP based society. As soon as we have any power on the means of production, it is crucially urgent to try to transform any productive activity in pleasure, a source of Selbsentfaltung. The "sacrifice for the future" ideologies of the countries of the "real socialism" are the opposite of what is needed here.
That task should be under the responsibility of the producers themselves, since they are the "end-users" of the means of production.
Raoul
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One has to be very cautious indeed about assuming that one does not have to count the actual
Labour cost of doing things if you want to accelerate automation.
In general in capitalist economies the rate of development of labour saving technologies is proportional to the cost of labour. Where labour is cheap, as with the backward castes in India, it will be used for the most demeaning and degrading activities - look at the quarries and brick kiln industries there which use human labour - most of it bonded to do work that in Europe would be done by Daihatsu's or Liebherrs.
Marx emphasised that backwardness in capitalist industries came from their only counting part of the cost of labour but counting the whole cost of machines.
If one wants to accelerate technical progress it is essential that in a future society the entire labour cost of an activity is taken into account, otherwise there can be no rational basis for discovering if a new automating technology actually saves work effort.
The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401
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