[A-List] electronics and value

[Jorge Figueiredo]

I would like comments about the main thesis of this paper:
"Electronics lays the basis for the destruction of the value system".
There are a Portuguese translation in http://resistir.info web site.
J. Figueiredo

The Shape of History:
Historical Materialism, Electronics and Value

Marxism is, first and foremost, the science of society. Through examination 
and experimentation, by applying theory through practice and, through 
practice, refining theory, we can determine the pathways and attractors (to 
borrow the language of complexity theory) that give shape and direction to 
social development and change.

Historical materialism

The basis of this "science of society" is historical materialism. Marxism 
builds on the philosophic principles of materialism  that the universe is 
"by its very nature material," it exists independent of consciousness. The 
universe is not the embodiment of a "universal spirit," or the construction 
of a subjective observer. The universe is objective, knowable, and 
law-governed. "Matter is not the product of mind, but mind itself is merely 
the highest product of matter." Historical materialism applies the 
principles of dialectics (how things change) and materialism to society and 
history  that is, history is not a collection of accidents, or divine 
interventions in the affairs of humans, but is a law-governed process, and 
the science of society is the determination of those laws so that they can 
be utilized in revolutionary work.

Karl Marx determined that the basis of understanding society lay in 
understanding how societies organize to meet their material needs. This 
social organization is in turn determined by the available productive 
forces  the technology and knowledge and organization  in a given period. 
Each qualitative advance of technology defines a period, or stage of human 
history. These periods have distinctive corollary forms of social or 
productive relations. Marx recognized that the relatively mobile (i.e., 
they are constantly developing) forces of production race ahead of the 
relatively static relations of production (the relationship of individuals 
and groups of people to one another in the process of production), laying 
the basis for transformation in society:
At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of 
society come into conflict with 
 the property relations within which they 
have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the forces of 
production these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of 
social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire 
immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. (Preface to A 
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)
This observation  that societies organize around the available technology, 
and that a qualitative change in the available technology sets the stage 
for a qualitative change in social relations  can perhaps be seen best by 
looking at different periods of human history, and noting what tools are 
available at different periods, and how people have organized themselves 
around those tools to meet their needs.

In prehistoric times, people lived in tribes, and survived by hunting 
animals and gathering edible vegetation. The tools were primitive  spears 
and stones, fire, some tanning of hides, etc. There was no surplus  that 
is, people were barely able to gather as much as they could consume. There 
was no "property" to speak of, what little "wealth" there was shared among 
the group.

Somewhere between 10,000 B.C. and 5,000 B.C., our ancestors discovered 
major new technologies, in particular, agriculture and animal husbandry. 
This enabled people to create a surplus, and with it ownership developed, 
and so did classes  some people owned or controlled the means of production 
(in this case, primarily land, animals, and agricultural implements), and 
others were slaves, who owned nothing, and were themselves treated as the 
property of the rulers of those days. The basic source of power was muscle 
power, primarily human and animal muscle power. Forms of social 
organization changed over the centuries somewhat, but agriculture and 
manual power remained the cornerstones of production.

Beginning in the 1700's, new technologies developed, of which the steam 
engine was perhaps the most important. The steam engine, and later the 
electric motor, provided a new motive force for production, and production 
on a completely new scale became possible. This period of industrial 
production was characterized by large scale factories, employing thousands 
of workers under one roof. (The Ford River Rouge factory in Detroit 
employed some 60,000 workers at its peak.) Along with this revolution in 
technology, new classes emerged. The new capitalist class championed the 
new technologies and the new ways of organizing production and of producing 
wealth and fought against the classes that championed the old agricultural 
and manual labor system. Emerging simultaneously with the capitalists was 
another new class, the working class, who owned nothing except their 
ability to work. Driven from the land, and with no other means of 
surviving, the workers were forced to sell their ability to work to the 
capitalists. The capitalists kept the surplus that the workers created, and 
became extremely rich and solidified their control of society.

A capitalist can only survive by striving to make more profit than his 
competitors. The capitalist who fails to make the maximum profit is driven 
out of business by his competitors. One of the main ways that the 
capitalist maximizes profit is by constantly developing and introducing new 
technologies to produce more and cut costs. Beginning in the 1930's, 
scientists and researchers in the laboratories developed electronics, 
harnessing the power of electrons in new ways. World War II gave this 
science and its application to real world problems a big boost. The new 
discoveries were combined with other technologies to invent computers, 
machines that could be programmed to carry out different kinds of tasks. 
These machines had the ability to record and playback human activity, in 
the absence of human beings. With the domestication of animals, and the 
harnessing of wind, water, and later steam and electric energy, humans were 
no longer needed as a source of physical power. With the invention of new 
gearing systems, cams, and other specialized machinery beginning in the 
1800's, humans were no longer needed as a manipulator of materials. With 
electronics, the last outpost of humans in production  that of overseer and 
monitor  began to be replaced.

With the widespread introduction of computers and other outcomes of the 
electronics revolution  e.g., biotechnology and digital 
telecommunications  we are now witnessing the eviction of human beings from 
production. Yet, although the technology is rapidly developing, and the old 
industrial system employing thousands of assemblers in giant factories is 
over, property relations today are still basically the same as they were in 
the 1930's.

To recap, technology is constantly developing. But the productive 
relations  the property relations  do not automatically keep up. At 
different periods in history, there have been revolutions to reconstruct 
property relations around what the new technologies make possible. This 
overview is somewhat different from other Marxist interpretations, which 
break history into the broad periods based on social relations: "primitive 
communism," slave society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, etc. These are 
the forms that societies took (as well as others); we instead have looked 
at the content of the period, the technological foundation that these 
societies rested on. So slave and feudal society have corresponded to 
manual labor-based production, and capitalism and socialism are both based 
on industrial production.

Electronics as a revolutionary technology

A revolutionary new technology forces people to change how society is 
organized. Agriculture made possible a surplus, and new forms of 
organization emerged that clashed with the old system organized around 
hunting and gathering. The development of the revolutionary new technology 
of steam engines freed up producers from the vicissitudes of wind and 
water-power and mobilized profoundly more powerful forces of nature. The 
champions of industrial production, the emerging class of industrial 
capitalists, could not advance their interests without destroying the old 
property relations constructed around the manual/agricultural system.

Is electronics a revolutionary technology? That is, are we at the same 
historical juncture that people were 150 years ago in the revolution from 
agriculture to electro-mechanical industry?

By looking at recent news stories, we can see that electronics is 
relatively rapidly extending throughout every aspect of production:  in 
manufacturing, in agriculture, in manual jobs like construction and dock 
work, in office jobs, in retailing, in service work like janitoring, and 
even in high tech work like computer programming. In various ways we can 
see how electronics is reducing the need for human labor or replacing 
people in their jobs  the robot literally replaces the welder or the 
janitor; the computer makes the few remaining workers more efficient by 
reducing waste and reducing needs for other products (and the need for the 
workers who made those products); science harnesses the powers of nature, 
like using bacteria to make plastics or insulin, or new materials to 
transform sunlight into electricity.

What is revolutionary about electronics? By revolutionary, we mean one 
quality is replaced by another, different quality. A quality is that which 
makes something distinct, that makes it "what it is." For the bulk of 
history, production has been based on human labor. Electronics makes 
production possible without human labor  because the knowledge and skills 
and efforts of previous generations of workers have been captured and 
embodied in the new technologies. This quality  laborless production  is 
what makes electronics a revolutionary technology, that is, technology of a 
new quality

In 1991, the San Francisco Examiner published an article (ironically, in 
the employment want ad section) with the headline "Will the age of the 
robots produce a workless society?" The article was about the work of 
scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. In the middle of 
the article, the author wrote: "Experts say the widespread entry of robots 
into the workplace could raise the living standards unlike any invention 
during the industrial revolution. But if robots indeed are able to take the 
place of human labor, critical questions arise."

Critical Questions: Value in the Age of Robots

As noted above, to understand society, we must look at how people are 
organized to meet their needs. In Marx's time, and up to the present, the 
dominant economic system is capitalism. Marx spent 25 years studying it, 
and the result is Capital. Marx begins his study with an examination of the 
commodity. A commodity is something produced by a person for exchange. It 
has two aspects to it  a use value, that is, the quality of the thing that 
satisfies a need or a want; and an exchange value or more generally, value, 
a quantity of socially necessary labor, which is the basis for exchanging 
commodities of different use values. Marx argued that human labor is the 
sole source of value, and value is the underpinning of the entire economy. 
Capitalists accumulate their wealth by expropriating surplus value (the 
difference between the value of the worker's labor power, paid out as 
wages, and the value created by the worker in the course of 
production).  Profit is one form of surplus value.

As noted above, capitalists compete with each other to maximize their 
profits, of which one of the main ways is by getting the workers to produce 
more in the same amount of time, by introducing more powerful and 
productive technology. At any given moment some capitalists are producing 
using the newest technology, and some are using old technology. When a 
commodity goes on to the market, it exchanges not at its individual value, 
that is, based on labor used to produce it, but on the average value of all 
of the same type of commodities from various producers, its social value. 
So capitalists who made commodities with the most advanced technology and 
the least labor will realize extra surplus value, while those using 
backward technology and more labor will realize less surplus value.

At the same time, workers are evicted from production, because they cannot 
work as cheaply as robots. Because workers rely on wages to buy the 
commodities from the capitalists, when they are laid off or forced to work 
for less, or driven into part-time or temporary work, workers are driven 
deeper into poverty. With electronics-based production, more and more 
workers are permanently unemployed. At one end of society a handful of 
capitalists become fabulously wealthy; at the other end, a growing mass are 
divorced from any means of securing a livelihood. Society polarizes into 
absolute wealth and poverty.

As the technology revolution progresses, driving forward an economic 
revolution as the capitalists reorganize production around the new 
technologies, a parallel process of value destruction begins. Value is 
destroyed in many ways. The use value of labor power  the workers ability 
to work  is destroyed, because the capitalist no longer needs to worker to 
continue production.  At the same time, capitalists begin to have 
difficulty in circulating their commodities because fewer people have the 
money to buy them. When commodities are unsold, their value is unrealized 
and thus disappears. When a new product made with robots appears alongside 
the same product made with labor, the value in the old products is driven 
down to the level of the robot-made product  its value is destroyed. As 
new, labor-less forms of production become more widespread, the social 
infrastructure that was built to sustain industrial production is also 
destroyed as social investment is pulled out of the communities of former 
workers. Neighborhoods deteriorate, education is de-funded, health care is 
abandoned, and so on.

With the spread of electronics-based production, social organization on the 
basis of value  the participation of human labor in production  begins to 
disintegrate. Electronics lays the basis for the destruction of the value 
system. At the same time, just as in the period when industrial production 
developed, new social forces begin to emerge to champion the new 
technologies  to reconstruct society so as to put the new technologies to 
optimal use. This can only be accomplished by the public ownership of the 
technology and the other means of producing necessities. At the same time, 
with the end of the wages system, a new system of distribution is 
demanded  one based on the circulation of the wealth of society on the 
basis of need. The public ownership of the means of production, and the 
distribution of wealth on no other basis than need are the cornerstones of 
the communist economy, the form which makes optimal use of 
electronics-based production.

The resource papers:

Paper #1: Science and Doctrine
Paper #2: Marxism as the Scientific Current Within Communism
Paper #3: How and Why Things Change
Paper #4: The Shape of History: Historical Materialism, Electronics and Value
Paper #5: Revolutionaries  The Role of the Individual
Paper #6: Revolution  The Line of March
Paper #7: Applying the Science of Society: The African slave trade, 
capitalism, and the ideology of race
Paper #8: Applying the Science of Society: The World Prior to 1492
Paper #9: Historical Materialism: The Civil War in the United States
http://www.scienceofsociety.org/inbox/res4.html



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