Connolly
28th November 2006, 23:29
Extract from "Strategy for Labour"(1967) by 'André Gorz'.
"The Western labour movement cannot wait for the positive model of the society that is to be constructed to be furnished to it from the outside. Certainly one can speculate that automation will bring all the capitalist societies to the point of crisis; it will destroy the quantitive criteria of efficiency on which these societies are based; automation will make it clear that the rational utilization of machines (fixed capital) according to the exigencies of maximum profitability cannot be achieved except at the price of an irrational utilization of men, of their time and their abilities, to the detriment of their human exigencies. One may further speculate that automation will be imposed on the capitalist societies by the advanced socialist societies, for whom there are no ideological and economic obstacles (although there are bureaucratic ones) to its application.
But this kind of speculation would simply defer the problem a generation or more while permitting the continued existence of the risk that capitalism, in order to maintain its criteria of rationality, will defend itself against the social and political consequences of automation by the organization of waste and destruction on a global scale. It is not possible to wait until a ready made model is furnished by the socialist societies, which are barely emerging from decades of forced accumilation. They are not very advanced in the theoretical investigation of the purposes and the model of life. All investigations to that purpose in the Western socialist movement will be for them a positive contribution."
Can anyone explain what he's talking about in the bolded area.
What waste and destruction on a global scale is he seeing exactly?
How will these work as a defence against automation?
I dont find myself agreeing with what he's saying, that 'capitalism will find and defend itself against automation and obsolete social relations (in relation to the technological properties of automated production).'
"The Western labour movement cannot wait for the positive model of the society that is to be constructed to be furnished to it from the outside. Certainly one can speculate that automation will bring all the capitalist societies to the point of crisis; it will destroy the quantitive criteria of efficiency on which these societies are based; automation will make it clear that the rational utilization of machines (fixed capital) according to the exigencies of maximum profitability cannot be achieved except at the price of an irrational utilization of men, of their time and their abilities, to the detriment of their human exigencies. One may further speculate that automation will be imposed on the capitalist societies by the advanced socialist societies, for whom there are no ideological and economic obstacles (although there are bureaucratic ones) to its application.
But this kind of speculation would simply defer the problem a generation or more while permitting the continued existence of the risk that capitalism, in order to maintain its criteria of rationality, will defend itself against the social and political consequences of automation by the organization of waste and destruction on a global scale. It is not possible to wait until a ready made model is furnished by the socialist societies, which are barely emerging from decades of forced accumilation. They are not very advanced in the theoretical investigation of the purposes and the model of life. All investigations to that purpose in the Western socialist movement will be for them a positive contribution."
Can anyone explain what he's talking about in the bolded area.
What waste and destruction on a global scale is he seeing exactly?
How will these work as a defence against automation?
I dont find myself agreeing with what he's saying, that 'capitalism will find and defend itself against automation and obsolete social relations (in relation to the technological properties of automated production).'