Roberto von Archimboldi on Nostr: this conversation is super interesting and split over too many threads. I am replying ...

this conversation is super interesting and split over too many threads. I am replying here because I am not sure that Individeweal wants to join in.

I'm sympathetic to the Luddite position that automation is necessarily the tool of the oppressor. It certainly is the case that automation is a capitalist ideal, all that Adam Smith stuff with the pins illustrates the problem nicely. It is hunky dory from the perspective of the owner of the pin making machine. They make money. They claim that it is objectively good because it is more efficient and so even the workers have more pins. The worker, of course, might prefer more freedom and less material stuff. That's before we get to the resource extraction problems.

Still, two things are noticeable. The 19th-20th Century revolutionaries, neither the anarchists nor the marxists, did not reject Smith's logic. They saw capitalism as liberating people from feudalism and, indeed, as a system of production that held out the hope of liberation from want. Durruti certainly thought that the working class could self organise to rebuild a better world.

'We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For you must not forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. '

The second is that despite this, revolutions, from the peasants wars through to the uprisings in Syria and Sudan have not been made by an industrial proletariat. The exception perhaps is the Haitian revolution and the slave revolts. It does look like the very people who, according to Marx, are meant to benefit from industrialisation are the most likely to oppose it