Nedd Ludd's Privileged Professionals

[alice wellintown]

from     Authoritarian and Democratic Technics

Lewis Mumford



There are large areas of technology that can be redeemed by the
democratic process, once we have overcome the infantile compulsions
and automatisms that now threaten to cancel out our real gains. The
very leisure that the machine now gives in advanced countries can be
profitably used, not for further commitment to still other kinds of
machine, furnishing automatic recreation, but by doing significant
forms of work, unprofitable or technically impossible under mass
production: work dependent upon special skill, knowledge, aesthetic
sense. The do-it-yourself movement prematurely got bogged down in an
attempt to sell still more machines; but its slogan pointed in the
right direction, provided we still have a self to do it with. The glut
of motor cars that is now destroying our cities can be coped with only
if we redesign our cities to make fuller use of a more efficient human
agent: the walker. Even in childbirth, the emphasis is already happily
shifting from an officious, often lethal, authoritarian procedure,
centered in hospital routine, to a more human mode, which restores
initiative to the mother and to the body's natural rhythms.

The replenishment of democratic technics is plainly too big a subject
to be handled in a final sentence or two: but I trust I have made it
clear that the genuine advantages our scientifically based technics
has brought can be preserved only if we cut the whole system back to a
point at which it will permit human alternatives, human interventions,
and human destinations for entirely different purposes from those of
the system itself. At the present juncture, if democracy did not
exist, we would have to invent it, in order to save and recultivate
the spirit of man

http://www.primitivism.com/mumford.htm


On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 2:55 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> The cost of labor is never simple. It is a complex set to calculate
> and to negotiate. For example, in the US, patronage has always been
> important factor. Determing the cost of large labor contracts is no
> easy formula because it must account for swings and shifts in
> political power structures. It's naive to argue that capitalism simply
> cycles into cheaper labor. A job (take Molly's Job, the subject of a
> book length study of recent cycles and trends in tech-jobs), may move
> to find cheaper labor or not. Also, cheaper in the short term (1-5
> yes) may not prove cheaper in the long term 5-10 years). The move of
> specialized work to cheaper labor has huge net benefits that have
> nothing much to do with the cost of labot; specialization does not
> produce innovation. So, let the Chinese do the specialized work on a
> computer board. This will free the American worker from the piece
> work, mind numbing labor that is only driven by monied incentives, to
> create, to innovate, to dream and invent, even if there is no or
> little monied reward for such reveries and the ideas they produce.
> Complex thing, labor, not something Marx only got by the tail. And the
> tail don't wag the dragon.