Socialism and technology: A sectoral overview

Capitalism, Nature, Socialism

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 81-98

  Wallis, Victor ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CAPITAL; ECONOMIC ACTIVITY; SOCIAL POLICY; SOCIALISM;

EID: 33646823018     PISSN: 10455752     EISSN: 15483290     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10455750600704638     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. [grosse Industrie] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, chapter 15.
2. For general discussion of this phenomenon and its implications, see Finn Bowring, Science, Seeds and Cyborgs: Biotechnology and the Appropriation of Life (London: Verso, 2003), especially pp. 27-57.
3. Cf. Ernest Mandel's discussion of "a permanent pressure to accelerate technological innovation" (his emphasis), in Late Capitalism (London: New Left books, 1975), p. 192.
4. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Third Assessment Report, Summary for Policymakers; A Report of Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2001
5. as cited in California Medical Association Resolution "Climate Change and Human Health," adopted February 24, 2002, online at www.sfbaypsr.org/work_cma13.html.
6. For a fuller exposition of this argument, see Victor Wallis, "Technology, Ecology, and Socialist Renewal," Capitalism Nature Socialism, 15, 2, June 2004, pp. 35-46.
7. Yrjö Haila and Richard Levins, Humanity and Nature: Ecology, Science and Society (London: Pluto Press, 1992), p. 157.
8. Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 221.
9. See also Christopher D. Cook, Diet for a Dead Planet: How the Food Industry Is Killing Us (New York: New Press, 2004).
10. Jane Akre, "The Fox, the Hounds, and the Sacred Cows," in Kristina Borjesson (ed.), Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002), p. 40.
11. "A Global Assessment of Organic Contaminants in Farmed vs. Wild Salmon: Geographical Differences and Health Risks" Science, January 2004, summarized at www.farmedanddangerous.org/farm∩sues.htm.
12. See Bowring, Science, Seeds and Cyborgs
13. and, for concise introductions, Luke Anderson, Genetic Engineering, Food, and Our Environment (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 1999)
14. and the 2004 film "The Future of Food," www.futureoffood.com.
15. Multinational Monitor, 24, 9, Sept. 2004, special issue, "The Precautionary Principle."
16. "WTO Ruling Backs Biotech Crops," Washington Post, February 8, 2006, p. D1.
17. For a powerful critique of this approach, see Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Boston: South End Press, 1997), especially chapter 4.
18. Based on Haila & Levins, op. cit., chapter 5 ("Agricultural Ecology").
19. Peter M. Rosset, "Alternative Agriculture Works: The Case of Cuba," Monthly Review, 50, 3, July/August 1998, p. 144.
20. See also Richard Levins, "How Cuba Is Going Ecological," Capitalism Nature Socialism, 16, 3, September 2005, p. 22.
21. An expression of this is the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, founded in 1972. IFOAM held its 15th World Congress in 2005. See: www.ifoam.org.
22. In "On the Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government" (1918), Lenin regretfully but firmly calls for emulating the industrial discipline of what he terms "state capitalism" as then practiced in Germany.
23. See Richard Douthwaite, The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth Has Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many, and Endangered the Planet, 2nd ed. (Gabriola, BC, Canada: New Society, 1999).
24. Richard Heinberg, The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (Gabriola, BC: New Society, 2003), summary Table on pp. 103/4.
25. Although precise dating of the peak remains controversial, the trend toward exploiting more marginal (and hence more costly) deposits is not in doubt. See Dan Box, et al., "The End of Cheap Oil," The Ecologist, 35, 8, October 2005, pp. 36-53
26. and "Peak Oil Forum," World Watch, 19, 1, Jan./Feb. 2006, pp. 9-24.
27. Jeremy Rifkin, The Hydrogen Economy (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), chapter 8.
28. See, e.g., Benjamin Joffe-Walt, "China's Computer Wasteland," The Progressive, 69, 1, January 2005.
29. Prisoners within the U.S. are also used for computer recycling. See Silicon Valley Toxics Action newsletter, Spring 2003, online at www.svtc.org/resource/news_let/spring_2003.pdf.
30. For a more complete discussion, see Victor Wallis, "Toward Ecological Socialism," Capitalism Nature Socialism, 12, 1, March 2001, especially pp. 135-40.
31. This goal is in part suggested by Chinese practice in the 1960s, when the enterprise was a site for general cultural development of its workers. Barry M. Richman, Industrial Society in Communist China (New York: Random House, 1969), p. 723.
32. Ursula Huws, "Material World: The Myth of the Weightless Economy," in The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003).
33. Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America's Best Kept Secret (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000)
34. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (eds.), Working Classes: Global Realities [Socialist Register 2001] (London: Merlin Press, 2000).
35. Wolfgang Sachs (Director of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Energy and Environment, in Wuppertal, Germany), "Wasting Time Is an Ecological Virtue," New Perspectives Quarterly, Winter 1997, p. 8.
36. From a study by Eric Williams of the United Nations University of Japan, reported in Kellyn Betts, "Calculating Computing's Environmental Costs," Environmental Science and Technology, 2002 www.chemistry.org/ portal/a/c/s/1/feature_pol.html?DOC= policymakers%5Cpol_computers.html. Thanks to Ted Smith of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (www.svtc.org) for this reference.
37. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 183.
38. Ibid., p. 258.
39. On distancing from social reality see also Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), especially p. 317ff.
40. Marx wrote that the worker "only feels himself [i.e., feels human] outside his work." The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, edited by D.J. Struik (New York: International Publishers, 1964), p. 110; we can now similarly say that the MUD addict only feels fully human outside real life, in the "virtual" world.
41. Arthur Firstenberg, "Killing Fields," The Ecologist, 34, 5, June 2004, pp. 22-27.
42. See also Paul Brodeur, The Great Power-Line Cover-Up: How the Utilities and the Government Are Trying to Hide the Cancer Hazard Posed by Electromagnetic Fields (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1993), especially chapter 19
43. Robert Cribb and Tyler Hamilton, "Is Her Cellphone Safe? Some scientists trying to find the answer say they've been pressured to soften controversial findings," Toronto Star, July 10, 2005, online at: www.thestar.com.
44. The psychological effects of cell phone dependence are explored in Hannah Rippin, "The Mobile Phone in Everyday Life," Fast Capitalism 1.1, 2005, online at www._fastcapitalism.com.
45. Peter Montague, "Welcome to the NanoWorld: Nanotechnology and the Precautionary Principle Imperative," Multinational Monitor 25, 9, Sept. 2004, pp. 16-19.
46. See especially William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2003).
47. Howell M. Estes, U.S. Space Command Long Range Plan (Colorado Springs: HQ, U.S. Command, 1998), p. 65
48. as cited in Matthew Mowthorpe, The Militarization and Weaponization of Space (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), p. 200.
49. Tim Weiner, "A New Model Army Soldier Rolls Closer to the Battlefield," New York Times, February 16, 2005, p. A1.
50. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, chapter 10, sec. 1.
51. For a recent overview, see Robert O'Harrow, No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society (New York: Free Press, 2005).
52. Eyewitness accounts of the November 2003 demonstration against the Free Trade Association of the Americas; see Ben Manski, "Massacre in Miami," Socialism and Democracy, 35, January-June 2004, p. 250.
53. On the introduction of these devices, see Anne-Marie Cusac's reports in The Progressive: "Stunning Technology," July 1996 and "Shock Value," September 1997.
54. See especially Mark Crispin Miller, Fooled Again! How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them) (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
55. The manipulation of the decisive Ohio vote in 2004 was taken to an even higher level in November 2005, when referendum proposals to reform that state's electoral procedures were defeated by margins that diverged from pre-election surveys by as much as 28 percentage points. See Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, "Has American Democracy Died an Electronic Death in Ohio's 2005 Referenda Defeats?" The Free Press, Nov. 12, 2005, online at: www.truthout.org/docs_2005/111405O.shtml.
56. Witness U.S. efforts to undermine the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez, whose victory in the 2004 recall vote was both more decisive and less tainted by fraud than was the victory of George W. Bush in U.S. elections the same year. See www.cartercenter.org/documents/2020.pdf and www.venezuelanalysis.com.
57. Vicente Navarro, Medicine Under Capitalism (New York: Neale Watson Academic Publications, 1976), especially p. 82ff
58. Samuel Epstein, "Cancer: It's a Growth Industry" (interview), Z Magazine, October 2003, pp. 39-42.
59. For an interesting discussion of the pressures in question, see Carl Elliott, "Enhancement Technology," in David M. Kaplan (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Technology (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 373-79.
60. See Richard Wilkinson, The Impact of Inequality (New York: New Press, 2005), and also the medical research papers of Nancy Krieger online at www.hsph.harvard.edu/faculty/NancyKrieger.html.
61. See Robert N. Ubell, "Twenty-five Years of Cuban Health Care," in Philip Brenner, et al. (eds.), The Cuba Reader: The Making of a Revolutionary Society (New York: Grove Press, 1989), pp. 435-45.
62. The argument of this concluding paragraph is further developed in my articles, '"Progress' or Progress? Defining a Socialist Technology," Socialism and Democracy, 27, Spring-Summer 2000, pp. 45-61,
63. and "Innovation," in Wolfgang Fritz Haug (ed.), Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus, vol. 6/II (Hamburg: Argument, 2004) [contact zendiveαol.com for English text].