[ICTs-and-Society] Socialist technologies in the service of capitalism

[Işık Barış Fidaner]

hi,
i think, in Intellectual and Manual Labour, Alfred Sohn-Rethel is
convincing enough for one to suspect any diagram that involves boxes
with 'input-output' links.

Marx was explaining in Capital what we now call 'input' and 'output',
where he told about the two metamorphoses of commodities.

barış


On 1/24/13 10:12 AM, Mustafa.Ali wrote:
> Greetings, Bob!
>
> I dispute the necessity of a socialist / progressive / radical interpretation of cybernetics and that it has been co-opted by capitalism; in my view, cybernetics, while not 'neutral' was forged in capitalist contexts, irrespective of whether they were private / individual capital or public / state capital. In this connection, I would refer you to the work of Steve Heims and others who have documented the history of cybernetics, both from US-centric and Soviet-centric perspectives.
>
> I should also like to refer you to my recently published tripleC article, "Race: The Difference That Makes  Difference" which briefly examines cybernetics from a critical race theoretical perspective:
>
> http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/324
>
> Kind regards
>
> (Syed) Mustafa (Ali)
>
> The Open University, UK
> ________________________________________
> From: Bob Hughes [bob at dustormagic.net]
> Sent: 23 January 2013 19:57
> To: discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net
> Subject: [ICTs-and-Society] Socialist technologies in the service of    capitalism
>
> Dear listmembers,
>
> Linear programming (and other mathematical/cybernetic planning
> techniques) were seen by many people in the 1940s and 1950s as
> heralding the end of markets, as they offered radically more
> efficient means of distribution.
>
> Instead, I get the impression these techniques ended up helping Big
> Capital to push markets to new limits, via Enterprise Resource
> Planning (ERP) apps like SAP.
>
> Certainly, I understand that people trained in cybernetics and OR
> during the 1960s increasingly found they could only get work in
> corporate situations, where it was impossible to work on 'whole
> systems' in the proper, cybernetic sense.
>
> And linear programming seems to be the basis of the 'combinatorial
> auction' systems that have been so very profitably developed for
> handling sell-offs of public assets (UK buses in 1995, followed by
> the auctions for 3G and now 4G bandwidth, and I guess auctions for
> airline routes ... and maybe finding further, similar markets in
> countries that come under IMF privatisation-orders).
>
> If this is the case then there's a ginormously bitter irony here:
> what should have led to an age of low-impact abundance ended up being
> a power-tool for the manufacture of high-impact scarcity.
>
> Has anyone researched this, or can anyone point me in the direction
> of someone who has? Do you think the above is broadly correct?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Bob Hughes
> --
> Home: +44 (0)1865 726804 * Mobile: +44 (0)7968 292499 * Mail:
> bob at dustormagic.net
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