A robot can build a car. But a robot cannot buy a car ... The explosion in the development of computer- and robot-based manufacturing is seeing the rapid expansion of laborless production systems. Such systems create enormous instability, both for the overall world economy where money previously paid in wages is now invested in labor-saving technology and therefore cannot be spent on goods, and for workers whose jobs are being de-skilled or are simply disappearing. Bringing together contributions from workers employed in the new electronics and information industries with theorists in economics, politics and science, Cutting Edge provides an up-to-the-minute analysis of the complex relations between technology and work. Individual essays look at topics including the cyclical nature of a technologically driven economy, the privatization of knowledge which new information industries demand, the convergence of different economic sectors under the impact of digitalization, and the strategies which trade unionists and governments might deploy to protect jobs and living standards.
Technology has the potential to end material scarcity and lay the foundations for higher forms of human fulfillment. But under existing power structures, it is more likely to exacerbate the poverty and misery under which most people live. Cutting Edge weighs that balance and, in helping us to understand how technology interacts with the production of goods and services, tips it in the direction of a more equal and creative world.
Daugiau informacijos
Theorists and technology experts assess the relationship between computers, robots and work
Acknowledgements vii 1 Introduction: Integrated Circuits, Circuits of Capital, and Revolutionary Change 1(10) PART I Theories and Trajectories 11(164) 2 Robots and Capitalism 13(16) Tessa Morris-Suzuki 3 Why Machines Cannot Create Value; or, Marxs Theory of Machines 29(28) George Caffentzis 4 Capitalism in the Computer Age and Afterword 57(16) Tessa Morris-Suzuki 5 High-Tech Hype: Promises and Realities of Technology in the Twenty-First Century 73(14) Guglielmo Carchedi 6 Value Creation in the Late Twentieth Century: The Rise of the Knowledge Worker 87(16) Martin Kenney 7 The Information Commodity: A Preliminary View 103(18) Dan Schiller 8 The Digital Advantage 121(24) Jim Davis Michael Stack 9 The Biotechnology Revolution: Self-Replicating Factories and the Ownership of Life Forms 145(12) Jonathan King 10 Structural Unemployment and the Qualitative Transformation of Capitalism 157(18) Thomas A. Hirschl PART II Conflicts and Transformations 175(128) 11 How Will North America Work in the Twenty-First Century? 177(18) Sally Lerner 12 Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism 195(48) Nick Witheford 13 A Note on Automation and Alienation 243(10) Ramin Ramtin 14 New Technologies, Neoliberalism and Social Polarization in Mexicos Agriculture 253(18) Gerardo Otero Steffanie Scott Chris Gilbreth 15 The New Technological Imperative in Africa: Class Struggle on the Edge of Third-Wave Revolution 271(16) Abdul Alkalimat 16 Heresies and Prophecies: The Social and Political Fallout of the Technological Revolution 287(10) A. Sivanandan 17 The Birth of a Modern Proletariat 297(6) Nelson Peery Contributors 303
Thomas Hirschl is Director of the Population and Development Program at Cornell University. Guglielmo Carchedi is Senior Researcher in the Department of Economics and Econometrics at the University of Amsterdam. His previous books include Frontiers of Political Economy and Marx and Non-Equilibrium Economics.
