(03-30-2021, 03:56 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: . I don't know what Marxist-Leninist school Einzige belongs to,
I've said this before and I'll say it again: none of them. My sympathies are with what is broadly called "left-communism", from Antonie Pannekoek, the Dutch Council Communist (and his American heirs like Paul Mattick) to Amadeo Bordiga.
"Marxism-Leninism" simply refers to the State capitalist dogma of the Soviet Union. As I am not sympathetic to the Soviets after 1922, I am not sympathetic to "Marxism-Leninism".
Quote:but even I can admit to learning something from Marx. Marx is obsolete; what other thinker who died in or before the year in which Harry Truman was born could be fully up-to-date on a topics that are anything but stagnant?
What other thinker who died in the year Harry Truman was born in anticipated the computerization of the economy and the Information Age? (Grundrisse, "Fragment on Machines")
Quote:Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.
The Fragment goes on to state the following:
Quote:... But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.
The fact that Marx distinguishes the "mechanical" and "intellectual" organs of this automaton is evidence that Marx was aware of the possible function of machine intelligence in capitalism. This wouldn't actually require an impossible feat of prognostication - proto-computers like the Difference Engine, the Eureka Machine, etc. were known to the Victorians. Their integration into capitalist production would have been obvious to a materialist like Marx.
This is a description of networked capitalism from three years before the American Civil War.
Nobody who was Marx's contemporary wrote anything this insightful. Not Ricardo, not Veblen, nobody.