Biomedicine, "natural" medicine and the commodity

I am thinking dialectically. I see the situation we're in is a product of ruling class/capitalist developments and our resistance, where as you seem to believe in some kind of autonomous process of 'progress'.

At least, you seem to be saying that, but you've not offered much argument, really.

Who here is denying that one of the fracture lines running through technology is the class struggle?

Nowhere in your analysis do you leave space for or discuss any other fracture lines, any other driving forces. I don't know whether this is because you can't see them, or can't include them as they undermine these sweeping generalisations you keep making.

sorry for swearing yesterday, didn't mean to insult you [if you took it that way].

You have made claims [several on the few threads I've been reading today] that are totally unsupported assertions that seek to narrow down sectors of society to unidimensional tools of the class struggle. The 'main point' of University is not just 'to reproduce the ruling and middle classes', that is a functional part of it's structure imposed on it by class society- to reduce it in it's totality to that is childish idiocy. Similarly with the claim you made on here [still not backed up by anything other than hand-waving obfuscation] that 'most scientific and technological developments have increased human misery'. Of course technology generally evolves along lines useful to the ruling class (Michael Albert's "..hence why during the Vietnam war no cheap portable weapons were developed that could shoot down US aircraft, but it was possible to develop napalm"). That is not controversial- but it is controversial to reduce all/most of it to this, and for good reason.

Technological innovations that are around the process of production are clearly under more pressure to develop along lines that deskill and reduce labour requirements, but medical tech around issues such as arterial stents or prosthetic limbs is not.

Lets have less of the confidently asserted homogeneity, please.

Mmmm... childish idiocy....

You seem to be putting forward some kind of autonomous/nice university that is being 'imposed' on. The history if the unis is, in fact, as training grounds for rulers and servants of rulers, ever since their creation in the middle ages as clerical institutions. Universities simply wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the fact that they meet these needs, so I don't see any problem with saying that this is their most significant function.

"Of course technology generally evolves along lines useful to the ruling class".

You seem to have accepted my main ponit, and are just complaning about my style and tone of voice.

If you're going to take medical tech as as example of 'good technology', then I'm going to have to dispute that.

You probably know the figures more than I do, but isn't it true that there's more spent on developing cures for baldness and impotence than on curing malaria?

I'm sure that that is right, yes. But that is not what you have been saying- there is no-one who would deny that capitalist distortions of research directions towards more marketable goods doesn't affect medical technology. This is not supporting evidence for your assertion.

And what I'm saying is that there is no autonomous 'technology' that exists outside the ways in which it has actually been implemented. Which, taking into account industrial production, DDT, weapons technology, etc, has overwhelmingly been to increase human misery.

[Hint: I'm arguing favour of a tautology. Revol worked it out a page or so back ;)]

Hey -- I quite like pingtao

As for universities, I'd argue that people who didn't go to uni show as great, or greater, political awareness, and the small amount of awareness that students develop is dwarfed by the reproduction of pro-capitalist attitudes.

What zobags said.

I went to music college though so I guess I'm excluded

No, in general. Actually, I shouldn't be taliking so much about 'attitudes', because if the modern uni system means anything it means that we're allowed to think what radical ideas we like as long as we take part in the system. There were tonnes of anarcho books in my uni librasry, but they were mostly there to be mulled over as theoretical works, and ripped off by aspiring advertising copywriters

don't you think that the evolution of the university has been like the rest of society the product of ongoing struggles. Or do you see everything as a bourgeois initative towards greater control? Don't you think that rising militancy in the working class, raised expectancies has played a role in the changing nature of universities?

I mean these are basic autonomist arguments about the nature of development and change. Much technology is actively held back because it would transgress the existing economic apparatus, file sharing being one such example. Likewise certain technologies developed for explicitly capitalist demands have been detourned and extended beyond such uses eg the fucking internet.

Yes, and that's why our universities have a level of freedom greater than that in the USA or zimbabwe, and less than that of the unis in Greece. But the point still remains that the only reason unis are still around is because they're useful to the reproduction of classes, and the great victory of recent years in the UK has to get rid of any remaining strongholds of uni autonomy. Not to mention, of course, the role that unis play in recuperating even sincere anti-capitalists; but that's mainly an argument to have with the marxists.

What concerns me most about your views on technology (and higher education), is that it seems to rest on nostalgia. There's absolutely no connection between your views on technology and a meaningful strategy to make that technology satisfy human needs. It's just wishing it away.

"If only we hadn't invented the wheel!" doesn't cut it. If the sea boiled there'd be lots of cooked fish.

Yes, sanitation is mainly necessary in sedentary communities, and had people not developed agriculture and then urban society it might never have been invented. It's impossible to prove that people were happier in nomadic hunter gatherer groups though, so that's simply speculation on our part either way.

The point is to look at conditions now, and try to improve them. Removing sanitation now means we all die of cholera. Just because you think it was a bad idea 10000 years ago, doesn't mean you can ignore the subsequent millenia and approach the development of sanitation ahistorically - would you oppose its introduction into communities that don't have it now?

yes but universities are decidely different than an abstract like technology. If you said education instead of universities it would be a better analogy.

From Revol's point about education/universities -

It's in capital's interests that most people in the UK can read and write to a certain standard, 150 years ago it wasn't. Both now and 150 years ago it's been in the working class's interests that the majority can read and right, because then they can read sources first hand and don't have to rely on people to "interpret" things.

Well, sod the music career, let's go on the stage with your mind reading skills! Where have I said anything about getting rid of existing tech?

Just because I recognise that the European colonisation of North America was a disaster doesn't mean that I want to kick them all into the sea.

You haven't, and I know that's not your view from other threads. But the logical extension of the idea that "it's all bad, it was all a terrible mistake by mankind" is to get rid of it all - and we know what sort of people want to do that.

The point is, can an anti-tech perspective be useful if you recognise that technology is essential to human society and we'd all be massively fucked without it? You've yet to show how it can. You can be anti-certain technologies, but that's completely different.

it's the daft don't eat the apple shit, as if there was some sort of eden that we fucked up through one absolute mistake that has lead us in this terrible journey.

So why bring it up? Are you arguing with me, or with someone else here?

More shadow-boxing. Please address what I've actually said, rather than darkly warning me that I'm lining up with 'bad people'.

You're causing me great distress due to my no-rolleyes resolution!

I'm saying that there is no independent concept of 'technology' that 'could' be great, only specific technologies that have, largely, been a disaster, just like colonisation has been a disaster.

You can be against settlers without wanting to kill them all, but even if you're going to expect people to get along with them, the fact of their settlement is crucial.

Doesn't anyone want to argue with that analogy? I think it's a doozy 8)

Would you like to take this one back, now, by the way?

it's fucking ridiculous, technology is a concept, it's implentation might be fucked up but thats like arguing against film cos of Vin Diesal and Sly Stallone.

Where does it exist, apart from its implementation?

Neo-platonist

"I've forgotten I'm in introductory thought, but catch has happily edited my post for me"

as if we humans don't create concepts that are independent of actual practice!

OK, I'll allow you to have this concept of a wonderful 'technology' that is/could be great -- as long as you agree that, in the real world, it's mostly fucked up.

Either way, let's face it, the future consists of a lot of technology smashing, and you've got to hold a hammer just like the rest of us 8)

Get lost, technophobe! In the future I'll download your brain and eat it.

No way! If I think the right thoughts I can encode a virus onto my prefrontal lobes

Yeah, but not without killing yourself, doofus.

It's a COMPUTER virus, that only kills sillicon, so double doofus and ner to you

PLus, if I eat the right mushrooms I can travel through the astral plane and eat your dreams and puke nightmares into your sleeping head. Deal with that, tech-boy

If I can download your brain, all your base will belong to me. Literally.

No I won't take the nostalgia comment back, because it stands.

clean water:

The need for sanitation, the separation of drinking/washing water from waste water, developed most likely as soon as humans adopted a sedentary lifestyle, most likely in the first agricultural communities.

Digging a pit to shit in, or a well to draw water from, is as much a technological development as water pipes and sewage treatment. Now you may come back and say "agriculture is bad maaan", but it was probably the only way the people who developed it could survive at the time, and I'm pretty certain it wasn't part of some class conspiracy.

Once you have people staying in the same place for any period of time, the alternatives to developing basic sanitation are two:

1. Die horribly.

2. Go back to nomadic hunter gatherer lifestyles.

If option 2 is an impossibility due to scarcity of prey via over hunting (must be those new arrowheads!) or changed migration patterns, increased population or whatever else, then both options involved death, disease and/or starvation.

That applies to many technological developments - we may have anti-biotics resistant viruses due to over-useage, but stop using them and we'll be dying of all kinds of illnesses that are minor complaints now.

The question of whether sanitation is a positive or negative technology then becomes one of nostalgia - there are no possible circumstances where its use could be discontinued. So it's simply harking back to a golden age.

Loads of technology now is fucked up, but I've no intention of smashing it. Power stations and DDT stockpiles need to be dealt with properly, smashing them would be about the stupidest thing you could probably do. All the bad stuff will need carefully taking apart so we can reconstitute it into stuff people need or put it somewhere it won't cause any more harm, otherwise it'll just be more landfill.