communism & progress

People are still going to want to minimise effort, which is the source of many incremental productivity gains (in fact in capitalism, the incentive is to keep these little tricks of the trade to yourself, not share them too widely). People are still going to be creative and come up with less labour-intensive methods.

Even in capitalism, many/most major innovations come from publicly-supported research, i.e. areas removed from immediate concerns of market competition and profitability (admittedly, much of it is military, but no reason you couldn't transpose such capability-focused research to healthcare or renewable energy or whatever).

In fact, a knowledge commons, in place of intellectual property, would almost certainly accelerate innovation and minimise duplication of effort. It would just make it harder to privatise and commodify the results, which is why such commons are only partially developed in capitalism.

Also you would hope that the mass of the human population would have more time to come up with innovative ideas, and be encouraged to do so.

As opposed to the current situation where most people's creativity is stifled, or is channelled towards a base level of survival.

Exactly. There are millions of potential Einsteins/Marie Curies in the world, who could have the potential to come up with groundbreaking ideas to improve human life. But billions lack a decent education; even those of us in countries with "decent" education systems, most of us are just thought how to be good, obedient workers for employers, not how to think critically, innovate or create. Then most of us have to waste our lives working pointless jobs.

And even people who do become research scientists, product designers etc only get to work where it is profitable. As Joseph says, a lot of this is in weaponry, and sadly huge amounts of it is in entirely bogus industries where you have to make products which don't really work (see the cosmetic industry, anti-ageing potions etc), or the pharmaceutical industry which has the same problem, or you get tasked with making a copy of a product which already exists, but which your company doesn't have the patent for.

And of course big companies with a stake in the status quo, like oil companies, can buy up patents for rival technologies like green energy and sit on them.

Capitalism stifles innovation. I believe communism will allow each of us to maximise our potential to innovate, create and do so for the good of everyone.

I don't think Australian aboriginal society lacked creativity. It lacked material conditions. I think the only domesticable indigenous species was the macademia nut, hardly the basis for agricultural society. And while there is some evidence of large-scale pre-agricultural societies elsewhere, this was in the fecund environment of the fertile crescent, which was abundant in wild grains and game species, whereas iirc Australian game species were wiped out quickly after the arrival of humans, as many had evolved without predation.

So while it's a bit of an old Marxist truism, the material conditions matter. And those include ideas, science, mathematics etc. I'd say creativity reflects a combination of social institutions and material conditions. So given the conditions, you just need institutions which enable human creativity. Markets are actually pretty bad at this.* Guaranteeing people's basic entitlements to things like housing, food, utilities etc would, imho, go a long way to freeing people up to pursue creative pursuits. If further incentives were needed, it wouldn't be too hard to say, put up prizes for solving particular problems or whatever, though that would need to reflect the fact many breakthroughs are cumulative rather than individual genius.

* There's a book that's making a lot of waves in mainstream politico circles at the moment, Mariana Mazzucato's 'The entrepreneurial state', which debunks a lot of the myths of market/venture capital creativity with examples showing the level of public support for key firms like Google, Apple etc.

There has been good answers in this thread.
I’d like to add that I do not think there will ever be full automation of production, because there will be a fusing of production for use and what is now called leisure type activities. There is tremendous pleasure in making things ‘by hand’, musical instruments, toys, furniture, or ‘one offs’ for special purposes.

When I was a boy I met two men, one who though hopeless at reading conventional drawings, could make the most exquisite copper or brass items; the other hated electrical machinery and made unique hand crafted items. Both were happy when they could express themselves in this way.
I suspect there’s others like me, who would like to learn how to build and sail a boat. Surely there is a link between creativity and innovation?

exactly, I wasn't trying to say that full automation would be possible or desirable. But that we should try to automate as many unpleasant tasks as possible.

TBH I would have thought that some tasks we would un-automate, as they are pleasurable activities. For example I think you would get more home-made clothes, rather than ones made in factories which were all the same.

In terms of your question about Australian aborigines, Joseph response to this well. Primitive communism was in the past, there can be no going back to that. Everything we know and have now, we will still know and have in the future: there will be no Year Zero or reset of human knowledge and experience

exactly what Marxist argument is that? TBH I'm not really sure what you're getting at now so maybe you could define what you mean by "competition" and "progress"?

Ah right, Tronti's 'copernican inversion'. Tronti, and Operaismo in general, was responding to a Communist Party orthodoxy that put all the stress on capital's 'objective forces' (which could only be interpreted by party experts, of course), and which justified all the shit the CP got up to. Tronti inverted this logic, and said no, capital isn't active, it's reactive. Workers' struggle drives development.

I think that's only partly true, but an understandable thing to say at the time (Italy from 1969 to 1977 was probably the most intense, sustained period of class struggle in the post-war Western world, and productivity deals between trade unions and capital had harnessed the class struggle as a motor of incremental innovation). But I don't think it makes sense to see the class struggle as the only driver of innovation. Perhaps broadening it out to include more individual refusals of work helps. This goes back to Adam Smith:

I used to have a job where I had to run a load of daily/weekly reports. I wrote a load of scripts and reduced my workload to a couple of hours a day. Obviously i didn't tell my boss, and incidentally, this was when I first read Tronti. The incentive to reduce tedious, repetitive tasks would still be there in a communist society, but there would also be an incentive to share the labour-saving method as widely as possible, rather than keeping it to myself to avoid losing my job.

Perhaps the other way to expand on Tronti would be to focus on 'cramped spaces', as in Thoburn's Deleuzian reading of Operaismo. Thoburn quotes Deleuze: "a creator who isn't grabbed around the throat by a set of impossibilities is no creator'", which seems like another way of saying 'necessity is the mother of all invention'. Class struggle would be one instance of this, but there could be others. Adapting agricultural and urban systems to climate change, for example.

Mazzucato (who's more of a Keynesian), talks about 'mission-oriented' innovation like deciding to put a man on the moon. This creates all sorts of unpredictable knowledge spill-overs and spin-off technologies with all sorts of civilian applications. While she's making the case for an active 'entrepreneurial' state within capitalism, there's no reason why a stateless communist society couldn't also organise such 'missions' and commit resources accordingly.

Augustynww #12

The logical conclusion is there will be no capitalist development.
Are humans going to lapse into lethargy without the incentives derived from wage slavery?
I think not.

augustynww #16

My reading of Australian history is very sketchy and probably well out of date. The last thing a saw was the first full-length feature film made entirely in indigenous Australian languages 'Ten Canoes'. The story is set long before the arrival of Europeans.

As I understand it, the lapsing into lethargy came after this invasion. A similar fate has met many indigenous people. I've read that the native Americans were also 'in the stone age' in terms of technological invention before the European 'enlightenment'. I suspect no one was sitting around wishing capitalism would hurry up and give them a television set.

The Europeans I was referring to were Captain Cook in the case of Australia and the arrival of the Spaniards in the Americas. It appears to boil down to what one considers 'highly developed societies' - the criteria used. If metal artifacts have been found in the Americas, which are dated before the Spaniards, I am unaware of this fact.

There is still a lot to be discovered about so called primitive societies, though I am very skeptical that any group of humans went into some kind of lethargic limbo for thousands of years.

Here I am using my very limited knowledge about Aborigines, which suggests that they must have had some understanding of aeronautics to make the boomerang. I agree that material conditions and isolation play a big part, and hope an Aussie may help enlighten this discussion.

I am suddenly reminded of Orson Wells comments in the 'Third Man', on the achievements of the Borgias in comparison to the Swiss:

'You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.'

EDIT:
From http://www.lithiccastinglab.com/gallery-pages/2011marchnativeamericangoldpage1.htm

"Although gold in the form of nuggets occurs in more than one section of the continent north of Mexico, the tribes in general were practically without knowledge of its use."---------1912, Frederick Webb Hodge, "Handbook Of American Indians North Of Mexico," p. 495.

"In later times, gold and silver were picked up on the Florida coast from wrecked Spanish treasure ships, and the Choctaw got silver by raiding the Caddo Indians after they had taken it from the Spaniards."---------1957, Emma Lila Fundaburk & Mary Douglass Fundaburk Foreman, "Sun circles And Human hands," p. 35.

"In a few cases objects of gold have been obtained from mounds in the Ohio valley, notably in the Turner group, Hamilton County, Ohio, where a small copper pendant was found retaining traces of a thin plating of gold, and bits of the filmy sheet were also found in the debris."---------1912, Frederick Webb Hodge, "Handbook Of American Indians North Of Mexico," p. 495.

"Some rudely shaped and perforated gold beads were found in one of the Etowah mounds and finds of slight importance are reported from other localities." ---------1912, Frederick Webb Hodge, "Handbook Of American Indians North Of Mexico," p. 495.

Although gold does occur in several areas of the United States, the use of gold by native American Indians is almost unknown. There was no traditional use of gold. In fact, where artifacts made of gold have been reported in the U.S, the largest percentage of them were apparently manufactured from European shipwreck gold rather than from locally collected raw nuggets. The most significant and recently dated artifacts have been discovered in burial mounds in Florida. Most of these artifacts are believed to have been made from looted Spanish gold that was retrieved from shipwrecks. But some of the gold artifacts that have been found on mound sites in Ohio and Georgia probably date to an earlier period.

I would say that even now tech giants, such as Google, Apple and Microsoft, rely absolutely on collective communistic types of innovation that are also outside state funded institutions (see https://github.com/explore). That innovation in high tech capitalism is at its heart libertarian and communistic. Right there you have an answer to your question (with some caveats). The problem is is that this open commons works against their activities so there is a need to IP and to monopolise applications of technology coming out of the open development process ie. to generate scarcity. It doesn't sit well tbh, and it points to some glaring contradictions moving forward.

All the America examples of cites metal working writing etc, come from people who had agriculture, as Joseph Kay pointed out, the people in Australia did not have the means to develop agriculture, because the native plants and wild life where not suitable. No mater how initiative the people are they need something to work with.

augustynww #22

I popped in the stuff about gold as an amendment to me writing above that I knew of no metal artefacts, as there obviously are some. I simply quoted from the site given.

That you are certain of your facts is good I’m envious. When reading about Africa some years ago (Basil Davidson, I think), he noted that Europeans found it impossible to believe that Africans were capable of building the great stone cities, and creating the metal artefacts which were being discovered. After all these sad people had no written language. It left me thinking that even if you have all the facts, how long before they can be evaluated?

It may also be interesting to note that the Mesoamerican civilizations basically had a planned economy. (Marx sometimes mentions this, referring to the "Peruvian civilzation".)

I think the whole pre-capitalist societies thing is maybe a red herring, if the question is why innovate if everyone's happy?

I mean, I don't think communism will make everyone fully content, even while it removes loads of structural problems. For one thing, creativity, discovery, learning etc are all means to 'self-actualisation' or whatever. I imagine for a significant portion of people, part of being happy is being able to pursue creativity, whether that's artistic, musical, scientific, technical, mathematical... So having your needs met wouldn't be a static state, but a process in motion.

I mean even in capitalism, look at say, the fan mods of popular video games, which thrive largely on account of the production of use-values for their own sake. I guess maybe that's because the use values are immediately useful, and relatively easy to produce compared to say, a physics proect on the scale of the large hadron collider. But then if a significant percentage of the population backed scientific research for its own sake, I don't see why such projects wouldn't get resources too.

Yeah true. Though this was through the collapse of empires (Rome, Carolignian...), and the subsequent rise of a patchwork of fiefs based on lordship and vassalage, whose dynamics of social reproduction tended to be highly conservative. I'm not particularly optimistic about global libertarian communism happening, but if it does, I'm very confident it won't herald a new dark age.

I know that the discussion has moved on so I won't dwell on this, but yes I'm aware of this operaist concept, but that doesn't say anything about technological innovation being driven by class struggle.