Reading List: Marxist Economists

This is a reading list featuring Marxist economists and theorists writing on the history and philosophy of science and technology. The list was compiled with the help of Richard Barbrook over two long evenings and consolidated by more research online.

The reason for me doing this is that I want to apply a dialectical materialist methodology to the history of media art. This attempt is based on an insight I gained during writing my lengthy 'Introduction' and which was carried out there only in a very limited way, but I recognised it is the only way forward for me. I base my research on the premise that the history of media art cannot be understood by solely looking on art itself but needs to be understood as part of the historic totality, addressing both base and superstructure. Therefore it is important to understand the economic base of the time: what were the new technologies of a certain age? How did they enter the productive system? What effects did they cause politically, socially? My thesis deviates from orthodox or vulgar Marxism insofar as I think the art of a certain period is not determined by the economic base but is affected by it. Art can be both ahead of its time, anticipating future changes, and lagging behind, articulating a reaction to shifts in the economic base. To give an example: I think it would be wrong to discuss early computer art in the 1960s solely on the basis of its aesthetic merits; it needs to be understood in relationship to accelerating automation and the social utopiae ("nobody will need to work in the future") and distortions (present day unemployment) which it created.

The list starts with a very good early science studies book with an introduction written by Monika Reinfelder, which I data-mined for further must-reads. Later, without making that apparent, it is just further reading materials from Richard's great collection.

Outlines of a Critique of Technology
By Phil Slater
Contributor Phil Slater
Published by Humanities Press, Ink Link 1980

TOC
Introduction: Breaking the Spell of Technicism, Monika Reinfelder, pp. 9-38
Raniero Panzierei, The Capitalist Use of Machinery: Marx versus the 'Objectivists' pp. 44-68
Norbert Kapferer, Commodity, Science and Technology: a Critique of Sohn-Rethel, pp.74-100
The Class Structure of Machinery: Notes on the Value Form, Hans-Dieter Bahr pp. 101-142

"...the perfection of man's technical mastery of nature. This obviously involves social relations of production, but these are by way of attendant circumstances, mapped onto the autonomous technical processes that constitute the 'inner essence' of actual historic development." As a result, "Marxist theoretisation of the objective body of the immedeate process of capitalist production is usually, and quite logically, restricted to a faith that the body in question already constitutes the potential base of socialism. In this way a historical materialist, critical perspective takes second place to the overriding teleology of "technique" and it is for this reason that the critique of technology presupposes breaking the spell of an ideology that can justifiably be labelled technicism. p.4 (14?)

Reinfelder argues that this is not due to Marx but partly due to the way how Engels and Kautsky turned dialectical materialism into a "metaphysical system".

F.E. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, London 1954
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectics_of_Nature
Full Text
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/index.htm

Karl Kautsky, Die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung, Dietz, Berlin 1927

Georgi, V. Plekhanov
The Development of the Monist View of History
(1895) Published in English: Lawrence & Wishart, London 1947. Moscow 1972
Lenin learned his dialectic materialism from Plekhanov

According to Reinfelder, Lenin demanded "obedience" of the workers in the factory and admired Taylorism, p. 16 Lenin both a technicist and authoritarian

Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, New York 1974
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/index.htm

According to Reinfelder, Trotsky also a 'technicist': Revolutionaries should not smash Fordism but separate Fordism from Ford and socialise and purge it. (page ??)
Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life. New York 1977

From here the road leads to Harold Wilson (Labour Party leader and prime minister) and Eurocommunism, Santiago Carrillo (leader of Spanish Communist Party and co-founder of Eurocommunism).

Wilson: forging socialism in the white heat of the scientific technological revolution (fanmous phrase used at a Labour Party conference in 1964)

Reinfelder then sums up some authors under the rubrique of "pseudo-criticism" of technicism:

Charles Bettelheim,Class Struggles in the USSR, Hassocks 1972

http://marx2mao.com/Other/CSSUi76NB.html

The complete Mao online
http://marx2mao.com/Mao/Index.html
Mao, Four Essays on Philosophy, Peking 1968

Online version
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/ms...

"Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone; they come from three kinds of social practice, the struggle for production, the class struggle and scientific experiment."
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/ms...

Bettelheim brought the question to the point: what is the driving force in history, class struggle or technological progress of the productive forces.

Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, London 1972

Despite a certain level of scepticism of Mao regarding the forces of production as 'objective'. Reinfelder points out that also "Mao regards the productive forces as transcendent of specific social relations of production. p.23

Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, New York 1970
Rosa Luxemburg speaks, By Rosa Luxemburg
Published by Pathfinder Press, 1970
473 pages

Online Biography
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/Luxemburg.html

Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, London 1970
http://www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1923/marxism-philosophy.htm

Reinfelder: Luxemburg's rejection of Lenin's "factory discipline" is theoretically grounded in a repudiation of its technicist base. p.26

Lukacs, Technology and Social Relations, in: New Left Review, Nr 39
http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=873 (access only by subscription)

History and class consciousness: studies in Marxist dialectics, By Georg Lukács, Rodney Livingstone, Translated by Rodney Livingstone
Published by MIT Press, 1972

the factory contains in concentrated form the whole structure of capitalist society (Lukacs)

Herbert Marcuse, Some Social Implications of Modern Technology, in: The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Oxford 1978
Short Introduction to the text
http://frankfurtschool.wordpress.com/2008/04/25/herbert-marcuse-some-soc...

The Essential Frankfurt school reader, By Andrew Arato, Eike Gebhardt
Published by Continuum International Publishing Group, 1982

Marcuse, Negations, London 1968

Marcuse Online
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/index.htm
and
http://www.wbenjamin.org/bibliotronic.html#marcuse (strange pnsophist website)

Marcuse An essay on literature, London 1969
Marcuse the aesthetic dimension London 1979

Reinfelder criticises Marcuse for the absence of a theoretic framework, and accuses him of "stimulating but diffusely scattered, semi-aphoristic insights"

Andre Gorz, the division of labour, Hassock 1976

Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour, London 1978
Intellectual and manual labour: a critique of epistemology
Humanities Press, 1983 ISBN 0391029053, 9780391029057

Hans Dieter Bahr, Kritik der Politischen Technologie, Frankfurt 1970
Kritik der"politischen Technologie": Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Herbert Marcuse und Jürgen Habermas
By Hans-Dieter Bahr
Published by Europäïsche Verlagsanstalt etc, 1970
107 pages

Mandel, Ernest. 1975. Late capitalism. London: NLB. first published in German
Mandel, Ernest. 1972. Der Spätkapitalismus.Suhrkamp

Contains chapter on Long Waves: Long Waves in the History of Capitalism pp 108-146

Once a revolution in the technology of productive motive machinery by machinery has occured the whole system of machinery is progressively transformed. p.118 relates to Marx, Capital Vol.I p 384-5 Mandel names as an example the electro motor; this reminds me of something I have read in science studies, I think a book by McKenzie and Wajczman, have to check, about electrification as a paradigm; once electricity had become viable as an energy source, the project was a) electrification, building power stations and a grid around the country, b) technologies needing electricity, mainly so called consumer durables, such as the electric fridge or the radio; this industrial revolution is also referred to as the second industrial revolution - electronics and computers then mark the Third Wave (Toffler) Thus, the history of radio is embedded within the history of electrification. and electrification did not just happen by itself but was carried out consciously by Edison and his industrial backers.

Richard remarked that there had been the 1893 Chicago exhibition which featured electric technologies and marked the beginning of a new industrial boom phase (after the 1873 crisis). CHECK Chicago exhibition.

Mandel links the long waves, the phases of expansion and contraction of the economy in 50 year cycles to a) the shrinking and rising rate of profit, b) investment in what he calls the productive motive technologies. Marx had discovered the cyclical nature of capitalism, yet those were cycle where roughly every 7 - 10 years a crisis occured.

long waves are not superimposed on economic development but are an extension of normal capitalist cycles (abbreviated, pages 120, 121)

I was also not aware that there was a history of long wave theory, Kondratiev did not invent it. the first to notice long waves was Alexander Helphand, also publishing as Parvus. More significant may be the Dutch man J.von Gelderen, pp 122-3

The period from 1873 to 1893 the second technological revolution based on electrical motors and monopoly formation (Edison) p. 188

durable consumer goods as application of new motive technology to consumer goods, p.190

Friedrich Pollock, Automation, Frankfurt 1964
see also Automation: the advent of the automatic factory. John Diebold. Van Nostrand, 1952
Original from the University of California

More on long waves

Joshua S. Goldstein, Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age, new Haven and London: Yale University Press 1988

This is the sort of definitive book on long waves, what makes it particularily interesting is that it is full of tables, charts and graphics explaining things which alone would make it worth buying. Thankfully, the author has made it available online. http://www.joshuagoldstein.com/jgcycle.htm

remark Richard: some have also linked cycles in agrarical production to sunspots

Capital-Logic School

Henryk Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, Pluto 1992
Also called capital-logic school because Grossmann saw history entirely driven by the logic of capital; there was no human agency as such, capitalism was understood to be a giant machine, which would in the end implode because of the falling rate of profit. Found few supporters except

Paul Mattick, Marx and Keynes, 1969

Grossmann argued to reappraise Marx's method and, following this lead, arrived at his conclusiosn. His work appeared first in German as

Das Akkumulations-Zusammenbruchsgesetz des kapitalistischen Systems (Zugleich eine Krisentheorie) Verlag Neue Kritik, 1970

Title: Keynes and Marx on the Theory of Capital Accumulation, Money and Interest Author(s): Fan-Hung Source: The Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Oct., 1939), pp. 28-41 Publisher(s): The Review of Economic Studies Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2967594

Marx and Keynes: the limits of the mixed economy
By Paul Mattick, Published by P. Sargent, 1969 Original from the University of California
Digitized 21 Aug 2008
364 pages

Isaak Illich Rubin, Essays on Marx Theory of Value, Detroit, Black and Red, 1972

This work is, according to Richard, largely an answer to Rudolf Hilferding, Austrian economist and later German minister of (finance?) in the Weimar Republic and a social democrate.
The value theory is central to the work of Marx, while other parts can be stripped away, such as the dialectic interpretation of history, but without value theory nothing is left of Marx.
On quick first reading: very good on commodity fetishism
Rubin was shot by Stalin in 1929

W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth, A Non.Communist Manifesto, Cambridge University Press 1967

Rostow features strongly in Imaginary Futures, member of the cold war left, former Marxists who became leading US intellectuals trying to forge an ideology that could combat the appearant Societ success in the Third World in the 1960s.

Chris Freeman, The Economics of Industrial Innovation, 3rd edn. (co-author with Luc Soete), Pinter, London, 1997.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Freeman
Very useful for development of economic and historical matrix for 2nd half of 20th century
Mentions Maastricht economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology
As Time Goes By: From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution (co-author with Francisco Louça), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001.

Fritz Machlup, The production and distribution of knowledge in the United States, Princeton University Press, 1962
Marks the beginning of research in the knowledge economy

E.P. Thompson, William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary, London, Merlin Press 1955, 1977

Shows the strong involvement of Morris in the socialist movement, something not really emphasised in art books about the Arts and Crafts movement, makes more plausible the link to Bauhaus

E.P. Thompson, the Making of the british working class
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._P._Thompson

E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (hatchet job on Althusser)
http://www.richardwebster.net/print/xlocusts.htm

Robert Brenner http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/sep/26/comment.business

Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble, The US in the World Economy, Verso 2002

Toni Negri, Revolution Retrieved. Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social Subjects, Red Notes 1988

Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis. Italian Marxist Texts of the Theory and Practice of a Class Movement 1964 - 79 (sort of a Samizdat publication, unbound)