Ken Macloed on Iain Banks

[Young Master Smeet]

http://www.kenmacleod.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/use-of-calculators.html

Quote:

But, I went on, the Culture on his telling didn't seem to have come about through class struggle, revolution, and the rest. How, then, could it have come about, given that Iain was as sceptical as I was about the likelihood of such a society being handed down by benevolent rulers from above? By way of answer, Iain pointed to his pocket calculator. He said that on his last vacation job, on a construction site, one of the full-time workers had borrowed it and worked his way through a stack of wage slips, to discover that he and his mates weren't getting all the pay they were due. The site workers had taken the result to the management, who duly if perhaps reluctantly shelled out the back pay that was owed. That, Iain said, was how he'd envisaged the Culture coming about. Conflicts of interest between classes and other groups there would be, but the sheer availability of information and computing power would arm the majority with facts and arguments that would enable them to prove, as well as enforce, their claims. The consequent advance in consciousness would allow the opportunities offered by automation and abundance to be grasped, first in imagination then in reality, and make opposition to their realisation irrational, futile, and weak.

[rodshaw]

The example Banks writes of is of a victory for a small section of workers against their bosses, for something they were legally entitled to anyway.But can the 'democratisation' of knowledge and information lead to the establishment of socialism from the bottom up? Will the abolition of capitalist society be a rubber-stamping exercise at the end of it all?The facts and arguments Banks wrote of need to be the type which support the socialist case and lead to socialist consciousness. They need to be somewhat more substantial than obtaining back payments from your employers.

[Author]

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