Young Master Smeet
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War Robots are here (link)
Quote:Britain, Israel and Norway are already deploying missiles and drones that carry out attacks against enemy radar, tanks or ships without direct human control. After launch, so-called autonomous weapons rely on artificial intelligence and sensors to select targets and to initiate an attack.Britain’s “fire and forget” Brimstone missiles, for example, can distinguish among tanks and cars and buses without human assistance, and can hunt targets in a predesignated region without oversight. The Brimstones also communicate with one another, sharing their targets.Quote:On Sept. 16, 2011, for example, British warplanes fired two dozen Brimstone missiles at a group of Libyan tanks that were shelling civilians. Eight or more of the tanks were destroyed simultaneously, according to a military spokesman, saving the lives of many civilians.The genie is out of the bottle. There's no point hoping the troops will come over to the side of the revolution, they won't be programmed to.
Well, the article says that rather than a million robots, there's only been 50,000, so instead they are hiring 2,300 workers per day: it's suggested there have been teething problems, and that humans are still better at the intricate and varied work involved.
Quote:Industrial robots designed to do the sort of work that goes on at Foxconn cost about £30,000 apiece.Still, 50,000 robots is a lot…
Lbird,small problem with your citation. The German Ideology was cop-written by Charlie & Fred, so those words above are Fred's words. Per Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_German_Ideology
Quote:The text itself was written by Marx and Engels in Brussels in 1845 and 1846 but it was not published until 1932. The Preface and some of the alterations and additions are in Marx's hand; the bulk of the manuscript, however, is in Engels' hand, except for Chapter V of Volume II and some passages of Chapter III of Volume I which are in Joseph Weydemeyer's hand. Chapter V in Volume II was written by Moses Hess and edited by Marx and Engels.BTW, you're not really hashing over anything that Raymond Williams didn't when he discovered Marx wasn'tr a mechanical materialist. That was back in 1950-something.
I doubt you can access this article: Work and LeisureKeith ThomasPast & Present, No. 29 (Dec., 1964), pp. 50-66Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present SocietyArticle Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/650161 (maybe get a public library to get a print copy for you). It more or less shows how we're both right and talking past different points.Interesting factoid:
Quote:In England it was, until the nineteenth century, not murder but petty treasonfor a servant to kill his employer, and their relationship at law did not become a fully contractualone until 1875SP,Actually in medieval times, if you look at the likes of Pier Ploughman there was a veneration of simple lay work as well, but people would take pride in their profession. Hence why giving work to God was important, it was giving an important thing up. You're right about the origins of the "protestant work ethic" but since that's not the thing under discussion, it's irrelevent (although to point out that at the time of Luther an artisan and a capitalist would have been socially idnistinguishable, so what would become the working class was there are part of the rise of protestantism). Of course, going back that far gives us a bias towards the people who wrote history of the time, we can't get oral accounts from the fourteenth century.Let me put this another, in your workplace, if someone wasn't pulling their weight, would you let them get away with it? We identify as the workign class, because we work. The skills, attitudes and value we need in order to work aren't just inflicted from without, we bring them to the table. When we get socialism work will not be a simple necessity, but a necessity for life, we'll look for work to do to enjoy ourselves and to create our freedom and use our energies. per Morris.Yes, our work isn't a match for the output of the ruling class, but it does provide us with (as I noted) annecodtal evidence of the workers rejecting our case when it presented to them (in detail). If they accept he statuis quo, however reluctantly, that is what they are voting for and what they intend to have. The point is, unlike Leninist, we don't claim to know what workers really want, or need, we tall them they are wrong to be be voting the way they are,a nd that they need to be taking responsibility for how they vote.
Sp, What I said originally was:
Quote:I think we need to take workers' opinions at face value. When asked, time and again they support capitalist parties, and capitalist ideas. When presented with the case for socialism, they reject it. That's why workers vote Tory, Libreral and Labour. Unless and until their lived experience accords with socialist understanding (and the need for socialist ideas) they will go on supporting capitalism.Most workers when presented with our ideas reject them. Simple empirical fact, we hand out leaflets and only the tiniest fraction ever come back and ask for more information. Annecdotally, I've addressed thousands of workers at Speaker's corner, and met with almost universal rejection. Empirically, workers vote for Capitalism, I know from my own experience that I only ever voted after consideration and with inent to vote for the party I meant to vote for. I'd need evidence that anyone else was voting with different behaviour. When given the chance to vote for socialism, they have not done so.Being a free workers meant you were better off than a slave, or an indentured or bonded worker, so the achievement of the status of wage workers was an advance for the working class. Selling our labour made us freer, or at least that's how it was often percieved, felt.
SP,but I have provided the proof, several times, as well as clarifying what I was saying as compared with what you say I'm saying (which are different things). For instance, I never said religion is a neutral thing, but that some protestnt sectaries were the means by which groups of workers both organised and expressed themselves (and many protestenat conventicles were very anti-hierchical: Blake left the Swedenborgians at the first whiff of priestcraft, just look at the early quakers).Anyway, I was always thought that part of the justification for socialism was because we work: we don't have any property to use, we can't use force to expropriate the labour of otehrs, so when it comes down to it our labour is what will make us free. Our resentment to the capitalist class is that they don't work.And, just to try and get away from another misapprehension that's crept in: my basic point is that we should assume that when millions of workers vote Tory or Labour that they actually want the policies propounded by thoe parties. When they vote, they mean it. It's irrelevent whether they have heard our case or not.
SP,Considering I never said "our class conceived" I said it was not an idea imposed upon our class or alien to it, and I pointed to artisans and labourers from the puritain and protestant movement as demonstration that the workign class was there when the idea was born. I would also dispute that religion is always a tool of the ruling class. Many working class revolutionaries conceived their ideas as adaptations of religious thought: the muggletonians, the diggers, the levellers. EP Thompson's 'Witness against the beast' is a wonderful journey through the religious fringes of eighteenth century artisan london.No idea belongs wholly to one person or one class, its terms are contested and layered with different meanings. The dignity of labour, the freedom from the oppression of the guildmaster and the idea that your employer leaves charge of you at the work door were gains for our class, freed from the structured hieracrhies of feudal life. My pay packet is mine, I earned it, I spend it how I want, and I keep myself independently. Those are powerful working class ideas.
As I said, you introduced the term, not me. Having realised my mistake in not making that correction, I now have. I should pay more attention.Dignity of labour has indeed been used by the ruling class, in an attempt to hijack the term.I have, incidentally, provided examples for which you have provided no rebuttal of the development of working class notions of the value of work, including contribution to protestant notions. I think there is some onus on yourself to explain why you think the working class have brought nothing to the intellectual party, and seem only to enter history bearing the thumb prints of other classes (by your account).I'll also throw in the history of the friendly societies (which Frank Field has tried to raise in his attacks on the welfare state) as a vector for the working class values:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_society
Well, first off, after due consideration I decided to clarify that "work ethic" was your term, that I shouldn't have let pass in the first instance. Providing proof would be difficult, since it involves going back to a time when the nascent working class and the bourgoisie both spent a lot of time attacking the aristocracy. I have given examples in which the elevation to free labourer from bondsman was part of the class struggle to realise its freedom. I could produce "When adam delved and eve span" except that goes all the way back to the peasants revolt, so it's not autochthonous to the working class. I've already produced the protestant sectaries who would have had a strong working class presence (even without having a local capitalist also as a member). Add the Miners, and I think there's enough for my purposes.Lets remember that the eary working class would have been in the same guilds as their employers: they were apprentices to master, so they would necessarilly have shared a lot of views (the masters go on to be industrialists, the apprentices waged workers).
Surely we could stand on the principle that our mayor would become a figurehead for an elected body. I beleive in Canada the Governor of one province did something like that. i.e. we'd have to stand on a slate of spreading democracy. Admittedly, it does raise the terrifying prospect of use having a city fall into our lap (as happened to the English Democrats in Doncaster) where we'd actually have to take charge of administering a city under capitalism, but we'd have to show how we can be different. If we're going to be taken seriously, we have to take this issue on head on.
SP, ISTR it ws you who introduced the term 'Work ethic' I didn't use those words, I'd categoprise what I was talking about under the rubric of 'dignity of labour' which is very much the workng class version.Alan,
Quote:Bonded servitude is a red herring, YMS, and the weighmen was a response to already existing piece -rates system to control it, they did not initiate it.But the struggle against bonded labour and the freedom to sell labour power at a market rate is at the very nub of the argument, when it was in the interests of workers to do so, they promoted and built market relations. Ruskin might have sighed about the cash nexus breaking down the relations between men, but for workers it was a liberation, of sorts. yes, in the context of enclosure there was a form of compulsion, but for the bst part of a century weavers were doing very nicely thank you. There was as much pull as push.The workers formed their own churches, and their own theology, hence the likes of William Blake (OK, technically an artisan, but the working class culture was very much driven by the artisans as much as the proletarians).
But the wages system precisely does away with betters, "never say thank you for a paycheck" means there is no gratitude to the employer, but money paid for work done well. The independent workers is freed from subservience and looks the employer in the eye and says 'How much?'.We can look to sport, the gentlemen versus players. For the middle class, they venerated the gentlemen, seeing professionalism as being subservient to the aristocracy (17th Century squires kept farm hands who were professional cricketers to play for them and back up their gambling), being a gentleman amateur meant playing the game for itself. For the working class sportsmen being paid for a job well done was a necessity and also a point of pride: just look at today how amateur is a universal perjorative, wheras professional is a positive term.For the work ethic, ask: who were the quakers, the protestants, the dissenters? Why were so many weavers of that disposition?
SP,I've already given one example, teh Durham miners, at the turn of the nineteenth century, were bonded labour. They couldn't leave their jobs. they fought to introduce the wages system and market pay. Later the National Union of Miners fought for the check-weigh-men to implement peice rates and hold the employers to account. The working class struggled and devloped the wages system, and for many being a skilled workers was a step up from being a poor farm labourer. Yes, there were industrial horrors, but for some of the the wages system was the remedy.As has been pointed out the main response is 'it sounds lovely, but it'll never work', at a basic level capitalism does work for the majority of workers. For many it doesn't, but it's proved adaptive to them.
Erm, the Labour Party owes more to Methodism than is does to Marxism: Methodism, and non-conformist low protestantism (which developed from the late seventeenth century onwards) was very much part and parcel of the working class freeing itself from Anglican domination, especially the aspirant skilled working class. It wasn't imposed, and its imposition couldn't have been welcomed if the working class had no usef for such ideas anyway.
