[PEN-L:8231] Re:Information revolution?

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> Rod Hay <rodhay@xxxxxxxxxxx> 06/22/99 07:09PM >>>
I don't doubt that these things are happening at least marginally, but does
this constitute a "revolution" similar in importance as the industrial
revolution in the 19th century or the corporate revolution in the 20th
century. If information is of economic value and the new technology allows
firms to control that information and thus alter the structure of the firm
and the subsequent social relations, it is still not clear where that is
going. Shifting the risk on to the workers is not new. Sometimes it is
easier to do that others.

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Charles: If we think of evolution as quantitative change and revolution as qualitative change, we might ask :how are the current changes in science and technology a qualitative change in the sense that the industrial revolution was a qualitative change , a leap ?

In _Capital_, Marx analyzes the qualitative change of the capitalist industrial revolution of the early 1800's ( out of the manufacturing phase of capitalism) as mechanization and cooperation: the shift to predominate use of machines and bringing together many workers in one place in an organization of production emblemized by the giant factory. These changes combined to cause a leap in the efficiency of production of commodities to the end of increasing profits.
(Engels and Marx had said in _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_ that the bourgeoisie are constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production).

Since then there has been mass electrification, assembly line production (Fordism) and a number of other technical innovations prior to the current inventions which are particularly in the quality of information technologies and which also increase the efficiency of production. These have allowed a qualitative shift away from the orginal dual characteristics isolated by Marx such that mechanization has advanced so much in communication and transportation that cooperation need not be so territorially concentrated as in the classic factory, but rather the points of production may be scattered without loss in production of surplus value. Just in time delivery is a graphic example of this, where parts may come from an international division of labor that was once concentrated in one plant, city or region.

This is one basis for seeing the "information" changes as revolutionary, a revolution in science and technology, not the relations of production.

Charles Brown

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The problem is that if information is decentralised and readily accessable
with the new technology what then is the basis of the firm. A monopoly on
capital? a monopoly on information? Will Bill Gates and this peers succeed
in controling the new technology or will it slip their grasps. Evidence can
be marshalled for either tendency. Perhaps the development of Linux will
prove to be a revolutionary act of significance. Perhaps not.

Peter Dorman wrote:
 >I have a theory about the info-rev and the changing structure of firms.
 >I won't go into the reasons (too long), but the main points are:
 >
 >1. Firms exist primarily to internalize and utilize nonprice
 >information.

Jim Devine wrote:
They also internalize other external benefits -- and they  profit by find
ways of externalizing internal costs, as shown by recent shifts to
management techniques relying more and more on worker turnover (as opposed
to job security, tenure, etc.), so that workers bear more and more of the
risk.






Rod Hay
rodhay@xxxxxxxxxxx
The History of Economic Thought Archives
http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html
Batoche Books
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