Re: Re: Re: Question about the economics of information

[Eugene Coyle <eugenecoyle@xxxxxxx>]

miychi sent the quote from Marx, below.  Greenspan's analysis of productivity
in the new economy reads something like Marx, does it not?

Gene Coyle


>
>
> A radical change in the mode of production in one sphere of industry
> involves a similar change in other spheres. This happens at first in such
> branches of industry as are connected together by being separate phases of a
> process, and yet are isolated by the social division of labour, in such a
> way, that each of them produces an independent commodity. Thus spinning by
> machinery made weaving by machinery a necessity, and both together made the
> mechanical and chemical revolution that took place in bleaching, printing,
> and dyeing, imperative. So too, on the other hand, the revolution in
> cotton-spinning called forth the invention of the gin, for separating the
> seeds from the cotton fibre; it was only by means of this invention, that
> the production of cotton became possible on the enormous scale at present
> required. [19] But more especially, the revolution in the modes of
> production of industry and agriculture made necessary a revolution in the
> general conditions of the social process of production, i.e., in the means
> of communication and of transport. In a society whose pivot, to use an
> expression of Fourier, was agriculture on a small scale, with its subsidiary
> domestic industries, and the urban handicrafts, the means of communication
> and transport were so utterly inadequate to the productive requirements of
> the manufacturing period, with its extended division of social labour, its
> concentration of the instruments of labour, and of the workmen, and its
> colonial markets, that they became in fact revolutionised. In the same way
> the means of communication and transport handed down from the manufacturing
> period soon became unbearable trammels on Modern Industry, with its feverish
> haste of production, its enormous extent, its constant flinging of capital
> and labour from one sphere of production into another, and its newly-created
> connexions with the markets of the whole world. Hence, apart from the
> radical changes introduced in the construction of sailing vessels, the means
> of communication and transport became gradually adapted to the modes of
> production of mechanical industry, by the creation of a system of river
> steamers, railways, ocean steamers, and telegraphs. But the '.huge masses of
> iron that had now to be forged, to be welded, to be cut, to be bored, and to
> be shaped, demanded, on their part, cyclopean machines, for the construction
> of which the methods of the manufacturing period were utterly inadequate.
>
> Modern Industry had therefore itself to take in hand the machine, its
> characteristic instrument of production, and to construct machines by
> machines. It was not till it did this, that it built up for itself a fitting
> technical foundation, and stood on its own feet. Machinery, simultaneously
> with the increasing use of it, in the first decades of this century,
> appropriated, by degrees, the fabrication of machines proper. But it was
> only during the decade preceding 1866, that the construction of railways and
> ocean steamers on a stupendous scale called into existence the cyclopean
> machines now employed in the construction of prime movers.
>
> In the first place, it must be observed that the machinery, while always
> entering as a whole into the labour-process, enters into the value-begetting
> process only by bits. It never adds more value than it loses, on an average,
> by wear and tear. Hence there is a great difference between the value of a
> machine, and the value transferred in a given time by that machine to the
> product.