[PEN-L:28642] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Drudgery

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ian Murray wrote:
>
> --
> Actually Feenberg, coming from a Marxian-Marcusian-Heideggerian standpoint pays a lot of attention
> to May 68 as well as address property relations. But you'd have to actually read his books to see
> that.
>

I intended my comment to apply only to the specific sentence quoted --
and I deliberately looked at it out of any context. The rest of the
material you quoted would have to be given more careful consideration.
But I would still hold to my view that the "experts" are not, in
themselves, a particular barrier to change. The opening paragraph you
quoted was interesting:

***
I start from the assumption that there is no unique correlation between
technological advance
and the distribution of social power. If authoritarian social hierarchy
is not technically necessary, then there must be other ways of
rationalizing society that democratize rather than centralize control.
We need not go underground or native to escape the iron cage. I will
argue that this is in fact the meaning of the emerging social movements
to change technology in a variety of areas such as computers, medicine,
and the environment.***

Those social movements probably consist partly of those who are
themselves experts in those areas. But of course under present
social-political conditions the immediate (or even long-range) interests
of most/many experts (and I include their interest in being useful to
people) are tied up with the institutions which employ or sponsor them.

Carrol