2-44
JACK LUDWIG
Politics, as we have understood them, are in the process of
change, and party politics based on the old cliches are becom–
ing increasingly irrelevant and distasteful to many of the scient–
ists and technologists who now make up such an important
and influential section of every society. Such people, by train–
ing and temperament, are more likely
to
be interested in the
most practical and rapid ways of getting results than in dogmas
and ideologies based on an earlier stage of economic develop–
ment.
That "earlier stage" takes in both socialism and capitalism. Not
just national party politics but the East-West struggle, by implication
the Cold War, is, in the light of automation, sheer nonsense. Commun–
ism and capitalism, Sir Leon says, are "two rather old-fashioned sys–
tems," and simply will not be able
to
stand up to the revolution
automation is bringing with it.
Under the influence of advancing automation we are beginning
to see that the differences between capitalism on the one hand,
and communism and socialism on the other, which have been
dividing the world and inhibiting thought for so long, are at
last beginning to diminish.
Though Sir Leon is admittedly no scholar and, indeed, no economic
analyst, it's quite clear what notions he thinks are "inhibiting thought."
Can, for instance, a nineteenth-century labor theory of value be protected
against the realities of a kind of production which makes mere
metaphors out of certain kinds of work and hours? Can the Marxist
descriptions of the suffering caused by the violent swings from under–
production
to
overproduction and the resulting shrink in employment
have anything
to
do with the millisecond and microsecond adjustments
of production to consumption? Automation, Sir Leon wants us to know,
is a mode, and thus properly apolitical. He quotes with obvious approval
a statement by the Russian "economist Strumlin . . . to the Soviet
Academy of Science[:]
'if
Capitalism can be characterized as a classical
period of the mechanization of work, Communism will be seen to bring
about a new era of total automation in production.' "
date.
The old capitalist goals and drives and urges are similarly out of
From a battle for possession of wealth, limited by our present
capacity to produce, we are moving into an era where we shall
be more concerned with the means of exploiting our technical
resources, with increasing productivity still further, and then of
necessity with the problem of the organization of society for the
greatest
good.
