From: glevy@PRATT.EDU
Date: Sat Oct 23 2004 - 10:19:22 EDT
Another interesting post from 'Globolist' by Joe Smith. I wonder: doesn't the diffusion of cell phones internationally have potentially important implications for decision-making under socialism? It seems to me that it furthers the possibility of mass decison-making and coordination discussed by Allin and Paul C in _Towards a New Socialism_. In solidarity, Jerry ======================================= He may have been hopelessly Eurocentric in his diffusionist view of development but Trotsky put his finger on something big. "A backward country assimilates the material and intellectual conquests of the advanced countries. But this does not mean that it follows them slavishly, reproduces all the stages of their past. The theory of the repetition of historic cycles [...] rests upon an observation of the orbits of old pre-capitalist cultures, and in part upon the first experiments of capitalist development. A certain repetition of cultural stages in ever new settlement was in fact bound up with the provincial and episodic character of that whole process. Capitalism means, however, an overcoming of those conditions. It prepares and in a certain sense realises the universality of permanence of man's development. By this a repetition of the forms of development by different nations is ruled out. Although compelled to follow after the advanced countries, a backward country does not take things in the same order. The privilege of historic backwardness - and such a privilege exists - permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specified date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages. Savages throw away their bows and arrows for rifles all at once, without travelling the road which lay between those two weapons in the past [...] The development of historically backward nations leads necessarily to a peculiar combination of different stages in the historic process. Their development as a whole acquires a planless, complex, combined character." Leon Trotsky (Chap One, History of Russian Revolution) Absent from the following article (as well as from Trotsky) is any notion of how the appropriation of technology also transforms its meaning and uses. It repeats the sin of stereotyping and devaluing non-European peoples. In Trotsky's case it was use of the term "savages" and "backwardness." In the LA Times, images of 'log beating', 'loin cloth wearing,' "undeveloped" people suddenly (miraculously) transformed into modern men and women (by contact with artifacts of European countries). The stereotype extends to images of underdevelopment portrayed here as a function of internal backwardness -- 'bureaucratic inefficiences' (read "endemic third world corruption") deny people living in remote areas phone lines. As if the issue wasn't about the relative expense and labor entailed in laying land lines to remote areas in an era of debt! Trotsky can be partially forgiven due to geographic isolation and the time in which he lived. The LA Times can make no such claims. ___________ They Can Hear You Now Cellphones are moving the developing world into the global village. Camel herders, jungle fishermen and jailed kingpins all have a say. By Héctor Tobar LA Times, Oct. 21, 2004 IQUITOS, Peru - A few miles downriver from this city in the western Amazon jungle, Andres Alvarado hops off a boat and walks up a muddy path to a hollowed-out log resting on a wooden stand. He beats the log with a stick, sending a series of low-pitched tones into the rain forest. "This is what they call the 'telephone of the jungle,' " says Alvarado, a tricycle taxi-driver and tourist guide. Moments later, as children of the Bora Indian tribe come bounding down the path to answer the "telephone," Alvarado's belt begins beeping: It's his cellphone. Iquitos and nearby riverside hamlets are among the more remote outposts in South America's expanding mobile phone system, part of a global network that is beginning to penetrate even the poorest and most undeveloped corners of the world. For millions of people living in countries where getting a fixed phone line remains a bureaucratic impossibility, the cellphone revolution has allowed them to leapfrog from archaic forms of communication straight into the digital era - and that is changing the fabric of their daily lives. In East Africa, the mobile phone has brought a first, tantalizing taste of modernity to people who live on less than $10 a day. In China, the world's biggest market for cellphones, they are embraced by rich and poor alike, a tiny pocket computer with which to surf the Internet, play video games or even do banking. Here in Iquitos, where speedboats and lumbering old fishing craft ply the brown, wide waters of the Amazon, fishermen grab the wheels of their vessels with one hand and their cellphones with the other to check the price their catch will fetch at markets downriver [...] The number of cellphones in Latin America has tripled since 1999, and one in five people now owns one. In Peru, as in many other countries in the region, there are more cellphones than fixed phone lines. Today, the world's fastest-growing cellphone markets are in places like Iquitos in rural South America and in sub-Saharan Africa, despite widespread poverty [...] Rwanda's cellphone boom has followed a pattern typical of many developing countries. It now has more than five times as many cellphones (134,000) as fixed telephone lines (23,000), according to the International Telecommunications Union. As in Rwanda, people elsewhere across Africa are coming to appreciate and rely upon the magic of the cellphone - communicating with a distant friend while under a baobab tree in Mali, for example, or on the Kenyan savanna. In Senegal, farmers use them in their annual, age-old battle against plagues of locusts, calling each other and the authorities to keep track of the progress of insect "hopper bands." In Somalia, men in loincloths flash their cellphones as they guide camels to port. Masai warriors in Tanzania pull phones from their red shuka robes to call gem brokers when they find glimmering purple-blue tanzanite, a rare gemstone found only in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro [...] Full: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg- cellular21oct21,1,163581.story?coll=la-headlines-world --- End forwarded message ---
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