From: Paul Adler (padler@USC.EDU)
Date: Wed Oct 12 2005 - 10:54:19 EDT
Friends -- I've been working on a paper whose main idea is one I put the list a long time ago; the paper is now pretty readable, and I'd greatly appreciate comments on it from any of you who cares to read it. By way of background, I note in the paper that Marxist theorists have had little to say about the ongoing process of socializing production. I note that a search of the compendium of Marxist writings on the Marxists Internet Archive and via journal search engines reveals that when the term "socialization" shows up, it has been used almost exclusively in the political sense, to refer to the partial steps towards socialization in the realm of the relations of production: very little has been written about the ongoing socialization in forces of production, even less about this phenomenon at the enterprise level, and virtually nothing about the subjective aspects that so impressed Marx in his discussion of rural and craft idiocy. My paper is framed as a Marxist account of the routinization of innovation postulated by Schumpeter. I focus specifically on software development as it is practiced in large software services businesses. I extend the analysis of Marx and Engels to argue, first, that this routinization represents socialization, both at the level of the individual firm's objective organization structure and also at the level of the subjective self-concepts of the workers (in this case, software developers); and to argue, second, that such socialization stands in a relation of real contradiction to capitalist valorization imperatives. I would be very interested to get some serious assessment/critique of my presentation and use of these themes in historical materialism. Please be in touch if you'd like me to email you a copy. Thanks in advance Paul
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