Yep, Morozov seems to be absolutely right:
"Benanav dubs his project “a real political economy of technology,” but leaf through the inventory and you’ll find the merchandise has been smuggled in, price tags still attached, from the very warehouse Marx spent his life trying to burn down: efficiency, innovation, trade-offs, even such neoclassical curios as the “vintage problem” and the “production frontier.”
So when he asks why I decline to do that kind of political economy, the answer writes itself: My reading of Marx—partial, perhaps; flawed, possibly—is that the task was to dynamite the categories of political economy, not to embalm them in scholastic amber and slap “realism” on the display case. That a prominent Marxist economist can wield these terms as if they were neutral instruments of reason rather than historical artifacts marinated in capitalist brine tells you something melancholy about the state of the tradition. The tools of the master’s house, lovingly polished and passed off as revolu
... Show more...Yep, Morozov seems to be absolutely right:
"Benanav dubs his project “a real political economy of technology,” but leaf through the inventory and you’ll find the merchandise has been smuggled in, price tags still attached, from the very warehouse Marx spent his life trying to burn down: efficiency, innovation, trade-offs, even such neoclassical curios as the “vintage problem” and the “production frontier.”
So when he asks why I decline to do that kind of political economy, the answer writes itself: My reading of Marx—partial, perhaps; flawed, possibly—is that the task was to dynamite the categories of political economy, not to embalm them in scholastic amber and slap “realism” on the display case. That a prominent Marxist economist can wield these terms as if they were neutral instruments of reason rather than historical artifacts marinated in capitalist brine tells you something melancholy about the state of the tradition. The tools of the master’s house, lovingly polished and passed off as revolutionary furniture.
Sadly, Benanav knows exactly what he’s doing. In a footnote to his first NLR essay, he explicitly dismisses the work of German value-form theorists—who argue that the categories of political economy (value, money, labor, the firm) are not neutral analytical tools but historically specific forms of capitalist social domination, to be abolished rather than repurposed. He doesn’t mention Moishe Postone—who chided socialists for fetishizing the category of “labor” instead of finding ways to transcend it—nor Simon Clarke—who argued that the categories of political economy, so skillfully dissected by Marx, are not neutral analytical tools passed off as timeless truths but, rather, reified expressions of social relations. We can infer that Benanav would find their work impractical too.
(...)
Consider the value Benanav treats as most self-evidently balanceable: efficiency."
theideasletter.org/essay/the-s…
#Marx #Technology #PoliticalEconomy #Wertkritik #Capitalism
Taking issue with Benanav’s institutional vision of a democratic political economy of technology, Morozov argues that generative AI exposes a deeper problem that socialism has yet to solve: how to…
Jordana Timerman (The Ideas Letter)
