Class-Biased Technical Change and Socialism: Some Reflections on Benedito Moraes-Neto's “On the Labor Process and Productive Efficiency: Discussing the Socialist Project”.

Are capitalism's latest technological advances necessary/appropriate for a socialist society? Or can relatively technologically “backward” capitalist societies follow their own distinct path to socialism? Here I take Benedito Moraes-Neto's “On the Labor Process and Productive Efficiency: Discussing the Socialist Project” as a starting point for my own reflections on these questions, attempting to broaden the terms of the debate, elaborating on the class-biased nature of technical change, and laying emphasis on the dialectical relationship between technology and the relations of production. Taking a knowledge perspective on the labor process, I argue that premachinery manufacture and Taylorism-Fordism are aspects of the same class struggle, the attempt by capital to appropriate working-class knowledge and thereby create space for itself to control and manage the labor process. Finally, I question the “techno-optimism” which leads Moraes-Neto to assert that late-twentieth-century advances in technology are an exception to this rule. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]