Fettering Thesis

= "For much of the twentieth century, the fettering thesis dominated Left thinking about technology." [1]

Discussion

Jasper Bernes:

"Many on the left still subscribe to a view of technology that G.A. Cohen, in his reconstruction of Marx’s thought, called “the fettering thesis.”

From this perspective, the technological forces that capitalism employs in its quest for productivity-driven profit are the foundation upon which an emancipated humanity will erect its new dwelling. Humane cultivation of these forces is, however, “fettered” by capitalist social relations. Capitalism is pregnant with what could be, a deployment in the conditional tense of given productive forces. In a resonant moment of triumphal phrasing at the end of the first volume of Capital, Marx describes capitalism as tending toward a moment of crisis, its property relations an “integument… burst asunder” by the maturation of increasingly centralized and concentrated productive forces. The consequences, for Marx, are clear: “The knell of capitalist property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”

At a critical point in the development of capitalism, the fragmented, unplanned allocation of wealth that characterizes production for profit in competitive markets no longer conforms with the complex, industrialized labor process of modern workplaces: only socialist planning and the supervision of the direct producers themselves can make effective use of the technology whose adolescence the bourgeoisie oversaw. Today, many will advance these arguments only with significant caveats, avoiding some of its more embarrassing iterations. Few would argue, for instance, that the deskilled, socialized labor of the factory system contains the germ of a new world in the making. They will not hesitate, however, to pour new wine into old bottles and say much the same thing about 3-D printers and self-driving cars.

The fettering thesis appears throughout Marx’s mature writings, especially in those rare, speculative moments when he considers the transition to communism. It sits uneasily, however, with a view developed most pointedly in his writing on large-scale machinery, in which the factory system actualizes capital’s control over labor, confiscating “every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity.”

(https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/belly-of-the-revolution-final.pdf)