Intellectual and manual labour Book

If socialism is to present an alternative to technocracy, if society is to gain control over technology rather than the reverse, then one must establish, as a theoretical precondition, that science depends on social history for its very origin and its logic. This book demonstrates that the conceptual form of thinking of philosophy and science can be traced outside the immanency of the mind and, in fact, to what Marx calls the 'commodity abstraction' which is the key to the formation of societies in which production is carried on for exchange. This is the novel element in this book: the view that abstraction is the vehicle of a historical process in time and space, by the agency of human action, not human thought The specific outcome that exchange produces In its own capacity is money, the abstract thing which links all human relations to a coherent social nexus The abstractness of exchange is precisely what carries this socially synthetic function. The real abstraction operating in exchange is shown to be the one which, reflected in the mind, results in the ideal abstraction which constitutes pure thought. By this deduction the Marxian critique of political economy is supplemented by a critique of the theory of knowledge. The work of science is seen, contrary to its understanding of Itself, as rooted in social practice, but in such a way that it is blinded to its own genesis. By the side of the system of abstract, alienated labour there is the system of abstract, alienated thought. Science does not perform its necessary social task in providing objective knowledge of nature but with a false consciousness of itself. In brief, this is a theory which achieves the historical explanation of ahistorical thinking. Operating within the twentieth-century production relations modern science has created forces entailing an immense social scale of production. Modern production culminating in automation is activated by an economics unhinging with classical market economics. The theory argued in this book sees development forced in the direction of production operated on a social scale more and more at variance with the capitalist system of private appropriation and the combined division of intellectual and manual labour.