'Network Society' Seems Anti-Individualistic

It would seem natural to think that a phrase like the 'network society', even capitalized, would merely refer to a world connected by the links of computerized networks. To some extent that is true. Ericcson, the Swedish technology company, says on its website that the network "will fundamentally change the way we innovate, collaborate, produce, govern and sustain." 

But something called the Centre for Personal Sovereignty claims that this network society "resembles laissez-faire capitalism combined with the better promise of Marxism."

First I would ask what the 'better promise' could possibly be if it is not the individual existing free of government interference in the market-workings of his enterprises. The term 'free market'...means free of government's aggressive force, said Reason Magazine. 'Regulation' of industry is often necessary, such as in labeling, where we don't want two products called 'aspirin', one of which is not acetylsalicylic acid; where we want to be assured that our meat is properly handled before packaging; where a Doctor has the necessary knowledge and competence to practice what we believe he says he can. But regulation of the market place, ala Marx, helps no one and hurts all.

This "network society" in general is not an economic system: "The impact of this revolutionary political system," the Centre says, "though today existing only in theory, can already be calculated."

Of course it can. I can calculate that because it is a political system that it will contain government interference, legal plunder and legally aggressive force. After all, it "maximizes market efficiencies" instead of letting the market finds its own way of doing that.

"Unlike capitalist systems," the Centre says, "in a Network Society the 'people' as individuals fully own their personal means of production. One's compensation is directly proportionate to one's value as we all become economic and political 'free agents'." 

They also say "it also represents control over your own means of production - that is, you will learn to reap the full economic value derived from what you do, rather than giving that value to your boss. A business owner that earns a profit from the efforts of her employees will be reaping the excess rewards derived from the synergistic efforts of the entire group (1 + 1 = 3). This excess value represents the value of the owner's ability to orchestrate the efforts of independent parts towards a productive end."

This gobbeldy-gook of twisted language leave me with questions:

• If you can still have a boss who "reaps the excess rewards", how is it different from capitalism?
• If you still have a boss, how do you "fully own your personal means of production", and if you do, why pay anything to a boss, let alone have a boss?
• How is the "synergistic" efforts of "the entire group" (what group?) any different from a normal workplace today?
• If an employer is the one who knows how to "orchestrate the efforts of independent parts towards a productive end," why is s/he reaping "excess rewards"? How can they be "excess" when s/he is doing essentially what the owner of his "personal means of production" will be doing; is that person not also reaping "excess rewards"? In excess of what? In excess of who's rewards? Why can't someone keep all his own rewards?

It all reminds me of Ayn Rand's criticism of Kant, when she said he "originated the technique required to sell irrational notions to the men of a skeptical, cynical age." We are living in such an age, and the technique keeps going and going.

After all, it would seem that my blogging and authoring a book to be sold only on line for E-readers would be the very thing Ericcson and the Centre and others are discussing. But it scares me to think that they want to include what I do in their crazy scheme of "the better promise of Marxism."

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© Curtis Edward Clark 2012

A Brief, Brief Exam of the Modern Counter-Enlightenment

    Someone recently asked if we have passed through the postmodern era into a new period of cultural and social history.

    No.

    "Marxism and postmodernism: people often seem to find this combination peculiar or paradoxical..."[1] They are neither. It was the 'modernists' who led us from Lockean/Jeffersonian individualism into the 'Beat Generation' of artists who came, post-WWII, from the indoctrination of the socialist elements of the unionist movements of their parents' and grandparents' generation.

    The tenets of the movement, its belief in progress, freedom, and equality, had been sustained from the outset by artists and intellectuals, and embraced by those who reaped the material benefits it brought.[2]

   Those were the individualists like Alexis de Tocqueville, whose historic first-hand description of Americans showed us to believe that "all values are human-centered, the individual is of supreme importance, and all individuals are morally equal. Individualism places great value on self-reliance, on privacy, and on mutual respect. Negatively, it embraces opposition to authority and to all manner of controls over the individual, especially when exercised by the state."[3] And so it included writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Washington Irving.

    But envy of men like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, A. A. Talmadge, and others led to a form of anti-industrialism where the forerunner of today's lobbyists were the so-called competitors of those men. 

    "Intense lobbying began between 1869 and 1877, during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant. The most influential lobbies wanted railroad subsidies and a tariff on wool. At the same time in the Reconstruction South, lobbying was a high intensity activity near the state legislatures, especially regarding railroad subsidies. The term itself came from Britain to describe approaches made to Members of Parliament in the lobbies of the House of Commons..."[4]

    Lobbying as it was practiced then does not 'embrace opposition to authority', it used authority; nor did it despise 'all manner of controls over the individual, especially when exercised by the state'. It wanted the intervention of the State, because then the lobbyists gained power over those who could manage quite nicely without any government assistance.

    In other cases it was quite the opposite: those who could do quite nicely without government interference or 'assistance', were forced to pay-off men in high places who could create interference with tariffs and subsidies to their competitors who were seen as being unable to 'compete' without running interference on their behalf.

    'Modernists' were therefore anti-industrialist anti-individualists. The violence of the unionist movement is rampant with people more interested in wresting power from the industries, than with the plight of the poor working class who needed someone to speak for them, to help them raise their wages and gain benefits. "The Russian Revolution had seemed at the time, and for a long time after, to be the answer to the progressive modernist's dream."[2]

  We are--and have been since the age of Rousseau and Kant--in the age of the counter-Enlightenment. To think of 'modernism' or 'post-modernism' while stuck in one era (in which we are going backward toward Plato's Cave) is ridiculous. Until we overthrow the counter-Enlightenment that spawned Napoleon and Trotsky, Eugene V. Debs, the Industrial Workers of the World,  and "the anti-modern, ideological religious right"[5]--until we do this and get back to thinking in terms of negative rights rather than positive rights, (not to be confused with 'negative liberty' and 'positive liberty') will we actually be in the 'modern era'. Only then, someday far in the future, can we ever look to a 'post-modern' era---and I hope it's rational.

[1] New Left Review
[2] Modernism and Politics
[3] Britannica Precise Encyclopedia
[4] Lobbying in the United States: History
[5] American conservatism as Counter Enlightenment

© Curtis Edward Clark 2011

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