Friday, July 31, 2015

David F. Ruccio — What comes next?


Technological innovation increases possibilities. Technology alone does not bring any of those possibilities into actuality on its own. This involves people making choices, and that involves many often competing and conflicting factors — the interests of ownership, the interest of the environment, and the common interest.
…we do need to be aware of the ways the existing set of relations—the relations of capitalist commodity production—not only create capitalist subjects, but also noncapitalist subjectivities.
The way I’ve put it in my own writing, capitalist commodity production both presumes and constitutes particular kinds of individual subjects (which Marx referred to as “commodity fetishism”). But it also brings into existence new collective subjectivities—new ways of “being in common”—that can transcend capitalism.…
That alternative subjectivity—that “being in common” in relation to healthcare—can serve as the basis of a noncommodified, noncapitalist form of healthcare. And, pace Mason, new kinds of information technologies might even be useful for connecting producers and consumers in postcapitalist ways. There’s nothing automatic about it, of course. Still, both signal the possibility of ways of moving beyond capitalism.
The key is to find ways to combine emerging information technologies and ethical concerns in a political movement that is inspired by a fundamental critique: both what is wrong with the existing order and an imagining of a concrete alternative.
 The issue become much more obvious when the traditional factors of production — capital, alnd, and labor — are called what they really are — technology, the environment, and people.
The Rectification of Names (Chinese: ; pinyin: Zhèngmíng; Wade–Giles: Cheng-ming) is the Confucian doctrine that to know and use the proper designations of things in the web of relationships that creates meaning, a community, and then behaving accordingly so as to ensure social harmony is The Good.[1] Since social harmony is of utmost importance, without the proper rectification of names, society would essentially crumble and "undertakings [would] not [be] completed." — <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectification_of_names"> Wikipedia </a>
Then we might have a meaningful debate on what constitutes a good life ethically in a good society socially.

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What comes next?
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics University of Notre Dame Notre Dame

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