Comments on: De-Industrialization

By: The Speculist » Blog Archive » Why Now?

The Speculist » Blog Archive » Why Now? — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 22:46:51 +0000

[...] to see a lot more of this sort of thing. As de-industrialization continues to push capabilities that once belonged only to large governments into the hands of [...]

By: triticale

triticale — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:54:39 +0000

De-industrialized society will be somewhat less of a surprise than was industrial society simply because the art of speculation has advanced so much. It is fascinating how wrong the science fiction of my youth was about most of the details, but many of the questions raised are ones with which we are beginning to deal.

By: Phil Bowermaster

Phil Bowermaster — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 08:16:34 +0000

Gamer –

The big difference is this: Marx was all for putting the means of production into the hands of the workers as a group. The technology of de-industrialization puts the means of production into the hands of individuals.

I’m not a thorough enough student of Marx to speculate as to whether he would have liked that. He might have. But he was so purely a creature of the large-scale, collectivist, industrialized world that he might have had a hard time getting his head around the idea.

In any case, it’s unlikely that any subsequent Marxists (particularly those in positions of power) would have cared for the idea at all.

By: Gamer

Gamer — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 20:46:40 +0000

Maybe Marx was right all along about the inevitability of the workers controlling the means of production. Don’t think he had this method in mind though.

By: Stephen Gordon

Stephen Gordon — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 19:49:02 +0000

“de-industrialization will not completely undo industrial society.”

…no more than the information age did away with industrialization or industrialization did away with agriculture. It will simply become a smaller part of the mix of wealth production.

I think there’s a permanent place for standardized products. The less time a consumer has to spend thinking about a product or the less important that product is to the user, the less likely the user would wish to customize it.