Breaking the Frame on Marx 19 Jan Whitechapel London

Breaking the Frame on Marx 19 Jan Whitechapel London

The January 2015 BTF Reading Group will be at

LARC, 62 Fieldgate Street, E1 1ES

at 7pm on Monday 19th January.

Nearest tube: Whitechapel.

We will be looking at Marxism and technology (particularly digital technology) by looking at some sections of Nick Dyer-Witheford’s Cyber-Marx. The most important sections to read if you can’t manage everything, are pages 1-5, 38-42, 48-54, 62-72 and 76-79.

For those who think that digital technology and the whole world structured according to it 'just happened' because of clever inventions by scientists, here is a quote from an article by Zbigniew Brzezinski, a key figure in right-wing US politics for the last fifty years, from 1968.

Writing in the CIA-funded Encounter magazine in an article called 'America in the Technetronic Age', Brzezinski extols the potential of electronics for social control: "Human conduct will become less spontaneous and less mysterious – more predetermined and subject to deliberate "programming." … The same techniques could serve to impose well-nigh total political surveillance on every citizen, putting into much sharper relief than is the case today the question of privacy….

The achievement-oriented society might give way to the amusement-focused society, with essentially spectator spectacles (mass sports, TV) providing an opiate for increasingly purposeless masses…. In the technetronic society, the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities effectively exploiting the latest communication techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason."