Date: Sun, 24 Aug 1997 19:23:47 +0100
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: M-TH: Ned Ludd


Louis doubts that the excellent statistics I provided give a real
picture because they do not cover a large enough period.


Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes is to my mind an excessively pessimistic
(if not millenarian text). None the less Hobsbawm has this to say about
material improvement:

'How did the world of the 1990s compare with the world of 1914? It
contained five or six million human beings, perhaps threee times as many
as at the outbreak of the first world war ... Most people in the 1990s
were taller and heavier than their parents, better fed and far longer-
lived ... The world was incomparably richer than ever before in its
capacity to produce goods and services and in their endless variety. It
could not have managed otherwise to maintain a global population several
times larger than ever before in the world's history. ... Humanity was
far better educated than in 1914. ... The world was filled with a
revolutionary and constantly advancing technology, based on triumphs of
natural science which could be anticipated in natural science in 1914,
but had then barely begun to be pioneered.' 

(p12-13)

Of course Hobsbawm quite rightly goes on to qualify these statistics of
material advance by looking at the growth of destructive tendencies such
as world war, economic collapses and so on.

None of this secular advance in material well-being in any way
invalidates Marx's theory of the growing domination of capital over
labour, nor, more importantly does it invalidate Lenin's theory of
Imperialism, unless that is wrongly read as a theory of absolute
decline.

On the contrary in Imperialism: Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin
characterises the age not only as stagnation and decay, but also of
combined and uneven development. As the early passages of the pamphlet
make quite clear the growht of monopolies actually facilitates
considerable leaps in technology as capital is centralised.
-- 
James Heartfield


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