social and technical is a mystification maintained by the commodity fetishism of capitalist society
See Leo Marx "Technology the Emergence of a Hazardous Concept"
5 Matching Annotations
- Jun 2025
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notesfrombelow.org notesfrombelow.org
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My proposal is that communists should think more like engineers.
very along the lines of 2nd gen+ cybernetics as well - thinking in terms of systems, processes etc as a way to better grasp and change complex societal conditions
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he closer to these realms of physical phenomena the act of abstraction becomes, the more it becomes the domain of a more classically trained engineer.11
honestly unclear on the point of this section - is it just to include software engineering/programming within the scope of "engineers"
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must extend beyond that which appears solely technical into the realm of social relations.
much easier said than done - to do so pushes against the fundamental practices of engineering education . Take the topic of so-called "engineering ethics". As taught in higher education the scope never covers if such and such engineering is "ethical" but instead if the engineer has not been negligent in their work to produce the product/project. Factors of safety, regulatory standards, proper documentation etc. The engineering methodology of creating system models always boils down to what can be included in a calculation - which often fundamentally excludes inputs like social or ethical implications.
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Secondly the engineers must adopt as their goal the dissolution of capitalism in favor of a social system where production is a deliberate, collectively-driven process capable of modeling and accounting for phenomena at scales ranging from personal to global
""for engineering to become communist it must first become communist""
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