Quotes from Ch. 7: The Promise of Civilzational Change

It is not easy to reconstruct Marx's theory of the path to this result, but I will argue that it consists in three transitional processes that correspond roughly to the three factors of change identified in the previous chapter: socialization, democratization, and innovation.

1. The socialization of the means of production, accompanied by the early substitution of planning for markets in the allocation of large scale productive forces and cultural capital.
2. The radical democratization of society through an end to the vast economic, social, and political inequalities characteristic of class societies.
3. A new pattern of technological progress yielding innovations that overcome the sharp division of mental and manual labor characteristic of capitalism. (142)

Democratic control of industry is a condition for generating an interest in a new direction of technological progress. In other words, democracy itself is a "productive force" of a new type, shaping innovation in a future socialist society. (143)

Because civilizational change effectively redefines what it is to be human, it has consequences for both ethical and economic advance. (147)

The economic circle is squared by the creation of an industrial perpetuum mobile that feeds off the very resources it consumes. The socialist labor process will be based on a synergism of the demand for skilled labor and the growth of human powers in leisure. A primary leisure activity, pursued for its own sake, increases the value of labor and so can be freely converted into an economic input. (150)

• Seems idealistic. This would be wonderful if the only jobs that needed to be done were those that people enjoyed doing in their spare time. However, there are jobs, realities of life, that I can't imagine anybody wanting to do or spend their free time immersed in. Trash collection, sanitary processing of waste materials...
  

But given the disqualifying effects of the capitalist division of labor, how can workers organize the firm? They need not all be experts to play a role in corporate governance, but they must at least have capacities equivalent to those that enable investors to handle their investments, and work together in shaping policy and selecting managers. Absent these capacities, socialization either remains purely formal, or leads to disastrous mistakes. (151)

Clearly, education is the answer. Social ownership must extend beyond machines, buildings, and land to include the monopolized knowledge required for the management of industry. (151)

The scope and importance of education would broaden accordingly, and in this context the acquisition of knowledge and skill would no longer appear as a subtraction from individual welfare but as a component of it. Education would be uncoupled from society's economic needs and from individuals' investment strategies; it would become the driving force in social and technological change. Industrial society would bootstrap out of the knowledge deficit to a condition in which more and more individuals possessed the cultural qualifications corresponding to their social responsibilities. (153)