From the industrial revolution to the computer revolution: First signs of a new combination of material and human productive forms

Abstract

This essay is a theoretical discussion of issues arising from a recent detailed empirical investigation of new automation and computerisation processes in French manufacturing industry by a team of industrial sociologists and economists. These changes pose fundamental problems for neo-Taylorist forms of management and forms of calculation within the enterprise, and open contradictory possibilities for the restructuring of skill and the redistribution of power and knowledge within the factory. Using Marxist categories, Lojkine attempts to identify the underlying potential of these changes and their implications for the relationship between technical progress and socio-economic change.