I’ve got a few days off after working flat out, late into the night, weekends and so on all through January. I should be sorting out my office, painting the house, tidying up the garage ….instead I find myself reading ‘Adventures in Marxism’ by Marshall Berman which is highly engaging and enjoyable.

He quotes this very striking passage from Marx’s Capital.

“Moden industry never views or treats the existing form of production process as the definitive one. Its technical basis is therefore revolutionary, whereas all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative. By means of machinery, chemical processes and other methods, it is continually transforming not only the technical basis of production, but also the functions of the worker and the social combinations of the labour process.

“At the same time, it thereby also revolutionises the division of labour, and incessantly throws masses of capital and of workers from one branch of production to another. Thus large-scale industry, by its very nature, necessitates variation of labour, fluidity of functions and mobility of workers in all directions….”

Its a good starting point to begin to understand what ‘e-government’ actually means in reality.

And the implications of this?

Technologies and their applications, such as the internet, are ‘revolutionary’ in the sense that they instigate dramatic change; they are disruptive; they enable new activities and change existing ones.

And the implications for the world of work, and those in charge of work processes? They need to both utilise these new technologies and control them, and control the labour. The technologies have a range of functions - to increase productivity; to control labour; to reduce costs (?maybe..). Once the technologies are introduced - the PCs, networks, servers - they want to absorb labour power. If they’re only used 12 hours a day, they spend half the day idle - better to create a 24 hour society (regardless of ‘demand’) so that the technology can be running continuously.

The senior and middle managers in this sense appear to be radical - they are the ones who advocate change throughout the structure and form of organisations. But they do this in order to have better control. They want to use the technologies to drive up productivity - to get more from each worker for the same amount of pay.

The trade unions and shop floor workers appear to be conservative and against change. They cling on to the old working practices. But they do this because a job is one of the defining aspects of many people’s existence. Without such a thing they are forced into a quite miserable subsistence level. So people do cling to low paid, unfulfilling, boring and stressful jobs because they alternatives are probably worse.

There are plenty of examples in recent history of whole industries rapidly disappearing - miners, printers, docks workers - and the short to medium term impact on whole communities was devastating. And for some people, there was never a recovery from the trauma this wholesale unemployment caused at both a mass and individual level.

The fear that something loosely categorised as ‘e-goverment’ might create is that what has happened to manufacturing industries, extractive industries, distributive industries, could soon happen to service industries. But on a scale not yet seen before.