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Title: Technology and Class Struggle Author: Wolfi Landstreicher Language: en Topics: class struggle, green anarchy, technology, social control, individualism Source: The Best of Green Anarchy, pg. 69
The developments in technology over the past sixty years—the nuclear
industry, cybernetics and related information techniques, biotechnology
and genetic engineering—have produced fundamental changes in the social
terrain. The methods of exploitation and domination have changed, and
for this reason old ideas about the nature of class and class struggle
are not adequate for understanding the present situation. The workerism
of the marxists and syndicalists can no longer even be imagined to offer
anything useful in developing a revolutionary practice. But simply
rejecting the concept of class is not a useful response to this
situation either, because in so doing one loses an essential tool for
understanding the present reality and how to attack it.
Exploitation not only continues, but has intensified sharply in the wake
of the new technology. Cybernetics has permitted the decentralization of
production, spreading small units of production across the social
terrain. Automation has drastically reduced the number of production
workers necessary for any particular manufacturing process. Cybernetics
further creates methods for making money without producing anything
real, thus allowing capital to expand itself without the expense of
labor.
Furthermore, the new technology demands a specialized knowledge that is
not available for most people. This knowledge has come to be the real
wealth of the ruling class in the present era. Under the old industrial
system, one could look at class struggle as the struggle between workers
and owners over the means of production. This no longer makes sense. As
the new technology advances, the exploited find themselves driven into
increasingly precarious positions. The old life-long skilled factory
position has been replaced by day labor, service sector jobs, temporary
work, unemployment, the black market, illegality, homelessness and
prison. This precariousness guarantees that the wall created by the new
technology between the exploiters and the exploited remains
unbreachable.
But the nature of the technology itself places it beyond the reach of
the exploited. Earlier industrial development had as its primary focus
the invention of techniques for the mass manufacturing of standardized
goods at low cost for high profit. These new technological developments
are not so much aimed at the manufacturing of goods as at the
development of means for increasingly thorough and widespread social
control and for freeing profit from production. The nuclear industry
requires not only specialized knowledge, but also high levels of
security that place its development squarely under the control of the
state and lead to a military structuring in keeping with its extreme
usefulness to the military. Cybernetic technology’s ability to process,
record, gather and send information nearly instantaneously serves the
needs of the state to document and monitor its subjects as well as its
need to reduce the real knowledge of those it rules to bits of
information-data-hoping, thus, to reduce the real capabilities for
understanding of the exploited. Biotechnology gives the state and
capital control over the most fundamental processes of life itself;
allowing them to decide what sort of plants, animals and—in time—even
human beings can exist.
Because these technologies require specialized knowledge and are
developed for the purpose of increasing the control of the masters over
the rest of humanity even in our daily lives, the exploited class can
now best be understood as those excluded from this specialized knowledge
and thus from real participation in the functioning of power. The master
class is, thus, made up of those included in participation in the
functioning of power and the real use of the specialized technological
knowledge. Of course these are processes in course, and the borderlines
between the included and excluded can, in some cases, be elusive as
increasing numbers of people are proletarianized—losing whatever
decision-making power over their own conditions of existence they may
have had.
It is important to point out that although these new technologies are
intended to give the masters control over the excluded and over the
material wealth of the earth, they are themselves beyond any human
beings control. Their vastness and the specialization they require
combine with the unpredictability of the materials they act upon—atomic
and sub-atomic particles, light waves, genes and chromosomes, etc.—to
guarantee that no single human being can actually understand completely
how they work. This adds a technological aspect to the already existing
economic precariousness that most of us suffer from. However, this
threat of technological disaster beyond any one’s control also serves
power in controlling the exploited—the fear of more Chernobyls,
genetically engineered monsters or escaped laboratory-made diseases and
the like move people to accept the rule of so-called experts who have
proven their own limits over and over again. Furthermore, the state—that
is responsible for every one of these technological developments through
its military—is able to present itself as a check against rampant
corporate “abuse” of this technology. So this monstrous, lumbering,
uncontrollable juggernaut serves the exploiters very well in maintaining
their control over the rest of the population. And what need have they
to worry about the possible disasters when their wealth and power has
most certainly provided them with contingency plans for their own
protection?
Thus, the new technology and the new conditions of exclusion and
precariousness it imposes on the exploited undermine the old dream of
expropriation of the means of production. This technology—controlling
and out of control— cannot serve any truly human purpose and has no
place in the development of a world of individuals free to create their
lives as they desire. So the illusory utopias of the syndicalists and
marxists are of no use to us now. But were they ever? The new
technological developments specifically center around control, but all
industrial development has taken the necessity of controlling the
exploited into account. The factory was created in order to bring
producers under one roof to better regulate their activities; the
production line mechanized this regulation; every new technological
advance in the workings of the factory brought the time and motions of
the worker further under control. Thus, the idea that workers could
liberate themselves by taking over the means of production has always
been a delusion. It was an understandable delusion when technological
processes had the manufacture of goods as their primary aim. Now that
their primary aim is so clearly social control, the nature of our real
struggle should be clear: the destruction of all systems of control-thus
of the state, capital and their technological system, the end of our
proletarianized condition and the creation of ourselves as free
individuals capable of determining how we will live ourselves. Against
this technology our best weapon is that which the exploited have used
since the beginning of the industrial era: sabotage.