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Title: Capital, Technology and Proletariat
Author: Miguel Amorós
Date: April 24, 2010
Language: en
Topics: Capitalism, reformism, technology
Source: Retrieved on 8th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/capital-technology-proletariat-miguel-amor%C3%B3s
Notes: Transcript of a speech delivered on April 24, 2010 at the cooperative bookstore, Enclave Libros, Madrid. Translated from the Spanish original: http://praxisdigital.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/capital-tecnologia-y-proletariado-miguel-amoros-2010/

Miguel Amorós

Capital, Technology and Proletariat

The origins of the proletariat must be sought in the historical period

when feudal society organized itself around the economy and was

transformed into capitalist society. This happened when the rule of

capital, dominant in commodity circulation, invaded the sphere of

production by means of an “industrial revolution”, in which the division

of labor and technology would play leading roles. The commodity, that

is, the product that is exchanged for money, had arisen at various

moments throughout history, always in connection with commerce, but had

never before occupied a central place in society, and its logic had

therefore never previously determined the social order. Not until the

18^(th) century—the century of the Enlightenment—did the moment arrive

when the enormous demand generated by the military needs of the States

give birth to a new system of production, the factory, with its

corresponding one-sided technology based on science and mass production.

The very fact that production became the production of commodities is

fundamental because it implies a special commodity that adds value to

the raw material: that commodity is labor. In short, it required the

creation of a proletariat. Capital created its antagonist, the wage

worker, under conditions that were established by a particular

technology and by a certain course of development pursued by the State.

The industrial proletariat is also the offspring of both of these

factors. Concretely, it is as much the fruit of the steam engine, as it

is of the regimentation of labor in accordance with the

military-industrial model.

The changes ushered in during the modern era were preceded by a slow

evolution of thought, during the course of which reason replaced

religion and disenchanted the world. Secularized man descended from the

heavens to the earth. The world, once it was viewed correctly, could be

explained on its own terms, without spiritual guides. Science came to be

accepted as the highest form of thought, displacing tradition and

authority. A new faith emerged, the faith in progress, the belief that

human betterment would be almost automatically achieved with the

generalization of scientific knowledge and technological innovations.

But progressivist reason was not content with the satisfaction of

knowledge, but wanted to advance under the sign of domination. In

addition to dominating the forces of nature and putting them at the

service of the ruling interests, the doctrine of progress implied a

goal, the complete demolition of the past, which was perceived as

miserable backwardness, as opposed to the future, which was depicted as

almost a paradise. Constant change, an elementary premise of science and

technology, was raised to the status of a moral duty. To oppose change

was to be against progress, to advocate poverty and ignorance. The

balance of forces tilted in favor of the machine and rationalized

organization, because the rule over nature, in other words, progress,

turned into servitude under science and technology. This instrumentalist

mentality paved the way for capitalism and created favorable conditions

for its development. In the new context imposed by the commodity, the

worker was a piece of the industrial mechanism, the source of surplus

value, and a slave of the machine. The production of commodities, and

therefore labor, would be increasingly subordinated to rationalization

and technological innovation. Real capitalist domination is impersonal,

since its directors are always the mere executors, for good or ill, of

rules they do not control. It consists in the power of things over

people, or, more precisely, the power of abstraction over social and

ecological reality, thanks to which the individual appears as the

intermediary between things, as a secondary part of a mechanism, a

plaything of alien laws, regardless of how this power is personified to

its victims. This abstraction assumes a material form through eminently

technical means. It becomes increasingly dependent on technology. Thus,

although domination would be more and more disconnected from the

concrete economic sphere in order to become increasingly technical in

nature, technology itself, having grown up within the economic sphere,

at the heart of the abstraction, would gradually be transformed into a

futuristic fetish situated above classes. Scientific-technological

criteria would be internalized, displacing ideological and political

criteria in the management of private and public affairs. Finally, for

the good of the economy and that of the dominant culture, science and

technology would begin to assume the form of an ideology as guides for

the organization of individual and collective existence.

During its first stage, the basic contradiction of capitalism was the

contradiction between capital and wage labor, between the bourgeois

class and the working class. The real domination of things over

individuals, which is the essence of capitalism, initially assumed the

appearance of personal or class exploitation. There appeared to be an

absolute incompatibility between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat

despite the fact that the class struggle took place within capitalism

and the fact that capital and labor, as two poles of the same relation,

together constitute a special community of interests. Actually, their

radical antagonism was the result of the commodity’s rapid penetration

of society; the growth of capitalism outstripped the development of its

corresponding juridical and political forms—for example, the right to

vote, freedom of association and the right to strike. These forms,

hamstrung by the remnants of the old regime that still affected the

classes, were incapable of mitigating the conflict. This is why the

workers movement began by demanding not just labor reforms, but also

political rights, and faced with the insurmountable obstacles that stood

in its way, it concluded that there was no other way to remove them

except social revolution. As the historical forms that conformed to

bourgeois needs were in the process of being established, the workers

movement was split over the question of methods, and only remained

united with regard to the question of its goals. Reformists and

revolutionaries both claimed to be pursuing the same goals, even if the

means they utilized were different. Nonetheless, the practices of

reformism and Jacobinism led to the creation of the labor bureaucracy

and its clientele, whose existence was made possible by the decline of

skilled trades and their integration into the system. In a subsequent

stage of political-economic development, the workers parties, trade

union collaborationism, Fordism, etc., revealed that the contradiction

between capital and labor was not as absolute as it had previously

appeared to be. Social reforms did not pave the way for the workers’

State or the workers’ community, but gave rise to the development of a

consumer society.

It is true that the revolutionary proletariat created communes, factory

committees, unitary trade unions, workers councils, militias and

collectives, which comprise the undefeated part of its movement and its

legacy to future revolutions. However, the debacle represented by the

construction of a totalitarian State in Russia, the defeat of the

Spanish Revolution and the inter-class anti-fascism of the postwar era

led some to question the historic role of gravedigger of capitalism that

was once attributed to the international working class. Facts such as

massive participation in parliamentary elections, mass consumption and

the entertainment industry revealed a population of wage laborers who

identified with bourgeois morality. Other realities, such as automation

or the expansion of the service sector, highlight the widening gap that

has opened up between production and the proletariat; in all, the

existence of a class society in the process of dissolution, a mass

society. Just as the classes were a creation of immature capitalism, the

masses are a creation of mature capitalism. They are the result of the

decline of the working class in the face of the predominance of

technology in production and managed consumption. Unlike classes, masses

are incapable of emancipating themselves. They are composed of uprooted

individuals, separated from any kind of solidarity or relation that is

not mediated by propaganda or the spectacle. On the social plane, this

means that all life has now become private life, indoctrinated, surveyed

and compelled to consume. In mass society, technology is in command; man

is the raw material of the machine, the instrument by which one social

mechanism constructs another, yet more mechanistic social mechanism. The

dominant values have become directly technical values, because

technology is decisive both with regard to capital formation and the

apparatus of power. The tendency for mass society to become a factory, a

shopping mall, a jail and a laboratory at the same time, or, to put it

another way, the will of the autonomous apparatus of power to become

capable of determining life in accordance with the criteria that

correspond to those four subsystems, reveals the real primary

contradiction of capitalism, the contradiction that is generated by the

clash between the technophile logic of the commodity and the social life

over which it has seized control, including its biological environment.

Exploitation does not cease at the end of the working day. All of life

has been expropriated and, given the impact of this expropriation on the

ecosystem, all of life is directly endangered. The contradiction reaches

its climax by threatening the survival of the species. Capitalism, in

its late stage, brings the era of instrumentalization to an end, the era

when political, economic and moral ideals were supposed to lead to a

technological utopia and, as a result, technology, or “dead labor”,

embraces life in all its aspects, since the latter is unfolding in an

increasingly more artificial environment. Cutting-edge technology is the

human destiny under late capitalism. In such a regime, there is no other

hope besides continuing on the course of technological innovation,

although along the way, due to the demands of the apparatus of

power—whether one calls it the technocratic oligarchy or simply the

megamachine—all human qualities will disappear and the planet will be

destroyed.

The revolts of the sixties and seventies did not fail to point out the

limitations of the old workers movement and to define the revolution as

a subversive transformation of our entire way of life. The situationist

definition, “the proletarian is someone who has no power over his life

and knows it”, transferred the class struggle to the terrain of everyday

life, which to some extent clashed with the SI’s councilist workerism,

as opposed to the more coherent combatant communities or fraternities of

the American radicals. In Europe, however, the industrial proletariat

still occupied the center of production, and the new class consciousness

came into conflict with the old. Young radicals often found themselves

in conflict with the old militants in the factories. The workerist ideal

became entirely obsolete in the midst of the widespread emergence of

lifestyles that demanded freedoms of every kind, free experimentation

and the abolition of all social prejudices and conventions. The last

waves of the workers movement in response to the crisis of the

modernization process were still capable of creating the illusion of a

reprise, or a second offensive, of a kind of “workers autonomy”, but

this was the part of the movement that suffered the most decisive

defeat, while the movement as a whole had the potential to go much

further. As long as the rebellion in the factories went hand in hand

with the rebellion of everyday life, there was a degree of rediscovery

and autonomy, but this conjunction was fleeting. The bitter taste of

defeat during the following years undermined the unrealistic optimism of

the previous years. Institutionalization, subsidies and electoral

mechanisms had transformed the workerist bureaucracy into a reactionary

factor of the first order, which the minor skirmishes mounted by the

radical workers were unable to prevent. With rare exceptions, the latter

remained on the same terrain; the struggles over wages, working hours or

job security, however legitimate they may have been, however violent

they were and however many assemblies arose from their struggles, did

not transgress the limits of capital, and therefore did not undermine

the political-trade union clientelism, nor did they contribute to the

decolonization of everyday life. They did not fight against capitalism,

but against a specific form of capitalism, one that was undergoing a

process of self-liquidation. Furthermore, the subsequent capitalist

offensive of the eighties liberalized customs, generalized consumption

and put an end to the radical outbreaks in the factories. Automation

displaced the mass of wage workers towards construction, distribution

and tourism. The trade union pact restored a model of vertical

negotiation and obscured the class consciousness of revolts. Repression

took care of the rest. The struggle at the workplace was definitively

separated from the struggle for an untrammeled life without capitalist

catastrophes. The idea of revolution was completely discredited and

relegated to the museum of utopias. The persistent residual workerism

was increasingly caught between the contemplation of a consumerist mass

of wage workers, docile and manipulable, and the dream of an abstract

working class, the bearer of universal ideals of emancipation. From then

on, it barricaded itself in its ghetto and survived in the form of

sects, with their dogmas, their symbols and their rituals; it ceased to

be a simple ideology born from an insufficient social analysis and

practice, in order to accommodate itself to the space reserved for it by

the technological era.

The consideration of labor as the element that is common to all of

society, as its organizational principle, as advocated by the supporters

of the proletarian revolution, amounts to presenting socialism as a

regime of workers in pursuit of social reform by evolutionary processes

that have been liberated from the capitalists. Under this

perspective—which is that of progress, or that of the

bourgeoisie—socialism is nothing but a corrected version of capitalism,

and the workers movement is an agent of modernization. This journey does

not require a lot of packing and the workerist bureaucrats chose it with

their eyes open: real capitalism was effectively the only socialism that

was possible, whether it is called the “Welfare State” or the “highly

developed” society. According to this view, the danger is not

integration but exclusion, not having too much capitalism but too

little. If in the past, socialism was often presented as the coherence

of capitalism, now that another more “human” (and more Keynesian)

version is thought to be possible, capitalism has proven to be the

coherence of socialism. Anti-capitalism, if it does not want to be

trapped in a contradiction, must mount a profound response to the forces

of production and the laws of the market. Production and distribution of

commodities will not cease to be production and distribution of

commodities just because production and distribution fall into the hands

of the workers, and should this take place, it will reproduce in one

form or another precisely what it sought to destroy: bosses, private

property, industry, market, the State. Labor, which, once embedded in a

fully developed society of consumption can no longer constitute a

community of the oppressed, is even less capable of serving as the basis

for any kind of free society. Only life can be that basis.

To abolish capitalism without abolishing the proletariat would be

equivalent to reproducing another form of capitalism and, as a

corollary, another ruling class, and another State. To abolish the

proletariat without rejecting the ideology of progress leads to the same

results. If you want to bring the reign of the commodity to an end, you

need to abolish labor as well as the technology associated with its

existence; in short, you must free individuals from the condition of

being workers, you must free them from the objectivized social relation

that transforms them into wage workers, accessories to the machine and

slaves of consumption. The suppression of labor must take place first of

all in production, but not by means of the collective appropriation of

the means of production, or by way of automation, but by the dismantling

of the urban-factory system and the abandonment of the centralizing

machinery. And at the same time, this process must be carried out in

circulation as well, but not only by means of the abolition of money and

the market, but with the elimination of technologized leisure, that new

form of labor. A life emancipated from labor is not a life of leisure;

among other things, it is a life in which productive activity, the

“metabolism with nature”, obeys the satisfaction of needs and does not

determine social functioning, it does not alter “universal fraternity”

in the least way (that is, it does not impede the reproduction of free

social relations). The revolution aspires to nothing but breaking the

chains of labor—especially those of technology—in order to facilitate

the reappropriation of life on the part of individuals, by way of the

free construction of all the moments of their lives. By putting an end

to the constrictions of separate power and autonomous technology, by

putting an end to artificialization, by putting an end to the

manipulation of needs, eroticism, desires and dreams, life will be freed

from barriers and impositions, and will be at its own disposal: it will

escape from the sphere of labor and consumption, that is, of harmful

phenomena and submission. The relations between man and machine, between

humanity and nature, or, more precisely, between individuals and things,

will have to be reinvented, and society will have to be reconstructed

morally and with regard to the requirements of mutual coexistence,

without hierarchies, with the aid of a multifaceted technology based in

agriculture, the arts and the satisfaction of real needs and authentic

desires. To restore equilibrium to the land, to reduce the size of the

cities and to establish new relations with the environment that are not

based on domination. To build free communities. Paradoxically, although

tradition must regulate the rhythms of social life, this does not mean

returning to one or another moment of the past, but making a clean slate

of the present.