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Title: Limitations of Leftism
Author: Eli Maybell
Language: en
Topics: leftism, technology
Source: Retrieved on 23 June 2011 from http://www.infoshop.org/page/Limitations-of-Leftism

Eli Maybell

Limitations of Leftism

Despite numerous insights into commodities and the market economy, the

left historically has always embraced the industrial, energy-intensive

system originally generated by private capitalism as a “progressive

force” that would lay the basis for a free and abundant society.

According to this schema, humanity has always lacked the technological

basis for freedom that industrial capitalism, for all its negative

aspects, would create. Once that basis was laid, a revolution would

usher in communism (or a “post-scarcity” society) using many of the

wonders of technology that were capitalism’s “progressive” legacy.

Presently, capitalism has allegedly outlived its progressive role and

now functions as a brake on genuine development. Hence it is the role of

the left to rationalize, modernize, and ultimately humanize the

industrial environment through socialization, collectivization and

participatory management of mass technics. In fact, in societies where

the bourgeois class was incapable of creating the basic structures of

capitalism — urban-industrial-energy development, mass production of

consumer goods, mass communications, state centralization, etc. — the

left, through national revolution and state-managed economies, fulfilled

the historic mission of the bourgeoisie.

In the leftist model (shared by Leninist and social democrat Marxists,

as well as by anarcho-syndicalists and social ecologists), the real

progressive promise of industrialization and mechanization is being

thwarted by private capitalism and state socialism. But under the

collective management of the workers, the industrial apparatus and the

entire society can be administered safely and democratically. According

to this view, present dangers and disasters do not flow from

contradictions inherent in mass technics (a view considered to reflect

the mistake of “technological determinism”), but rather from capitalist

greed or bourgeois mismanagement — not from the “forces of production”

(to use the Marxist terminology) but from the separate “relations of

production”.

The left, blinded by a focus on what are seen as purely economic

relations, challenges only the forms and not the material, cultural and

subjective content of modern industrialism. It fails to examine the view

— one it shares with bourgeois liberalism — that human freedom is based

necessarily on a material plentitude of goods and services. Parroting

their profit, Marxists argue that the “appropriation” by the workers of

the “instruments of production” represents “the development of a

totality of capacities in the individuals themselves”. Conquest of the

“realm of necessity” (read: conquest of nature) will usher in the “realm

of freedom”. In this view, the material development of industrial

society (“the productive forces”) will make possible the abolition of

the division of labor; “the domination of circumstances and chance over

individuals” will be replaced by the “domination of individuals over

chance and necessity”. (Marx and Engels, “The German Ideology”) Mastery

of nature by means of workers’ councils and scientific management will

put an end to oil spills. Thus, if mass technics confront the workers as

an alien power, it is because the apparatus is controlled by the

capitalist ruling class, not because such technics are themselves

uncontrollable.

This ideology, accompanied usually by fantasies of global computer

networks and the complete automation of all onerous tasks (machines

making machines making machines to strip mine the coal and drill the oil

and manufacture the plastics, etc.), cannot understand either the

necessity for strict and vast compartmentalization of tasks and

expertise, or the resulting social capacity and stratification and the

impossibility of making coherent decisions in such a context. Unforeseen

consequences, be they local or global, social or ecological, are

discounted along with inevitable errors, miscalculations, and disasters.

Technological decisions implying massive intervention into nature are

treated as mere logic problems or technological puzzles which workers

can solve through their computer networks.

Such a view, rooted in the 19^(th) century technological and scientific

optimism that the workers’ movement shared with the bourgeois, does not

recognize the matrix of forces that has now come to characterize modern

civilization — the convergence of commodity relations, urbanization and

mass technics, along with the rise of interlocking, rival

nuclear-cybernetic states into a global mega-machine. Technology is not

an isolated project, or even an accumulation of technical knowledge,

that is determined by a somehow separate and more fundamental sphere of

“social relations”. Mass technics have become, in the words of Langdon

Winner, “structures whose conditions of operation demand the

restructuring of their environments” (Autonomous Technology, 1977) , and

thus of the very social relations that brought them about.

Mass technics — a product of earlier forms and archaic hierarchies —

have now outgrown the conditions that endangered them, taking on an

autonomous life (though overlapping with and never completely nullifying

these earlier forms). They furnish, or have become, a kind of total

environment and social system, both in their general and individual,

subjective aspects. For the most part, the left never grasped Marx’s

acute insight that as human beings express there lives, so they

themselves are. When the “means of production” are in actuality

interlocking elements of a dangerously complex, interdependent global

system, made up not only of technological apparatus and human operatives

as working parts in that apparatus, but of forms of culture and

communication and even the landscape itself, it makes no sense to speak

of “relations of production” as a separate sphere.

In such a mechanized pyramid, in which instrumental relations and social

relations are one and the same, accidents are endemic. No risk analysis

can predict or avoid them all, or their consequences, which will become

increasingly great and far-reaching. Workers councils will be no more

able to avert accidents than the regulatory reforms proposed by liberal

environmentalists and the social-democratic left, unless their central

task is to begin immediately to dismantle the machine altogether.

The left also fails to recognize what is in a sense a deeper problem for

those desiring revolutionary change, that of the cultural context and

content of mass society — the addiction to capitalist-defined “comforts”

and a vision of material plenitude that are so destructive ecologically.

The result is an incapability to confront not just the ruling class, but

the grid itself — on the land, in society, in the character of each

person — of mass technics, mass mobility, mass pseudo-communications,

mass energy-use, mass consumption of mass-produced goods.

As Jacques Ellul writes in “The Technological Society” (1980), “it is

the technological coherence that now makes up the social coherence...

Technology is in itself not only a means, but a universe of means — in

the original sense of Universum: both exclusive and total”. This

universe degrades and colonizes the social and natural world, making

their dwindling vestiges ever more perilously dependent on the

technological that has supplanted them. The ecological implications are

evident. As Ellul argues, “Technology can become an environment only if

the old environment stops being one. But that implies destructuring it

to such an extreme that nothing is left of it”. We are obviously

reaching that point, as capital begins to pose its ultimate technology,

bioengineering and the illusion of total biological control, as the only

solution to the ecological crisis it has created. Thus, the important

insights that come from a class analysis are incomplete. It won’t be

enough to get rid of the rulers who have turned the earth into a company

town; a way of life must end and an entirely new, post-industrial

culture must also emerge.