💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › miguel-amoros-technological-society-mass-society.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:27:10. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Technological Society—Mass Society
Author: Miguel Amorós
Date: October 29, 2005
Language: en
Topics: crisis, culture, fascism, technology
Source: Retrieved on 11th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/technological-society-mass-society-miguel-amor-s
Notes: Text for a presentation at the “Escuela Popular de la Prosperidad”, Madrid, October 29, 2005. Translated in June 2018 from the Spanish text obtained online at: http://www.mundolibertario.org/secciontumornegro/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Miguel-Amoros-Sociedad-Tecnologica-Sociedad-de-Masas.pdf

Miguel Amorós

Technological Society—Mass Society

“Without automobiles, without airplanes, and without loudspeakers, we

could not have seized power in Germany.”

—Hitler

The loss of class consciousness after the defeat of the most recent

proletarian assault on capitalist society obliges us to revise Marx’s

famous dictum and say instead that it is no longer a matter of

transforming the world but rather of interpreting it. Now more than

ever, in order to change the world we must understand it. We repudiate

self-satisfied activism, but we do not renounce practice nor are we

calling for complacent speculation, but instead, to the contrary, we

proclaim theoretical activity to be the most important part of practice

at the historical juncture in which we find ourselves. Because the

project of domination is based on the unintelligibility of the world in

order to make us voluntarily hand over its management to its leaders,

the project of liberation must be exactly the opposite: the world must

be rendered comprehensible so that its inhabitants can control it

without the need for intermediaries. For this purpose, deeds are not

enough; it is words that are needed above all.

The victory of capitalist domination entailed two fundamental changes:

the predominance of technology and the emergence of the masses. By

technology, we do not mean an agglomeration of machines or practical

knowledge that we have the choice to use or not to use. Technology is a

medium, an environment, a world that envelops all social activities,

from which no one can escape. In short, technology is a total, universal

system. And when we use the term masses, a concept invented by the

Frankfort School, we are referring to the majority of the population

that has arisen from the dissolution of classes. This dissolution takes

place when classes are deprived of their technical environment. Neither

change was a matter of ineluctable fate; they are historical products

that arose during the 1990s after two decades of crises and revolts.

The military inventions of World War Two revolutionized transport and

communications when they were adopted by civilian industry. If

technology made big industry, and therefore the proletariat, possible,

at a subsequent stage of its development it put an end to both.

Automobiles, airplanes, telephones, household appliances, television,

etc., were innovations that profoundly transformed the means of

production and everyday life, undermining the stability of the classes.

During the 1960s, entire sectors of the working class attained a

standard of living that would have been unthinkable in previous eras,

and governments assumed full responsibility for a broad range of social

services, so that, with the collaboration of the trade unions, a long

period of social peace was made possible. The “Welfare” State

transformed the legal system, health care, education, communications,

transport and leisure into powerful bureaucratic machines. The

“scientific organization of labor” was imposed in factories and

consumption increased in working class households. The working class

developed a tendency towards reformism and immersion in private life,

and began to disintegrate. The challenges that were posed by the most

important aspects of the integration of the working class into the

system led to the rise of resistance and refusal within the proletariat

(especially among the youth) and to the emergence of a more profound

awareness of the role of machines and deteriorating working conditions;

the result was the wave of revolts that took place between 1968 and

1982. The rise in the price of oil during the early 1970s marked the

beginning of the crisis that paralyzed industry and plunged millions of

people into unemployment. The reaction of the working class was blunted

and destroyed. In its struggles it launched new forms of organization

(committees, assemblies, coordinadoras, pickets) that were, however,

incapable of taking the form of a revolutionary project. Finance capital

emerged as the absolute victor. Issues that flourished alongside labor

conflicts, such as protest movements in favor of the rights of women,

homosexuals and children, the defense of nature, prisoners’ protests,

the struggle against racial discrimination, etc., were no longer

considered to be specific aspects of the social question and were

transformed into the platforms of particular ideologies that were

compatible with the system. Financial policies steered the economic

recovery of the 1980s onto new foundations: industrial restructuring,

the trend towards part-time and temporary jobs, the privatization of

government services and the growing predominance of the service sector

in the economy. National economies dissolved in a globalized economy

thanks to computers and the internet. Technology became the determinant

factor in capitalist society, because the source of value was no longer

human labor but technological invention and innovation. Technology was

the main productive force. Technology was institutionalized and became

autonomous and capable of self-perpetuation. The course of development

of the dominant order came to depend on technological progress. Social

institutions began to base their legitimacy and activities on new

(technological) foundations. Due to the fact that the workers were

excluded from the productive process by automation, the contradiction

between productive forces and social relations was seemingly abolished.

Technology accentuated the international division of labor by means of

industrial “relocation”, that is, by dispatching to the periphery of the

system, along with whole industries, the class struggle, so that the

latter could be mixed up with all kinds of ideological archaisms,

nationalisms, indigenous identity movements, racial and religious

questions, pre-capitalist traditions, etc. If the complications

generated by this division of labor endangered the interests of the

ruling classes, then the latter resorted to the military solution, the

technological solution par excellence. War is the continuation of

politics—and global economics—by strictly technical means. The

differences between economics, politics and war are only differences of

degree. The situation was no longer characterized by power becoming

technological, but by technology becoming power. Technology defined and

justified the new dominant interests. The new social relations, and

along with them, exploitation, the lack of freedom, suffering, war, etc.

… were presented as technically necessary facts in a rationalized

society. Technical jargon would be used to formulate every question

because under technology, now transformed into the ruling power, all

problems are technical problems. Nutrition, health, freedom, well-being,

culture and desire will from now on be susceptible to technical

treatment and must be reconciled with technology to be viable.

The new society, regardless of the political form that it takes, is a

fascist totalitarian society. Fascism is nothing but the result of the

logic of the technological State of modern society pursued to its

extreme conclusions. This fascism of a new type—derived, like the other

kind of fascism, from a reaction to contemporary social crisis—is the

product of a definitive leap forward in technological development. The

technological system is superimposed on class society and absorbs the

latter. All of society is then transformed into a laboratory where all

kinds of new inventions are tested. At the end of this process, the

result is social anomie, that is, the decomposition of classes into

masses. Modern fascism is based on this transformation. It is the regime

that is based on the mass mobilization of atomized and isolated

elements. It cannot survive unless it can permanently mobilize everyone.

These masses have been manufactured with the destruction of all

sociability, of every form of rank and file power, of all horizontal

institutions or means of expression, of the most minimal group

solidarity, etc. … by way of confinement in private life, incessant

movement, emotional discharge and control. All these developments are

not so much the work of cunning leaders as they are the outcome of the

impersonal logic of the technological system. Technology, by colonizing

everyday life and facilitating the penetration of the cultural

commodity, has created a situation where the workers are no longer a

world apart, and in which their social behavior has become identical

with that of their rulers, so that, although hierarchies still exist,

not only the tastes, but also the illnesses typical of executives are

now the tastes and illnesses of the workers, too. There are differences

with respect to categories, but not with respect to style. Urbanism is

an effective means of dispersion and confinement, that is, of

massification. The masses live in conurbations, not in cities. Space is

subdivided in accordance with vertical criteria: the leaders tend to

occupy the centers and the population is transferred to the periphery

but well-being is still defined for all as highly-equipped

privatization. Every era produces the people that it needs and their

fetishes. Our era has continuously produced, everywhere, men and women

who are fascinated by technology, men and women who have been raised

from the cradle in its world. Their way of thinking is conditioned by

the artificial urban environment in which they live. The police are

merely a supplemental factor, for thanks to the generalized feeling of

impotence generated by isolation, control has been internalized by most

people. Neither experience nor arguments will affect the masses and

modify their conduct; the work-consumption-escape cycle abolishes real

free time and destroys both the capacity to have experiences as well as

the capacity to reason. The masses live as prisoners of the present,

they have no memory because they do not have either a past or a future.

They therefore do not adopt a truly fascist ideology, but are simply

incapable of distinguishing between reality and fiction, truth and

deception, present and past. They are emancipated from experience and

memory. Unlike classes, masses are indifferent, they have neither public

life nor political opinions, and they are therefore incapable of

formulating common interests or of uniting behind a single objective.

They are much more exploitable. Regardless of the political form taken

by domination, the mass-individual is only a cog in the social

machinery, without a real place in the world, useless, superfluous,

replaceable. Totalitarianism cannot exist without this feeling of

uselessness, emptiness and uprootedness that dwells in the masses and

facilitates their accelerated circulation. Change, fashion, novelty,

constant motion, the race to the office, the supermarket, the stadium,

the voting booth … these constitute the soul of fascism. Constant

movement causes the masses to be malleable and makes it easier to get

them to move in the desired direction. And technology is a dynamic

system that modifies and reinvents everything, and forces constant

re-adaptations; in a word, it demands movement.

Fascism can adopt democratic ways and allow a certain range of political

activity. However, because government and politics have been subjected

to technological imperatives, the traditional differences between

democracy and fascism have been erased. Technology is not neutral, but

neutralizes all social activity, such as, for example, government and

protest. It does not seek participation, but productivity, higher

yields, efficiency. On the one side, it is the business of

professionals, experts, technicians; on the other side, it is pure

triviality and entertainment. In terms of the techniques they utilize,

all parties are the same. This does not mean the end of ideologies, but

the triumph of one ideology, the ideology of progress, of the spectacle,

of technology.

Technological society is a society without a subject, and any attempt to

manufacture such a subject by extolling the mass spectacle amounts to

fighting on behalf of the dominant fascism. The masses are the object of

the new totalitarianism; the “multitude”, the “citizenry”, the “working

class” and the “human species” are merely its apologetic carbon copies.

The forms of alternative false consciousness, the ideologies of dissent,

can be the deliberate products of the servants of domination, but they

are often the simple expressions of that inability to distinguish

between reality and fiction that is characteristic of the masses, and

therefore of their individual atoms. Ideologies are not the

crystallization of incomplete thought, or of a badly elaborated

critique, but a hodgepodge of diverse themes derived from previous

ideologies. Thus, the mass-individual will find no contradiction at all

between his everyday conservatism and his particular “utopia”. Nor will

he think that there is any major problem involved in passing from one to

the other, or in combining two or three such concepts. Ideologies are

psychological mechanisms of adaptation. They no longer reflect the

aspirations of specific sectors of the population, that is, of classes

or fragments of classes, but are the extremely varied efflorescence of

mental aberrations that can be produced by the schizophrenia of the

masses. As a result, false protest can easily become more and more

spectacular, more and more an expression of role-playing. It is above

all a matter of escape and “having a good time”. In spite of all

appearances to the contrary, there are no fundamental differences

between ideological fashions. All of them ignore the temporal

conjuncture and therefore history, which is why all of them think it is

possible to turn back the clock. The “alter-globalization” movement, for

example, advocates a return to the political and economic conditions of

the pre-globalization period, the period when economic power was

legitimized by social pacts, while it simultaneously accepts the current

technological system and the deplorable condition of the masses. While

the former position has led its proponents to become the servants of

traditional politics, the latter view has established them as defenders

of hard-core capitalism pure and simple, and therefore, regardless of

their intentions, the closer they get to reality, the more their

activities resemble a circus act and the more vacuous their program

becomes. Other phony rebels have advocated even more improbable returns

to the past with similar results. Despite the fact that they live only

in the present, or perhaps for that very reason, the present instills

them with panic. Their common characteristic is the way that all of them

shield themselves from reality: their belief in a Golden Age. This

dissatisfied sector of the suffering masses thinks that any past time

was better. For the civil society movement, this past time is the era of

the Nation State, the period of bourgeois democracy tempered in the

bureaucracy which they want to reach by riding the wave of technological

advances. Technophiles of a workerist bent situate this Golden Age in

the Russia of 1918, in the Spain of 1936 or in May ‘68, a Golden Age

which they will attain when the “proletariat” seizes control of the

existing means of production. The technophobic minority, which at least

does not believe in the self-management of technology, directs its gaze

deeper into the past, to the Renaissance, to the rural Middle Ages

(contempt for the Court, praise for the village), or to the Paleolithic

era (up with hunting and gathering, down with agriculture), as the place

where virtue makes its dwelling. In their nostalgic yearning for the

past, they believe that history might have existed at one time, but

after their respective Golden Ages, there is no longer any history. The

present is only a deviation that must be corrected by applying the magic

formula contained in their dogmas. They therefore ignore the historic

distance that separates us from the past and restrict themselves to

awaiting the return of the conditions that once made the Golden Age

possible. They do not want to face reality, but instead want to merely

worship the ideal image of a defunct reality whose impossible

restoration serves them as a moral consolation and as an alibi for their

inactivity. Contrary to what is commonly believed, ideology is not the

secular religion of the ghetto, for whether it is the ideology of Negri,

or virtual internet guerrillas, or primitivists, it does not seek to

establish itself in a confined milieu outside of the system, but seeks

something much more simple, that is, to choose a particular form of lack

of style within the broad range of choices offered by the spectacle of

domination. If there is one thing that distinguishes the new

totalitarianism it is the fact that those who stand out from the crowd

and are appropriately creative make much better citizens than those who

are lifelong conformists.

Technological systems are fragile; technical progress reaches a point

beyond which it is no longer susceptible to control and we have already

passed this point. In fact, many sub-systems no longer function; they

have ended up producing effects contrary to the purposes for which they

were created; the justice system foments crime, the healthcare system

fosters illness, the educational system produces idiots. The system of

food production exacerbates world hunger, the production of automobiles

swells the number of fatalities in traffic accidents, the “welfare”

system results in a higher suicide rate…. Technological society has

reached such a degree of development that the more it advances, the

greater are the unforeseen effects that it produces and the more

irremediable the nature of those effects. Neither experts nor managers

know where they are going. Progress entails a greater concentration of

personnel and more organizational complexity, increasing the likelihood

of errors and breakdowns and amplifying the repercussions of accidents.

Attempts to correct these trends have only a minor impact, insofar as

the system depends to a growing degree on a constantly increasing number

of factors, and are much too late in view of the fact that the system is

always functioning at a higher speed. Small slip-ups can have formidable

consequences; just one absent-minded oversight could shut down an entire

sector. In fact, a single person could bring about the collapse of whole

zones of production with relative ease, while the precautions necessary

to forestall his mistakes or his sabotage, if this is even possible,

require thousands of people. We are constantly having to deal with the

destructive efficacy of such malfunctions. The consequences are

irreversible: the project to make the world a world of technology

therefore results in catastrophe. The technological solution for

catastrophe is based on generalized control. Thus, by learning to live

with this prospect of catastrophe we are turning this generalized

control into the normal social condition, but the process does not stop

there. New catastrophes are superimposed on the old ones while social

control is tending to develop towards absolute control. In fascist

conditions a catastrophe does not trigger any kind of social crisis but

instead provides yet another reason for legitimizing the status quo:

technology will save us from the evils caused by technology. There is no

turning back. Furthermore, as the principal motor force of development,

catastrophe becomes the defining characteristic of the economy and

politics, so that it ceases to be a misfortune and becomes instead a

necessity. All social activity then revolves around the dialectic of

destruction and reconstruction. Politics is then redefined as managing

the survival of the masses under catastrophic conditions, a circumstance

that gives rise to the further development of all kinds of mechanisms of

control. In reality, social control takes two forms: the kind of social

control that pursues adaptation to extreme environments, and the kind

that seeks to contain anti-social conduct. The former is mild and

gentle, because domination needs rank and file partners who will

cooperate with its managers; these elements constitute the residents of

the fish tank that holds the pro-system volunteers such as the

environmentalists, the staffs of the NGOs and the members of the civil

society groups. A party of the vanquished who join the side of the

victors. The second kind of social control is harsh, it is the business

of the police. Its purpose is to detect dissidents, because at a time

when technical domination has destroyed the traditional control

mechanisms like the family, the educational system and trade unionism,

dissidence is dangerous. Police control will always be the best

organized and equipped sector of any kind of fascism. Once the point is

reached where the system’s vulnerability has forced it to mobilize its

mechanisms of control, the social function of the State becomes a

weighty responsibility for its leaders. Then they set aside their

welfare functions in order to devote themselves more seriously to the

technological variety of social control par excellence; the complete

technological State is a police State. Anyone can be an enemy, and at

the extreme point the whole population is a potential enemy. In a

totalitarian regime the entire population is under suspicion and

therefore all of its movements are under surveillance.

Without a historical subject, the unity of theory and practice, of

reality and reason, is impossible. Events do not awaken consciousness,

but at most instill resignation, thus tending to lose their significance

as the terrain of practice, but never totally. While it is true that

there is no revolutionary class, since all that exists now are masses,

it is no less certain that minorities still survive amidst the masses,

minorities who have not admitted defeat and who believe in the

possibility of a revolutionary practice. The radical struggles that do

take place, although few and far between, are the manifest proof that

not all is lost. Fascism rules in the geographical center, but not one

hundred percent. The normalization of catastrophe is not yet automatic.

It is a poor foundation but it is the only practical basis for a

revolutionary critique. Every aspect of the lives of the masses is the

object of exploitation, and in this respect as well the masses are

different from classes. For the masses there is no distinction between

work and non-work, which is why struggles cannot be circumscribed by the

confines of the workplace. Furthermore, struggles that affect the places

where people live have a much greater chance of generating

consciousness. Thus, the defense of the urban neighborhoods or the

territory, insofar as they demand the self-management of areas, of areas

as the space of freedom and desire, is more clarifying. In a fascist

environment broad movements and huge dissident organizations, such as

characterize the Third World countries, are not possible, but on a small

scale solidarity and resistance, information and debate, theory and

practice, are perfectly plausible. So that within modern totalitarianism

a micro-society of dissidents—a veritable ghetto—is feasible, but in a

clandestine state, outside of the din of the mass media. It could find

support in the larger struggles, but without allowing itself to be

mystified by them. This ghetto has a paradoxically conservative

function, since it must rescue the emancipatory and libertarian dream of

past struggles from the “uninterrupted noise of all social situations”

and preserve it for a time when men and women will “finally be forced to

contemplate their real life and mutual relations without illusions”

(Karl Marx, “The Communist Manifesto”). It must be invisible to the eyes

of power, and therefore outside of the law, unrecuperable, criminal;

only thus can it cast light on the cracks in this system that is

constantly undergoing self-destruction and help to make these cracks

bigger at the right moment. Nothing is objectively certain; history

promises nothing. Resistance might become a subject, or it might become

merely a picturesque detail in a panorama of desolation, it all depends

on how we play our cards.