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Title: Modern Technology and Anarchism
Author: Sam Dolgoff
Date: 1986
Language: en
Topics: neoliberalism, syndicalist, technology
Source: Retrieved on 6 May 2011 from http://radicalarchives.org/2010/12/11/dolgoff-modern-tech-anarchism/
Notes: from Libertarian Labor Review #1, 1986, pp 7 — 12.

Sam Dolgoff

Modern Technology and Anarchism

In their polemics with the Marxists the anarchists argued that the state

subjects the economy to its own ends. An economic system once viewed as

the prerequisite for the realization of socialism now serves to

reinforce the domination of the ruling classes. The very technology that

could now open new roads to freedom has also armed states with

unimaginably frightful weapons for the extinction of all life on this

planet.

Only the social revolution can overcome the obstacles to the

introduction of the free society. Yet the movement for emancipation is

threatened by the far more formidable political, economic and social

power and brain-washing techniques of the ruling classes. To forge a

revolutionary movement, inspired by anarchist ideas is the great task to

which we must dedicate ourselves.

To make the revolution we must stimulate the revolutionary spirit and

the confidence of the people that their revolution will at last reshape

the world nearer our aspirations. Revolutions are stirred by the

conviction that our ideals can and will be realized. A big step in this

direction is to document the extent to which the liberating potential of

modern technology constitutes a realistic, practical alternative to the

monopoly and abuse of power. This is not meant to imply that anarchism

will miraculously heal all the ills inflicting the body social.

Anarchism is a twentieth century guide to action based on realistic

conceptions of social reconstruction.

Anarchism is not a mere fantasy. Its fundamental constructive principle

— mutual aid — is based on the indisputable fact that society is a vast

interlocking network of cooperative labor whose very existence depends

upon its internal cohesion. What is indispensable is emancipation from

authoritarian institutions over society and authoritarianism within the

people’s associations — themselves and miniature states.

Peter Kropotkin, who formulated the sociology of anarchism, wrote that

“Anarchism is not a utopia. The anarchists build their previsions of the

future society upon the observation of life at the present time...” If

we want to build the new society the materials are here.

Decentralization

When Kropotkin wrote in 1899, his classic Fields, Factories and

Workshops to demonstrate the feasibility of decentralizing industry to

achieve a greater balance and integration between rural and urban

living, his ideas were dismissed by many as premature. However, it is no

longer disputed that the problem of making the immense benefits of

modern industry available to even the smallest communities has largely

been solved by modern technology. Even bourgeois economists,

sociologists and administrators like Peter Drucker, John Kenneth

Galbraith, Gunnar Myrdal, Daniel Bell and others now favor a large

measure of decentralization not because they have suddenly become

anarchists, but primarily because technology has rendered anarchistic

forms of organization “operational necessities” — a more efficient

devise to enlist the cooperation of the masses in their own enslavement.

Peter Drucker writes, “Decentralization has become exceedingly popular

with American business... decisions have to be made at the lowest

possible rather than at the highest possible level... it is important to

emphasize the concept of functional decentralization.” With respect to

the emergence of highly qualified trained scientific, technical,

engineering, educators, etc. whom Drucker calls knowledge workers he

remarks “We must let them manage their own plant community.” (The New

Society, page 256, 357)

John Kenneth Galbraith, for example, writes: “in giant industrial

corporations autonomy is necessary for both small decisions and large

questions of policy... the comparative advantages of atomic and

molecular power for the generation of electricity are decided by a

variety of scientists, technical, economic and planning judgments. Only

a committee, or more precisely, a complex of committees can combine the

knowledge and experience that must be brought to bear... The effect of

denial of autonomy and the inability of the technostructure [corporate

centralized industry, SD] to accommodate itself to changing tasks has

been visibly deficient organizations. The larger and more complex

organizations are, the more they must be decentralized...” (The New

Industrial State, page 111)

The engineering expert Robert O’Brian (Life Publications, 1985) explains

that “because electricity... can be piped almost anywhere... borne by

high tension lines across mountains, deserts and all manner of natural

obstacles.. factories no longer need be located near their sources of

power. As a result, the factories have been able to relocate at will...”

The following quote from Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media reads

like an extract from Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops: “...

electricity decentralizes... permits any place to be a center and does

not require large aggregations... By electricity we everywhere resume

personal relations on the smallest village scale... In the whole field

of the electrical revolution this pattern of decentralization appears in

various guises...”

The cities in what was once the industrial heartland of American now

look like abandoned ghost towns. Steel, auto, agricultural machinery,

mines, electronic plants, and other installations are rushing away. But

the industrial corporations did not go out of business. They simply

built new plants abroad or here in the U.S. in remote, non-industrial,

non-union areas were wages and working conditions are poor. Automobiles,

clothing, shoes, electronic equipment, machinery; almost everything

formerly manufactured in the United States is now being made abroad even

in “third world” countries like Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, Korea — though

many of these countries lack essential natural resources. For example,

Japan with very few natural resources is nevertheless a first class

industrial power exporting and competing with the United States and

other industrialized nations in the production of steel, automobiles,

electrical products and other goods. General Motors promised to build a

new plant in Kansas City but will build it in Spain. The Bulova Watch

Corporation makes watch movements in Switzerland, assembles them in Pogo

Pogo and ships them to be sold in the Unites States. And so it goes.

Extirpating Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy is a form of organization in which decisions are made on the

top, obeyed by the ranks below, and transmitted through a chain of

command as in an army. A bureaucratic regime is not a true community,

which implies an association of equals making decisions in common and

carrying them out jointly.

A major obstacle to the establishment of a free society is the

all-pervading bureaucratic machinery of the state and the industrial,

commercial and financial corporations exercising de facto control over

the operations of society. Bureaucracy is an unmitigated parasitical

institution.

Highly qualified scientific-technological experts, economists and other

academics, who accepted bureaucracy as an unpleasant, but indispensable

necessity, now agree that the byzantine bureaucratic apparatus can now

be dismantled by modern computerized technology. Their views (to be

sure, unconsciously) illustrate the practical relevance of anarchistic

alternatives to authoritarian forms of organization.

In his important work Future Shock Alvin Toffler concludes that: “In

bureaucracies the great mass of men performing routine tasks and

operations — precisely these tasks and operations that the computer and

automation do better than men — can be performed by self-regulating

machines... thus doing away with bureaucratic organization... far from

fastening the grip of automation on civilization... automation... leads

to the overthrow [of the] power laden bureaucracies through which

authority flowed [and] wielded the whip by which the individual was held

in line...”

Professor William H. Read of McGill University believes that “the one

effective measure of... coping with the problem of coordination in a

changing society will be found in new arrangements of power which

sharply break with bureaucratic tradition...” William A. Faunce (School

of Industrial and Labor Relations, Michigan State University) predicts

that “the integration of information processing made possible by

computers would eliminate the need for complex organizations

characteristic of bureaucracies.” Faunce sees conflict between

professional workers and bureaucratic administrators. The workers do not

need ‘hierarchical superiors.’ They are perfectly able to operate

industry themselves. He advocates workers self-management, not because

he is a radical, but primarily because self-management is more efficient

that the outworn system of bureaucracy.

Industry Best Organized Anarchistically

The libertarian principle of self-management will not be invalidated by

the changing composition of the work force or by the nature of work

itself. With or without automation the economic structure of the free

society must be based on the people directly involved in economic

functions. under automation millions of highly trained technicians,

engineers, scientists, educators, etc. who are now already organized

into local, regional, national and international federations will freely

circulate information, constantly improving both the quality and

availability of goods and services and developing new products for new

needs. Every year sixty million pages of scientific-technical

information are freely circulated all over the world! And these

voluntary associations are non-hierarchical.

Many scientific and technical workers are unhappy. Quite a few whom I

interviewed complain that nothing is so maddening as to stand helplessly

by while ignoramuses who do not even understand the language of science

dictate the direction of research and development. They are particularly

outraged that their training and creativity are exploited to design and

improve increasingly-destructive war weapons and other anti-social

purposes. They are often compelled, on pain of dismissal, to perform

monotonous tasks and are not free to exercise their knowledge. These

frustrated professional workers already outnumber relatively unskilled

and skilled “blue collar” manual workers rapidly displaced by modern

technology. Many of them will be receptive to our ideas if intelligently

and realistically presented. We must go all out to reach them. Even

bourgeois academics like Joseph A. Raffaele (Professor of Economics,

Drexel Institute of Technology) are unintentionally and unconsciously

writing like anarchists! Raffaele writes: “we are moving toward a

society of technical co-equals in which the line of demarcation between

the leader and the led become fuzzy.” Management consultant Bernard

Muller-Thym emphasizes that: “within our grasp is a kind or production

capability that is alive with intelligence, with information, so that is

will be completely flexible in a world-wide basis.”

The progress of the new society will depend greatly upon the extent to

which its self-governing units will be able to speed up communication —

to understand each other’s problems and thus better coordinate their

activities. Thanks to modern communications technology, computer

laundromats, personal computers, closed television and telephone

circuits, communication satellites, and a plethora of other devices

making direct communication available to everyone; even visual and radio

contact with the moon! A stranded motorist can contact Ford dealers for

help in an emergency by communicating with the Ford Motor Company

satellite. Marshall McLuhan concludes that advances in printing

technology have reached a point where “every man can be his own

publisher.” All this adds up to a workable preview of a free society

based on direct democracy and free association. The self-governing units

that make up the new society would not be miniature states. In a

parliamentary democracy the actual rulers are the professional

politicians organized into political parties. In theory they are

supposed to represent the people. In fact they rule over them — free to

decide the destinies of the millions. The anarchist thinker Proudhon

well over a century ago defined a parliamentary democracy as “a king

with six hundred heads.” The democratic system is in fact a dictatorship

periodically renewed at election time.

The organization of the new society will not, as in authoritarian

governments or authoritarian associations, emanate from the ‘bottom up’

or from the ‘top down’ for the simple reason that there will be no top.

In this kind of free, flexible organization, power will naturally flow

like the circulation of the blood throughout the social body constantly

renewing its cells.

The optimism kindled by the libertarian potential of modern technology

should not mislead us to underestimate the formidable forces blocking

the road to freedom. A growing class of state, local, provincial and

national bureaucracies; scientists, engineers, technicians and other

professions — all of them enjoying a much better standard of living than

the average worker. A class whose privileged status depends upon

accepting and supporting the reactionary social system, immeasurably

reinforces the ‘democratic’, ‘welfare’ and state ‘socialist’ varieties

of capitalism.

They extol the miraculous labor-saving benefits of the technological

revolution. But they prefer to ignore the fact that this same technology

now enables the State to establish what is, in effect, a nationalized

poorhouse where the millions of technologically unemployed — forgotten,

faceless outcasts — on public ‘welfare’ will be given enough to keep

them quiet. They prefer to ignore the extent to which computers

immeasurably increase the power of the State to regiment every

individual and obliterate truly human values.

All of them echo the slogans of self-management and free association,

but they dare not raise an accusing finger again the holy arc of the

state. They do not show the slightest sign of grasping the obvious fact

that elimination of the abyss separating the order givers from the order

takers — not only in the state but at every level — is the indispensable

condition of the realization of self-management and free association:

the very heart and soul of the free society.