“Technological development does not stand apart from, or govern, social and economic factors. It results from and interacts with them”.
“Tomorrow’s World” is a weekly TV programme which shows inventions and technological possibilities. It confirms the notion of man’s ingenuity, that every problem can and will be solved: usually, in the electronic age, at the touch of a switch. While there is widespread interest in this there is also widespread cynicism—when is it all going to happen? Technical developments such as fast transport, refrigeration and heating, automatic washing machines, radio and television and countless other devices have altered everyday life sweepingly in this century. Yet the accumulation of them has not produced the liberating effect which is the great promise of technology and science. Large numbers of people agree with Orwell’s remark that progress is a swindle.
This is based on a misconception about progress. “Tomorrow’s World” conveys that its novelties are, or shortly will be, available to those watching, who in turn are likely to assume that the things must be used because they appear capable of adding to comfort and happiness. On those assumptions, there is bound to be disappointment. In many cases the innovation is consigned to being a distant prospect simply because of cost. In others, the transition from prototype to mass production requires a further development — making the article deliberately inferior so that it will break down or wear out, to keep the market going. Apart from everyday-life technology, a range of possibilities exists for production and power whose use depends on their being found “economic”.
Progress is not a matter of finding new things which could transform existence. It is the development of society’s capacity to let that happen. One of the most misunderstood statements by Marx is “The hand mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill society with the industrial capitalist.” This is obviously true in one sense; however, mills existed in ancient Rome but had little use in a slave society. Technological development does not stand apart from, or govern, social and economic factors. It results from and interacts with them. At times the economic needs of society almost call it into being; at other times the potentialities it creates are obscured or blocked by the way society is organized.
Social epochs
The watermill and the windmill were an integral part of the feudal economy where slave-labour was not part of the forces of production, and from agriculture they opened the way to the wider use of power. Rotary was converted into reciprocal motion by the crank and the trip-hammer; from the building and servicing of mills came the trade of millwrights, the first mechanical engineers who also produced hydraulics and the clock. The mariner's compass began in ancient games of foretelling the future, but in the Middle Ages combined with the development of the rudder to make open-sea voyages possible. Navigation promoted astronomy, and the instrument-makers became scientists; while research into the workings of the compass laid the basis of the theory of magnetism and electricity.
Behind the sophisticated technical changes lay simpler ones, like horse-harness and nailed horse-shoes, which increased the productivity of the land and put trade on the roads. Trade gave importance to merchants and handicrafts. Thus the drive towards commodity production and a money economy built up: the feudal system cultivating willy-nilly the agencies which would destroy it. The technical innovations and discoveries gave rise to a new experimental science which opposed the static, hierarchical systems of belief of the Middle Ages. As a further part, the introduction of gunpowder made cannons a new, expensive necessity for war: only wealthy republics and kings backed by merchants had the money and commanded the technical skill. Yet gunpowder was not invented under European feudalism. The ancient Chinese produced it first and, in a different social system, used it only for fireworks.
Mining, metallurgy, chemistry were produced by and produced economic and political development. Attitudes and ideas changed — on the surface, in response to fresh knowledge and conceptions, fundamentally as reflections of the expanding needs of a potential new ruling class. With profit made the norm, inventions promised riches to both inventor and purchaser; scientific education and scientific societies arose, and philosophers who were publicists as well a prophets.
The final rush from feudalism to full-scale capitalism was accomplished in the Industrial Revolution. What preceded it, as the necessary condition, was the political revolution which took power out of the hands of the old ruling class and put it at the disposal of the capitalists. Technical development is related not only to the level of science but to the laws of a country, the influence of its general history, and the class structure these are rooted in. The machinery of the Industrial Revolution appeared because the capitalist class had won legal sanction for itself to dominate society; given that, and the availability of labour-power and opportunities for profit, production stimulated technology instead of the other way round. Of course, once the process is under way a new machine or principle—such as the use of electricity—can change the technique of production. But there is never any shortage of ingenious men. As Shelley wrote, in another connection: “The mass of capabilities remains at every period materially the same; the circumstances which awaken it to action perpetually change.”
As an example of the interaction between technology, economic activity and politics, the early process for steel production required high-grade iron ore. When the basic-lining open-hearth furnace was introduced in 1879, making low-grade ores usable, the great phosphatic ore deposits of Lorraine provided a massive centre of heavy industry in Germany: railways, machinery, munitions. It made competition between Britain and Germany acute, leading to war in the 20th century. Was technology responsible? Capitalist industry pressed technology for a solution to its urgent desire for cheap steel. The inventor of the basic-lining process was a Londoner named Gilchrist Thomas; what followed his effort confirms only that resources of production and markets mean rivalry which produces capitalism’s wars.
Workers
Marx wrote: “Thus all the progress of civilization, or in other words every increase in the powers of social production, if you like, in the productive powers of labour itself—such as results from science, inventions, division and combination of labour, improved means of communication, creation of the world market, machinery etc.—enriches not the worker but rather capital; hence it only magnifies again the power dominating over labour; increases only the productive power of capital.” (Grundrisse, p. 308.)
In production, an “animated monster” which “objectifies the scientific idea” and makes the worker “its living isolated accessory” (all Marx’s phrases) does not create wealth. Only labour applied to materials, does that; the machine reproduces no more than its own value, bit by bit. The purpose of technology in industry is to produce relative surplus-value —“to increase the productivity of labour, to lower the value of labour-power by increasing the productivity of labour and so to shorten that period of the working day necessary for the reproduction of that value” (Capital Vol. 1, p. 319, Penguin edn.). Put more prosaically, it is that Fred at his new machine in eight hours shall turn out more of Brand X than he did by the former method. The machine shortens the labour-time he spends producing a given quantity of Brand X; it depreciates the value, and therefore the potential price, of his labour-power. In addition, Fred has to buy some of Brand X as part of the necessities of life; the process has cheapened it, depreciating the value of his labour-power further still.
In practice, Fred may belong to a trade union which has some success in battling against this pressure on wages. Since workers are consumers, he and his family get a share in the amenities technology provides. It is obviously better to live in a society which has these things than one which hasn’t, and where the general level of science provides medicine, education and welfare. But, as was the case with feudalism, the techniques capitalism has had to find to develop its productive forces are also the means for its own destruction. The productive forces centre on the working class. Technology is itself a product of human industry, and its application revolutionizes social knowledge. The working class of today are better-informed, logical-thinking, and more widely conscious than ever before: able, indeed, to comprehend technology and see that it offers far more than it gives under capitalism.
Socialism
Marx’s analysis of the rôle of technology went beyond the production of surplus-value. He saw it as a precondition of the change from capitalism to Socialism: “If we did not find, concealed in society as it is, the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic.” (Grundrisse, p. 159). In particular, technology makes possible the reduction of working time so that labour need not dominate life. This in turn changes the nature of man—from being “the bearer of one specialized social function”, as the worker is today, he becomes “a totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity to be taken up in turn”.
This does not mean technology will be applied indiscriminately, for its own sake, in Socialism. Because man will be in conscious control of his own social activity, we shall be able to look selectively at what exists and use the criterion of benefit to society as a whole (instead of the present purpose of benefit to an owning class who are the minority). One feature of capitalism which causes concern today is a possible shortage of materials caused by “demand”. Yet what lies behind this is the mass production of short-lived goods for markets. Putting technology to socialist instead of capitalist use will end the “planned obsolescence” which devours resources, and make inventiveness both exciting and liberating.
An example of the preconditions created by technology “concealed in society as it is” can be found in an objection to Socialism which is not heard any more. Questioners would say: “Who is going to do the dirty, degrading work?” What they had particularly in mind was emptying middens and other sanitary work. At the beginning of the 19th century Fourier took this seriously and argued that squads of dirt-loving children were the answer. It appears now as an antediluvian argument, because main drainage and piped water and other innovations have virtually ended those kinds of jobs. Capitalism helps to show the working class that Socialism is possible, as well as to force on them that it is necessary.
Robert Barltrop
1 comment:
1970s Socialist Standards and their bolded paragraphs.
Post a Comment