Shape of things to come (1981)

Book Review from the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mike Cooley, Architect or Bee? Langley Technical Services, 1980.

This is a tantalizing, awkward but informative little book. The question that Cooley does not answer is whether and in what way a socialist society could use the new technology—that is, automation, chips, computer aided design, computer-linked robotic production and so on. But he skirts around it and answers a hundred other related questions, so that all may find something useful here.

Cooley was a design engineer with Lucas Aerospace (he was sacked quite recently for taking time off work to propagandise the views in this book). His own attitude to modern technology shows an interesting evolution; he began by assuming that technology was neutral—that computers were inherently useful but that their use was perverted by what capitalist society demanded; he now thinks that the technology of any society is an integral part of its politics. The last point is worth labouring. Cooley holds that with a change in the politics of capitalism the uses of technology could change. Correspondingly, he holds that with a change in society the shape of technology must change. Consecutively, he holds that the drive to change society is linked with the drive to find socially harmonious uses for the new technology. For him these sum up the human/technology relationship. Such a position has led him to champion the Lucas Aerospace Corporate plan—a trade union-backed series of alternative production projects that are offered to industry, like vehicles for spina bifida cases in place of nuclear weapons.

Cooley thinks that something has been lacking in the socialist analysis of science and technology. We concentrate too much on the contradictions of distribution (poverty amid plenty) and neglect the contradictions of production (technological systems that produce an abundance of products by degrading skilled work). As a corrective he suggests that we should question the assumptions embodied in science and technology and find out whether the ideology of capitalism has helped to determine the experimental designs and theories upon which they are based. This balanced analysis would help us to determine the types of technology that would be compatible with a socialist society.

Computer aids to production have become very sophisticated over the last decade and a wide range of engineering components can be produced, inspected and delivered under continuous data processing control—including the design and planning of the product. It is important not to miss the last point. Gone are the days when a master craftsman suggested a new idea to a draughtsman and worked in conjunction with him to develop its design, materials, process treatments, properties and conditions of use. With data processing engineering there is only the draughtsman who draws the original design on a digitally coordinated board, translates this spatial information into numerical terms and types it into a central processor; the computer then specifies the entire sequence of movements required by all the machines under its control that are used in the making of the product. The other point not to miss is that this system works only for the range of product types and production operations that are given in the control programme, innovation outside this range is impossible; for that the system has to be re-programined, rebuilt or even replaced. The outcome is not merely that creative and co-operative work among craftsmen and designers is redundant, but that in factories with engineering data processing it becomes impossible.

The problem for a socialist society using this equipment would be to recognise when the process was destroying the potential for creative labour, or impeding technological innovation, or both. On this matter there can be no other guide than the tacit knowledge, skills and expertise of individuals; but on the face of it these may not be acceptable, because when this computer-controlled equipment produces a design for a component at the limit of its control programme, a craftsman may see it and only be able to say “it doesn’t look right to me”. Whereas the writer of the control programme and the system designers can produce masses of technical argument to prove that it will work, just by pressing the read-out buttons. Moreover the new components may function for several years before they fail and justify the craftsman’s intuition. The problem resolves into a social question—how much influence respectively do you allow the technical expert and the practical craftsman over production decisions when they are in dispute? In simple terms—who has the power to decide and how? If socialist society were to use present technology then its democracy could be tested by controversies about technics versus skill.

Computer aided design presents more problems still. There are now systems where a designer works with a light pen directly onto a video display unit, linked to a computer programmed with a design package. The designer has a basic idea for a building, he draws the rough outline on the screen and then gets the computer to manipulate this basic material with the set of subroutines in the programme. Effectively the computer can turn a few lines into a fully drawn Greek temple, or turn the basic specification for a tower block into a picture and project it on the screen in dramatic perspective. It can construct and display a picture of a non-existent structure in an architectural setting so that you can judge whether the proposed building will harmonise with the environment and will even give you a picture of what the outside world would look like from inside a building that was only an idea in your head a few minutes before.

“Terrific!” may be your first response to all this. Cooley suggests that “ugh!” may be your second. It hardly needs saying that the use of this equipment to capitalist society is to reduce reliance upon a range of architectural, draughting and civil engineering workers; resulting in redundancies, cutting of costs, increasing output and so on; bringing the design process under the “scientific management” of capital.

But what use would this equipment be to a socialist society? Once again there could be clashes between those who felt that architectural aesthetics were being obliterated in computer simulations and, however good it seemed on the screen, it wouldn’t be right to build a Centre Point on the Acropolis—or a Centre Point anywhere for that matter. Such disputes might be the stuff of life for a socialist society. Imagine two sets of protagonists flinging themselves into such architectural discussions with the zeal of William Morris in his crusade against industrial architecture, and the propagandist power of the Futurists for modern architecture. When they had exhausted themselves, a socialist society could count heads and do what the majority wanted.

But would the battle over ideas in such cases be an equal one if computer aided design takes over? It’s an interesting question and provides the core of Cooley’s book, although he doesn’t answer it.

The trouble with computer aided design is that on a large scale it will replace intuition, creativity and the sheer tactility that goes with the craftsman’s approach to the physical nature of production. As it does so the popular notion of good design becomes just a completed decision sequence in machine code. In one way computer aided designs can always be justified, because the programmes work with a simplified model of reality that raises no decision problems. While in the sophisticated reality of the craftsman all decisions arc reached in the face of bewildering complexity. The craftsman can rarely explain how he is able to identify and locate faults in a complicated machine just by listening to it running. But the programmer can explain in a million steps how his impoverished model of reality will yet deliver the goods. As victories for computer aided design go up, says Cooley, so does our hold on reality go down and with it the direct interaction between production systems and the real world. If this technology is utilised unchanged in a socialist society then the development of production will be out of control in fact, even with the purest form of democratic control being exercised over it.

Information and understanding are the obvious keys in solving this problem. Provided that the population of a socialist world are aware of the situation then that society can provide self-adjustment processes and if they don’t work then it must abandon the technology. We must take the craftsman’s approach—suck it and see!

Cooley takes the leftist approach and strives to construct a theory of socialist development based upon current popular reactions against unemployment, nuclear power, the degradation of the natural environment and so on. The Lucas Aerospace Corporate Plan above mentioned is an example. Socialist society, says Cooley, becomes possible as the workers can conceive of an entire range of socially useful products to replace the destructive garbage that capitalism turns out. This would be an interesting point to discuss, but Cooley ruins it by describing the Russian revolution as a socialist transformation that went wrong, because Lenin introduced F. W. Taylor’s work measurement and control techniques after 1920; socialist production was thus supposed to have been converted back into capitalist toil. Howlers like this make you doubt whether he’s been talking about the same things as you all along. Particularly when he says that other countries are striving towards socialism.

How useful would computers be to a socialist world? The current crop of machines and programmes are laughably inadequate to represent even the noddy view of the capitalist system professed by bourgeois theorists. The original simulation of capitalism on a computer programme, written by Forrester in the late 1960s, was developed by Meadows, et al, in their doom-laden prophecy called Limits to Growth. Even in later sophisticated forms—Mesarovic and Pestel, Mankind at the Turning Point—it still does little other than predict that what is happening now is going to continue.

Cooley may well be right in a way he doesn’t realise. Computers are electronic aids in the production of surplus value. The design and languages of electronic processors stem from and are geared to quantitative assessments of production in units of currency-business languages. Can the current range of machines be used with programmes designed to sense human needs? Can the current-programming skills of computer personnel encompass the idea of production for use and free access? Let’s all become socialists and find out.

B. K. McNeeney

Free the airwaves! (1984)

From the September 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The rapid development of the technology of communications makes present social relations more and more outdated with every day. The obstacle to a more free use of these exciting new channels is the same as that which has held back the spreading of knowledge for hundreds of years: the fact that a minority class possess and control the means of communication just as they do the means of production in general.

In 1637, under a decree of the Star Chamber, whipping, the pillory and imprisonment were to be the penalties for publishing without the consent of the licensers, who were headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. In later years, an invidious “tax on knowledge" known as the Stamp Duty was the slightly more subtle method used to prevent the majority of the population making "subversive" use of their growing literacy. In 1831, however, and in defiance of the Stamp Duty laws. Henry Hetherington brought out the Poor Man's Guardian, a "weekly newspaper for the people, established contrary to law, to try the power of ‘Might’ against ‘Right', price Id”. On the front page, in place of the official government red stamp was a black one inscribed “Knowledge is Power", with a drawing of a printing press and the words "Liberty of the Press”. The first paragraph of this journal is worth quoting from, if only to demonstrate the difference between this early working-class paper, and its latter-day name-sake, the Liberal Man’s Guardian:

No more evasion; we will rot trespass, but deny the authority of our "lords" to enclose the common against us; we will demand our right, nor treat but with contempt the despotic "law" which would deprive us of it.

The Stamp Duty was finally abolished in 1855, but not before Hetherington had served a prison sentence for his pains.

The capitalist state is a coercive machine and overcomes the sporadic resistance of individuals and groups by resorting to force or the threat of it. But it could not survive for long if it had constantly to use such brutal (and costly) methods. In the course of the nineteenth century in Europe there gradually evolved an ideology of reformism, the intention of which was to replace repression with placatory gestures to accommodate the working class into the administration of their own exploitation. This presented the ruling class with a dilemma on the question of working-class literacy. As a Justice of the Peace was quoted as saying in 1807:

It is doubtless desirable that the poor should be instructed in reading, if it were only for the best of purposes — that they may read the scriptures. As to writing and arithmetic, it may be apprehended that such a degree of knowledge would produce in them a derelish for the laborious occupations of life.

 In 1870, this dilemma was solved through the enactment of the Education Act. which provided for a standard system of state-controlled schooling, capable of manufacturing the raw material for modern industry: literate, numerate and disciplined wage-slaves. The tradition of independent working-class self-education continued to flourish, however, in Mechanics Institutes, in bodies such as the Workers Educational Association, and through the carefully preserved bookshelves of knowledge passed down from one generation of workers to another, cherished for the relevance of their contents to the problems which confront workers: the works of Marx and Engels, of William Morris and Robert Tressell.

The early twentieth century witnessed an explosion of large-scale communication technologies, once again under the strict and stifling control of the state or of private business interests. In 1984, more than one hundred and fifty years after the publication of the Poor Man's Guardian, it is still illegal for anyone to broadcast publicly over the airwaves to others, without the (unlikely) approval of the BBC or IBA. The 1949 Wireless Telegraphy Act allows the Home Office almost total power to control and regulate the use of the frequency spectrum. The capitalist class monopolise the land and factories across the world (including the state capitalist Russian empire); the air itself, however, is no more immune from this tragic abdication of responsibility for our world and lives which we make by allowing a minority to possess that world.

The 1930s saw the evolution of the new culture industry, with an increasingly uniform state-regulated leisure entering the sway of the world market. In marketing communications as a commodity in itself, huge profits were accumulated. The big telecommunications multinationals such as IBM. ITT, Western Electric and AT & T are usually to be found on the list of top ten US companies today.

Of course, there have continually been attempts at various levels to evade this monopoly. In 1962 a young Irish businessman. Ronan O’Rahilly, tried to promote a recording of Georgie Fame and came up against the power of EMI, Decca, Pye and Philips, who between them cornered 99 per cent of the market. All the radio stations, including Radio Luxembourg, were working hand in glove with these companies, so O’Rahilly founded Radio Caroline. In 1967, however, the Labour government’s Marine Broadcasting Offences Bill outlawed all the pirate stations and later that year the BBC’s new 4-channel radio service came into operation with Radio One as a pop channel, all safely under the control of the (Labour administered) capitalist state.

Communications technology in the twentieth century has been developed according to the needs of profit and, as a corollary to this, according to military needs. By the mid-seventies there were, according to NASA, about 3,700 satellites in space. Of these, only a handful were communications satellites; the vast majority served the military establishments of the superpowers, in command and message systems, logistics, interception and surveillance.

Under capitalism, the latest advances in communication technology will be used to improve the efficiency of profit accumulation while dividing people more and more from one another and from their own self- determined needs. For example an advertisement for one of the home microcomputers on the market speaks of the delights of "balancing the family budget" (working out what you can no longer afford after splashing out on the computer) and of "the fascination of controlling your own private little world" as being "addictive".

With the advent of socialist democracy, there could be a great proliferation of multilateral communications systems. We must forget the false division between the passive entertainment of the media and the active process of education. In the words of Brecht, “Radio must be changed from a means of distribution to a means of communication". But for the devices at the disposal of humanity to be used to enhance, rather than obstruct, the democratic control of society, we must replace the social relationship of employers and employed which permeates the world today with social relationships of equality and co-operation:

A microphone is not an car, a camera is not an eye and a computer is not a brain . . . as we design technological systems, we are in fact designing sets of social relationships. (Mike Cooley, Architect or Bee?)

The forms which communication takes will be directly related, in other words, to the form which society takes. If we are to start communicating with one another globally on the sophisticated level which modern technology has made possible it is a social revolution, rather than a technological revolution, which is urgently needed.

Clifford Slapper

Party News (1981)

Party News from the May 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Paris public meeting

There has at least been some sanity in this month's French presidential election: members and sympathisers of the Socialist Party of Great Britain organised a public meeting in Paris on the subject of universal suffrage and Marxism. Maximilien Rubel gave a talk on how Marx concluded in 1880 that the working class could change universal suffrage from an instrument of trickery into an "agent of emancipation" by mandating socialist delegates to immediately dismantle the state machinery of capitalism and establish socialism. Rubel stressed the importance of working-class consciousness in the transformation of society but when then suggested that we should adopt a reform programme to win support. The logical outcome of reforming capitalism could be seen on the way back from the meeting: large posters with the most absurd and vague slogans lined the streets: "France needs a president. V. Giscard d'Estaing"; "Jobs first: Mitterand for President" ("Socialist" Party); "With Huguette Bouchardeau for the alternative" (Unified Socialist Party); "Let's produce French: Marchais for President" (French Communist Party); and, most bemusing of all, "Now, together, act with Jacques Chirac". The alternative to this array of careerist hypocrites is for us to stop following leaders and cast a vote not for a person or a policy, but for a socialist society. The election issue of Socialisme Mondial, as well as a French version of the Questions of the Day pamphlet Pour le Socialisme Mondial is now available from Head Office.

Clifford Slapper

The future of work

Wealth in present society is produced only when there is the prospect of a profit; in a socialist society, production would be carried out simply in order to satisfy human needs, whenever and wherever they occurred. The contrast was brought out very well by Mike Cooley of the Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards Committee, at a conference in March organised by the William Morris Society and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Several SPGB members took part. Cooley argued that people could create high quality articles through satisfying co-operative work, provided that the priority was use and not exchange.

Modern technology will only act as a liberating force if the basis of society is altered from market competition to human co-operation. At Lucas Aerospace co-operating workers are exploring the possibilities of creating useful work and production, although their struggle for survival in the world market system imposes severe limitations. Mike Cooley also told how Lucas workers had occupied the Willesden factory to oppose "rationalisation". One weekend they left the factory and on returning found that Lucas Industries had burnt out the inside of the place and ripped the roof off.

Ray Watkinson spoke about William Morris' views on work. Morris saw useful labour as the only true art, and looked forward to a time when socialist co-operation would allow all work to become creative and satisfying. Watkinson neglected to explain how Morris spent his later years campaigning for this, through the political organisation of the working class.

The discussion that followed was chaired by Geoffrey Robinson, MP, who more than once slipped in a sly plea for support for the Labour Party. He spoke of the "need" for a harmonious partnership between labour and capital. A socialist from the audience suggested we should get rid of this "holy alliance" and institute real harmony in a classless society. Robinson replied that we should keep working for harmony within in the present economy, and keep socialism in mind for the future. "Like a carrot", came a call from the audience.