Civilization at the Crossroads : Social and Human Implications of the Scientific and Technological Revolution (International Arts and Sciences Press)

Social and Human Implications of the Scientific and Technological Revolution

Radovan Richta

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138037809
• eBook ISBN: 9781351711067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 1968. The dynamic advance of scientific discovery in recent decades, together with the rapid development of the material base of human life, is assuming the magnitude of revolutionary changes that promise in the long run to transform the nature of civilization and open up boundless prospects for a new form of society. These considerations underscore the urgency of probing the substance of the scientific and technological revolution of our day — its social and human roots and implications. In 1965, a systematic examination of these problems was undertaken in Czechoslovakia by a research team made up of workers in various branches of science. The group was attached to the Institute of Philosophy, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, and headed by Dr. R. Richta, who has been working in this field for some time. The original purpose was to make a brief report on urgent ideological and theoretical matters arising from the new advances in science and technology. However, a fuller analysis led to a more ambitious and long-term project. Its aim was to draw, insofar as this was possible, a synthetic picture of the scientific and technological revolution against the background of the two social systems — socialism and capitalism — while also attempting to suggest ways of handling the inevitable social and human issues involved.

1
The Nature of the Scientific and Technological Revolution

The speed and range of the revolution in the field of production, the technical innovations and scientific discoveries in the world today, signalize the inception of processes making for radical change in the structure of the productive forces and in the material base of human life; the prospect is that all previous achievements of civilization will be surpassed. With the rapidly accelerating stream of scientific advance, inventions can now be registered in minutes. Whereas at the start of the century technical innovations usually yielded slight rises in productivity, today, more often than not, entire operations are transformed. Man is penetrating the structure of matter and inauguratiog the space age. Human activities are assuming new forms, life is changing under our eyes—distances grow shorter, time more intensive, man-made environments are replacing the natural—and at every turn we find science opening up new dimensions of mobility. People are gradually mastering the basis of their own being. Hitherto each generation has taken over from its predecessors a ready-made pattern of existence that had shaped the entire course of its life; now, however, it will evidently be necessary to reckon with the fact that each generation will experience more than one reconstruction of the nature of civilization and the entire pattern of human life.

Taking these processes to their conclusions from the initial stages or rudimentary forms we are witnessing today, we can see coming decades bringing a radical turn in the transmutation of the world and in man’s shaping of his own self: in short, we are on the threshold of a scientific and technological revolution.

1.1 Changes in the Structure and Dynamics of the Productive Forces

What is the substance of these innovations and how do they differ from the previous advances of civilization?

1.1.1 The Industrial Revolution as the Starting Point

We stand today at the divide of a civilization evolved over the last 150—200 years, with its roots in the industrial system which dominated national economies and set the tenor of human life. Machines, systems of machines, conveyor belts—and alongside a vast army of workers, each performing a tiny part of the combined operation—that is the feature of production in an industrially advanced society. Harnessing the labour of generations, capitalism built up a production base that—in contrast to small-scale manufacture—no longer relied on the individual factor (tools and craft skills), but drew to the full on social production forces: the use of machines with a labour force to match.

The industrial revolution assumed various material aspects, but in substance it remained the same. Marx and Engels had already defined it¹ as a constant revolution in the instruments of production (the main component of the means of production). The continually developing machine—the main agent, the vital nerve of the industrial productive forces—pushed its accompanying object of production (which underwent no radical change) into the background and established a claim to its inseparable companion in the shape of the simple (essentially unchanging) labour power of an army of workers.

The working machine, which fragmented and took over the operations of the human hand, the power machine that excluded the human motive force, the transmission belt—these, in brief, were the stages leading up to the mechanical principle (involving the breakdown of complicated craft processes to abstract elements, with mechanization undertaking the main work, leaving to man the sole job of machine-minding).

The outcome was the machine system, installed in entire workshops and factories, engaging a mass of labour power, either in the form of series of universal or specialized machines with rows of worker-operators alongside them (traditional European industry) or in the form of the conveyor belt linking all operations in a more or less continuous mechanical flow which guided the movement of materials and of human labour (American type). The mass of workers were left to carry out simple manipulation or regulation at the fringes and in the pores of the mechanical system.

The starting point of the industrial revolution was the working machine¹ (first industrial revolution); its universal distribution was only possible in connection with the power machine, such as the steam engine (second industrial revolution)², while the spread of transmission devices, belts, transport facilities and especially electric equipment (all of which could be taken to signify a third industrial revolution) marked the virtual completion of the industrial base of civilization.

The industrial revolution disengaged the production process from the range and rhythm of individual labour. The original subjective unity of production, deriving from the producer (craft production) or a body of subdivided labour (manufacture) was fragmented to make its appearance anew in the form of the objective unity of the machine system which subjected the “aggregate worker”.

Industrialization, in providing the production base of the capitalist epoch, made this structure of the productive forces general in the guise of the factory; varying in its material aspects, the structure was stable in the internal separation of machinery and labour power.

1.1.2 The Substance of the Scientific and Technological Revolution

Recent decades have seen the onrush of seience and technology breakiing the bonds of the industrial revolution; the structure and dynamcs of the productive forces are being transformed.

a) The means of labour are now passing beyond the confines of the machine, assuming functions that in effect elevate them to the position of an autonomous productive complex; that is to say, modern technological advance is not merely a matter of innovations in plant and equipment.

b) Progress is spreading to the objects of production—the range of materials that have served for thousands of years, with the industrial revolution changing at most the proportions (iron, wood, agricultural raw materials, etc.).

c) The “subjective factor” in production is starting to move after centuries of immutability; step by step the jobs performed directly by simple labour power are being eliminated—technology is excluding man from his directly manual, machine-minding, operational and, ultimately, ĩegulatory functions in production proper.

d) New productive forces, first and foremost science and its application in technology, are entering the production process on all fronts, and with them goes the base of all scientific activity—social integration and finally the growth of human capacities that underlies all creative activity.

What really distinguishes the coming advance, giving it the new dimensions of a scientific and technological revolution is, in short, primarily its development into a universal transformation of all the productive forces that is setting their whole elementary structure in motion and consequently radically altering the status of man. Everything points to the fact that we are no longer concerned merely with the constant advance of one objective factor in the productive forces (that is, the means of labour)—as was the case during the industrial revolution—or with the introduction from time to time of some new type of production that causes a stir, raises the level of civilization and then quietens down. On the contrary, we have an unceasing, accelerating stream of far-reaching changes in all productive forces, in the objective and the subjective factors in the production of human life—that is, in the structure and dynamics of the productive forces.

The upsurge of technology is excluding man with his limited physical and mental powers from production proper, introducing an intrinsic technical unity as the basis of automatic working. The technological revolution carries on from the point where the breakdown of labour into simple elements ended (in this sense it takes complex mechanization to its logical conclusion); but it employs, on the other hand, a synthesis which is a natural technical process that man has achieved and appropriated—and can therefore control; this synthesis signifies the victory of the automatic principle in the widest sense of the term (irrespective of the actual technical basis). We now have not merely tools or the means of labour interposed between man and nature, but an entire autonomous technical process embodying in one way or another a synthesized interaction of means and objects; and it is assuming an intrinsic pattern and dynamism.

The starting point of automatic production is no longer the individual machine, but a fully particularized, continuous, mechanised production process:¹ continuous production in the power industry, chemicals, metallurgy, cement production, mass-flow production in the manufacturing industries, and standardized work in offices—this is the most fertile soil for the automatic principle.

Man then stands alongside the production process proper (manufacture), whereas formerly he was its chief agent.² Simple human labour power is incapable of competing with the technical component of production; the average physical capacity of human labour power barely reaches 20 watts, the speed of sense reaction is of the order of 1/10 of a second and mechanical memory is limited and unreliable.³ Only in the scope of his creative potentialities and his accessibility to cultivation does man tower above the most mighty of his creations. The traditional employment of man as simple, unskilled labour power therefore necessarily becomes in one sector after the other a brake on the productive forces, involving wastage of human abilities.

To the extent to which man allows the products of his past labours to operate as natural forces, with a consequent withdrawal of human labour power from participation in the immediate production process,⁴ there enters into production a far more powerful force of human society —science as a productive force in its own right, operating on a basis of all-inclusive social cooperation. The production process then ceases to be labour in the immediate sense; it finds its support in “man’s understanding of nature”, which implies equally mastery of his “own general productive powers”—i.e. in science, “the accumulated knowledge of society”.¹ Science is now penetrating all phases of production and gradually assuming the role of the central productive force of human society and, indeed, the “decisive factor” in the growth of the productive forces.²

The more man gives up the jobs that he can leave to be done by his handiwork, the wider the prospects opening up before him—prospects that would have been inaccessible without the backing of his own achievement.

1.1.3 The Revolution in Technology, Raw Materials and Power Resources

By its very nature the scientific and technological revolution starts on a much wider front than was the case with the industrial revolution. Speaking in this wide sense of the automatic principle³ (converting production to a technical process controlled by man), we have in mind a number of components:

a) Cybernation is the classical procedure. Automation equipment has been evolved as a means of internal autonomy in the working of the most advanced mechanical systems:

Its embryonic form is represented in technical feelers (“artificial senses”) which eliminate the remnants of human operation and leave merely the need to set the various complexes.

When these devices take over the entire machine system, the control and backset points are converted into a system of technical reflexes (“nervous system”) that ensure a feed-back and simply require to be guided by special apparatus (control desk), or perhaps feeding in of programmes; the function of man is now on the fringe of operations.

The third and highest form of automation¹ comes with the computer (technical “brain centre”) which operates as a new internal dominant throughout the continuous flow of production, making use of information linkages and coordinating the technical process in workshops, factories and complex units; human activity is then relegated to the pre-production stages, to technological preparation, research, science and the welfare of man.

The simpler types of automation equipment are flooding mechanized industrial undertakings, while advanced cybernetic equipment capable of automatically controlling entire units is still fairly rare and will evidently come to the fore in the next sta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Members of the Interdisciplinary Team
• Foreword by Academician Šorm
• Introduction: The Purpose of Change
• CHAPTER 1 The Nature of the Scientific and Technological Revolution
• CHAPTER 2 Radical Changes in Work, Skills and Education
• CHAPTER 3 Modern Civilization and the Development of Man
• CHAPTER 4 New Features of Social Development in the Era of the Scientific and Technological Revolution
• Epilogue. Practical Aspects. Some Ideas for Consideration
• Statistical Tables
• Bibliography