Progress Without People

David F. Noble

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 1995
• ISBN:
  9781926662299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Relations de travail et relations industrielles

A provocative discussion of the role of technology and its accompanying rhetoric of limitless progress in the concomitant rise of joblessness and unemployment.

PART 1
ANOTHER LOOK AT PROGRESS

CHAPTER 1
IN DEFENCE OF LUDDISM

There is a war on, but only one side is armed: this is the essence of the technology question today. On the one side is private capital, scientized and subsidized, mobile and global, and now heavily armed with military-spawned command, control, and communication technologies. Empowered by the second industrial revolution, capital is moving decisively now to enlarge and consolidate the social dominance it secured in the first.

In the face of a steadily declining rate of profit, escalating conflict, and intensifying competition, those who already hold the world hostage to their narrow interests are undertaking once again to restructure the international economy and the patterns of production to their advantage. Thus, with the new technology as a weapon, they steadily advance upon all remaining vestiges of worker autonomy, skill, organization, and power in the quest for more potent vehicles of investment and exploitation. And, with the new technology as their symbol, they launch a multimedia cultural offensive designed to rekindle confidence in “progress.” As their extortionist tactics daily diminish the wealth of nations, they announce anew the optimistic promises of technological deliverance and salvation through science.

On the other side, those under assault hastily abandon the field for lack of an agenda, an arsenal, or an army. Their own comprehension and critical abilities confounded by the cultural barrage, they take refuge in alternating strategies of appeasement and accommodation, denial and delusion, and reel in desperate disarray before this seemingly inexorable onslaught—which is known in polite circles as “technological change.”

What is it that accounts for this apparent helplessness on the part of those whose very survival, it would seem, depends upon resisting this systematic degradation of humanity into mere disposable factors of production and accumulation? To be sure, there is a serious imbalance of power between the opposing forces, and perhaps an immobilizing fear on the weaker side in the face of so awesome an assault. But history is replete with examples of how such weaker forces have valiantly defied, and even triumphed over, the stronger. Why then this striking lack of resolve against the new technological offensive?

In search of an explanation for this apparent paralysis, and a cure for it, this book explores beyond the constraints of the current crisis to focus upon older and more fundamental handicaps. Rather than examining the well-known enemies without—the tactics and threats of multinational corporations that are daily reported in the press and chronicled by a spectrum of specialists—this analysis examines the enemies within—the opposition’s own established patterns of power and inherited habits of thought that now render it so supine and susceptible. These internal foes, at once political and ideological, can only successfully be overcome by means of direct and frank confrontation, which is the task begun here.

In outline, the opposition suffers from a fatalistic and futuristic confusion about the nature of technological development, and this intellectual problem is rooted in, and reinforced by, the political and ideological subordination of people at the point of production, the locus of technological development. This twofold subordination of workers, not alone by capital but also by the friends of labour (union officials, left politicians, and intellectuals), has hardly been accidental. Rather, it has served the interests of those who wield control over labour’s resources and ideas. For the political subordination of workers has disqualified them from acting as subjects on their own behalf, through their own devices and organizations, and thus has minimized their challenge to the labour leadership. And the ideological subordination of the workers has invalidated their perceptions, knowledge, and insights about what is to be done, and has rendered them dependent upon others for guidance, deferential to the abstract and often ignorant formulations of their absentee agents.

Such subordination has handicapped the opposition to the current technological assault in several ways. First, and perhaps most obvious, it has eliminated from the battle those actually on the battlefield of technological innovation, those best situated to comprehend what is happening and to fight effectively. Second, in denying the possibility of people at the point of production participating on their own behalf in the struggle, the opposition has lost as well its understanding of what is actually happening—an appreciation that arises only from daily confrontation, extended experience, and intimate shopfloor knowledge. Finally, the political and ideological subordination of people at the point of production has entailed a removal of the technology question from its actual site and social context, with serious consequences.

While this removal of the technology question has perhaps strengthened the position of the friends of labour, vis-à-vis the workers themselves, it has weakened them vis-à-vis capital. For without any power rooted in the self-activity of the workers at the point of production, the friends of labour have become more susceptible to the power of others. Without a firm grasp of reality based upon experience, they have become abstract in their thinking, and more vulnerable to the ideas of others. (It must be emphasized that this is not a matter of individual integrity or weakness, but rather a powerful cultural phenomenon that has influenced everyone.)

The impotence and ignorance resulting from the double disqualification of people at the point of production, moreover, have manifested themselves in profound intellectual confusion about the nature and promise of technological development itself. Abstracted from the point of production, and therefore from the possibility of a genuinely independent point of view, the opposition’s own notion of technological development has come to resemble and ratify the hegemonic capitalist ideology of technological necessity and progress. For it too has become a mere ideological device, an enchantment, and an opiate. The idea of technology has lost its essential concreteness, and thus all reference to particulars of place and purpose, tactics and terrain.

Without moorings in space, the disembodied idea has wandered adrift in time as well. Technological development has come to be viewed as an autonomous thing, beyond politics and society, with a destiny of its own which must become our destiny too. From the perspective of here and now, technological development has become simply the blind weight of the past on the one hand and the perpetual promise of the future on the other. Technological determinism—the domination of the present by the past—and technological progress—the domination of the present by the future—have combined in our minds to annihilate the technological present. The loss of the concrete, the inevitable consequence of the subordination of people at the point of production, has thus resulted also in the loss of the present as the realm for assessments, decisions, and actions. This intellectual blind-spot, the inability even to comprehend technology in the present tense, much less act upon it, has inhibited the opposition and lent legitimacy to its inaction.

This chapter examines the origin of this paralysis and the ideas that sanction it, looking in turn at the first and second industrial revolutions. The aim is to regain the concrete by affirming the perceptions of those at the point of production, thereby to reclaim the present as a locus of action—while there is still time to act. For people at the point of production were the first to comprehend the full significance of the first industrial revolution and to respond accordingly. They have also been the first to see the second industrial revolution for the devastating assault that it is—not because of their superior sophistication at dialectics but because of what it is already doing to their lives—and to respond accordingly.

The purpose here is to acknowledge, endorse, and encourage their response to technology in the present tense, not in order to abandon the future but to make it possible. In politics it is always essential to construct a compelling vision of the future and to work toward it, and this is especially true with regard to technology. But it is equally essential to be able to act effectively in the present, to defend existing forces against assault and try to extend their reach. In the absence of a strategy for the present, these forces will be destroyed, and without them all talk about the future becomes merely academic.

No one alive today remembers first-hand the trauma that we call the first industrial revolution, which is why people are now able so casually to contemplate (and misunderstand) the second. What little we actually know about those earlier times—perhaps the only adequate antecedent to our own—has filtered down to us through distorting lenses devised to minimize this calamity and justify the human suffering it caused in the name of progress. The inherited accounts of this period were formulated by and large in response to the dramatic actions of those who fought for their survival against this progress. They constituted a post hoc effort to deny the legitimacy and rationality of such opposition in order to guarantee the triumph of capitalism.

The Luddites were not themselves confused by this ideological invention. They did not believe in technological progress, nor could they have; the alien idea was invented after them, to try to prevent their recurrence. In light of this invention, the Luddites were cast as irrational, provincial, futile, and primitive. In reality, the Luddites were perhaps the last people in the West to perceive technology in the present tense and to act upon that perception. They smashed machines.

The effort to reconstruct this earlier period of the first industrial revolution might help us to deconstruct our inherited perceptions of technology, because those perceptions date in large part from this historical watershed. Fortunately, during the last several decades and in an effort to understand the opposition to progress in its own terms, social historians have made great strides toward just such a reconstruction. In particular, they have sought to redeem those who have come to seem so irrational and wrongheaded, and they have discovered that the resistance was in fact rational, widely supported, and indeed successful—both in buying time for reflection and strategizing (something today’s labour movement would surely welcome) and in awakening a far-reaching political consciousness among workers.

According to these revisionist interpretations, the Luddites who resisted the introduction of new technologies were not against technology per se but rather against the social changes that the new technology reflected and reinforced. Thus, the workers of Nottingham, Yorkshire, and Lancashire were not opposed to hosiery and lace frames, the gig mill and shearing frames, larger spinning jennies, or even power looms. Rather, in a postwar period of economic crisis, depression, and unemployment much like our own, they were struggling against the efforts of capital, using technology as a vehicle, to restructure social relations and the patterns of production at their expense. During the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the workers in manufacturing trades united in opposition to unemployment, the lowering of wages, changes in the system of wage payments, the elimination of skilled work, the lowering of the quality of products, and the factory system itself, which entailed an intensification of work discipline and a loss of autonomy and control over their own labour. Similarly, the agricultural workers who participated in the Swing riots of the 1830s were not opposed to threshing machines per se but rather to the elimination of winter work, the threat of unemployment, and the overall proletarianization of agricultural labour.

In short, during the first half of the nineteenth century workers were reacting against the encroachment of capitalist social relations, marked by domination and wage slavery, and they were well aware that the introduction of new technologies by their enemies was part of the effort to undo them. Unencumbered by any alien and paralysing notion of technological progress, they simply tried to arrest this assault upon their lives in any way they could. They had nothing against machinery, but they had no undue respect for it either. When choosing between machines and people or, more precisely, between the capitalist’s machines and their own lives, they had little problem deciding which came first. As historian Eric Hobsbawm reminds us, unlike their twentieth-century descendants the nineteenth-century “machine breakers were not concerned with technical progress in the abstract.” Thus, they were able to perceive the changes in the present tense for what they were, not some inevitable unfolding of destiny but rather the political creation of a system of domination that entailed their undoing. They were also able to act decisively—and not without success when measured in terms of a human lifetime—to defend their livelihoods, freedom, and dignity.

“The machine was not an impersonal achievement to those living through the Industrial Revolution,” historian Maxine Berg notes, “it was an issue.” In her valuable study of the machinery question in the first half of the nineteenth century, Berg emphasizes that “in the uncertainty of the times, it still seemed possible to halt the process of rapid technological change.” Such rapid change, which is in itself destabilizing and thus has been used again and again to force labour onto the defensive, was not at that time viewed as inevitable. Thus, as Berg states, “The working class challenged the beneficence of the machine, first by its own distress then by its relentless protest.” It “criticized the rapid and unplanned introduction of new techniques in situations where the immediate result would be technological unemployment.” Moreover, “Technological innovation was challenged in everyday struggle in the workplaces of most industries throughout the period. Workers and their trade unions were not ashamed to denounce the type of progress which brought redundancy,” speed-up, and loss of freedom. They exposed the reality of the technology, challenged its uses, demanded equitable distribution of gains if there were to be any, and sought greater control over the direction of technological development itself.

“The chief advantage of power looms,” the Bolton weavers declared in 1834, “is the facility of executing a quantity of work under more immediate control and management and the prevention of embezzlement and not in the reduced cost of production.” The weavers recognized that the power loom “was profitable only for certain fabrics and required a very large investment in fixed capital,” as Berg points out. “It was quite clear to many that the productivity of the power loom was not its greatest asset.” The weavers recognized that so-called economic viability, the presumed reason for introducing a new technology, was not in reality an economic category but a political and cultural one.

The decision to invest capital in machines that would reinforce the system of domination, which might in the long run render the chosen technique economical, was not itself an economic decision but a political one, with cultural sanction. Other technologies, equally uneconomic but preferable for other reasons, might have been chosen for further investment, and perhaps in the long run they would have been rendered economic. (J.H. Sadler, for example, proposed such an alternative, the pendulum hand-loom, on behalf of the weavers. It was designed to preserve the skills and jobs of the weavers and enable them to avoid the degrading conditions of factory life.)

In short, the weavers raised “a powerful and impressive critique of machinery, a critique that carried a genuine belief that technical change was not a ‘given’ but could be tempered and directed to match the requirements of social ideals.” They “consistently drew attention to piece-rates, home competition, and the specific technical and market conditions for the introduction of power looms.” Above all, and again consistently, they demanded a social policy on technology. They proposed, for example, a tax on power looms and a host of other legislative measures to protect the lives of the weavers.

But to achieve their ends the weavers did not. rely solely upon such formal tactics. Central to their effort was a strategy of highly organized direct action, the machine-breaking for which they are still remembered today. Between 1811 and 1812, for example, manufacturing workers marching under the banner of the mythical Ned Ludd destroyed over one thousand mills in the Nottingham area. A decade later the machine-breaking spread across the midlands, and as Pierre Dubois, a historian of industrial sabotage, describes the experience, “In some cases, it had a definitely revolutionary character, involving a confrontation between two armed forces.” Workers smashed machines selectively, but deliberately, and this act more than any other characterized the workers’ movement of the period.

The precise significance of machine-breaking in the context of the workers’ movement is open to interpretation. The paucity of historical evidence makes a fair measure of extrapolation and conjecture inevitable. Most of the revisionist social historians who undertook to reconstruct the movement in the workers’ own terms have argued convincingly that the workers were not opposed to the machines per se. They knew who their real (human) enemies were. These historians suggest, therefore, that selective machine-breaking was simply one tactic among others used to cripple and intimidate their foes and win concessions. Rooted in such traditional forms of protest as food riots and incendiarism, machine-breaking also constituted a form of early trade unionism (during a period when such organizations were outlawed)—a form of collective bargaining by riot, as Hobsbawm describes it.

A more recent interpretation, by Geoffrey Bernstein, rejects this minimization of machine-breaking to the status of mere tactic. His analysis suggests that perhaps the social historians are themselves still too bound up in the ideological reverence for technological progress and that to redeem the Luddites as rational the historia...