Technology has Economically Benefitted Who?

Post date: Jan 31, 2011 5:36:17 AM

Few people deny that technological change has political consequences; yet equally few people seem to realize that the present "system," in the widest sense, is the product of technology and cannot be significantly changed unless technology is changed.

The question may be asked: What is it that has produced modern technology? Various answers can be given. We may go back to the Renaissance, or even further, to the arising of Nominalism, and point to certain changes in Western man's attitude to religion, science, nature, and society, which then apparently released the intellectual energies for modern technological development. Marx and Engels gave a more direct explanation: the rising power of the bourgeoisie, that is, "the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production, and employers of wage labour."

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left no other bond between man and man than naked selfinterest, than callous "cash payment." It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production. The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities . . . has agglomerated population, centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.

If the bourgeoisie did all this, what enabled it to do so? The answer cannot be in doubt; the creation of modern technologies. Once a process of technological development has been set in motion it proceeds largely by its own momentum, irrespective of the intentions of its originators. It demands an appropriate "system," for inappropriate systems spell inefficiency and failure. Whoever created modern technology, for whatever purpose, this technology or, to use the Marxian term, these modes of production, now demand a system that suits them, that is appropriate to them.

As our modern society is unquestionably in crisis, there must be something that does not fit. (a) If overall performance is poor despite brilliant technology, maybe the "system" does not fit. (b) Or maybe the technology itself does not fit present-day realities, including human nature.

Which of the two is it? This is a very crucial question. The assumption most generally met is that the technology is all right—or can be put right at a moment's notice—but that the "system" is so faulty it cannot cope:

Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells . . . The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by the enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of" new markets and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means by which crises are prevented. Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848.

The culprit is the capitalist system, the profit system, the market system, or, alternatively, nationalization, bureaucracy, democracy, planning, or the incompetence of the bosses. In short: we have a splendid train but a bad track or a rotten driver or a lot of stupid, unruly passengers. Maybe all this is quite true, except that we do not have such a splendid train at all. Maybe what is most wrong is that which has been and continues to be the strongest formative force—the technology itself.

If our technology has been created mainly by the capitalist system, is it not probable that it bears the marks of its origin, a technology for the few at the expense of the masses, a technology of exploitation, a technology that is class-orientated, undemocratic, inhuman, and also unecological and nonconservationist?

I never cease to be astonished at the docility with which people—even those who call themselves Socialists or Marxists—accept technology uncritically, as if technology were a part of natural law (38-40).

E.F. Schumacher.

Good Work.

New York: Harper & Row, Publishers (now HarperCollins), 1979. ISBN 0060138572.

(OOP, but link to E.F. Schumacher's page @ HarperCollins.ca is here.)