On Flying Cars and the declining Rate of Profit
Pages 120-140:Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis:
Thesis
There appears to have been a profound shift, beginning in the 1970s, from investments in technologies associated with the possibility of alternative futures to investment technologies that furthered labor discipline and control
"The burgeoise cannot exist without constantly revolutioning the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society...All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."
—Marx and Engels, Manifest of the Communist Party (1847)
"I said that fun was very important, too, that it was a direct rebuttal of the kind of ethics and morals that were being put forth in the country to keep people working in a rat race which didn't make sense because in a few years the machines would do all the work anyway, that there was a whole system of values that people were taught to postpone their pleasure, to put all their money in the bank, to buy life insurance, a whole bunch of things that didn't make sense to our generation at all."
—Abbie Hoffman, from the trial of the Chicago Seven (1970)
Since its inception in the eighteenth century , the system that has come to be known as "industrial capitalism" has fostered an extremely rate of scientific advance and technological innovation—one unparalleled in human history. Its advocates has always held this out as the ultimate justification for the exploitation, misery, and destruction of communities the system also produced. Even its most famous detractors, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were willing to celebrate capitalism—if for nothing else—for its magnificent unleashing of the "productive forces". Marx and Engels also believed that that very tendency, or, to be more precise, capitalism's very need to continually revolutionize the means of industrial production, would eventually be its undoing.
Is it possible that they were right? and is it also possible that in the sixties, capitalists, as a class, began to figure this out?
Marx's specific argument was that, for certain technical reasons, value, and therefore profits, can only be extracted from human labor. Competition forces factory owners to mechanize production, so as to reduce labor costs, but while that is to the short-term advantage of the individual firm, the overall effect is actually to drive the overall rate of profit of all firms down. For almost two centuries now, economists have debated whether all this is really true. But if it is true, the otherwise mysterious decision by industrialists not to pour research funds into the invention of robot factories that everyone was anticipating in the sixties, and instead began to relocate their factories to labor-intensive, low-tech factories in China or the Global South, makes perfect sense.
Antithesis
Yet even those areas of science and technology that did receive massive funding have the breakthroughs originally anticipated
At this point, the pieces would seem to be falling neatly into place. By the 1960s, conservative political forces had become skittish about the socially disruptive effects of technological progress, which they blamed for the social upheavals of the era, and employers were beginning to worry about the economic impact of mechanization. The fading of the Soviet threat allowed for a massive reallocation of resources in directions seen asless challenging to the economic arrangements—and ultimately, to ones that could support a campaign to sharply reverse the gains progressive social movements had made since the forties, thus achieving a decisive victory in what U.S. elites did indeed see as a global class war. the change of priorities was touted as a withdrawal of big-government projects and a return to the market, but it actually involved a shift in the orientation of goverment-directed research, away from programs like NASA—or, say, alternative energy sources—and toward even more focus on military, information, and medical technologies.
I think all this is true as far as it goes; but it cannot explain everything. Above all, it cannot explain why even in those areas that have become the focus of well-funded research projects, we have not seen anything like the kind of advances anticipated fifty years ago. To take only the most obvious example: if 95 percent of robotics research has been funded by the military, why is there no sign of Klaatu-style killer robots shooting death rays from their eyes? Because we know they've been working on that.
...
Here I can speak from experience. My own knowledge comes largely from universities, both in the United States and the UK. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative paperwork, at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for instance, we have not only more administrative staff than faculty, but the faculty, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administrative responsibilities as on teaching and research combined. This is more or less par for the course for universities worldwide. The explosion of paperwork, in tur, is a direct result of the introduction of corporate management techniques, which are always justified as ways of increasing efficiency, by introducing competition at every level. What these management techniques invariably end up meaning in practice that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell each other things:grant proposals, book proposals, assessment of our students' job and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors, institutes, conference workshops, and universities themselves, which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors. Marketing and PR thus come to engulf every aspect of university life.
The result is a sea of documents about the fostering of "imagination" and "creativity", set in an environment that might as well have been designed to strangle the actual manifestations of imagination and creativity in the cradle. I am not a cientist. I work in social theory. but I have seen the results in my own field of endeavor. No major works of social theory have emerged in the united states in the last thirty years. We have, instead, been largely reduced to the equivalent of Medieval scholastics, scribbling endless annotations on French theory from the 1970s, despite the guilty awareness that if contemporary incarnations of Giles Deluze, Michel Focault, or even Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the U.S. academy, they would be unlikely to even make it through grad school, and if they somehow did it, they would almost certainly be denied tenure.
There was a time when academia was society's refuge for the eccentric, brilliant and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all.
If all this is true in the social sciences, where research is still carried out largely by individuals, with minimal overhead, one can only imagine how much worse it is for physicists. And indeed, as one physicist has recently warned students pondering a career in the sciences, even when one emerge from the usual decade-long period languishing at someone else's flunky, one can expect one's best ideas to be stymied at every point.
You [will] spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems... It is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal; because they have not yet been proved to work.
That pretty much answers the question of why we don't have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes. Common sense dictates that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone for a while. Most will probably turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something completely unexpected. If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those people they will receive no resources unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you that they already know what they are going to discover.
That's pretty much the system we have now.
In the natural sciences, to the tyranny of managerialism we can also add the creeping privatization of research results. As the British economist David Harvie has reminded us, "open source" research is not new. Scholarly research has always been open-source in the sense that scholars share materials and results. There is competition, certaily, but it is, as he nicely puts it, "convival":
Convival competition is where I (or my team) wish to be the first to prove a particular conjecture,to explain a particular phenomenon, to discover a particular species, star or particle, in the same way that if I race my bike against my friend I wish to win. But convival competition does not exclude cooperation, in that rival researchers (or research teams) will share preliminary results, experience of techniques and so on... Of course, the shared knowledge, accessible through books, articles, computer software, and directly through dialogue with other scientists, forms an intellectual commons.
Obviously, this is no longer true of scientists working in the corporate sector, where findings are jealously guarded, but the spread of the corporate ethos within academy and research institutes themselves has increasingly caused even publicly funded scholars to treat their findings as personal property. less is published. Academic publishers ensure that findings that are published are more difficult to access, further enclosing the intellectual commons. As a result, convival, open-source competition slides further into something much more like classic market competition.
Synthesis
On the Movement from Poetic to Bureaucratic Technologies
"All the labor-saving machinery that has hitherto been invented has not lessened the toil of a single human being"
—John Stuart Mill
It is the premise of this book that we live in a deeply bureaucratic society. If we do not notice it, it is largely because bureaucratic practices and requirements have become so all-pervasive that we barely see them—or worse, cannot imagine doing things any other way.
Computers have played a crucial role in all of this. Just as the invention of new forms of industrial automation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had the paradoxical effect of turning more and more of the world's population into full-time industrial workers, so has all the software designed to save us from administrative responsibilities in recent decades ultimately turned us into full-time administrators. Just as university professors seem to feel it is inevitable that they will spend more and more time managing grants, so do parents simply accept that they will have to spend weeks of every year filling out forty-page online forms to get their children into acceptable schools, and store clerks realize that they will be spending increasing slices of their waking lives puncing passwords into their phones to access, and manage, their various bank and credit accounts, and pretty much everyone understands that they have to learn how to perform jobs once relegated to travel agents, brokers, and accountants.
Someone once figured out that the average American will spend a cumulative six months of her life waiting for the light to change. I don't know if similar figures are available for how long she is likely to spend filling out forms, but it must be at least that much. If nothing else, I think it's safe to say that no population in the history has spent so much time engaged in paperwork.
Yet all of this is supposed to have happened after the overthrow of horrific, old-fashioned, bureaucratic socialism, and the triumph of freedom and market. Certainly this is one of the great paradoxes of contemporary life, much though—like the broken promises of technology—we seem to have developed a profound reluctance to address the problem.
Clearly, these problems are linked—I would say, in many ways, they are ultimately the same problem. Nor is it merely a matter of bureaucracy, or more specifically managerial, sensibilities having been choked off all forms of technical vision and creativity. After all, as we're constantly reminded, the Internet has unleashed all sorts of creative vision and colloborative ingenuity. What it has really brought is a kind of bizarre inversion of ends and means, where creativity is marshaled to service the administration rather than the other way around.
I would put it this way: in this final, stultifying stage of capitalism, we are moving from poetic technologies to bureaucratic technologies.
By poetic technologies, I refer to the use of rational, technical, bureaucratic means to bring wild impossible fantasies to life. Poetic technologies in this sense is as old as civilization. They could even be said to predate complex machinery. Lewis Mumford used to argue that the first complex machines were actually made of people. Egyptian pharaohs were only able to build the pyramids because of their mastery of administrative procedures, which then allowed them to develop production line techniques, dividing up complex tasks into dozens of simple operations and assign each to one team of worksmen—even though they lacked mechanical technology more complex than the lever and inclined plane. Bureaucratic oversight turned armies of peasant farmers into the cogs of a vast machine. even much later, aften actual cogs had been invented, the design of complex machinery was always to some degree an elaboration of principles originally developed to organize people.
Yet still, again and again, we see those machines—whether their moving parts are arms and torsos or pistons, wheels, and springs—being put to work to realize otherwise impossible fantasies: cathedrals, moon shots, transcontinental railways, and on and on. Certainly, poetic technologies almost invariably have something terrible about them; the poetry is likely to evoke dark satanic mills as much as it does grace or liberation. But the rational, bureaucratic techniques are always in service to some fantastic end.
From this perspective, all those mad Soviet plans—even if never realized—marked the high-water mark of such poetic technologies. What we have now is the reverse. It's not that vision,creativity, and mad fantasies are no longer encouraged. It's that our fantasies remain free-floating; there's no longer eventhe pretense that they could ever take form or flesh. Meanwhile, in the few areas in which free, imaginative creativity actually is fostered, such as open-source Internet software development, it is ultimately marshaled in order to create even more, and even more effective platforms for filling out of forms. That is what I mean by "bureaucratic technologies": administrative imperatives have become not the means, but the ends of technological development. Meanwhile, the greatest and most powerful nation that has ever existed on earth has spent the last decades telling its citizens that we simply can no longer contemplate gradiose enterprises, even if—as the current environmental crisis suggests—the fate of the earth depends on it.