On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Part 3, Chapter 3

Summary of Part 3 Chapter 3: Technical and Philosophical Thought

In this chapter Simondon lays out his prognostications for how a presumably emerging or soon to emerge “philosophical thought” will characterize, or help bring about, the passage from our current split world toward a world which renews the unity or wholeness or whatever, which had characterized the original, magical world. He goes through the different kinds of thought which characterize our stage in world history – technical, religious, and aesthetic – showing how they fail to reach the desired outcome, and yet all include aspects which need to be included in the coming philosophical thought. Technics “grasps” us and our world below the level of unity, and social and political thought (which are the “functional analog of religions” (223) (and which he later specifies as national socialism, “American democratic doctrine,” and Soviet Communism (231)) grasp us from above the level of unity (224).

but these two representations are not enough, because the human world can be grasped in its unity only at the neutral point; technics pluralize it, and political thought integrates it into a higher unity, that of the totality of humanity in its coming-into-being, where it loses its real unity in the same way that the individual loses its unity within a group.

Aesthetic thought “grasps” reality at the “neutral point” between these, and philosophical thought will as well; but it will have to go beyond the merely representational level which aesthetic thought is stuck at, it will also require an “aesthetics of aesthetics,” putting the different stages of aesthetic thought into relation.

S goes through the limitations of current technical thought: it focuses on technical objects instead of seeing at the needed level, of the concrete technical individual (226). Instead of focusing on discipline-specific understanding, it will be necessary to understand the similarity (or identity?) of schemas at the intersection of multiple sciences and practical domains (227). Philosophical thought will need to grasp the “polytechnic — both natural and human — universe” (228); though the term “network” (réseau) goes a way towards this, it is too imprecise, S argues, in that it “does not account for the particular regimes of causality and conditioning that exist in these networks, and that functionally attach them to the human world and to the natural world, as a concrete mediation between these two worlds.” [But “réticulation” totally nails it? This might be related to his critique of cybernetics as too focused in homeostasis, and too readily positing what S considers false equivalences between different kinds of system.]

The introduction of adequate representations of technical objects into culture would result in the key-points of technical networks becoming real terms of reference for the ensemble of human groups, whereas they currently are only key terms for those who understand them, which is to say for the technicians of each specialty; for other men, they only have a practical value, and correspond to very confused concepts; technical ensembles introduce themselves into the world as if they had no natural or human right of belonging, while a mountain or promontory, which have less concrete regulatory power than some technical ensembles, are known by all men of a region and belong to the representation of the world.

[I have to admit I have not been tracking to what extent Simondon’s concepts of “key points” (points clés) and “high points” (hauts lieux) correspond; this passage makes me think they do.] Anyway this sentence sums up “what is wrong with people and society today” in S’s view, and this is the situation which the coming philosophical thought will correct. S notes the different experiences of the human individual toward tools and networks:

one changes tools and instruments, one can construct or repair a tool oneself, but one cannot change the network, one doesn’t construct a network of one’s own: one can only connect to a network, adapt to it, participate in it; the network dominates and frames [enserre] the action of the individual, it even dominates each technical ensemble. (229)

S goes into a very interesting discussion of the human experience of the technical and natural world in terms of respect and the sacred. To non-technically aware people, big things like a harbor, a freeway interchange, or the aforementioned mountain peak, command respect; but the technical networks of which they are not aware of, do not command such respect. He describes an occasion in which the clock of the Paris Observatory was thrown off to some fractional degree (less than could cause any practical disruption at large) by “the tumultuous visit of science students passing by it on their way to the catacombs,” and the scandal this caused among the scientists who were attuned to this clock’s importance, and thus hold it in respect. S points out that humanities students would not have even thought to profane the workings of the clock, since they would not understand it to be sacred; likewise, a classroom experiment in disrupting a similar clock would not be scandalous, because such a clock does not hold the same sacred, key-point position in a crucial network. So, a future, better society in which we all had better technical understanding, would also be one in which we were more respectful of such networks and their “key-points.”

Turning to social-political thought, S lists its three main forms in the mid-20^th century (national socialism, “American democratic doctrine,” and Soviet communism), and how these are each related to technology (e.g., Soviet communism “gains self-awareness through the use of tractors, the foundation of factories” (231):

the distribution and integration of key-points of social and political thought in the world at least partially coincides with the distribution and integration of the technical key-points, and ... this coinciding becomes all the more perfect as technics becomes increasingly integrated within the universe, in the form of fixed ensembles, attached to one another, constraining [enserrant] human individuals into the links they determine.

Part of what S is doing through this chapter is noting the deficiencies of each of the existing forms of thought, and also the promising aspects which philosophical thought can draw on, when it unifies or transcends them or whatever. Technical and religious (including social-political) thoughts separate the world, when what is needed is to grasp its continuity (233). Part of the solution is the development of what S has elsewhere in the book called “technical culture” (cf. Combes 2013: 57ff.):

it is culture, considered as a lived totality, that must incorporate the technical ensembles by knowing their nature, in order to be able to regulate human life according to these technical ensembles. Culture must remain above all technics, but it must incorporate into its content the knowledge and intuition of genuine technical schemas. Culture is that through which man regulates his relation with the world and with himself; and yet if culture were not to incorporate technology, it would contain an opaque zone and wouldn’t be able to contribute its regulative normativity to the coupling of man and the world. For in this coupling of man and the world, which is that of technical ensembles, there are schemas of activity and conditioning that can be clearly thought only by virtue of concepts defined by a reflexive but direct study. Culture must be contemporary with technics. Culture must reshape itself [se reformer] and must once again take up its content stage by stage. (234)

Per S, contemporary culture fails in this regard because it lags behind technology, understanding it through concepts and ethics which were suitable for earlier stages of history, but are now no longer sufficient. [Though of course, what S does not appear to consider is why this should be the case other than the extent to which “nobody has figured it out yet.” He does not consider what role such “opaque zones” [aka black-boxing] plays in contemporary political and social structures; how, for instance, the fact that users have only an opaque idea of the workings of social media, AI, and so on, is not a bug but a feature from the viewpoint of those who control platforms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber, etc.] Nevertheless, with such sociopolitical context added in, S’s vision has some resonance with thinkers like Bookchin or even Ruskin, who advocate a society whose technology is accessible to, and understood by, all members at large. Ruskin, however, would be susceptible to Simondon’s next argument, which is that

the confusion of technical realities with utensils is a cultural stereotype, founded on the normative notion of utility that is at once valorizing and devaluing. But this notion of utensil and of utility is inadequate to the effective and actual role of technical ensembles within the human world; it thus cannot be regulative in an effective way. (234-5)

S is here specifically arguing against Heidegger, but this also argues against Ruskin’s dream of a return to a day of independent artisans with their utensil-bound technical imagination, inadequate, per S, for the present and future of technical ensembles. The way for humans to learn how to understand technical ensembles is for them to experience, directly, certain situations:

In the same way one used to consider journeys as a means for acquiring culture, because they constituted a mode of placing man into a situation, one should also consider the technical experiences of being placed into a situation with respect to an ensemble, with effective responsibility, as having cultural value. To put it another way, every human being should to a certain extent take part in technical ensembles, that is, take on a responsibility, a definite task with respect to such an ensemble and be connected with a network of universal technics. Furthermore, individual man should not simply experience a single kind of technical ensemble, but rather a plurality of them, just as a traveler will have to encounter several peoples, and experience their mores.

Thus, a future philosophically-informed technical culture would encourage its members to experience a diversity of such situations. Interestingly, S then continues in a manner reminiscent of a famous passage from Marx:

However, this kind of experience must be conceived more as a way of experiencing the situating of each type of technics and ensemble of technics, than as an effort to participate in the condition of man in each of the technics: for in each technics there are technicians, unskilled laborers, workers, managers, and to the extent that conditions are strictly social, they can be rather analogous, at each level, in the different technics. It is the particular situating in the technical network that must be experienced, insofar as it places man in the presence of and within a series of actions and processes that he does not direct alone, but in which he participates. (235-6)

The resonant, oft-quoted passage from The German Ideology:

… in a communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. (Marx 1978: 160)

Marx then continues, emphasizing why such a range of experience should resist the recreation of what he calls “partial identities:”

This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors of historical development up till now. (ad loc.)

The mere idealism of Simondon’s warning to avoid falling into the limited, socially determined perspectives of “technicians, unskilled laborers, workers, managers,” and so on (cf. his similar argument back in the Introduction) can perhaps here be supplemented with something like Marx’s materialist account of how this involves overcoming exploitation and alienation (cf. the discussion of alienation in the summary of Part 2, Chapter 2). It is also worth noting that Simondon’s earlier argument privileging a particular social-scientific position of the “mechanologist” now appears to have dissolved into a more general argument for a sort of society in which individuals learn such a perspective through their regular course of experience; and in what sort of society would this be more likely, than one in which agency, access to, and responsibility for technical (etc.) organization was evenly distributed? [Daniel Colson, most notably, has found numerous resonances with anarchism in Simondon’s otherwise “largely apolitical” work (Colson 2019: 13).]

The philosopher/mechanologist retains an important role, which is similar to that of the artist in contemporary society:

The philosopher, comparable in this role to the artist, can help in raising awareness of the situation within the technical ensemble, by reflecting it within himself and by expressing it; but, again just as the artist, all he can do is be the one who solicits an intuition in others, once a definite sensitivity has been awakened and allows the grasping of the sense of a real experience. (236)

Again, this has to be more than what is possible today with art, which is, essentially, [aestheticizing]:

All the prestigious color photographs of sparks, of fumes, all the recordings of noise, sounds, or images, generally remain a use [exploitation] of technical reality and not a revelation of this reality. Technical reality must be thought, and even be known through participation in its schemas of action; aesthetic feeling can emerge, but only after this intervention of real intuition and participation and not as a fruit of a mere spectacle: every technical spectacle remains puerile and incomplete if it is not preceded by the integration into the technical ensemble.

“Intuition” and “participation” are among Simondon’s consistent offerings for how to get past the divisions he charts, between the technical and religious, the practical and theoretical, the inductive and the deductive, the a priori and the a posteriori. Religion, “being the paradigm of deductive thought” (240), is responsible for a division between Being (as primary) and Knowledge (as secondary), which has detrimentally influenced non-religious ways of thinking as well. [This may not be what he is referring to, but what springs to mind is the interminable 20^th century epistemological debate, taking a form similar to: S can be said to “know” p if:

1: p is true.

2. S believes that p is true.

3. S has “valid reasons” for believing that p is true.

The subsequent debate then hinges over how precisely to word proposition 3 (and/or 4, etc.), without recognizing that propositions 1 and 2 have set up an insuperable Cartesian binary, namely that which Simondon is here criticizing.]

Besides the “participation” in situations which was discussed above, Simondon’s other important answer for how to get past these binaries is intuition, which he derives from Bergson. Intuition is distinct from both “idea” (inductive) and “concept” (deductive):

Now, it is not entirely correct to identify intuition with the idea; knowledge by way of intuition is a grasping of being that is neither a priori nor a posteriori, but contemporaneous with the existence of the being it grasps, and which is at the same level as this being; it is not a knowledge by way of the idea, for intuition is not already contained within the structure of the known being; it does not belong to that being; it is not a concept, since it has an internal unity that grants its autonomy and its singularity, preventing a genesis through accumulation; lastly, knowledge by way of intuition is really mediate in the sense that it does not grasp being in its absolute totality, like the idea, or on the basis of elements and by combination, like the concept, but rather grasps being at the level of domains constituting a structured ensemble.

Note that this also gets us past the limited perspectives focusing solely on element or totality. The new, philosophical intuition will follow on from, but surpass, the earlier stages of magical and aesthetic intuition (244). It will not grasp technical objects (and their users, ensembles, collectivities, etc.) as stable objects but genetically, in becoming. The essence will be going beyond previous, limited and divided ways of thinking, to grasp technicity through an understanding of concretization (thus establishing the importance of the rest of the book to this goal):

this conditioning of the technical object’s genesis are indeed effectively translated by a particular type of the technical object’s coming-into-being, what we have called the concretization of the technical object. The process of this concretization can be directly apprehended by the examination of a certain number of examples of technical objects. But the sense of this concretization, which is an inherence in the object of a technicity that is not entirely contained in it, can be understood only by philosophical thought following the genesis of the technical and non-technical modes of the relation between ... man and the world. Whence the use in this study of a genetic method applied first to technical objects and then to the study of the situation and role of technical thought in the whole [l'ensemble] of thought. (245-6)

Colson, Daniel (2019) A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze. Tr. by Jesse Cohn. Autonomedia, New York.

Combes, Muriel (2013) Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Marx, Karl (1978) “The German Ideology: Part I” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: WW Norton.

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 11

Summary of Chapter 11: Surplus Value and Surplus Labor

Braverman starts off this third section of the book, on “Monopoly Capital,” with a very brief chapter of barely four pages, relating the growth of surplus value in financial/monopoly capitalism, to the growth of “surplus labor,” here referring not only to the labor that produces surplus value, but the surplus of labor available in a heavily automated society, and the uses (other than direct production) to which that labor is put.

He begins with the observation that the atomized and competitive capitalist system of Marx’s day has been replaced by something very different. Observers have differed over what to call it: finance capitalism, late capitalism, and so on. Braverman chooses “monopoly capitalism” as the most felicitous, citing Lenin, and Baran and Sweezy, as precursors in this regard (175). Monopoly capitalism had its beginnings in the last decades of the 19^th century, which saw the end of colonialism (everything had been conquered) and the birth of true imperialist era:

Monopoly capitalism thus embraces the increase of monopolistic organi­zations within each capitalist country, the internationalization of capital, the international division of labor, imperialism, the world market and the world movement of capital, and changes in the structure of state power. (175)

This also corresponds in time to the scientific-technical revolution, and the birth of scientific management, etc.

He discusses how this book relates to and differs from that by Baran and Sweezy: they focused on the movements of value, whereas Braverman’s emphasis is on the corresponding movements of labor. He cites Marx on the relation between the movements of labor and of value, and how the creation of vast amounts of capital in need of investment goes along with the creation of the reserve army of labor, in need of employment. Marx had described this capital as rushing into old branches of production which it transforms, and into new branches which it creates anew; Braverman adds that both labor and capital are being funneled into new non-productive jobs, similar to what David Graeber called “bullshit jobs” which exist just to keep the economy expanding despite the fact that more than enough wealth is already being generated:

In tracing this mass of labor, we will be led not only to “newly formed branches of production” in Marx’s sense, but also, as were Baran and Sweezy, into branches of non-production, entire industries and large sectors of existing industries whose only function is the struggle over the allocation of the social surplus among the various sectors of the capitalist class and its dependents. (177)

This leads capitalism, and commodification, to colonize more and more aspects of social life:

In this process, capital which “thrusts itself frantic­ally” into every possible new area of investment has totally reorganized society, and in creating the new distribution of labor has created a social life vastly different from that of only seventy or eighty years ago. And this restless and insatiable activity of capital continues to transform social life almost daily before our eyes, without heed that by doing so it is creating a situation in which social life becomes increasingly impossible.

Obviously, many links/contrasts with Bookchin are here available, and no doubt will come up again and again in the rest of the book. For now, he states that his plan going forward is to discuss how the occupational structure of capitalism has changed, and the forces at work in this.

Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Chapter 4

 

Summary of Chapter 4: The Forms of Freedom

[As I am using a truncated pdf, this is the last chapter, "Listen, Marxist!" and the essays on May 1968, etc. having been cut off for some reason.]

In this short chapter, Bookchin discusses the political organization of a revolutionary society of the future. He summarizes the successes, failures, and lessons he finds in historical forms of revolutionary and egalitarian social organization, then ends with some thoughts on how to get “from here to there.”

However personalized, individuated or dadaesque may be the attack upon prevailing institutions, a liberatory revolution always poses the question of what social forms will replace existing ones. At one point or another, a revolutionary people must deal with how it will manage the land and the factories from which it acquires the means of life. It must deal with the manner in which it will arrive at decisions that affect the community as a whole. Thus if revolutionary thought is to be taken at all seriously, it must speak directly to the problems and forms of social management. (165)

The social organization of a society is important not least because it shapes how individuals, and relations between individuals, are formed:

Every personal relationship has a social dimension; every social relationship has a deeply personal side to it. Ordinarily, these two aspects and their relationship to each other are mystified and difficult to see clearly.

In reality, there exists no strictly “impersonal” political or social dimension; all the social institutions of the past and present depend on the relations between people in daily life.

Bourgeois society takes the mediation of human social relations to the extreme, by treating everyone as objects and interposing commodities as mediators (a la monetary exchange). B discusses the history of the link between mediation and hierarchy, back to the ancient establishment of chiefs and priests as mediators; the precapitalist mediation by men (e.g., councils, chiefs) is replaced in capitalism by mediation by things/commodities. B notes contemporary youth demands for tribalism and community; these are are sometimes depicted as temporally “regressive,” but they are fundamentally progressive, pointing to a renewed future community.

By contrast, the traditional revolutionary demand for council forms of organization (what Hannah Arendt describes as “the revolutionary heritage”) does not break completely with the terrain of hierarchical society. (167)

B reiterates his view that workers are not an inherently revolutionary class in the Marxist sense; instead, workers’ councils would simply reflect workers’ interests:

For the present, it suffices to say that most advocates of workers’ councils tend to conceive of people primarily as economic entities, either as workers or nonworkers. This conception leaves the onesidedness of the self completely intact. Man is viewed as a bifurcated being, the product of a social development that divides man from man and each man from himself. (168)

There is more to B’s idea of revolution than the transferal of economic decision-making from owners to workers: more than just having worker input on management, etc., we must “transform the work into a joyful activity, free time into a marvelous experience, and the workplace into a community” (168) to have actual liberation, and not just “perpetuate the limitations of the proletariat as a product of bourgeois social conditions.”

Council organizations, as advocated by Marxists, etc., are “forms of mediated relationships rather than face-to-face relationships” and so will recreate hierarchy and thus fail to be fully and truly revolutionary. He discusses various limitations of traditional workers’ council ideas; factory committees of course are/will be an important step, but just an initial, not the final, step.

He summarizes the history of earlier revolutionary attempts at reorganizing society; all were too short-lived or “distorted” to serve as models, with the exception of the Spanish Revolution.

Starting off with the Paris Commune of 1870, he states that it was really just a council/democracy with elected representatives; although it co-existed with more revolutionary popular clubs, neighborhood vigilance committees, and battalions of the national guard:

Had the Paris Commune (the Municipal Council) survived, it is extremely doubtful that it could have avoided conflict with these loosely formed street and militia formations. (170)

B argues the Commune was mostly not proletarian, but rather sans-culottes, lumpens and other groups; in a footnote he takes aim at what he identifies as the Situationist tendency to

describe any social stratum as “proletarian” (as the French Situationists do) simply because it has no control over the conditions of its life... This giddy approach to social analysis divests the industrial proletariat and the bourgeoisie of all the historically unique features which Marx believed he had discovered (a theoretical project that proved inadequate, although by no means false); it slithers away from the responsibilities of a serious critique of Marxism and the development of “laissez-faire” capitalism toward state capitalism, while pretending to retain continuity with the Marxian project. (171)

He moves on to discuss the Russian Soviets of 1905 and of 1917:

The Soviets of 1917 reveal all the limitations of “sovietism.” Though the Soviets were invaluable as local fighting organizations, their national congresses proved to be increasingly unrepresentative bodies. The congresses were organized along very hierarchical lines. Local Soviets in cities, towns and villages elected delegates to district and regional bodies; these elected delegates to the actual nationwide congresses. In larger cities, representation to the congresses was less indirect, but it was indirect nonetheless—from the voter in a large city to the municipal soviet and from the municipal soviet to the congress. In either case the congress was separated from the mass of voters by one or more representative levels. (173)

The soviet congresses met once every three months, which was far too long an interval; an executive committee was in permanent session, but still too unwieldy; it handed over responsibilities to the smaller Council of People’s Commissars, and the Bolsheviks used this hierarchy to seize and consolidate power.

The power of the local Soviets passed into the hands of the Executive Committee, the power of the Executive Committee passed into the hands of the Council of People’s Commissars, and finally, the power of the Council of People’s Commissars passed into the hands of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party. (174)

He argues that “that the Russian Soviets were incapable of providing the anatomy for a truly popular democracy is to be ascribed not only to their hierarchical structure, but also to their limited social roots;” by “limited social roots” he seems to argue that the peasants and other sectors were mostly uninvolved or withdrawn and inward looking: the power of the soviets was heavily working class and factory-centric.

Here we encounter a basic contradiction in class concepts of revolutionary power: proletarian socialism, precisely because it emphasizes that power must be based exclusively on the factory, creates the conditions for a centralized, hierarchical political structure. (174-5)

[This again is part of his argument for not taking the working class as the key revolutionary subject; while there coninues to be a distinct working class (tied to factories, etc., even if controlling them), their interests remain “particularistic” and thus fall short of the generalized revolution which he called for back in Chapter 1.]

However much its social position is strengthened by a system of “self-management,” the factory is not an autonomous social organism. The amount of social control the factory can exercise is fairly limited, for every factory is highly dependent for its operation and its very existence upon other factories and sources of raw materials. Ironically, the Soviets, by basing themselves primarily in the factory and isolating the factory from its local environment, shifted power from the community and the region to the nation, and eventually from the base of society to its summit. The soviet system consisted of an elaborate skein of mediated social relationships, knitted along nationwide class lines. (175)

He finds more hope in the anarcho-syndicalists in Spain during the civil war, because both workers and peasants were involved. The assemblies had power to revoke delegates to councils, and countermand council decisions: “Let there be no mistake about the effectiveness of this scheme of organization: it imparted to each member of the CNT a weighty sense of responsibility, a sense of direct, immediate and personal influence in the activities and policies of the union.” CNT control of Barcelona was a success, until it was put down by outside forces.

He dismisses several other abortive attempts, and summarizes:

The fact remains that council modes of organization are not immune to centralization, manipulation and perversion. These councils are still particularistic, one-sided, and mediated forms of social management. At best, they can be the stepping stones to a decentralized society—at worst, they can easily be integrated into hierarchical forms of social organization. (177)

He turns from mediated councils to unmediated forms: assembly and community.

The assembly probably formed the structural basis of early clan and tribal society until its functions were pre-empted by chiefs and councils. It appeared as the ecclesia in classical Athens; later, in a mixed and often perverted form, it reappeared in the medieval and Renaissance towns of Europe. Finally, as the “sections,” assemblies emerged as the insurgent bodies in Paris during the Great Revolution. The ecclesia and the Parisian sections warrant the closest study. Both developed in the most complex cities of their time and both assumed a highly sophisticated form, often welding individuals of different social origins into a remarkable, albeit temporary, community of interests. (177)

It does not minimize their limitations to say that they developed methods of functioning so successfully libertarian in character that even the most imaginative Utopias have failed to match in speculation what they achieved in practice. (177-8)

He discusses the Athenian ecclesia and its workings; making note of issues with patriarchism, slavery, etc.

Taken as a whole, this was a remarkable system of social management; run almost entirely by amateurs, the Athenian polis reduced the formulation and administration of public policy to a completely public affair. ... At its best, Athenian democracy greatly modified the more abusive and inhuman features of ancient society. (180)

B argues that slavery was different, and more humane, in ancient Greece, [than what we are accustomed to from the history of the US]:

On balance, the image of Athens as a slave economy which built its civilization and generous humanistic outlook on the backs of human chattels is false ... (181)

[My guess is that he wants to argue this, to show that the democracy of Athens was overall a humanizing experience; the responsibility and public-mindedness of the men partaking in it has been a point of his, so they should thus also be producing a more humane society, than that of the colonial/capitalist system that produced the much more dehumanizing modern form of slavery. There is a bit of a valid point here but it also opens up a much bigger can of worms, and really I think he is being far too dismissive. The interesting case of Diogenes being captured and sold into slavery (“sell me to the man who wants a master”), could be considered: the story plays up a role reversal between master and servant, but the idea that one person can buy and sell another is not questioned. In any case the tendency of Bookchin, like many other thinkers, to fetishize the limited democracy of ancient Athens has come under substantial and warranted critique.]

His next example is the Parisian sections of the French Revolution, called into existence as part of the state apparatus, then refusing to give back power:

After performing their electoral functions, the assemblies were required to disappear, but they remained on in defiance of the monarchy and constituted themselves into permanent municipal bodies. By degrees they turned into neighborhood assemblies of all “active” citizens, varying in form, scope and power from one district to another. (182)

This “active” vs “passive” citizens distinction was later abolished, and the sans-culottes invited to participate; according to Bookchin, this radicalized and energized the sections. The sections were not just fighting organizations but “genuine forms of self-management” (182-3); he details the responsibilities they took on.

It must be borne in mind that this complex of extremely important activities was undertaken not by professional bureaucrats but, for the most part, by ordinary shopkeepers and craftsmen. The bulk of the sectional responsibilities were discharged after working hours, during the free time of the section members. The popular assemblies of the sections usually met during the evenings in neighborhood churches. Assemblies were ordinarily open to all the adults of the neighborhood. (183)

This echoes his discussion in an earlier chapter about keeping the “doors of the revolution open.” Also important were the ad hoc and fluid, rather than rigidified, relationships between sections:

The Paris Commune of the Great Revolution never became an overbearing, ossified institution; it changed with almost every important political emergency, and its stability, form, and functions depended largely upon the wishes of the sections. (184)

Having relied on the sections to fasten their hold on the Convention, the Jacobins began to rely on the Convention to destroy the sections.

[Just as with the Bolsheviks, once again a hierarchical system (in this case the Convention over the sections) allows for a centralization and suppression of the true revolution]. B describes how the Jacobins limited the power of the sections and centralized power in their own hands; he needles Marx in a footnote for his “short-sightedness” in admiring the Jacobins in this regard.

The sections had been subverted by the very revolutionary leaders they had raised to power in the Convention. (185)

Having gone from critiques of the state and council forms of social organization, to the more hopeful examples of the Athenian ecclesia and Parisians sections, he concludes with a discussion of how to get “from here to there,” most notably the perils that need to be avoided.

The factors which undermined the assemblies of classical Athens and revolutionary Paris require very little discussion. In both cases the assembly mode of organization was broken up not only from without, but also from within—by the development of class antagonisms. There are no forms, however cleverly contrived, that can overcome the content of a given society. Lacking the material resources, the technology and the level of economic development to overcome class antagonisms as such, Athens and Paris could achieve an approximation of the forms of freedom only temporarily—and only to deal with the more serious threat of complete social decay.

[Whatever “social decay” is... anyway with the nod at “material resources,” he ties this to his overall post-scarcity argument.]

Both the ecclesia and the sections were undermined by the very conditions they were intended to check—property, class antagonisms and exploitation—but which they were incapable of eliminating. What is remarkable about them is that they worked at all, considering the enormous problems they faced and the formidable obstacles they had to overcome. (186)

He points out that Athens and Paris were large cities, not villages; this shows that these egalitarian forms were able to handle the complexity involved in running these urban centers (though he will contradict this at the end of the essay, with a call for the dissolution of large cities). Paris, like Athens, was run by amateurs, in this case working men who ran the assemblies after they had spent the day at labor:

There is no evidence that these assemblies and the committees they produced were inefficient or technically incompetent. On the contrary, they awakened a popular initiative, a resoluteness in action, and a sense of revolutionary purpose that no professional bureaucracy, however radical its pretensions, could ever hope to achieve.

Both added great cultural achievements to this:

The arena for these achievements was not the traditional state, structured around a bureaucratic apparatus, but a system of unmediated relations, a face-to-face democracy organized into public assemblies. (187)

Another issue in getting from “here” to “there” is our ability to imagine a more free society, to begin with:

The goal of dissolving propertied society, class rule, centralization, and the state is as old as the historical emergence of property, classes, and states. In the beginning, the rebels could look backward to clans, tribes, and federations; it was still a time when the past was closer at hand than the future. Then the past receded completely from man’s vision and memory, except perhaps as a lingering dream of the “golden age” or the “Garden of Eden.”

Thus the dream of liberation has come to be founded, not on memory but on imagination; it has become “speculative and theoretical, and like all strictly theoretical visions its content was permeated with the social material of the present.” He argues that this has resulted in the problems/absurdities of visions such as More’s Utopia, with its slaves, kings, etc., as well as the centralization and bureacratization of the Soviet Union as a once-revolutionary experiment.

In envisioning the complete dissolution of the existing society, we cannot get away from the question of power—be it power over our own lives, the “seizure of power,” or the dissolution of power. In going from the present to the future, from “here” to “there,” we must ask: what is power? Under what conditions is it dissolved? And what does its dissolution mean? How do the forms of freedom, the unmediated relations of social life, emerge from a statified society, a society in which the state of unfreedom is carried to the point of absurdity—to domination for its own sake? (188)

He emphasizes the historical lesson that almost all revolutions were spontaneous: “Whosoever calls himself a revolutionist and does not study these events on their own terms, thoroughly and without theoretical preconceptions, is a dilettante who is playing at revolution.”

Nearly all the great revolutions came from below, from the molecular movement of the “masses,” their progressive individuation and their explosion—an explosion which invariably took the authoritarian “revolutionists” completely by surprise. (189)

There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal. A society based on self-administration must be achieved by means of self-administration.

B articulates his concept of a revolutionary “self”:

This implies the forging of a self (yes, literally a forging in the revolutionary process) and a mode of administration which the self can possess.

... “selfhood” is not only a personal dimension but also a social one. The self that finds expression in the assembly and community is, literally, the assembly and community that has found self-expression—a complete congruence of form and content.

“If we define “power” as the power of man over man, power can only be destroyed by the very process in which man acquires power over his own life and in which he not only “discovers” himself but, more meaningfully, formulates his selfhood in all its social dimensions.

Again, this can only be achieved by “molecular” action from below, not imposed or “delivered” by the plans of a revolutionary vanguard:

Assembly and community must arise from within the revolutionary process itself; indeed, the revolutionary process must be the formation of assembly and community...

Assembly and community must be recognized as “modes of struggle” not “theoretical or programatic abstractions" (190):

they will be the arenas of demassification, for the very essence of the revolutionary process is people acting as individuals.

[a touch of the 1960s Marcuse-esque, etc. language of mass vs individual in the above]

Two problems will then need to be faced: 1) the competing power of the existing bourgeois state from which the assemblies are attempting to be free; and 2) the “incipient state” or “tendency to create mediated social forms” which must be fought within the revolutionary organizations [to avoid the failures of the councils and earlier discussed forms]

The specific gravity of society, in short, must be shifted to its base—the armed people in permanent assembly. (190-1)

Here he critiques what he sees as the inherently counter-revolutionary aspect of the “modern bourgeois city,” in terms Merrifield takes issue with in his own book:

As long as the arena of the assembly is the modern bourgeois city, the revolution is faced with a recalcitrant environment. The bourgeois city, by its very nature and structure, fosters centralization, massification and manipulation. Inorganic, gargantuan, and organized like a factory, the city tends to inhibit the development of an organic, rounded community. In its role as the universal solvent, the assembly must try to dissolve the city itself. (191)

As first the young, then the old, leave to found “nuclear ecological communities,” the modern city “begins to shrivel, to contract and to disappear”. The factory, another artificial “particularized” creation of class relations, dissolves into the community.

The dissolution of the factory into the community completes the dissolution of the last vestiges of propertied, of class, and, above all, of mediated society into the new polis. And now the real drama of human life can unfold, in all its beauty, harmony, creativity and joy.

Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Chapter 3

 

Summary of Chapter 3: Towards a Liberatory Technology

In this third chapter he lays out the third part of his overall platform, detailing the way that technology will be embraced, but used differently, in a revolutionary post-scarcity society. Despite various criticisms that could be made of Bookchin’s romanticism, naturalization, etc., it seems likely that any actually successful, sustainable, egalitarian society of the future will bear a good deal of resemblance to his vision.

According to Bookchin, people used to fetishize technological progress, but now there is a "schizoid" mentality: people fear it on the one hand (apocalyptically) but at the same time desire its benefits with a “a yearning for material abundance, leisure and security” (107). There is also a schizoid aspect to technology, producing both helpful and disastrous technologies and inventions: “The bomb is pitted against the power reactor.” Bookchin says the fear side is winning out: “technology is viewed as a demon, imbued with a sinister life of its own, that is likely to mechanize man if it fails to exterminate him” (108). This is dangerous:

There is a very real danger that we will lose our perspective toward technology, that we will neglect its liberatory tendencies, and, worse, submit fatalistically to its use for destructive ends.

A balance must be struck:

The purpose of this article is to explore three questions. What is the liberatory potential of modern technology, both materially and spiritually? What tendencies, if any, are reshaping the machine for use in an organic, human-oriented society? And finally, how can the new technology and resources be used in an ecological manner—that is, to promote the balance of nature, the full development of natural regions, and the creation of organic, humanistic communities?

He argues against deterministic views, which cast technology as inherently liberatory, or as inherently dehumanizing (citing Juenger and Ellul on the second point). 

An organic mode of life deprived of its technological component would be as nonfunctional as a man deprived of his skeleton. Technology must be viewed as the basic structural support of a society; it is literally the framework of an economy and of many social institutions. (109)

He notes 1848 as a key year with the Communist Manifesto as a statement of revolutionary theory, the workers' uprising, and being at about the “culmination” of steam technology that had started a century and a half earlier; both the potential, and the limitations of 19th century technology had an influence on 19th century revolutionary thought, as evidenced by M&E's manifesto. One inherent shortcoming of this is that said technology had not yet reached the potential for post-scarcity, that, according to Bookchin, is the real precondition for revolution:

However glowing and lofty were the revolutionary ideals of the past, the vast majority of the people, burdened by material want, had to leave the stage of history after the revolution, return to work, and deliver the management of society to a new leisured class of exploiters. Indeed, any attempt to equalize the wealth of society at a low level of technological development would not have eliminated want, but would have merely made it into a general feature of society as a whole, thereby recreating all the conditions for a new struggle over the material things of life, for new forms of property, and eventually for a new system of class domination.  (111)

[He cites M&E to the same effect just below this. I'm not sure the argument (regarding the conditions of want becoming “a general feature of society” after a revolution with industrial-era technology) has merit. But he is basically talking about why and how M&E differ from his own analysis, because of the different technological development of their day: enough to deliver some promise, but not enough to deliver the truly revolutionary promise of the post-scarcity society].

The fact that men would have to devote a substantial portion of their time to toil, for which they would get scant returns, formed a major premise of all socialist ideology—authoritarian and libertarian, Utopian and scientific, Marxist and anarchist.

The problem of dealing with want and work—an age-old problem perpetuated by the early Industrial Revolution- produced the great divergence in revolutionary ideas between socialism and anarchism. (112)

Marx pursued the compromise of a worker-run state; Bakunin and Kropotkin argued for tradition, social pressure, or moral instinct to mutual aid as their hope for a state free society. According to Bookchin, the former compromise made Marxism by the 20th century no better than mainstream capitalist doctrines, while the anarchists back in the time of scarcity had been admirable idealists, but ultimately mere impractical idealists, all the same [he will argue that post-scarcity changes the equation: anarchism is now practical rather than merely idealistic.]

Bookchin discusses how the USSR promoted the ideal of workers and full employment, everyone working hard. Bookchin, in contrast, sees the importance of distinguishing between “pleasurable work” and “onerous toil” (114) and wants to get rid of the toil aspect. By Bookchin’s time of writing (1965), the possibility of a world without toil has become obvious. He notes, and dismisses, contemporary calls for an annual guaranteed income, as being stuck in the quantitative thinking of a scarcity society, instead of being open to the qualitative thinking of a post-scarcity society. In an important footnote, he delineates a distinction between “justice” (quantitative, scarcity-era thinking) and “freedom” (qualitative, post-scarcity thinking):

An exclusively quantitative approach to the new technology, I may add, is not only economically archaic, but morally regressive. This approach partakes of the old principle of justice, as distinguished from the new principle of freedom. Historically, justice is derived from the world of material necessity and toil; it implies relatively scarce resources which are apportioned by a moral principle which is either “just” or “unjust.” Justice, even “equal” justice, is a concept of limitation, involving the denial of goods and the sacrifice of time and energy to production. Once we transcend the concept of justice—indeed, once we pass from the quantitative to the qualitative potentialities of modern technology—we enter the unexplored domain of freedom, based on spontaneous organization and full access to the means of life. (116)

[The links between justice and scarcity, and freedom and post-scarcity, are worthy of being further explored. On the one hand this is a poignant critique of the current fervor for “social justice” which often relies on appeals to a redistributive state. On the other hand, we currently do still live in a situation of scarcity, not just of material wealth but in which political power is unevenly distributed (and thus scarce for the many). To argue in this context for a politics of freedom rather than justice may be equivalent to taking the position of the abstract (privileged, white, male, etc.) subject, not recognizing that the conditions for this freedom and equality have yet to be achieved for most people.]

Bookchin lists the new questions he wants to pose about technology:

Is this technology staking out a new dimension in human freedom, in the liberation of man? Can it not only liberate man from want and work, but also lead him to a free, harmonious, balanced human community—an ecocommunity that would promote the unrestricted development of his potentialities? Finally, can it carry man beyond the realm of freedom into the realm of life and desire? (116-7)

For the first time in history, technology has reached an open end. The potential for technological development, for providing machines as substitutes for labor is virtually unlimited. Technology has finally passed from the realm of invention to that of design—in other words, from fortuitous discoveries to systematic innovations.

Because the problem is no longer dealing with scarcity, technology has “reached an open end” with new unlimited potential; the realm of “invention” has been replaced by the realm of “design,” by which he means that we have gone “from fortuitous discoveries to systematic innovation” building off an existing system. He quotes Vannevar Bush on this [which is funny because I was just reading Wiener talking about how he gave Bush ideas for computers, etc. Interestingly Bush’s illustration of such “systematic design” is about how to design a car that would follow a white line down a road, and the answer is basically a "breadboard model" with sensors and actuators, basically an arduino!] Bush's point is that there is a host of reliable gadgets to be called upon, and of "men who understand fully all their queer ways" (118). Nothing would really have to be invented, just assembled, because we have achieved a platform or system for easy and quick innovation in the future [also presumably better directed than under the capitalist system, which subordinates technological progress to the demands of profit.]

Bookchin pulls two points out of Bush's story: "the two most important features of the new, so-called "second," industrial revolution," [again echoing Wiener]:

[1] the enormous potentialities of modern technology and

[2] the cost-oriented, nonhuman limitations that are imposed upon it.

The second is the profit motive under capitalism, and is a constraint upon innovation.

Perhaps the most obvious development leading to the new technology has been the increasing interpenetration of scientific abstraction, mathematics and analytic methods with the concrete, pragmatic and rather mundane tasks of industry. This order of relationships is relatively new. Traditionally, speculation, generalization and rational activity were sharply divorced from technology. This chasm reflected the sharp split between the leisured and working classes in ancient and medieval society. (118)

[This is interesting as both Wiener and Braverman have been making this point, but here Bookchin is much closer to Wiener’s analysis than to Braverman's, or at least so far]

In our own day this synthesis, once embodied by the work of a single, inspired genius, is the work of anonymous teams. Although these teams have obvious advantages, they often have all the traits of bureaucratic agencies—which leads to a mediocre, unimaginative treatment of problems. (119) 

Bookchin notes that a lot of industrial growth is not due to mechanization but to the "continual reorganization of the labor process," here sounding increasingly like Braverman:

Historically, it would be difficult to understand how mechanized mass manufacture emerged, how the machine increasingly displaced labor, without tracing the development of the work process from craftsmanship, where an independent, highly skilled worker engages in many diverse operations, through the purgatory of the factory, where these diverse tasks are parceled out among a multitude of unskilled or semiskilled employees, to the highly mechanized mill, where the tasks of many are largely taken over by machines manipulated by a few operatives, and finally to the automated and cybernated plant, where operatives are replaced by supervisory technicians and highly skilled maintenance men.

And then like Marx:

the machine has evolved from an extension of human muscles into an extension of the human nervous system. (119-20)

The mechanical devices and engines developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not replace human muscles but rather enlarged their effectiveness. Although the machines increased output enormously, the worker's muscles and brain were still required to operate them, even for fairly routine tasks. (120)

The development of fully automatic machines for complex mass-manufacturing operations requires the successful application of at least three technological principles: such machines must have a built-in ability to correct their own errors; they must have sensory devices for replacing the visual, auditory and tactile senses of the worker; and, finally, they must have devices that substitute for the worker's judgment, skill and memory.

In other words, [feedback], sensors, and knowledge; this could be contrasted with Wieners account. Bookchin gives examples of feedback  mechanisms, distinguishing between “closed” (controlled by feedback) vs. “open” (manually controlled) systems; sensors can be used to turn open systems into closed ones, thus reducing the need for human labor (122). He brings up digital computers, and looks at the impact of automation in an automobile factory: there is a great increase in speed, along with a reduction in the number of needed workers; but even the current system is quickly out of date as new speeds are reached.

[So far a difference between Bookchin and Braverman is that Braverman has asked what the development of technology would be like in a worker-centric or controlled system – how this would lead to technological development that was not an attempt to control or limit workers’ power and knowledge, skill, etc. and thus would presumably not have led to the split between  managerial/technical knowhow and brute, repetitive labor. Bookchin, in contrast, takes this separation for granted, because he is not talking about what a system would look like that had been shaped all along by anti-authoritarianism, but rather how an anti-authoritarian or anarchist society could result now, only just now having been made possible, after the fact of having gone through this capitalist development (Bookchin is thus closer to Marx here).]

Among the many parallels in this chapter with the recent chapter of Wiener, labor in mines is given as a standard of the most grueling kind of work:

If it is true that the moral level of a society can be gauged by the way it treats women, its sensitivity to human suffering can be gauged by the working conditions it provides for people in raw materials industries, particularly in mines and quarries. (125)

He quotes Mumford on the mine as the first artificial environment, where work is divorced from the day and night cycle:

The abolition of mining as a sphere of human activity would symbolize, in its own way, the triumph of a liberatory technology. That we can point to this achievement already, even in a single case at this writing, presages the freedom from toil implicit in the technology of our time. (126)

[Bookchin here echoes Wiener's discussion or rather example of mining as a good kind of work to get rid of; however he seems not to be taking Mumford’s point about mining as the birthplace of a certain organization or way of thinking about and imposing work discipline.] 

His vision of small, local, distributed factories, produced with that plug-in breadboard-like “design not invention” principle of shared knowledge and tech: 

It is easy to foresee a time, by no means remote, when a rationally organized economy could automatically manufacture small "packaged" factories without human labor; parts could be produced with so little effort that most maintenance tasks would be reduced to the simple act of removing a defective unit from a machine and replacing it by another—a job no more difficult than pulling out and putting in a tray. Machines would make and repair most of the machines required to maintain such a highly industrialized economy. Such a technology, oriented entirely toward human needs and freed from all consideration of profit and loss, would eliminate the pain of want and toil—the penalty, inflicted in the form of denial, suffering and inhumanity, exacted by a society based on scarcity and labor.

He begins to discuss how technology might be reorganized after the revolution:

The current type of industrial organization—an extension, in effect, of the industrial forms created by the Industrial Revolution—fosters industrial centralization (although a system of workers’ management based on the individual factory and local community would go far toward eliminating this feature). (128)

He talks about the history of computers and the trend towards miniaturization, as developments that presage the desired local ecologically conscious system; in contrast, he gives the existing example of a top-of-the-line steel mill which needs vast amounts of material constantly to be at maximum effectiveness:

Even if it is totally automated, its operating and management needs far transcend the capabilities of a small, decentralized community. The type of administration it requires tends to foster centralized social forms. (130)

[The two examples set up an opposition between tech advances which enable “human scale” distributed organization, vs. those which favor centralized, top-down organization].

 He discusses several alternatives to centralized steel mills, which would allow for local-based steel production; smaller localized factories would also need fewer resources overall, and so could bring locally available sources, which had fallen out of production due to economies of scale on a global market, to be brought back into production, decreasing costs of transportation and resulting in a more ecologically responsible use of resources.

Since the smaller complex requires ore, fuel and reducing agents in relatively small quantities, many communities could rely on local resources for their raw materials, thereby conserving the more concentrated resources of centrally located sources of supply, strengthening the independence of the community itself vis-a-vis the traditional centralized economy, and reducing the expense of transportation. What would at first glance seem to be a costly, inefficient duplication of effort that could be avoided by building a few centralized steel complexes would prove, in the long run, to be more efficient as well as socially more desirable.32)

This goes along with the economics of a shift from single purpose (part of the expensive centralized system) to multipurpose machines (reusable when products change). He turns to “the ecological use of technology” (134ff); that is, the question of how to design a technological system which encouraged people to be more conscious of their environment and their impact on it, as opposed to the current system which divorces consumers from such awareness.

I have tried, thus far, to deal with the possibility of eliminating toil, material insecurity, and centralized economic control-issues which, if “utopian,” are at least tangible. In the present section I would like to deal with a problem that may seem highly subjective but which is nonetheless of compelling importance—the need to make man’s dependence upon the natural world a visible and living part of his culture. (134)

“Actually, this problem is peculiar only to a highly urbanized and industrialized society;” in all earlier cultures, the relationship to nature was much more obvious. The question is how to restore this sort of knowledge without giving up on the benefits of modern technology. [A good question, because the previous awareness was, after all, based in large part on the existential peril of scarcity].

He discusses Fourier and the early Utopians, and their advocacy of reintegrating town and country. But Bookchin does not want this to mean that people labor like peasants, somehow “for their own good.”

If we grant that the land and the community must be reintegrated physically, that the community must exist in an agricultural matrix which renders man's dependence upon nature explicit, the problem we face is how to achieve this transformation without imposing “painful toil” on the community. How, in short, can husbandry, ecological forms of food cultivation and farming on a human scale be practiced without sacrificing mechanization? (137)

He discusses various current (in 1965) technologies for automating and simplifying agricultural production. He sees a potential for mechanized agricultural which nevertheless keeps people in touch with the ecosystem and landscape:

Let us pause at this point to envision how our free community might be integrated with its natural environment. We suppose the community to have been established after a careful study has been made of its natural ecology—its air and water resources, its climate, its geological formations, its raw materials, its soils, and its natural flora and fauna. Land management by the community is guided entirely by ecological principles, so that an equilibrium is maintained between the environment and its human inhabitants. Industrially rounded, the community forms a distinct unit within a natural matrix; it is socially and aesthetically in balance with the area it occupies. (139)

There is much discussion of the way “town” and “country” are to “blend” in a way that preserves the positive features of both. Agriculture will become an enjoyable activity, engaged in not only for food but for the pleasure of the work:

I believe that a free community will regard agriculture as husbandry, an activity as expressive and enjoyable as crafts. Relieved of toil by agricultural machines, communitarians will approach food cultivation with the same playful and creative attitude that men so often bring to gardening. Agriculture will become a living part of human society, a source of pleasant physical activity and, by virtue of its ecological demands, an intellectual, scientific and artistic challenge. (140)

And thus, even though there is plenty of machinery and automation, people will regain that sense of connection to the land which had been lost with the industrial revolution:

They will regain the sense of one-ness with nature that existed in humans from primordial times. Nature and the organic modes of thought it always fosters will become an integral part of human culture; it will reappear with a fresh spirit in man's paintings, literature, philosophy, dances, architecture, domestic furnishings, and in his very gestures and day-to-day activities. (141)

There will be a locally-based mixture and diversity of technology and energy sources (including nuclear). Discussing ways that locally-based production could be achieved without dependence on some large centralized production process, he talks about how there are trace elements of useful minerals in even a handful of soil, and claims that tech is being developed, or will be, to extract this efficiently. [What happened to the idea of not seeing nature as a resource to be mined/extracted?]

As the chemist Jacob Rosin argues, if an element can be detected in the laboratory, there is reason to hope that it can be extracted on a sufficiently large scale to be used by industry. (143)

[Laboratory-centric reasoning? It seems to contradict the farming-experiencey thing].

The question of reliable local [and less polluting] energy sources arises; he talks about the promise of solar power, and lists examples of solar tech of the time, for several pages, along with tides, wind power, etc. According to Bookchin, these sources will only ever be good enough for small communities, they will not be able to support large cites like Paris, London, or New York. (151)

Limitation of scope, however, could represent a profound advantage from an ecological point of view. The sun, the wind and the earth are experiential realities to which men have responded sensuously and reverently from time immemorial. Out of these primal elements man developed his sense of dependence on—and respect for—the natural environment, a dependence that kept his destructive activities in check. The Industrial Revolution and the urbanized world that followed obscured nature's role in human experience—hiding the sun with a pall of smoke, blocking the winds with massive buildings, desecrating the earth with sprawling cities. Man's dependence on the natural world became invisible; it became theoretical and intellectual in character, the subject matter of textbooks, monographs and lectures. True, this theoretical dependence supplied us with insights (partial ones at best) into the natural world, but its onesidedness robbed us of all sensuous dependence on and all visible contact and unity with nature. In losing these, we lost a part of ourselves as feeling beings. We became alienated from nature. Our technology and environment became totally inanimate, totally synthetic—a purely inorganic physical milieu that promoted the deanimization of man and his thought.

[There is an interesting insight here into how the means of obtaining energy affects society and thinking. Coal/Fossil fuels support an extractive/resource view of the world, while electric transmission supports a dissociation from the power source, which is only relevant to the extent that we have power flowing to our homes, etc.]

To bring the sun, the wind, the earth, indeed the world of life, back into technology, into the means of human survival, would be a revolutionary renewal of man's ties to nature.

Human systems would in effect be part of their local ecological system, not an [alien force] operating against it.

Crafts would regain their honored position as supplements to mass manufacture; they would become a form of domestic, day-to-day artistry.

Higher quality would replace [planned obsolescence] and overall shoddiness/cheapness of mass production; the ecological sustainability of an item would be part of its appeal.

In the final part of the essay, called “Technology for Life,” Bookchin turns more explicitly to how he expects technology to work in a revolutionary society. His critique of previous revolutions could be said to be that they were a sort of holiday or world-turned-upside down ritual, in which business as usual was briefly suspended, but after which everyone had to “go back to work,” and this fact – that working people remained tied to their labor – allowed for elites to re-install themselves and eventually bar the working class from effective political participation.

In a future revolution, the most pressing task of technology will be to produce a surfeit of goods with a minimum of toil. The immediate purpose of this task will be to open the social arena permanently to the revolutionary people, to keep the revolution in permanence. (152)

Thus far very social revolution has foundered because the peal of the tocsin could not be heard over the din of the workshop. Dreams of freedom and plenty were polluted by the mundane, workaday responsibility of producing the means of survival. (153)

This means the people were too busy, and so “the reins of power fell into the hands of the political ‘professionals,’ the mediocrities of Thermidor.” He gives the example of the bourgeois Girondin party during the French Revolution, who wanted the doors of the popular assemblies closed at ten in the evening, to keep the workers from arriving after work:

Essentially, the tragedy of past revolutions has been that, sooner or later, their doors closed, "at ten in the evening." The most critical function of modern technology must be to keep the doors of the revolution open forever!

Bookchin celebrates “those magnificent madmen,” the Dadaists, for their refusal of work. Turning to the question of technology, he criticizes the idea of technology as an “extension” of the human [in a way that could be said to presage Stiegler’s discussion of technology as pharmakon]. Only in the case of traditional technology, argues Bookchin, can technology be seen as an “extension of man,” because back then craft workers controlled their tools, instead of being controlled by them: 

The tool amplifies the powers of the craftsman as a human; it amplifies his power to exercise his artistry and impart his identity as a creative being to raw materials.  (154)

With the industrial revolution, this relationship is reversed:

The machine now appears as an alien force—apart from and yet wedded to the production of the means of survival.

Technology becomes part of a “social machine” which is also distinguished from the human or individual (aka “men”):

Although initially an “extension of man,” technology is transformed into a force above man, orchestrating his life according to a score contrived by an industrial bureaucracy; not men, I repeat, but a bureaucracy, a social machine.

With the arrival of mass production as the predominant mode of production, man became an extension of the machine, and not only of mechanical devices in the productive process but also of social devices in the social process.

This distinction between “mechanical devices in the productive process” and “social devices in the social process” echoes his discussion back in Chapter 2, where part of his critique of the Marxist position on class had to do with the creation of consumer consciousness through mass media, marketing, education, etc. – this is presumably what “social devices,” refers to, though the term seems even more relevant to a smartphone-dominated society. In line with this, he denounces the consumer as an unwittingly manufactured dupe:

The decline from craftsman to worker, from an active to an increasingly passive personality, is completed by man qua consumer—an economic entity whose tastes, values, thoughts and sensibilities are engineered by bureaucratic "teams" in "think tanks." 

Man, standardized by machines, is reduced to a machine.

In a footnote, Bookchin lists the ways in which “man-the-machine” is an ideal tool of power:

The “ideal man” of the police bureaucracy is a being whose innermost thoughts can be invaded by lie detectors, electronic listening devices, and “truth” drugs. The “ideal man” of the political bureaucracy is a being whose innermost life can be shaped by mutagenic chemicals and socially assimilated by the mass media. The “ideal man” of the industrial bureaucracy is a being whose innermost life can be invaded by subliminal and predictively reliable advertising. The “ideal man” of the military bureaucracy is a being whose innermost life can be invaded by regimentation for genocide. (155)

Here is another one of Bookchin’s dense paragraphs where he contrasts the idea of the eternally renewing revolutionary potential of the youth, versus the sloth of the bureaucracy: the “man as machine” ideal

is continually defied by the rebirth of life, by the reappearance of the young, and by the contradictions that unsettle the bureaucracy. Every generation has to be assimilated again, and each time with explosive resistance. The bureaucracy, in turn, never lives up to its own technical ideal. Congested with mediocrities, it errs continually. Its judgment lags behind new situations; insensate, it suffers from social inertia and is always buffeted by chance. Any crack that opens in the social machine is widened by the forces of life.

[Of course, how would the newer generations of so-called “digital natives” fit into this vision? Bookchin would perhaps argue that the “social device” training of the young gets earlier and earlier and more and more intrusive, because it has to; this is not a sign of the ultimate triumph of the machinification of the human, but of its fragility and desperation.]

How can we heal the fracture that separates living men from dead machines without sacrificing either men or machines? How can we transform a technology for survival into a technology for life?

Bookchin foresees two possibilities, the first of which is burying/hiding the technology [an interesting link to the soft city, not to mention the Teletubbies-Eloi and their subterraneann caretakers-Morlocks-“machines of loving grace”]:

Or these humans of the future may simply choose to step over the body of technology. They may submerge the cybernated machine in a technological underworld, divorcing it entirely from social life, the community and creativity. All but hidden from society, the machines would work for man. Free communities would stand at the end of a cybernated assembly line with baskets to cart the goods home. (155)

The fracture separating man from machine would not be healed. It would simply be ignored. (156)

Bookchin, naturally, is against such a move:

Ignoring technology, of course, is no solution. Man would be closing off a vital human experience—the stimulus of productive activity, the stimulus of the machine. Technology can play a vital role in forming the personality of man.

He cites Mumford on art and personal growth [basically Marx’s, or indeed Kant’s, insight regarding production and self-consciousness, the need to act on the world and see results]. In a liberated society, machines will make the hard work easier, while leaving the artistry and craftsmanship to humans:

A liberated society, I believe, will not want to negate technology precisely because it is liberated and can strike a balance. It may well want to assimilate the machine to artistic craftsmanship. By this I mean the machine will remove the toil from the productive process, leaving its artistic completion to man. The machine, in effect, will participate in human creativity.

The machine can absorb the toil involved in mining, smelting, transporting and shaping raw materials, leaving the final stages of artistry and craftsmanship to the individual.

In this wiser, no longer profit-driven economy, degrowth would become a reality, as the concept of what is “necessary” would change (with reference to Marx’s discussion of the “realm of necessity”):

Having acquired a vitalizing respect for the natural environment and its resources, the free decentralized community would give a new interpretation to the word “need.” Marx's “realm of necessity,” instead of expanding indefinitely, would tend to contract; needs would be humanized and scaled by a higher valuation of life and creativity. Quality and artistry would supplant the current emphasis on quantity and standardization; durability would replace the current emphasis on expendability... (157)

The shallowness of market exchange would be replaced with the creativity of a gift economy:

The repulsive ritual of bargaining and hoarding would be replaced by the sensitive acts of making and giving.Things would cease to be the crutches for an impoverished ego and the mediators between aborted personalities; they would become the products of rounded, creative individuals and the gifts of integrated, developing selves.

In contrast to the hierarchy and separation which are the effects of a centralized economic system, local production could lead to communities finding ways to cooperate over resources, which would thus act as “sinews of confederation” crossing ecological boundaries (157). He rejects the idea that society is too “complex” to operate as decentralized, autarchic communities: much of this apparent complexity is really just the fluff and wastefulness of state and corporate bureaucracy; filing cabinets, paperwork, etc.:

As in Kafka's novels, these things are real but strangely dreamlike, indefinable shadows on the social landscape. (159)

[Here is an interesting connection to Braverman, who discusses the “shadow world” of bureaucratic paperwork, stealing agency from human workers and turning them into “automata” per Taylor].

Degrowth is not just ecologically sensible, but would also lead to a simpler, and thus more anarchist, society, by getting rid of a lot of hierarchical bloat:

if we grant that buttons must be styled in a thousand different forms, textiles varied endlessly in kind and pattern to create the illusion of innovation and novelty, bathrooms filled to overflowing with a dazzling variety of pharmaceuticals and lotions, and kitchens cluttered with an endless number of imbecile appliances. If we single out of this odious garbage one or two goods of high quality in the more useful categories and if we eliminate the money economy, the state power, the credit system, the paperwork and the policework required to hold society in an enforced state of want, insecurity and domination, society would not only become reasonably human but also fairly simple. (159)

No community would specialize wholly in one product, but would instead have “rounded” economies producing “rounded” people:

Every community would approximate local or regional autarky. It would seek to achieve wholeness, because wholeness produces complete, rounded men who live in symbiotic relationship with their environment. (160)

Even today there are acts of mutual aid, even though these go against society; how much more there shall be in the future, when it is let loose! Bookchin admits we could end in disaster, but he expects rather than we will create a better society: 

Would it not be the height of absurdity, indeed of impudence, to gauge the behavior of future generations by the very criteria we despise in our own time? Free men will not be greedy, one liberated community will not try to dominate another because it has a potential monopoly of copper, computer “experts” will not try to enslave grease monkeys, and sentimental novels about pining, tubercular virgins will not be written. (161)

Echoing Brecht, he asks people of the future to forgive us for taking so long with the revolution, and to try to understand us.