                  D.10 How does capitalism affect technology?

   Technology has an obvious effect on individual freedom, in some ways
   increasing it, in others restricting it. However, since capitalism is a
   social system based on inequalities of power, it is a truism that
   technology will reflect those inequalities as it does not develop in a
   social vacuum. As Bookchin puts it:

     "Along side its positive aspects, technological advance has a
     distinctly negative, socially regressive side. If it is true that
     technological progress enlarges the historical potentiality for
     freedom, it is also true that the bourgeois control of technology
     reinforces the established organisation of society and everyday
     life. Technology and the resources of abundance furnish capitalism
     with the means for assimilating large sections of society to the
     established system of hierarchy and authority . . . By their
     centralistic and bureaucratic tendencies, the resource of abundance
     reinforce the monopolistic, centralistic and bureaucratic tendencies
     in the political apparatus . . . [Technology can be used] for
     perpetuating hierarchy, exploitation and unfreedom." [Post-Scarcity
     Anarchism, p. 3]

   No technology evolves and spreads unless there are people who benefit
   from it and have sufficient means to disseminate it. In a capitalist
   society, technologies useful to the rich and powerful are generally the
   ones that spread. This can be seen from capitalist industry, where
   technology has been implemented specifically to deskill the worker, so
   replacing the skilled, valued craftsperson with the easily trained and
   replaced "mass worker." By making trying to make any individual worker
   dispensable, the capitalist hopes to deprive workers of a means of
   controlling the relation between their effort on the job and the pay
   they receive. In Proudhon's words, the "machine, or the workshop, after
   having degraded the labourer by giving him a master, completes his
   degeneracy by reducing him from the rank of artisan to that of common
   workman." [System of Economical Contradictions, p. 202]

   So, unsurprisingly, technology within a hierarchical society will tend
   to re-enforce hierarchy and domination. Managers/capitalists will
   select technology that will protect and extend their power (and
   profits), not weaken it. Thus, while it is often claimed that
   technology is "neutral" this is not (and can never be) the case. Simply
   put, "progress" within a hierarchical system will reflect the power
   structures of that system.

   As sociologist George Reitzer notes, technological innovation under a
   hierarchical system soon results in "increased control and the
   replacement of human with non-human technology. In fact, the
   replacement of human with non-human technology is very often motivated
   by a desire for greater control, which of course is motivated by the
   need for profit-maximisation. The great sources of uncertainty and
   unpredictability in any rationalising system are people . . .
   McDonaldisation involves the search for the means to exert increasing
   control over both employees and customers." [The McDonaldisation of
   Society, p. 100] For Reitzer, capitalism is marked by the
   "irrationality of rationality," in which this process of control
   results in a system based on crushing the individuality and humanity of
   those who live within it.

   In this process of controlling employees for the purpose of maximising
   profit, deskilling comes about because skilled labour is more expensive
   than unskilled or semi-skilled and skilled workers have more power over
   their working conditions and work due to the difficulty in replacing
   them. Unskilled labour makes it easier to "rationalise" the production
   process with methods like Taylorism, a system of strict production
   schedules and activities based on the amount of time (as determined by
   management) that workers "need" to perform various operations in the
   workplace, thus requiring simple, easily analysed and timed movements.
   As companies are in competition, each has to copy the most "efficient"
   (i.e. profit maximising) production techniques introduced by the others
   in order to remain profitable, no matter how dehumanising this may be
   for workers. Thus the evil effects of the division of labour and
   deskilling becoming widespread. Instead of managing their own work,
   workers are turned into human machines in a labour process they do not
   control, instead being controlled by those who own the machines they
   use (see also Harry Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital: The
   Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century).

   As Max Stirner noted (echoing Adam Smith), this process of deskilling
   and controlling work means that "[w]hen everyone is to cultivate
   himself into man, condemning a man to machine-like labour amounts to
   the same thing as slavery. . . . Every labour is to have the intent
   that the man be satisfied. Therefore he must become a master in it too,
   be able to perform it as a totality. He who in a pin-factory only puts
   on heads, only draws the wire, works, as it were mechanically, like a
   machine; he remains half-trained, does not become a master: his labour
   cannot satisfy him, it can only fatigue him. His labour is nothing by
   itself, has no object in itself, is nothing complete in itself; he
   labours only into another's hands, and is used (exploited) by this
   other." [The Ego and Its Own, p. 121] Kropotkin makes a similar
   argument against the division of labour ("machine-like labour") in The
   Conquest of Bread (see chapter XV -- "The Division of Labour") as did
   Proudhon (see chapters III and IV of System of Economical
   Contradictions).

   Modern industry is set up to ensure that workers do not become
   "masters" of their work but instead follow the orders of management.
   The evolution of technology lies in the relations of power within a
   society. This is because "the viability of a design is not simply a
   technical or even economic evaluation but rather a political one. A
   technology is deemed viable if it conforms to the existing relations of
   power." [David Noble, Progress without People, p. 63]

   This process of controlling, restricting, and de-individualising labour
   is a key feature of capitalism. Work that is skilled and controlled by
   workers is empowering to them in two ways. Firstly it gives them pride
   in their work and themselves. Secondly, it makes it harder to replace
   them or suck profits out of them. Therefore, in order to remove the
   "subjective" factor (i.e. individuality and worker control) from the
   work process, capital needs methods of controlling the workforce to
   prevent workers from asserting their individuality, thus preventing
   them from arranging their own lives and work and resisting the
   authority of the bosses. This need to control workers can be seen from
   the type of machinery introduced during the Industrial Revolution.
   According to Andrew Ure (author of Philosophy of Manufactures), a
   consultant for the factory owners at the time:

     "In the factories for spinning coarse yarn . . . the mule-spinners
     [skilled workers] have abused their powers beyond endurance,
     domineering in the most arrogant manner . . . over their masters.
     High wages, instead of leading to thankfulness of temper and
     improvement of mind, have, in too many cases, cherished pride and
     supplied funds for supporting refractory spirits in strikes . . .
     During a disastrous turmoil of [this] kind . . . several of the
     capitalists . . . had recourse to the celebrated machinists . . . of
     Manchester . . . [to construct] a self-acting mule . . . This
     invention confirms the great doctrine already propounded, that when
     capital enlists science in her service, the refractory hand of
     labour will always be taught docility." [quoted by Noble, Op. Cit.,
     p. 125]

   Proudhon quotes an English Manufacturer who argues the same point:

     "The insubordination of our workmen has given us the idea of
     dispensing with them. We have made and stimulated every imaginable
     effort to replace the service of men by tools more docile, and we
     have achieved our object. Machinery has delivered capital from the
     oppression of labour." [System of Economical Contradictions, p. 189]

   It is important to stress that technological innovation was not driven
   by reasons of economic efficiency as such but rather to break the power
   of workers at the point of production. Once that was done, initially
   uneconomic investments could become economically viable. As David Noble
   summarises, during the Industrial Revolution "Capital invested in
   machines that would reinforce the system of domination [in the
   workplace], and this decision to invest, which might in the long run
   render the chosen technique economical, was not itself an economical
   decision but a political one, with cultural sanction." [Op. Cit., p. 6]

   Needless to say, this use of technology within the class war continued.
   A similar process was at work in the US, where the rise in trade
   unionism resulted in "industrial managers bec[oming] even more
   insistent that skill and initiative not be left on the shop floor, and
   that, by the same token, shop floor workers not have control over the
   reproduction of relevant skills through craft-regulated apprenticeship
   training. Fearful that skilled shop-floor workers would use their scare
   resources to reduce their effort and increase their pay, management
   deemed that knowledge of the shop-floor process must reside with the
   managerial structure." [William Lazonick, Organisation and Technology
   in Capitalist Development, p. 273]

   American managers happily embraced Taylorism (aka "scientific
   management"), according to which the task of the manager was to gather
   into his possession all available knowledge about the work he oversaw
   and reorganise it. Taylor himself considered the task for workers was
   "to do what they are told to do promptly and without asking questions
   or making suggestions." [quoted by David Noble, American By Design, p.
   268] Taylor also relied exclusively upon incentive-pay schemes which
   mechanically linked pay to productivity and had no appreciation of the
   subtleties of psychology or sociology (which would have told him that
   enjoyment of work and creativity is more important for people than just
   higher pay). Unsurprisingly, workers responded to his schemes by
   insubordination, sabotage and strikes and it was "discovered . . . that
   the 'time and motion' experts frequently knew very little about the
   proper work activities under their supervision, that often they simply
   guessed at the optimum rates for given operations . . . it meant that
   the arbitrary authority of management has simply been reintroduced in a
   less apparent form." [David Noble, Op. Cit., p. 272] Although, now, the
   power of management could hide begin the "objectivity" of "science."

   Katherine Stone also argues that the "transfer of skill [from the
   worker to management] was not a response to the necessities of
   production, but was, rather, a strategy to rob workers of their power"
   by "tak[ing] knowledge and authority from the skilled workers and
   creating a management cadre able to direct production." Stone
   highlights that this deskilling process was combined by a "divide and
   rule" policy by management based on wage incentives and new promotion
   policies. This created a reward system in which workers who played by
   the rules would receive concrete gains in terms of income and status.
   Over time, such a structure would become to be seen as "the natural way
   to organise work and one which offered them personal advancement" even
   though, "when the system was set up, it was neither obvious nor
   rational. The job ladders were created just when the skill requirements
   for jobs in the industry were diminishing as a result of the new
   technology, and jobs were becoming more and more equal as to the
   learning time and responsibility involved." The modern structure of the
   capitalist workplace was created to break workers resistance to
   capitalist authority and was deliberately "aimed at altering workers'
   ways of thinking and feeling -- which they did by making workers'
   individual 'objective' self-interests congruent with that of the
   employers and in conflict with workers' collective self-interest." It
   was a means of "labour discipline" and of "motivating workers to work
   for the employers' gain and preventing workers from uniting to take
   back control of production." Stone notes that the "development of the
   new labour system in the steel industry was repeated throughout the
   economy in different industries. As in the steel industry, the core of
   these new labour systems were the creation of artificial job
   hierarchies and the transfer of skills from workers to the managers."
   ["The Origins of Job Structure in the Steel Industry," pp. 123-157,
   Root & Branch (ed.), Root and Branch: The Rise of the Workers'
   Movements, p. 155, p. 153, p. 152 and pp. 153-4]

   This process of deskilling workers was complemented by other factors --
   state protected markets (in the form of tariffs and government orders
   -- the "lead in technological innovation came in armaments where
   assured government orders justified high fixed-cost investments"); the
   use of "both political and economic power [by American Capitalists] to
   eradicate and diffuse workers' attempts to assert shop-floor control";
   and "repression, instigated and financed both privately and publicly,
   to eliminate radical elements [and often not-so-radical elements as
   well, we must note] in the American labour movement." [William
   Lazonick, Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor, p. 218 and p. 303]
   Thus state action played a key role in destroying craft control within
   industry, along with the large financial resources of capitalists
   compared to workers. Bringing this sorry story up to date, we find
   "many, if not most, American managers are reluctant to develop skills
   [and initiative] on the shop floor for the fear of losing control of
   the flow of work." [William Lazonick, Organisation and Technology in
   Capitalist Development, pp. 279-280] Nor should we forget that many
   technologies are the product of state aid. For example, in the case of
   automation "the state, especially the military, has played a central
   role. Not only has it subsidised extravagant developments that the
   market could not or refused to bear but it absorbed excessive costs and
   thereby kept afloat those competitors who would otherwise have sunk."
   [Op. Cit., p. 83]

   Given that there is a division of knowledge in society (and, obviously,
   in the workplace as well) this means that capitalism has selected to
   introduce a management and technology mix which leads to inefficiency
   and waste of valuable knowledge, experience and skills. Thus the
   capitalist workplace is both produced by and is a weapon in the class
   struggle and reflects the shifting power relations between workers and
   employers. The creation of artificial job hierarchies, the transfer of
   skills away from workers to managers and technological development are
   all products of class struggle. Thus technological progress and
   workplace organisation within capitalism have little to do with
   "efficiency" and far more to do with profits and power. "Capitalism
   does not utilise a socially nature technology for capitalist ends,"
   Cornelius Castoriadis correctly argued. It has "created a capitalist
   technology, which is by no means neutral. The real intention of
   capitalist technology is not to develop production for production's
   sake: It is to subordinate and dominate the producers" and "to
   eliminate the human element in productive labour." This means that
   capitalist technologies will evolve, that there is "a process of
   'natural selection,' affecting technical inventions as they are applied
   to industry. Some are preferred to others" and will be "the ones that
   fit in with capitalism's basic need to deal with labour power as a
   measurable, supervisable, and interchangeable commodity." Thus
   technology will be selected "within the framework of its own class
   rationality." [Social and Political Writings, vol. 2, p. 104]

   This means that while self-management has consistently proven to be
   more efficient (and empowering) than hierarchical management
   structures, capitalism actively selects against it. This is because
   capitalism is motivated purely by increasing the power and profits for
   the bosses, and both are best done by disempowering workers and
   empowering bosses (i.e. the maximisation of power) -- even though this
   concentration of power harms efficiency by distorting and restricting
   information flow and the gathering and use of widely distributed
   knowledge within the firm (as in any command economy) as well as having
   a serious impact on the wider economy and social efficiency. Thus the
   last refuge of the capitalist or technophile (namely that the
   productivity gains of technology outweigh the human costs or the means
   used to achieve them) is doubly flawed. Firstly, disempowering
   technology may maximise profits, but it need not increase efficient
   utilisation of resources or workers' time, skills or potential.
   Secondly, "when investment does in fact generate innovation, does such
   innovation yield greater productivity? . . . After conducting a poll of
   industry executives on trends in automation, Business Week concluded in
   1982 that 'there is a heavy backing for capital investment in a variety
   of labour-saving technologies that are designed to fatten profits
   without necessary adding to productive output.'" David Noble concludes
   that "whenever managers are able to use automation to 'fatten profits'
   and enhance their authority (by eliminating jobs and extorting
   concessions and obedience from the workers who remain) without at the
   same time increasing social product, they appear more than ready to
   do." [David Noble, Progress Without People, pp. 86-87 and p. 89] As we
   argue in greater detail later, in [1]section J.5.12, efficiency and
   profit maximisation are two different things, with such deskilling and
   management control actually reducing efficiency -- compared to workers'
   control -- but as it allows managers to maximise profits the capitalist
   market selects it.

   Of course the claim is that higher wages follow increased investment
   and technological innovation ("in the long run" -- although usually
   "the long run" has to be helped to arrive by workers' struggle and
   protest!). Passing aside the question of whether slightly increased
   consumption really makes up for dehumanising and uncreative work, we
   must note that it is usually the capitalist who really benefits from
   technological change in money terms. For example, between 1920 and 1927
   (a period when unemployment caused by technology became commonplace)
   the automobile industry (which was at the forefront of technological
   change) saw wages rise by 23.7%. Thus, claim supporters of capitalism,
   technology is in all our interests. However, capital surpluses rose by
   192.9% during the same period -- 8 times faster! Little wonder wages
   rose! Similarly, over the last 20 years the USA and many other
   countries have seen companies "down-sizing" and "right-sizing" their
   workforce and introducing new technologies. The result? Simply put, the
   1970s saw the start of "no-wage growth expansions." Before the early
   1970s, "real wage growth tracked the growth of productivity and
   production in the economy overall. After . . ., they ceased to do so. .
   . Real wage growth fell sharply below measured productivity growth."
   [James K. Galbraith, Created Unequal, p. 79] So while real wages have
   stagnated, profits have been increasing as productivity rises and the
   rich have been getting richer -- technology yet again showing whose
   side it is on.

   Overall, as David Noble notes (with regards to manufacturing in the
   early 1990s):

     "U.S. Manufacturing industry over the last thirty years . . . [has
     seen] the value of capital stock (machinery) relative to labour
     double, reflecting the trend towards mechanisation and automation.
     As a consequence . . . the absolute output person hour increased
     115%, more than double. But during this same period, real earnings
     for hourly workers . . . rose only 84%, less than double. Thus,
     after three decades of automation-based progress, workers are now
     earning less relative to their output than before. That is, they are
     producing more for less; working more for their boss and less for
     themselves." [Op. Cit., pp. 92-3]

   Noble continues:

     "For if the impact of automation on workers has not been ambiguous,
     neither has the impact on management and those it serves -- labour's
     loss has been their gain. During the same first thirty years of our
     age of automation, corporate after tax profits have increased 450%,
     more than five times the increase in real earnings for workers."
     [Op. Cit., p. 95]

   But why? Because labour has the ability to produce a flexible amount of
   output (use value) for a given wage. Unlike coal or steel, a worker can
   be made to work more intensely during a given working period and so
   technology can be utilised to maximise that effort as well as
   increasing the pool of potential replacements for an employee by
   deskilling their work (so reducing workers' power to get higher wages
   for their work). Thus technology is a key way of increasing the power
   of the boss, which in turn can increase output per worker while
   ensuring that the workers' receive relatively less of that output back
   in terms of wages -- "Machines," argued Proudhon, "promised us an
   increase of wealth they have kept their word, but at the same time
   endowing us with an increase of poverty. They promised us liberty . . .
   [but] have brought us slavery." [Op. Cit., p. 199]

   But do not get us wrong, technological progress does not imply that we
   are victims. Far from it, much innovation is the direct result of our
   resistance to hierarchy and its tools. For example, capitalists turned
   to Taylorism and "scientific management" in response to the power of
   skilled craft workers to control their work and working environment
   (the famous 1892 Homestead strike, for example, was a direct product of
   the desire of the company to end the skilled workers' control and power
   on the shop-floor). Such management schemes never last in the long run
   nor totally work in the short run either -- which explains why
   hierarchical management continues, as does technological deskilling.
   Workers always find ways of using new technology to increase their
   power within the workplace, undermining management decisions to their
   own advantage). As left-wing economist William Lazonick puts it:

     "Because it is the workers, not managers, who are actually doing the
     work, access to information on the effort-saving potential of a
     machine will be asymmetric, giving workers a distinct advantage in
     determining the pace of work. In addition, workers through their
     unions will attempt to exert industry-wide control over the relation
     between effort and pay on newly diffused technology. The resultant
     relation between effort and earnings will depend on the exercise of
     social power, not on abstract 'laws' of proportional change."
     [Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor, pp. 66-7]

   This means that the "economic effectiveness of the factory as a mode of
   work organisation did not occur within a social vacuum but depend[s] on
   the historical evolution of conditions that determined the relative
   power of capitalists and workers to structure the relation between
   effort and pay." As such, it is important not to overemphasise the
   "independent influence of technology as opposed to the relations of
   production in the determination of work organisation. Because machinery
   does change the skill content of work, it can potentially serve as an
   instrument of social power. How and to what extent it does so, however,
   depends not only on the nature of the technology but also on the nature
   of the social environment into which it is introduced." Thus the
   introduction of machinery into the capitalist labour process "is only a
   necessary, not sufficient, condition for the displacement of worker
   control over the relation between effort and pay." [Lazonick, Op. Cit.,
   p. 52 and p. 63] Needless to say, capitalists have always appealed to
   the state to help create a suitable social environment.

   This analysis applies to both the formal and informal organisation of
   workers in workplace. Just as the informal structures and practices of
   working people evolve over time in response to new technology and
   practices, so does union organisation. In response to Taylorism,
   factory and other workers created a whole new structure of working
   class power -- a new kind of unionism based on the industrial level.
   For example, the IWW was formed specifically to create industrial
   unions arguing that "[l]abourers are no longer classified by difference
   in trade skill, but the employer assigns them according to the machine
   which they are attached. These divisions, far from representing
   differences in skill or interests among the labourers, are imposed by
   the employers that workers may be pitted against one another and
   spurred to greater exertion in the shop, and that all resistance to
   capitalist tyranny may be weakened by artificial distinctions." [quoted
   by Stone, Op. Cit., p. 157]

   For this reason, anarchists and syndicalists argued for, and built,
   industrial unions -- one union per workplace and industry -- in order
   to combat these divisions and effectively resist capitalist tyranny.
   This can be seen in many different countries. In Spain, the C.N.T. (an
   anarcho-syndicalist union) adopted the sindicato unico (one union) in
   1918 which united all workers of the same workplace in the same union
   (by uniting skilled and unskilled in a single organisation, the union
   increased their fighting power). In the UK, the shop stewards movement
   arose during the first world war based on workplace organisation (a
   movement inspired by the pre-war syndicalist revolt and which included
   many syndicalist activists). This movement was partly in response to
   the reformist TUC unions working with the state during the war to
   suppress class struggle. In Germany, the 1919 near revolution saw the
   creation of revolutionary workplace unions and councils (and a large
   increase in the size of the anarcho-syndicalist union FAU which was
   organised by industry).

   This process was not limited to just libertarian unions. In the USA,
   the 1930s saw a massive and militant union organising drive by the
   C.I.O. based on industrial unionism and collective bargaining
   (inspired, in part, by the example of the I.W.W. and its broad
   organisation of unskilled workers). More recently, workers in the 1960s
   and 70s responded to the increasing reformism and bureaucratic nature
   of such unions as the CIO and TUC by organising themselves directly on
   the shop floor to control their work and working conditions. This
   informal movement expressed itself in wildcat strikes against both
   unions and management, sabotage and unofficial workers' control of
   production (see John Zerzan's essay "Organised Labour and the Revolt
   Against Work" in Elements of Refusal). In the UK, the shop stewards'
   movement revived itself, organising much of the unofficial strikes and
   protests which occurred in the 1960s and 70s. A similar tendency was
   seen in many countries during this period.

   So in response to a new developments in technology and workplace
   organisation, workers' developed new forms of resistance which in turn
   provokes a response by management. Thus technology and its (ab)uses are
   very much a product of the class struggle, of the struggle for freedom
   in the workplace. With a given technology, workers and radicals soon
   learn to resist it and, sometimes, use it in ways never dreamed of to
   resist their bosses and the state (which necessitates a transformation
   of within technology again to try and give the bosses an upper hand!).
   The use of the Internet, for example, to organise, spread and
   co-ordinate information, resistance and struggles is a classic example
   of this process (see Jason Wehling, "'Netwars' and Activists Power on
   the Internet", Scottish Anarchist no. 2 for details). There is always a
   "guerrilla war" associated with technology, with workers and radicals
   developing their own tactics to gain counter control for themselves.
   Thus much technological change reflects our power and activity to
   change our own lives and working conditions. We must never forget that.

   While some may dismiss our analysis as "Luddite," to do so is make
   "technology" an idol to be worshipped rather than something to be
   critically analysed. Indeed, it would be temping to argue that
   worshippers of technological progress are, in effect, urging us not to
   think and to sacrifice ourselves to a new abstraction like the state or
   capital. Moreover, such attacks misrepresent the ideas of the Luddites
   themselves -- they never actually opposed all technology or machinery.
   Rather, they opposed "all Machinery hurtful to Commonality" (as a March
   1812 letter to a hated Manufacturer put it). Rather than worship
   technological progress (or view it uncritically), the Luddites
   subjected technology to critical analysis and evaluation. They opposed
   those forms of machinery that harmed themselves or society. Unlike
   those who smear others as "Luddites," the labourers who broke machines
   were not intimidated by the modern notion of progress. As John Clark
   notes, they "chose to smash the dehumanising machinery being imposed on
   them, rather than submit to domination and degradation in the name of
   technical progress." [The Anarchist Moment, p. 102] Their sense of
   right and wrong was not clouded by the notion that technology was
   somehow inevitable, neutral or to be worshipped without question.

   The Luddites did not think that human values (or their own interests)
   were irrelevant in evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of a given
   technology and its effects on workers and society as a whole. Nor did
   they consider their skills and livelihood as less important than the
   profits and power of the capitalists. In other words, they would have
   agreed with Proudhon's later comment that machinery "plays the leading
   role in industry, man is secondary" and they acted to change this
   relationship. [Op. Cit., p. 204] The Luddites were an example of
   working people deciding what their interests were and acting to defend
   them by their own direct action -- in this case opposing technology
   which benefited the ruling class by giving them an edge in the class
   struggle. Anarchists follow this critical approach to technology,
   recognising that it is not neutral nor above criticism. That this is
   simply sensible can be seen from the world around us, where capitalism
   has, to quote Rocker, made work "soulless and has lost for the
   individual the quality of creative joy. By becoming a dreary
   end-in-itself it has degraded man into an eternal galley slave and
   robbed him of that which is most precious, the inner joy of
   accomplished work, the creative urge of the personality. The individual
   feels himself to be only an insignificant element of a gigantic
   mechanism in whose dull monotone every personal note dies out." He has
   "became the slave of the tool he created." There has been a "growth of
   technology at the expense of human personality." [Nationalism and
   Culture, p. 253 and p. 254]

   For capital, the source of problems in industry is people. Unlike
   machines, people can think, feel, dream, hope and act. The "evolution"
   of technology must, therefore, reflect the class struggle within
   society and the struggle for liberty against the forces of authority.
   Technology, far from being neutral, reflects the interests of those
   with power. Technology will only be truly our friend once we control it
   ourselves and modify to reflect human values (this may mean that some
   forms of technology will have to be written off and replaces by new
   forms in a free society). Until that happens, most technological
   processes -- regardless of the other advantages they may have -- will
   be used to exploit and control people. Thus Proudhon's comments that
   "in the present condition of society, the workshop with its
   hierarchical organisation, and machinery" could only serve "exclusively
   the interests of the least numerous, the least industrious, and the
   wealthiest class" rather than "be employed for the benefit of all."
   [Op. Cit., p. 205]

   While resisting technological "progress" which is considered harmful to
   people or the planet (by means up to and including machine breaking) is
   essential in the here and now, the issue of technology can only be
   truly solved when those who use a given technology control its
   development, introduction and use. ("The worker will only respect
   machinery on the day when it becomes his friend, shortening his work,
   rather than as today, his enemy, taking away jobs, killing workers," in
   the words of French syndicalist Emile Pouget [quoted by David Noble,
   Op. Cit., p. 15]). Little wonder, therefore, that anarchists consider
   workers' self-management as a key means of solving the problems created
   by technology. Proudhon, for example, argued that the solution to the
   problems created by the division of labour and technology could only be
   solved by "association", and "by a broad education, by the obligation
   of apprenticeship, and by the co-operation of all who take part in the
   collective work." This would ensure that "the division of labour can no
   longer be a cause of degradation for the workman [or workwoman]." [The
   General Idea of the Revolution, p. 223]

   While as far as technology goes, it may not be enough to get rid of the
   boss this is a necessary first step. Unless this is done, it will be
   impossible to transform existing technologies or create new ones which
   enhance freedom rather than controlling and shaping the worker (or user
   in general) and enhancing the power and profits of the capitalist. This
   means that in an anarchist society, technology would have to be
   transformed and/or developed which empowered those who used it, so
   reducing any oppressive aspects of it. In the words of Cornelius
   Castoriadis, the "conscious transformation of technology will therefore
   be a central task of a society of free workers." [Op. Cit., p. 104] As
   German anarchist Gustav Landauer stressed, most are "completely unaware
   of how fundamentally the technology of the socialists differs from
   capitalist technology . . . Technology will, in a cultured people, have
   to be directed to the psychology of free people who want to use it."
   This will happen when "the workers themselves determine under what
   conditions they want to work," step out of "capitalism mentally and
   physically", and "cease playing a role in it and begin to be men [and
   women]." ["For Socialism," pp. 184-6, Anarchism, Robert Graham (ed.),
   p. 285 and p. 286]

   Thus most anarchists would agree with Bookchin's comment that
   technology "is necessarily liberatory or consistently beneficial to
   man's development" but we "do not believe that man is destined to be
   enslaved by technology and technological modes of thought." A free
   society "will not want to negate technology precisely because it is
   liberated and can strike a balance" and create a "technology for life,"
   a liberatory technology based on human and ecological needs. [Op. Cit.,
   p. 43 and p. 80] See [2]section I.4.9 for more discussion on technology
   within an anarchist society.

References

   1. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secJ5.html#secj512
   2. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secI4.html#seci49
