Returning from a pleasant vacation in Austin, Texas where I had the great
pleasure to meet Bill Lear over lunch and to discuss prospects for a PEN-L
web page with him (more about this later), I sifted through my email late
last night. I have to confess that the discussion about "technology" sort
of baffles me since it seems detached from the broader question of how
society is organized.
There is no question that automation of blue-collar and white-collar work
has led to increased misery under capitalism. Citibank help-desk personnel
work under intense pressure to maintain quotas while they are constantly
monitored electronically. Joan Greenbaum's "Windows on the Workplace" is a
powerful critique of this system. Meanwhile, industrial skills continue to
be degraded as traditional high-skill jobs like welding and tool-and-die
get done by programmed machines. All the while, the assembly line pace
quickens while harried workers try to keep up or lose their jobs to third
world workers. The greatest fear is to lose one's job altogether to a machine.
If we had no alternative to capitalism, this would be a grim picture. But
isn't it the case that socialism would welcome labor-saving technology? I
worked briefly in a very low-tech job shop as a spot-welder in the late 70s
doing missionary work among the proletariat. It was unbelievably oppressive
work. Why wouldn't we want to automate such tasks in a socialist society?
On that job I held two pieces of metal in my hand while I stepped on a
pedal that delivered the juice from dangerous weld-spouts that shot
rooster-tail sparks in my face everytime contact was made. This is much the
same way that spot-welding had been done since the 1930s and it is utter
hell. Long-time workers in the weld shop were zoned out from the fumes and
the heavy labor. Most factory work *is like this*. The whole goal of a
socialist society would be to automate as much of this type of work as
possible in "closed system" factories that eliminate pollutants at the
point of production using advanced technology. There are actually some
steel mills today that have virtually no workers, except some very highly
trained college-educated people--often with degrees in metallurgical
engineering--who keep the automated machines going. What would socialism
be, other than widespread use of such factories that require very little
labor?
It's hard for me to think of any day-to-day jobs in capitalist society that
are really enjoyable. In my first few months at Met Life in 1968 when I was
programmer trainee, I was miserable at my desk and complained loudly to
everybody in sight including my boss. He said, "You schmuck, now you know
why they call it work" Even the people who are at the top of the food chain
in the post-Fordist system--the computer programmers--would prefer to have
the fucking computers program themselves. For Christ's sake, writing code
to process a payroll check is not the same thing as growing orchids or
teaching dolphins to speak. Most work is work, believe it or not. Let's let
machines do it. I have a feeling that most of the people who write books
about the apocalypse of machines replacing living labor are tenured
professors who have never done factory work or sat in a desk in an
insurance company. There never was a "golden age" as far as these types of
jobs are concerned. Read Charles Dickens. Read Upton Sinclair or Harvey
Swados. That's where it's at.
One of the big achievements of Tecnica in Nicaragua was to implement a
Lotus 123 application at the Central Bank to convert Nicaraguan pesos into
foreign currency equivalents. It used to take 6 college educated people an
entire day to come up with the sum total available for imports. After Lotus
123, it took one person a few hours in the morning. The other 5 people went
on to more productive activity. This is the paradigm we should have in
mind, not Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times", when we speak about technology.
I may be one of the few eccentrics around who believes in communism, but
back in 1968 when I got started at Met Life and saw the power of mainframe
computers, I became a firm believer in "feasible" communism. I still am.
Louis Proyect
