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Capitalism and Technology: To whose benefit, at what costs?
By Doug Dowd
In 1917, as war ripped Europe apart, Einstein wrote to a
friend that "Our much-praised technological progress, and
civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the
hands of a pathological criminal." Subsequently, in showing
that E=MC2, that lifelong pacifist had paved the way for the
most catastrophic technology ever.
His was neither the first nor the last instance of a "father
of invention" discovering that once the genie is out of the
bottle it is also up for grabs; Bill Joy, Chief Scientist of
Microsystems, recently warned of the terrifying
possibilities now attaching to robotics, genetics and
nanotechnology. Shades of Ted Kaczynski.
Ever since knives and spears, technology has been used both
constructively and destructively; when, how, where and why
it will be used -- and, in consequence, who will benefit and
who and what will be harmed -- finds its answer in the
structure of power, at whose center sits capitalism and its
State. There have been "collateral benefits" for the less
powerful, of course. But.
It is a very large "but" that broadens, deepens, and becomes
more multi-dimensional over time. It is common to think of
production when technology is mentioned, its main home until
very recently; now, however, its use and misuse shape and
permeate all of human, social, and environmental existence.
When technology took its first big leaps in England, the
harm done was almost entirely to farmers and pre-industrial
workers; and the gains went almost entirely to what became
large landowners (who, by 1790, owned 80 percent of the land
of England). Thus was laid the basis for the industrial
capitalism of the nineteenth century: the earlier
"progress," in obliterating the fabled "yeomanry" and
cottage industry, gave birth to what became a powerless
working class -- inspiring, in 1770, Goldsmith's "Deserted
Village," and its "Ill fares the land/ to hastening ills a
prey/ where wealth accumulates and men decay...."
Those exploited were the fuel of industrial capitalism, and
their lives burned out quickly. As Hobsbawm has shown,
between 1821 and 1851 the lifespan of the average working
person in Britain declined substantially -- from 37 to 46
percent who died by age 19. Exploitation became less lethal
as Britannia came to rule the waves -- allowing workers'
real incomes in Britain to rise (in the 1880s), but only
because exploitation spread and deepened globally.
Sound familiar? In the past several decades, the advancing
technologies of transportation, communication and
transportable capital equipment have allowed transnational
corporations (TNCs) -- with the easily-corrupted support of
their governments and those of the "emerging market
economies" of Latin America, Asia, and Africa -- to deepen
and tighten their hold on the human and other resources of
the whole globe. Once again, peasants been swept off the
land, to allow the new technologies and agribusiness owners
their way. In consequence, small farmers have plummeted
from a life that was merely difficult to one that is
harrowing, have lost their culture and history, have been
forced into the exploding cities of their own land or richer
societies, where they confront hatred and a squalid
existence.
Ah! economists have said for over two hundred years and
still say: but in the long-run, all this is for the good of
all; those in the poorer countries need only be patient:
behold the levels of real income of industrial workers in
the strongest countries! There is much wrong with such
observations; here we look at only some of it.
First, there is no chance whatsoever that the people of the
poorer countries will ever reach the material comfort levels
of the leading industrial economies of today, if only
because there is no other set of countries which they can
"imperialize"; nor will they ever have the access to the
relative military might that cleared the path for the now
rich societies. And they are already or will be ruled not
by their own governments but by the new Holy Family:
TNC/WTO/IMF.
Second, in the richest countries,led by the USA,
exploitation is very much on the rise, very much facilitated
by technological "progress." In the past ten years, as U.S.
growth and wealth break records, worker exploitation has
been rising: not only did real wages fall or remain
stagnant from 1973 into the late 1990s, but, as Business
Week (12-6-99) has reported, the average worker (not just
the poorest) put in 260 hours more in 1999 -- six weeks of
extra work -- than in 1989, with little or no wage increases
(and this says nothing about unreported data, such as the
spreading practice of having workers "punch out" and then
continue to work, and of diverse "overwork" practices of
home workers and part-time temps -- "beloved by many
employers, because they're cheaper and more flexible than
those you put on payroll..." (Fortune Small Business
(4/2000).
Such phenomena are but part of a long list of dire outcomes
resulting from the combination of the most concentrated-ever
business power and the uses to which new technologies can be
put, much assisted by the media technology's teaching us (as
Paul Baran put it) "to want what we don't need, and not to
want what we do." Thus have most been seduced into
senseless debt while being "down-sized and outsourced" as
unions have weakened. The upshot is a population desperate
to stay afloat in the high seas of debt -- now 102 percent
of disposable income, up from 62 percent in 1978.
Already in the eighteenth century workers were rioting
against new technology, famously so with the
"machine-breakers" (or Luddites) by the early 19th century.
Those who protested technological change were not protesting
the technology as such, but the ways in which it was -- or
was not -- used; as, in our day, workers are protesting not
"free trade" but the ways in which the freedom of capital
harms the lives of workers in both the rich and the poor
countries, despite economists' and politicians hype to the
contrary.
And then there is the massive waste, much of it destructive
waste, of modern industrialism -- obscene in the face of the
inadequate to fatally low levels of income of at least
two-thirds of the world's people, recklessly insane in terms
of the already accomplished and rising levels of
environmental damage. More: the waste of human resources
and possibilities foregone goes beyond obscenity to
something like social criminality: consider what could have
been done in the past century with the technology,
knowledge, and resources of the globe; and set that next to
the perils and tragedies that instead confront us every day:
moderate estimates see half of U.S. GDP as sheer waste; and
that ignores the common practices in durable consumer goods
of "deliberate obsolescence" (carried to perfection in
computers now) and the gross waste of the military.
The foregoing is not merely or mostly a litany of annoyance
and outrage. It describes an ongoing calamity whose
proportions have already been lethal on a large scale and
that threaten to expand always further. Of the abuse and
misuse of technology, there will be no end, so long as it is
capital's wants, not human needs and possibilities, that
guide its use. Marx put it forcefully long ago:
Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the
social productiveness of labour are brought about at the
cost of the individual labourer; all means for the
development of production transform themselves into means of
domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they
mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him
to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every
remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated
toil.... (Capital, I, 645)
All told, then, no matter who we are, where we live, or what
we do for a living, our work is cut out for us, if we are to
live in a safe, sane, and decent society. Among the many,
many things that are both required for and would flow from
such a society is the transformation of technology from
being mostly a blight to becoming a contribution for
furtherance of life, for all.
The existence of political democracy provides us with the
ability to change the society for the better through
existing and new unions and diverse political organizations
of both narrower and broader scope. But "abilities" mean
little unless they are used, and they are unlikely to be
used without a three-sided effort: 1) to unlearn what we
have been socialized to see as the good life and "common
sense"; 2) to learn the full realities of the interaction of
business power with "our much-praised technological
progress" and, in the same processes, 3) to teach ourselves
the ways to mount a broad and deep political movement that
does not depend upon crumbs from the table of establishment
politics.
"Unlearning" is more difficult than learning; habits are
harder to break than to make. That is not because of some
intrinsic complexity in the matters to be shucked off, but
to the sticking-power of ideology, of what we have come to
take for granted in distinguishing between good and bad,
right and wrong, desirable and horrible. A large part of
the difficulties in forming a strong political movement sits
in that seat of "common sense." With sufficient learning we
will learn to brush that and to regain our "good sense."
Our ideology tells us to see the business system -- now
wearing the smiling mask of "the free market" -- as
simultaneously competent, efficient and responsible. Maybe
so; mostly it is not. In an era when technology's powers,
already immense, are always multiplying, we cannot trust
business -- whose driving force is, after all, the search
for individual gain -- to make decisions affecting all the
people, all the time, all over; and all of nature as well.
There have been too many Pinto bumpers, too many thalidomide
babies, too many Love Canals, too many lung cancers, too
many.... -- and too much denial and obstructionism all along
the way. So it's up to us.
Much work was done in the past, of course; good work that
gave many of us effective unions, pensions, health care and
better wages, along with laws against discrimination of most
kinds. But: 1) since the 1970s, much that was won has been
lost; moreover, 2) there was much that needed winning
earlier that was never fought for at all, let alone won.
The grand old slogan "An injury to one is an injury to all"
was directed at workers in the United States; today's
technologies require that all workers recognize the unity of
their needs with workers everywhere, and join with others to
end injuries of all kinds, including those to Mother Nature,
not just those turning on wages and working conditions. The
time to begin was years ago.
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