Technology and the Future of Work

Albert Langer

(Originally published in Readings on Technology and Change, Community Research Centre, Monash University 1985)

Attitudes towards technology and the future of work reflect a fundamental division in world outlook generally.

People with a progressive world outlook compare the present with the future and find it wanting. They are excited by the possibilities of the future and optimistic about achieving those possibilities. Correspondingly they are discOntented with the present and welcome its disintegration. Above all, progressives advocate the abolition of the wages system, and the system of property ownership on which it rests, as the principal barrier to the unfolding of human potential.

Progressives are divided between reformists, who believe the present can gradually be transformed into the future, through step by step cumulative small changes, and revolutionaries, who believe a radical and violent rupture of the old is both inevitable and desirable in order to bring birth to the new.

Another division among progressives is between scientific socialists and utopians. Utopians do not contrast the present with the future but look at the future by itself in isolation from the present, putting forward various schemes and fantasies about how the future ‘should’ be organized. Scientific socialists draw their perspective on the future and how to get there, from an analysis of trends in the real world of the present. They look for forces within modern society that are its inevitable product and that at the same contradict modern society and tend towards its disintegration and destruction. They look therefore towards the class of employees, who are the essential product of modern industry, now constituting the overwhelming majority of the population in every advanced industrial society, as the social force that will destroy that society in order to abolish its own conditions of existence.

People with a fatalistic world outlook have no sense of history and are incapable of contrasting the present with either the past or the future. For them the present can only be compared with itself. It may be good or bad but above all, it is inevitable. Things have always been more or less the way they are, and they always will be. Such is fate. At best things move in cycles. This world outlook was largely smashed in the Western world centuries ago by the indisputable facts of rapid social change. You could be for the changes that were happening or against them, but it became impossible to deny that `the times, they are a changing’. Fatalism remains important in the East and also has a curious reflection in the growth of Eastern mysticism in the West. The immense ideological confusion accompanying the rapid disintegration of modern Western society has put all traditional Western world outlooks into question and given some temporary credibility to even the most absurd alternatives.

People with a reactionary world outlook compare the present with the past and find it wanting. Things are going from bad to worse and something must be done to stop the rot. Reactionaries are perpetually looking backwards towards some mythical golden age in the past, when social contradictions were not so acute and the present organization of society was not so obsolete. Reactionaries correctly recognize that developments in modern technology are continually undermining existing social relationships. Accordingly, they seek to control and restrict the development of new technology so as to preserve the old social relationships. Reactionaries are afraid of new technology precisely because of its impact on the future of work.

Central to the world outlook of all modern reactionaries is defending the old organization of work — wage labor. Old fashioned reactionaries defended feudal subservience or even slavery with catch cries upholding the dignity of serf and slave labor and denouncing the modern bourgeois mode of production for radically disrupting the natural ties that bound the exploited to their exploiters. Modern reactionaries still hanker nostalgically for some sort of return to pre-industrial society, with smaller communities and a rejection of the cash or market economy. But their main efforts are devoted to preserving wage labor, which they see as the only possible or acceptable organization of society. Their central slogan is “The right to work”. By this they mean the right of the vast majority to be employed for wages, that is to have their life time bought for cash, to be employed, used or exploited, (they are all synonyms) by those who own and control the means of production.

In defence of wage labor, reactionaries will go to any lengths. They even explicitly support labor intensive methods of production in opposition to labor saving innovations, precisely on the grounds that labor intensive techniques create employment while labor saving innovations undermine it. In other words, reactionaries believe we should all work longer hours, to produce less output, simply in order to preserve a system of social relationships based around the employment of wage labor.

In opposing labor saving innovations as such, reactionaries find themselves opposed to all human progress. The very name `reactionary’ is taken from their attitude of ‘reacting’ against new developments. They have a continuous grudge against fate and their most characteristic mode of expression is the ‘whinge’. Instead of looking forward optimistically to the tremendous possibilities of the future, they are always whinging about the present, which they imply is heading down some dangerous path away from the tried and tested benefits of the past.

The clearest and most consistent expression of the reactionary world outlook, will be found in most of what passes for the ‘left’ in advanced Western countries. Instead of looking to the future and presenting a positive program for transforming social relationships to correspond to the possibilities now open through modern technology, these ‘leftists’ are exclusively concerned with contrasting the present with the past. Like all reactionaries, they find the present wanting and they whinge about it. Their language and their whole outlook is indistinguishable from that of certain old people, defeated and crushed by life’s struggles, who are forever moaning “what’s the world coming to” and “things aren’t what they used to be” and “I don’t know where it will all end”.

When one listens to the whinging of old reactionaries it is possible to classify almost every sentence of social comment they utter into one of those three categories. Naturally people find this all rather boring and tend to leave such reactionaries alone to moan and whine to each other. The reactionaries put this down to the arrogance of youth and their disrespect for their elders and betters. They add complaints about the ignorance, apathy and stupidity of the young, to their litany of woes.

It is very instructive to pick up any issue of any allegedly ‘left’ publication and classify each sentence for its essential content. Most are saying “What’s the world coming to”, “things aren’t what they used to be” or “I don’t know where it will all end”. We need not be surprised that their publishers are being left alone to moan and whinge to each other, nor that they tend to agree among themselves that people are generally ignorant, apathetic and stupid. Why else would the vast majority of the population who prefer the mass media to these publications be ignoring the important truths that their elders and betters are so patiently revealing to them, if they are not ignorant, apathetic and stupid?

Reactionaries are essentially irrelevant in any society undergoing rapid social change. That is why they have to seek inspiration from outside their own societies by holding up as positive some stultifyingly boring reactionary regime abroad. It took a great deal for left’ reactionaries to abandon their wild enthusiasm at the advent to power of the medievalist Khomeini regime in Iran. While most ‘leftists’ are at least embarrassed about the police states of eastern Europe, the only voices claiming such regimes are not intolerable, will be found on the left’.

What the new technology promises for the future of work is quite simply its abolition. The industrial revolution drastically reduced the requirement for , direct manual labor in producing most goods. Craft labor was replaced by the supervision of work actually carried out by machines. The new industrial revolution is simply carrying forward this same process, replacing human supervision of machines with electronic supervision of machines. Perhaps current developments in molecular biology and genetic engineering will involve tome fundamentally new evolutionary process in which the human species itself is changed radically and quickly. That would be very exciting and therefore naturally arouses the deepest fears of reactionaries. But the new technology that is having the greatest impact at present — microelectronics and so forth, is only accelerating the same kind of new forms of human society, and a higher development of humanity, that has been a fact of life since the end of the dark ages.

The future role of humans in production will be primarily mental labor — the creative planning, management and direction which requires human intelligence rather than just human eye and hand coordination. Science itself is emerging as the most powerful productive force and the the struggle for production is merging with scientific and technical research and development. Modern industry can only be planned, managed and directed by workers with a far higher cultural level than before. The educational level and degree of initiative and responsibility required are quite incompatible with the social status of an employee, a wage slave who “only works here”.

The consequences of the industrial revolution were first comprehended theoretically by scientific socialism in the nineteenth century. The old socialist movement that merely denounced capitalism gave way to a new communist movement that understood its inner working and the tendencies within capitalism that inevitably drive towards its abolition. Marxism explained how the very process of capital accumulation implies continous technological progress and a continuous socialization of production and centralization of ownership. It explained how this process creates a class with no stake in the old society and both the capacity and the necessity to overthrow it.

A century has passed and a new industrial revolution should involve fundamentally new theoretical problems and a further major advance in our understanding of social development. It is ironic that Marxism has been virtually extinguished in the West, during precisely the period of its most vivid confirmation. The fact that piecemeal reform of capitalism cannot lead to its abolition stares us in the face. All the social reforms and all the technical progress of the last century have landed us in an impasse where once again the world is sliding towards a gigantic economic crisis and a third world war. It is glaringly obvious that the social relations of capitalism are no longer a factor promoting progress but a barrier preventing us achieving the kind of life that is already technically possible.

Not only does the large majority of humanity in third world countries eke out a miserable existence with starvation and semi-starvation still the norm in many areas, but even in the most advanced countries an ever growing part of the labor force finds itself shut out completely from all benefits of social and technical progress. The dominance of reformism in progressive movements is coming to an end because capitalism simply isn’t delivering the reforms required. The immediate effect is a collapse of reformist movements and reformist ideologies. People who used to feel comfortable fighting for all kinds of social progress within capitalism, whether they acknowledged these struggles as reformist, or pretended they were revolutionary, now feel bewildered and lost. They either accept incorporation in the consensus politics of the reformist state, dropping all pretense of oppositional polities, or they drop out of political activity, rethinking their whole position. Most progressive organizations are currently disintegrating in a miserable fit of the blues as their activists recognize the bankruptcy, futility and sheer worthlessness of the activities that previously sustained their interest.

This disintegration of reformism appears very depressing if one pins ones hopes for the future on reforms. Indeed it is depressing that there is still no revolutionary oppositional current emerging to fill the vacuum being left by the virtual collapse of reformism. But the coming crisis will pose the question of revolution more sharply than it has ever been posed before.

The fact that most of the left' have abandoned progressive reformism in favour of frankly and openly reactionary attitudes towards technical progress can only accelerate a deeper understanding of the necessity for revolutionary politics. The more that reactionaryleftists’ prattle on against modern technology the less interest there will be in their views. Some workers will put some energy into ‘defending the right to work’ and even resisting innovations that reduce the amount of work required. Some with particular skills that are becoming obsolete even have a direct material interest in resisting new technologies that undermine their position, just as their employers will continue demanding ever increasing ‘protection’ from competition. But the more energy they put into reactionary resistance, the quicker they will realise the futility of this kind of struggle.

There will always be conservative workers who will ‘militantly’ struggle to defend obsolete traditional ways of doing things. They will sometimes succeed in preventing a particular innovation in a particular industry. Demands to control and restrict the new technology will get some support, especially when dressed up as an assertion of the workers right to determine their own destiny instead of having things foisted on them for the benefit of management. But in the long run these campaigns cannot succeed. The dead end is obvious.

Even the most conservative workers cannot actually feel inspired by a program to preserve things as they are, because everyone knows that things aren’t all that wonderful and they are bound to change anyway. At best they can go along with such campaigns out of a feeling of desperation and having no alternative. It may sound very militant to demand that the bosses justify every innovation before it is introduced, but what really needs justifying is why innovations are not being introduced. Unlike `left’ trade union officials, most workers do not see their bosses as dangerous radicals hell bent on untried experiments. They see them as stodgy conservatives who are a real obstacle to actually getting anything done. Workers will demand control of technology, not in the sense of restricting and slowing down labor saving innovations, but in the sense of taking control of their work and abolishing it as rapidly as possible.

When a revolutionary left emerges it will not abandon the fight for reforms and it will not ignore the issues posed by new technology. But instead of demands that any changes to existing work methods be justified, it will demand that any continuation of obsolete work methods be justified, and it will do so in the context of a positive program for re-organizing the whole of society. Instead of ‘reacting’ to this or that initiative by by bosses, a revolutionary left will take the initiative showing how society can and will be radically transformed when it wins power. Its central activity will not be `demanding’ that the bosses refrain from doing this or that, or even demanding that they positively do this or that, but simply pushing the bosses aside and doing things our own way.

A sad sign of the collapse of Marxism is the frequent polemics which reactionaries launch against the idea that technological change is neutral and can either benefit workers or capitalists depending on how it is implemented: Even sadder are the replies from alleged Marxists, pitifully proclaiming that not all technological change benefits the ruling class and that it would be possible for workers to benefit from new technology if only they had control of it.

Whether one accepts or rejects the Marxist position, it has never been that technology is neutral. At the very center of Marxism has always been the concept that technological change, development of the forces of production, is the active positive dynamic element that pushes social development forward, compelling the social relationships to adapt to changes in the underlying economic reality, or else burst apart attempting to constrain those changes. Presumably reactionaries would be even more hostile to the idea that technological change is the positive motor of social development than to the idea that it might be neutral. The fact that they see no need to denounce such views indicates that they have never even heard of them. Marxism has been buried for a long time now. When the positive rather than neutral attitude towards new technology becomes recognized as the main target for reactionary polemics, we will know that the revival of Marxism has really begun.

Slaves who ‘militantly’ demand that their owners stick to tradition deserve to remain slaves. Progressive workers make no such demands of their employers. The revolution will come when a party emerges that makes no demands of the employers at all, but simply overthrows them in order to carry out its own positive program for unleashing the productive forces of humanity and reaching towards the stars.

***