Against technocracy (Part 1)
There is a scene in Star Trek: First Contact (1996), where Captain Jean-Luc Picard comments: ‘The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money does not exist in the 24th century…The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity’.
Such sentiments draw on a long tradition of utopian thinking. A common feature of such thinking is the idea of material abundance. Abundance is what renders money obsolete.
In the painting The Land of Cockaigne by the Flemish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1567), a trio of figures is depicted dozing beneath a tree, their tools of the trade lying unused beside them. This is a magical world in which a cooked goose makes itself available on a platter and a roasted pig trots past with a carving knife stuck in its flank. No need to lift a finger to satisfy one´s hunger pangs.
The painting has attracted different interpretations. For some, it represents a moralising critique of the spiritual emptiness associated with sloth and gluttony (‘consumerism’); for others, the wistful dream of a world beyond grinding labour and material deprivation.
The Cockaignian tradition can be traced to the folk utopias of early medieval Europe and even earlier. What is striking about it is the relative lack of emphasis on technology as the means of achieving abundance. Mother Nature, not human ingenuity, was the provider of plenty.
This began to change over time, Bacon´s scientific utopia, The New Atlantis (1627), being an early example. From the mid-18th century, small-scale cottage industries gave way to the factory system. This was the first industrial revolution based on steam power and mechanisation. We have since had a second industrial revolution, commencing in the late 19th century (Fordist mass production and electrification), a third in the late 20th century (automation and digital electronics) and are currently in the throes of a fourth, featuring such cutting-edge innovations as AI, machine learning, the Internet of Things, advanced robotics and biotechnology.
Marx and Engels
When Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto in 1848, the Second Industrial Revolution had not yet begun (the first patented electric light bulb was still decades away). They held that socialism depended not only on a majority wanting it and understanding what it entailed, but also on the productive apparatus being sufficiently developed to ensure the reasonable needs of the population could be adequately met.
In the mid-19th century, this was not possible. For this reason, the Manifesto called for the ‘centralisation of all instruments of production in the hands of the State, ie, of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible’. State ownership was thought to be a more effective way of achieving this by capitalising on economies of scale.
However, by the late 19th> century, there was a clear shift in their thinking. Thus, their 1872 Preface to the Manifesto stated that, because of the advances of modern industry since 1848, the state capitalist transitional measures they earlier proposed had become ‘antiquated’and that ‘no special stress’ should be laid on them.
Interestingly, in 1878, we find Engels writing: ‘The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties – this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here’ (1878, Anti Dühring, Part 3).
New thinking about how to expedite a post-capitalist society was certainly required (and Marx and Engels were moving in this direction), but sadly, many supposed ‘Marxists’ today seem to be trapped in a time warp, their vision limited to nothing more ambitious than the nationalisation of the ‘commanding heights of industry’.
Edward Bellamy
Back then, socialists were not alone in recognising the growing technological potential to supersede the capitalist money-based economy. A foretaste of a non-Marxian technocratic version of this was provided by the American journalist, Edward Bellamy, in his fictional work Looking Backward (1888).
This was an enormously influential book, particularly in America, selling over a million copies shortly after publication. In it, Bellamy described the huge economic benefits that would result from dispensing with money:
‘Another item wherein we save is the disuse of money and the thousand occupations connected with financial operations of all sorts, whereby an army of men was formerly taken away from useful employment’.
However, his vision of a future moneyless society was a statist one, the ‘nation’ being deemed ‘the sole employer and capitalist’ (reminiscent of Lenin’s later description of ‘socialism’). Production was organised under the aegis of a ‘General Council of the Industrial Army’.
There was limited political democracy insofar as the government was elected, with this kind of society enjoying broad support, but practical decision-making itself was generally top-down and paternalistic. Labour would take a compulsory, quasi militaristic form (unlike Marx´s idea of ‘freely associated labour’) with individual consumption being rationed via a credit card scheme.
Bellamy saw this future moneyless society as being technically advanced and exhibiting a high degree of automation. This was not a vision that appealed to everyone, however. William Morris, who likewise wrote about a future moneyless society in News from Nowhere (1890), was critical of Bellamy´s outlook – in particular, its negative depiction of work as a coerced activity requiring extrinsic incentives to motivate individuals to work.
The idea of work being intrinsically undesirable is also implicit in some contemporary representations of a moneyless future. One example is the concept of ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ (FALC), associated with writers such as Aaron Bastani.
Automation will undoubtedly play an important role in a post-capitalist society, particularly when it comes to work deemed dangerous, dirty or monotonous. However, we would surely not want to eliminate all work and the potentially enormous creative pleasure to be derived from working. It is the terms and conditions under which we currently work that are the problem, not necessarily work itself.
All too often, work is unthinkingly equated with waged employment. These are not the same. In fact, even today under capitalism, most work is performed outside the money sector, not within it (María Ángeles Durán 2012, ‘Unpaid Work in the Global Economy’, Fundación BBVA).
We need work, or labour, as a form of creative self-expression. In hunter-gatherer societies, the distinction between work and play tends to be blurred. Much the same approach to work is found in Marx´s description of a higher phase of communist society in which ‘labour has become not only a means of life, but life’s prime want’ (1875, Critique of the Gotha Programme).
The Technocracy Movement
Bellamy´s futuristic society has been interpreted to represent a proto-technocratic utopia. However, the term ‘technocracy’, denoting governance by technical experts, was only coined somewhat later, in 1919, by an engineer, William Smyth. The basic idea behind this subsequently found expression in the rise of a movement in the 1930s in America (also in Canada and parts of Europe), bearing that name: the ‘Technocracy Movement’.
Though Howard Scott and Marion King Hubbert founded this movement, the individual thought to have first clearly set out the basic principles of technocracy was the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen in 1921, in an article titled ‘Engineers and the Price System’.
Veblen saw technological development as paving the way to the reorganisation of the economy, leading automatically to the gradual disappearance of money. Technological innovation followed its own developmental trajectory. The price mechanism was regarded as simply a wasteful and unnecessary encumbrance on production. It did not so much ‘guide’ technological development as follow it (and profit from it).
Veblen envisaged the decline of business culture and its replacement by a more technically-minded society in which people like scientists and engineers would lead the way. There was, he suggested, a built-in or deep-seated antagonism between the pecuniary values promoted by financiers and businesspeople and the industrial values embraced by the technicians and skilled workers.
The economist J M Keynes later said something similar in his 1930 essay ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’. Keynes suggested that within a century, technological progress and rising affluence would cause our obsession with money to die out. At the same time, the working week would contract to a mere 15 hours on average.
During the Great Depression, interest in the Technocracy movement grew rapidly, and the movement became quite popular for a brief period (at one point attracting hundreds of thousands of adherents) before going into steep decline following the implementation of Roosevelt´s New Deal reforms that drew support away from the movement.
Among the various ideas it advanced was the suggestion, grounded in Scott´s ‘Energy Theory of Value’, that energy units (joules) should replace money as the unit of accounting in the production and distribution of goods, with citizens being allocated ‘energy certificates’ to regulate consumption. What lay behind this was the belief that the money system was something inherently wasteful and oriented towards the perpetuation of needless scarcity. As one contemporaneous article noted:
‘Technocracy states that price and abundance are incompatible; the greater the abundance, the smaller the price. In a real abundance, there can be no price at all. Only by abandoning the interfering price control and substituting a scientific method of production and distribution can an abundance be achieved’ (Sept 1937, “What is Technocracy”, The Technocrat).
Jeremy Rifkin and Zero Marginal Cost
The claim about increasing abundance brought about by the price-collapsing effect of technological innovation is the stuff of much recent sensationalist speculation. According to Jeremy Rifkin, author of the best-seller The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2015), the ‘emerging Internet of Things is speeding us to an era of nearly free goods and services, precipitating the meteoric rise of a global Collaborative Commons and the eclipse of capitalism’.
However, Rifkin´s thesis is based on a flawed understanding of marginal cost pricing. Even if the marginal cost of producing some item (the cost of producing one additional unit of this item) fell to zero, there are still fixed costs to account for. Information goods, for example, may be ‘non-rivalrous’ in the sense that if I use the internet to do a Google search, it doesn’t prevent you from doing the same. But, internet-based corporations like Google or Meta still have enormous fixed costs to pay for. They still have to generate revenue to cover these costs and realise the huge profits they make in the process.
For the same reason, the prognosis of people like the billionaire, Elon Musk, about AI eliminating all jobs within two decades is fanciful in the extreme. Remarkably, someone who has profited so much from capitalism seems to know very little about how it actually works.
Capitalist production presupposes sufficient ‘effective demand’, such that a business can expect to realise a profit meeting this demand. Without the prospect of profit, even essential needs will remain unmet. To satisfy them, workers depend on paid employment in a capitalist, money-based economy.
How would this be possible if no one had a job? Living labour, not machinery, is the source of capitalist profit. In theory, if all work were automated, the rate of profit would fall to zero, and capitalism would cease to exist.
However, this is not remotely likely to happen. Well before that, Marx’s famous ‘counteracting tendencies to the falling rate of profit’ would kick in. For instance, growing technological unemployment would depress wages, thereby paradoxically making it more profitable once again to employ more labour.
Thus, there are self-correcting mechanisms that pre-empt the sort of scenario that people like Musk have in mind. Indeed, some studies suggest AI will lead not to a reduction but to an increase in jobs overall, with its main impact being to transform the nature of work under capitalism.
We cannot depend on technological innovation alone to transcend capitalism. This is a major weakness of the technocratic paradigm, which we will examine in Part 2.
ROBIN COX