TECHNOLOGY AND CLASS
                                        STRUGGLE

                      The developments in technology over the past sixty years-the
                      nuclear industry, cybernetics and related information techniques,
                      biotechnology and genetic engineering-have produced fundamental
                      changes in the social terrain. The methods of exploitation and
                      domination have changed, and for this reason old ideas about the
                      nature of class and class struggle are not adequate for understanding
                      the present situation. The workerism of the marxists and syndicalists
                      can no longer even be imagined to offer anything useful in developing
                      a revolutionary practise. But simply rejecting the concept of class is
                      not a useful response to this situation either, because in so doing one
                      loses an essential tool for understanding the present reality and how
                      to attack it.
                      Exploitation not only continues, but has intensified sharply in the
                      wake of the new technology. Cybernetics has permitted the
                      decentralization of production, spreading small units of production
                      across the social terrain. Automation has drastically reduced the
                      number of production workers necessary for any particular
                      manufacturing process. Cybernetics further creates methods for
                      making money without producing anything real, thus allowing capital
                      to expand itself without the expense of labor.
                      Furthermore, the new technology demands a specialized knowledge
                      that is not available for most people. This knowledge has come to
                      be the real wealth of the ruling class in the present era. Under the old
                      industrial system, one could look at class struggle as the struggle
                      between workers and owners over the means of production. This no
                      longer makes sense. As the new technology advances, the exploited
                      find themselves driven into increasingly precarious positions. The old
                      life-long skilled factory position has been replaced by day labor,
                      service sector jobs, temporary work, unemployment, the black
                      market, illegality, homelessness and prison. This precariousness
                      guarantees that the wall created by the new technology between the
                      exploiters and the exploited remains unbreachable.
                      But the nature of the technology itself places it beyond the reach of
                      the exploited. Earlier industrial development had as its primary focus
                      the invention of techniques for the mass manufacturing of
                      standardized goods at low cost for high profit. These new
                      technological developments are not so much aimed at the
                      manufacturing of goods as at the development of means for
                      increasingly thorough and widespread social control and for freeing
                      profit from production. The nuclear industry requires not only
                      specialized knowledge, but also high levels of security that place its
                      development squarely under the control of the state and lead to a
                      military structuring in keeping with its extreme usefulness to the
                      military. Cybernetic technology's ability to process, record, gather
                      and send information nearly instantaneously serves the needs of the
                      state to document and monitor its subjects as well as its need to
                      reduce the real knowledge of those it rules to bits of
                      information-data-hoping, thus, to reduce the real capabilities for
                      understanding of the exploited. Biotechnology gives the state and
                      capital control over the most fundamental processes of life
                      itself-allowing them to decide what sort of plants, animals and-in
                      time-even human beings can exist.
                      Because these technologies require specialized knowledge and are
                      developed for the purpose of increasing the control of the masters
                      over the rest of humanity even in our daily lives, the exploited class
                      can now best be understood as those excluded from this specialized
                      knowledge and thus from real participation in the functioning of
                      power. The master class is, thus, made up of those included in
                      participation in the functioning of power and the real use of the
                      specialized technological knowledge. Of course these are processes
                      in course, and the borderlines between the included and excluded
                      can, in some cases, be elusive as increasing numbers of people are
                      proletarianized-losing whatever decision-making power over their
                      own conditions of existence they may have had.
                      It is important to point out that although these new technologies are
                      intended to give the masters control over the excluded and over the
                      material wealth of the earth, they are themselves beyond any human
                      beings control. Their vastness and the specialization they require
                      combine with the unpredictability of the materials they act
                      upon-atomic and sub-atomic particles, light waves, genes and
                      chromosomes, etc.-to guarantee that no single human being can
                      actually understand completely how they work. This adds a
                      technological aspect to the already existing economic precariousness
                      that most of us suffer from. However, this threat of technological
                      disaster beyond any one's control also serves power in controlling
                      the exploited-the fear of more Chernobyls, genetically engineered
                      monsters or escaped laboratory-made diseases and the like move
                      people to accept the rule of so-called experts who have proven their
                      own limits over and over again. Furthermore, the state-that is
                      responsible for every one of these technological developments
                      through its military-is able to present itself as a check against
                      rampant corporate "abuse" of this technology. So this monstrous,
                      lumbering, uncontrollable juggernaut serves the exploiters very well
                      in maintaining their control over the rest of the population. And what
                      need have they to worry about the possible disasters when their
                      wealth and power has most certainly provided them with
                      contingency plans for their own protection?
                      Thus, the new technology and the new conditions of exclusion and
                      precariousness it imposes on the exploited undermine the old dream
                      of expropriation of the means of production. This
                      technology-controlling and out of control-cannot serve any truly
                      human purpose and has no place in the development of a world of
                      individuals free to create their lives as they desire. So the illusory
                      utopias of the syndicalists and marxists are of no use to us now. But
                      were they ever? The new technological developments specifically
                      center around control, but all industrial development has taken the
                      necessity of controlling the exploited into account. The factory was
                      created in order to bring producers under one roof to better regulate
                      their activities; the production line mechanized this regulation; every
                      new technological advance in the workings of the factory brought
                      the time and motions of the worker further under control. Thus, the
                      idea that workers could liberate themselves by taking over the
                      means of production has always been a delusion. It was an
                      understandable delusion when technological processes had the
                      manufacture of goods as their primary aim. Now that their primary
                      aim is so clearly social control, the nature of our real struggle should
                      be clear: the destruction of all systems of control-thus of the state,
                      capital and their technological system, the end of our proletarianized
                      condition and the creation of ourselves as free individuals capable of
                      determining how we will live ourselves. Against this technology our
                      best weapon is that which the exploited have used since the
                      beginning of the industrial era: sabotage.

Back to the Venomous Butterfly Page (on KKA)
                             Back to the Killing King Abacus Page
Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

1