Chapter 5 : Scarcity and Post-Scarcity

Chapter 5: Scarcity and Post-Scarcity

Introduction

For all but the privileged few, history has been in great part a chronicle of material scarcity — that is, an insufficiency of the goods and services that people need and value — all too often as a result of an unequal distribution of wealth. At best, people living under conditions of material scarcity must spend an inordinate amount of time working to produce the goods they need for material survival, or else earn a livelihood. This necessity, Bookchin maintains, reduces people to a quasi-animalistic existence; it prevents them from fulfilling their potential for rationality and freedom and thus from becoming fully human.

At the same time, material scarcity has also been an ideology as well as a reality — in particular, ruling elites have used it as a rationale for authoritarianism — both when scarcity is real, and when it has been artificially induced for the benefit of the few. There are not enough goods to meet the needs and desires of everyone, we are told, because resources are scarce — that is, because nature is “stingy.” As a result of this “stinginess,” an authority such as the state, this ideology holds, is necessary in order to prevent people from struggling against one another, in a war of all against all, to obtain what they can; it is further necessary, they insisted, to organize humanity’s domination of nonhuman nature, in order to generate goods. Material scarcity, says Bookchin, thus

provided the historic rationale of the development of the patriarchal family, private property, class domination, and the state; it nourished the great divisions in hierarchical society that pitted town against country, mind against sensuousness, work against play, individual against society, and finally, the individual against himself.[36]

Because of scarcity’s pernicious social and political consequences, its elimination has been a longstanding vision in the socialist tradition. The desire for technologies of production that would reduce toil and create abundance dates back at least to Robert Owen, who in 1818 announced glowingly that an “age of plenty” for humankind was dawning, one in which “new scientific power will soon render human labor of little avail in the creation of wealth.”[37]

In the United States of the early 1960s, the postwar technological revolution seemed to fulfill the dream of Owen and others like him. Some New Left commentators, to be sure, took a less sanguine view, warning that the new technologies of automation and cybernation would have negative social consequences, such as unemployment. According to a 1963 paper endorsed by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS):

Automation has sharply reduced the demand for employment, mass production industries, agriculture, and many trade and service enterprises. During the fifties, for example, manufacturers were able to increase productive output by 70 percent, with no increase whatever in the number of manufacturing workers. Just when the need for workers was being reduced, a radical increase in the number of people needing jobs was taking place.... Thus advancing technology and an exploding population create an enormous employment problem.[38]

And Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio warned that one of the “most crucial problems facing the United States today” was the “problem of automation,” in which machines put people out of work.[39]

Herbert Marcuse, for his part, felt that the “objective abundance” of the 1960s would have ambiguous social consequences. On the one hand, it would have the desirable consequence of making possible the liberation of the libido; but it would also generate the artificial satisfactions of consumerism and a new form of imperialism.

But others in the socialist tradition followed Owen and welcomed the advent of automation and cybernation, and the revolution in production they created, as a crucial step in ending the age-old problem of scarcity. Bookchin was one of them; in contrast to Marcuse’s pessimism, he emphasized the possibilities of abundance, not only for erotic liberation but for social and political revolution. These technologies, he argued, held the potential, for the first time in human history, to abolish scarcity and want on a worldwide basis and usher in a life of plenty for all. In effect, he argued that they were rendering material scarcity obsolete.

Significantly, by bringing about the end of material scarcity, he argued, these technologies are depriving the ruling classes of a critical rationale for their authority. Equally important, by enabling humanity to pass to abundance, they are making possible a reduction of onerous and tedious toil, thus providing people with the free time they need in order to participate fully in political and social life.

Capitalism, Bookchin acknowledges, is perverting the use of cybernation and automation, like all other technologies, for oppressive rather than liberatory ends. But if they could be appropriated for liberatory ends, the material abundance and reduction in toil they generate could undergird a society of what he calls “post-scarcity.” That is, they could constitute the technical means for the creation of utopia.

“Post-scarcity,” as Bookchin uses the word, does not mean material abundance alone; rather, the technological means for utopia have to be set in the context of a society that is itself utopian: an ecological, rational society.

The human relationships and psyches of the individual in a postscarcity society must fully reflect the freedom, security, and selfexpression that this abundance makes possible. Post-scarcity society, in short, is the fulfillment of the social and cultural potentialities latent in a technology of abundance.[40]

Bookchin’s ecological society would depend on at least two types of technology: the ecological technologies of renewable energy, and the productive technologies that would eliminate scarcity. The judicious application of both would make possible a free society without toil or material want, without hierarchy or domination, and even without repression or guilt. In such a society people would finally have the material base to fulfill their potentialities for freedom and rationality as human beings.

Conditions of Freedom

(from “Post-Scarcity Anarchism,” 1967)

All the successful revolutions of the past have been particularistic revolutions of minority classes seeking to assert their specific interests over those of society as a whole. The great bourgeois revolutions of modern times offered an ideology of sweeping political reconstitution, but in reality they merely certified the social dominance of the bourgeoisie, giving formal political expression to the economic ascendancy of capital. The lofty notions of the “nation,” the “free citizen,” of “equality before the law,” concealed the mundane reality of the centralized state, the atomized isolated man, the dominance of bourgeois interest. Despite their sweeping ideological claims, the particularistic revolutions replaced the rule of one class with that of another, one system of exploitation with another, one system of toil with another, and one system of psychological repression with another.

What is unique about our era is that the particularistic revolution has now been subsumed by the possibility of the generalized revolution — complete and totalistic. Bourgeois society, if it achieved nothing else, revolutionized the means of production on a scale unprecedented in history. This technological revolution, culminating in cybernation, has created the objective, quantitative basis for a world without class rule, exploitation, toil, or material want. The means now exist for the development of the rounded man, the total man, freed of guilt and the workings of authoritarian modes of training, and given over to desire and the sensuous apprehension of the marvelous. It is now possible to conceive of man’s future experience in terms of a coherent process in which the bifurcations of thought and activity, mind and sensuousness, discipline and spontaneity, individuality and community, man and nature, town and country, education and life, work and play are all resolved, harmonized, and organically wedded in a qualitatively new realm of freedom. Just as the particularized revolution produced a particularized, bifurcated society, so the generalized revolution can produce an organically unified, many-sided community. The great wound opened by propertied society in the form of the “social question” can now be healed.

That freedom must be conceived of in human terms, not in animal terms — in terms of life, not of survival — is clear enough. Men do not remove their ties of bondage and become fully human merely by divesting themselves of social domination and obtaining freedom in its abstract form. They must also be free concretely: free from material want, from toil, from the burden of devoting the greater part of their time — indeed, the greater part of their lives — to the struggle with necessity. To have seen these material preconditions for human freedom, to have emphasized that freedom presupposes free time and the material abundance for abolishing free time as a social privilege, is the great contribution of Karl Marx to modern revolutionary theory.

By the same token, the preconditions for freedom must not be mistaken for the conditions of freedom. The possibility of liberation does not constitute its reality. Along with its positive aspects, technological advance has a distinctly negative, socially regressive side. If it is true that technological progress enlarges the historical potentiality for freedom, it is also true that the bourgeois control of technology reinforces the established organization of society and everyday life. Technology and the resources of abundance furnish capitalism with the means for assimilating large sections of society to the established system of hierarchy and authority. They provide the system with the weaponry, the detecting devices, and the propaganda media for the threat as well as the reality of massive repression. By their centralistic nature, the resources of abundance reinforce the monopolistic, centralistic, and bureaucratic tendencies in the political apparatus. In short, they furnish the state with historically unprecedented means for manipulating and mobilizing the entire environment of life — and for perpetuating hierarchy, exploitation, and unfreedom....

The Redemptive Dialectic

Is there a redemptive dialectic that can guide the social development in the direction of an anarchic society where people will attain full control over their daily lives? Or does the social dialectic come to an end with capitalism, its possibilities sealed off by the use of a highly advanced technology for repressive and co-optative purposes?

We must learn here from the limits of Marxism, a project which, understandably in a period of material scarcity, anchored the social dialectic and the contradictions of capitalism in the economic realm. Marx, it has been emphasized, examined the preconditions for liberation, not the conditions of liberation. The Marxian critique is rooted in the past, in the era of material want and relatively limited technological development. Even its humanistic theory of alienation turns primarily on the issue of work and man’s alienation from the product of his labor. Today, however, capitalism is a parasite on the future, a vampire that survives on the technology and resources of freedom. The industrial capitalism of Marx’s time organized its commodity relations around a prevailing system of material scarcity; the state capitalism of our time organizes its commodity relations around a prevailing system of material abundance. A century ago scarcity had to be endured; today it has to be enforced — hence the importance of the state in the present era. It is not that modern capitalism has resolved its contradictions and annulled the social dialectic but rather that the social dialectic and the contradictions of capitalism have expanded from the economic to the hierarchical realms of society, from the abstract “historic” domain to the concrete minutiae of everyday experience, from the arena of survival to the arena of life.

The dialectic of bureaucratic state capitalism originates in the contradiction between the repressive character of commodity society and the enormous potential freedom opened by technological advance. This contradiction also opposes the exploitative organization of society to the natural world — a world that includes not only the natural environment but also man’s “nature” — his Eros-derived impulses. The contradiction between the exploitative organization of society and the natural environment is beyond co-optation: the atmosphere, the waterways, the soil, and the ecology required for human survival are not redeemable by reforms, concessions, or modifications of strategic policy. There is no technology that can reproduce atmospheric oxygen in sufficient quantities to sustain life on this planet. There is no substitute for the hydrological systems of the earth. There is no technique for removing massive environmental pollution by radioactive isotopes, pesticides, lead, and petroleum wastes. Nor is there the faintest evidence that bourgeois society will relent at any time in the foreseeable future in its disruption of vital ecological processes, in its exploitation of natural resources, in its use of the atmosphere and waterways as dumping areas for wastes, or in its cancerous mode of urbanization and land use.

Even more immediate is the contradiction between the exploitative organization of society and man’s Eros-derived impulses — a contradiction that manifests itself as the banalization and impoverishment of experience in a bureaucratically manipulated, impersonal mass society. The Eros-derived impulses in man can be repressed and sublimated, but they can never be eliminated. They are renewed with every birth of a human being and with every generation of youth. It is not surprising today that the young, more than any economic class or stratum, articulate the life-impulses in humanity’s nature — the urgings of desire, sensuousness, and the lure of the marvelous. Thus the biological matrix, from which hierarchical society emerged ages ago, reappears at a new level with the era that marks the end of hierarchy, only now this matrix is saturated with social phenomena. Short of manipulating humanity’s germ plasm, the life-impulses can be annulled only with the annihilation of man himself.

The contradictions within bureaucratic state capitalism permeate all the hierarchical forms developed and overdeveloped by bourgeois society. The hierarchical forms that nurtured propertied society for ages and promoted its development — the state, city, centralized economy, bureaucracy, patriarchal family, and marketplace — have reached their historic limits. They have exhausted their social functions as modes of stabilization. It is not a question of whether these hierarchical forms were ever “progressive” in the Marxian sense of the term.... Today these forms constitute the target of all the revolutionary forces that are generated by modern capitalism, and whether one sees their outcome as nuclear catastrophe or ecological disaster, they now threaten the very survival of humanity.

With the development of hierarchical forms into a threat to the very existence of humanity, the social dialectic, far from being annulled, acquires a new dimension. It poses the “social question” in an entirely new way. If man had to acquire the conditions of survival in order to live (as Marx emphasized), now he must acquire the conditions of life in order to survive. By this inversion of the relationship between survival and life, revolution acquires a new sense of urgency. No longer are we faced with Marx’s famous choice of socialism or barbarism; we are confronted with the more drastic alternatives of anarchism or annihilation. The problems of necessity and survival have become congruent with the problems of freedom and life.

The Problem of Want and Work

(from “Toward a Liberatory Technology,” 1965)

Virtually all the utopias, theories, :md revolutionary programs of the early nineteenth century were heed with the problem of necessity — of how to allocate labor and material goods at a relatively low level of technological development. These problems permeated revolutionary thought in a way comparable only to the impact of original sin on Christian theology. The fact that men would have to devote a substantial portion of their time to toil, for which they would get scant return, formed a major premise of all socialist ideology — authoritarian and libertarian, utopian and scientific, Marxist and anarchist. Implicit in the Marxist notion of a planned economy was the fact, incontestably clear in Marx’s own day, that socialism would still be burdened by relatively scarce resources. Men would have to plan — in effect, to restrict — the distribution of goods and would have to rationalize — in effect, to intensify — the use of labor. Toil, under socialism, would be a duty, a responsibility that every able-bodied individual would have to undertake. Even Proudhon advanced this dour view. “Yes, life is a struggle,” he wrote. “But this struggle is not between man and manit is between man and Nature; and it is each one’s duty to share it.” [41] This austere, almost biblical emphasis on struggle and duty reflects the harsh quality of socialist thought during the Industrial Revolution.

The problem of want and work — an age-old problem perpetuated by the early Industrial Revolution — produced the great divergence in revolutionary ideas between socialism and anarchism. In the event of a revolution, freedom would still be circumscribed by necessity: How was this world of necessity to be “administered”? How could the allocation of goods and duties be decided? Marx left this decision to a state power — a transitional “proletarian” state power to be sure, but nevertheless a coercive body, established above society. According to Marx, the state would “wither away” as technology developed and enlarged the domain of freedom, granting humanity material plenty and the leisure to control its affairs directly. This strange calculus, in which necessity and freedom were mediated by the state, differed very little politically from the common run of bourgeois–democratic radical opinion in the nineteenth century. The anarchist hope for the abolition of the state, on the other hand, rested largely on a belief in the viability of man’s social instincts. Bakunin, for example, thought custom would compel individuals with antisocial proclivities to abide by collectivist values and needs without obliging society to use coercion. Kropotkin, who exercised more influence among anarchists in this area of speculation, invoked man’s propensity for mutual aid — essentially a social instinct — as the guarantor of solidarity in an anarchist community (a concept that he derived from his study of natural and social evolution).

The fact remains, however, that both the Marxist and the anarchist answers to the problem of want and work were shot through with ambiguity. The realm of necessity remained brutally present; it could not be conjured away by mere theory and speculation. The Marxists could hope to administer necessity by means of a state, and the anarchists to deal with it through free communities, but given the limited technological development of their time, in the last analysis both schools depended on an act of faith to cope with the problem of want and work. Anarchists could argue against Marxists that any transitional state, however revolutionary its rhetoric and democratic its structure, would be self-perpetuating; it would tend to become an end in itself and to preserve the very material and social conditions it had been created to remove. For such a state to “wither away” (that is, to promote its own dissolution) would require leaders and bureaucrats of superhuman moral qualities. The Marxists, in turn, could invoke history against the anarchists, showing that custom and mutualistic propensities have never been effective barriers to the pressures of material need, or to the onslaught of property, or to the development of exploitation and class domination. Accordingly, they could dismiss anarchism as an ethical doctrine that revived the mystique of “the natural man” and his inborn social virtues.

The problem of want and work — of the realm of necessity — was not satisfactorily resolved by either doctrine in the last century. It is to the lasting credit of anarchism that it uncompromisingly retained its high ideal of freedom — the ideal of spontaneous organization, community and the abolition of all authority — even though this ideal remained only a vision of the future, of the time when technology would eliminate the realm of necessity entirely. Marxism increasingly compromised its ideal of freedom, painfully qualifying it with transitional stages and political expediencies, until today it is an ideology of naked power, pragmatic efficiency, and social centralization almost indistinguishable from the ideologies of modern state capitalism....

In retrospect, it is astonishing how long the problem of want and work cast its shadow over revolutionary theory. In a span of only nine decades — between 1850 and 1940 — Western society created, passed through, and evolved beyond two major epochs of technological history — the paleotechnic age of coal and steel, and the neotechnic age of electric power, synthetic chemicals, electricity, and internal combustion engines. Ironically, both ages of technology seem to have enhanced the importance of toil in society. As the number of industrial workers increased in proportion to other social classes, labor — more precisely toil — acquired an increasingly high status in revolutionary thought. During this period, the propaganda of the socialists often sounded like a pean to toil; not only was toil “ennobling,” but the workers were extolled as the only useful individuals in the social fabric. They were endowed with a supposedly superior instinctive ability that made them the arbiters of philosophy, art, and social organization. This puritanical work ethic of the left did not diminish with the passage of time, and in fact it acquired a certain urgency in the 1930s. Mass unemployment made jobs and the social organization of labor the central themes of socialist propaganda in the 1930s. Instead of focusing their message on the emancipation of man from toil, socialists tended to depict socialism as a beehive of industrial activity, humming with work for all. Communists pointed to Russia as the land where every able-bodied individual was employed and where labor was continually in demand. Surprising as it may seem today, little more than a generation ago socialism was equated with a work-oriented society, and liberty with the rna terial security provided by full employment. The world of necessity had subtly invaded and corrupted the ideal of freedom.

That the socialist notions of the last generation now seem anachronistic is not due to any superior insights that prevail today. The last three decades, particularly the late 1950s, mark a turning point in technological development, a technological revolution that has negated all the values, political schemes, and social perspectives held by mankind throughout all previous recorded history. After thousands of years of tortuous development, the countries of the Western world (and potentially all countries) are now confronted by the possibility of a materially abundant, even toilless era in which most of the means of life can be provided by machines. A new technology has developed that could largely replace the realm of necessity with the realm of freedom. So obvious is this fact to millions of people in the United States and Europe that it no longer requires elaborate explanations or theoretical exegeses. This technological revolution and the prospects it holds for society as a whole form the premises of radically new lifestyles among today’s young people, a generation that is rapidly divesting itself of the values and age-old work-oriented traditions of its elders. Even recent demands for a guaranteed annual income faintly echo the new reality that currently permeates the thinking of the young. Owing to the development of a cybernetic technology, the notion of a toilless mode of life has become an article of faith to an ever-increasing number of young people.

Cybernation and Automation

(from “Toward a Liberatory Technology,” 1965)

For the first time in history, technology has become open-ended. The potential for technological development, for providing machines as substitutes for labor, is virtually unlimited. Technology has finally passed from the realm of invention to that of design — from fortuitous discoveries to systematic innovations.

The meaning of this qualitative advance was stated in a rather freewheeling way by Vannevar Bush, the wartime director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, in 1955:

Suppose, fifty years ago, that someone had proposed making a device which would cause an automobile to follow a white line down the middle of the road, automatically and even if the driver fell asleep.... He would have been laughed at, and his idea would have been called preposterous. So it would have been then. But suppose someone called for such a device today, and was willing to pay for it, leaving aside the question of whether it would actually be of any genuine use whatever. Any number of concerns would stand ready to contract and build it. No real invention would be required. There are thousands of young men in the country to whom the design of such a device would be a pleasure. They would simply take off the shelf some photocells, thermionic tubes, servomechanisms, and relays, and if urged, they would build what they call a breadboard model, and it would work. The point is that the presence of a host of versatile, cheap, reliable gadgets, and the presence of men who understand fully all their queer ways, has rendered the building of automatic devices almost straightforward and routine. It is no longer a question of whether they can be built, it is rather a question of whether they are worth building.[42]

... Several developments have brought us to this open end, and a number of practical applications have profoundly affected the role of labor in industry and agriculture. Perhaps the most obvious has been the increasing interpenetration of scientific abstraction, mathematics, and analytic methods with the concrete, pragmatic, and rather mundane tasks of industry. This order of relationships is relatively new. Traditionally, speculation, generalization, and rational activity were sharply divorced from technology. This chasm reflected the sharp split between the leisured and the working classes in ancient and medieval society. Aside from the inspired works of a few rare men, applied science did not come into its own until the Renaissance, and it began to flourish only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The men who personify the application of science to technological innovation are not the inventive tinkerers like Edison but the systematic investigators with catholic interests, like Faraday, who added simultaneously to man’s knowledge of scientific principles and to engineering. In our own day this synthesis, once the work of a single inspired genius, is the work of anonymous teams....

[In another remarkable development,] the machine has evolved from an extension of human muscles into an extension of the human nervous system. In the past, tools and machines enhanced man’s muscular power over raw materials and natural forces. Not even the mechanical devices and engines developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries replaced human muscles — rather, they enlarged their effectiveness. Although these machines increased output enormously, workers’ muscles and brain were still required to operate them, even for fairly routine tasks. Technological advance could be calculated in strict terms of labor productivity: One man using a given machine produced as many commodities as five, ten, fifty, or a hundred had produced without the machine....

The development of fully automatic machines for complex massmanufacturing operations required that these machines have a builtin ability to correct their own errors; sensory devices for replacing the visual, auditory, and tactile senses of the worker; and finally, devices that replace the worker’s judgment, skill, and memory. These three principles presuppose the development of the technological means (the effectors, if you will) for applying the sensory, control, and mindlike devices in everyday industrial operations; further, they presuppose that we can adapt existing machines or develop new ones for handling, shaping, assembling, packaging, and transporting semifinished and finished products....

With the advent of the computer we entered an entirely new dimension of industrial control systems. The computer is capable of performing all the routine tasks that burdened the mind of the worker a generation ago.... By virtue of its speed, the computer can perform highly sophisticated mathematical and logical operations ... It is arguable whether computer “intelligence” is, or ever will be, creative or innovative (although every few years bring sweeping changes in computer technology), but there is no doubt that the digital computer is capable of taking over all the onerous and distinctly uncreative mental tasks of man in industry, science, engineering, information retrieval, and transportation. Modern man, in effect, has produced an electronic “mind” for coordinating, building, and evaluating most of his routine industrial operations. Properly used within the sphere of competence for which they are designed, computers are faster and more efficient than man himself....

Even current systems are now already obsolete. “The next generation of computing machines operates a thousand times as fast — at a pulse rate of one in every three-tenths of a billionth of a second,” observes Alice Mary Hilton. “Speeds of millionths and billionths of a second are not really intelligible to our finite minds. But we can certainly understand that the advance has been a thousand-fold within a year or two. A thousand times as much information can be handled or the same amount of information can be handled a thousand times as fast. A job that takes more than sixteen hours can be done in a minute! And without any human intervention! Such a system does not control merely an assembly line but a complete manufacturing and industrial process!”[43]

The basic technological principles involved in cybernating can be applied to virtually every area of mass manufacture — from metallurgy to food processing, from electronics to toy-making, from prefabricated bridges to prefabricated houses. Many phases of steel production, tool and die making, electronic equipment manufacture, and industrial chemical production are now partly or largely automated.... To be sure, every industry has its own particular problems, and the application of a toilless technology to a specific plant would doubtless reveal a multitude of kinks that would require painstaking solutions.... But there is practically no industry that cannot be fully automated if the product, the plant, the manufacturing procedures, and the handling methods are redesigned. In fact, the difficulty of describing how, where, or when a given industry will be automated arises not from assessing its unique problems but from considering the enormous leaps that occur every few years in modern technology. Almost every account of applied automation today must be regarded as provisional: as soon as one describes a partially automated industry, technological advances make the description obsolete.

There is one area of the economy, however, in which any technological advance is worth describing — the area of work, of toil, that is most brutalizing and degrading for man. If it is true, as Fourier said, that the moral level of a society can be gauged by the way it treats women, its sensitivity to human suffering can be gauged by the working conditions it provides for people in raw materials industries, particularly in mines and quarries. In the ancient world, mining was often a form of penal servitude, reserved primarily for the most hardened criminals, the most intractable slaves, and the most hated prisoners of war. The mine is the day-to-day actualization of man’s image of hell; it is a deadening, dismal, inorganic world that demands pure mindless toil.

Field and forest and stream and ocean are the environment of life; the mine is the environment alone of ores, minerals, metals [writes Lewis Mumford].... In hacking and digging the contents of the earth, the miner has no eye for the forms of things; what he sees is sheer matter and until he gets to his vein it is only an obstacle which he breaks through stubbornly and sends up to the surface. If the miner sees shapes on the walls of his cavern, as the candle flickers, they are only the monstrous distortions of his pick or his arm: shapes of fear. Day has been abolished and the rhythm of nature broken: continuous day-and-night production first came into existence here. The miner must work by artificial light even though the sun be shining outside; still further down in the seams, he must work by artificial ventilation too: a triumph of the “manufactured environment.”[44]

The abolition of mining as a human activity would symbolize, in its own way, the triumph of a liberatory technology. That we can point to this achievement already presages the freedom from toil implicit in the technology of our time. The first major step in this direction was the continuous miner, a giant cutting machine with nine-foot blades that slices up eight tons of coal a minute from the coal face. It was this machine, together with mobile loading machines, power drills, and roof bolting, that reduced mine employment in areas like West Virginia to about a third of 1948 levels, at the same time nearly doubling individual output. Coal mines still require miners to place and operate the machines. The most recent technological advances, however, have replaced operators by radar sensing devices and eliminate the miner completely.

Adding sensing devices to automatic machinery could easily remove the worker from toil not only in mines but in agriculture. The wisdom of industrializing and mechanizing agriculture is highly questionable, but the fact remains that if society were to so choose, it could automate large areas of industrial agriculture, ranging from cotton picking to rice harvesting. Almost any machine, from a giant shovel in an openstrip mine to a grain harvester in the Great Plains, could be operated either by cybernated sensing devices or by remote control with television cameras. The effort needed to operate these devices and machines at a safe distance, in comfortable quarters, would be minimal, assuming that a human operator were required at all.

It is easy to foresee a time, by no means remote, when a rationally organized economy could automatically manufacture small “packaged” factories without human labor, when parts could be produced with so little effort that most maintenance tasks would be simply to remove a defective unit from a machine and replace it with another — a job no more difficult than pulling out and putting in a tray. Machines would make and repair most of the machines required to maintain such a highly industrialized economy. Such a technology, oriented entirely toward human needs and freed from all consideration of profit and loss, would eliminate the pain of want and toil — the penalty, inflicted in the form of denial, suffering, and inhumanity, exacted by a society based on scarcity and labor.

Technology for Life

(from “Toward a Liberatory Technology,” 1965)

In a future revolution, the most pressing task of technology will be to produce a surfeit of goods with a minimum of toil. The immediate purpose of this task would be to open the social arena permanently to the revolutionary people, to keep the revolution in permanence. Thus far every social revolution has foundered because the peal of the tocsin could not be heard over the din of the workshop. Dreams of freedom and plenty were polluted by the mundane, workaday responsibility for producing the means of survival. In the brute facts of history, as long as revolution meant continual sacrifice and denial for the people, the reins of power fell into the hands of the political “professionals,” the mediocrities of Thermidor. How well the liberal Girondins of the French Convention understood this reality can be judged by their effort to reduce the revolutionary fervor of the Parisian popular assemblies — the great sections of 1793 — by decreeing that the meetings should close “at ten in the evening,” or as Carlyle tells us, “before the working people come from their jobs.”[45] The decree proved ineffective, but it was well aimed. Essentially, the tragedy of past revolutions has been that sooner or later, their doors had to close “at ten in the evening.” The most critical function of modern technology must be to keep the doors of the revolution open forever! ...

The future liberated men will choose from a large variety of mutually exclusive or combinable work styles, all of which will be based on unforeseeable technological innovations. Or they may choose to submerge the cybernated machine to a technological world, divorcing it entirely from social life, the community, and creativity. All but hidden from society, machines would work for man. Free communities would stand at the end of a cybernated assembly line with baskets to cart the goods home. Industry, like the autonomic nervous system, would work on its own, subject to the repairs that our own bodies require in occasional bouts of illness. The fracture separating man from machine would not be healed. It would simply be ignored.

Ignoring technology, of course, is no solution. Man would be closing off a vital human experience — the stimulus of productive activity, the stimulus of the machine. Technology can in fact play a vital role in forming the personality of man. Every art, as Lewis Mumford has argued, has its technical side, requiring the self-mobilization of spontaneity into expressed order and providing contact with the objective world during the most ecstatic moments of experience.

A liberated society, I believe, would not want to negate technology, precisely because it is liberated and can strike a balance. It may well want to assimilate the machine to artistic craftsmanship. By this, I mean the machine would remove the toil from the productive process, leaving its artistic completion to man. The machine, in effect, would participate in human creativity. There is no reason that automatic, cybernated machinery cannot be used so that the finishing of products, especially those destined for personal use, is left to the community. The machine could absorb the toil involved in mining, smelting, transporting, and shaping raw materials, leaving the final stages of artistry and craftsmanship to the individual. Most of the stones that make up a medieval cathedral were carefully squared and standardized to facilitate their laying and bonding — a thankless, repetitive, and boring task that modern machines could now do rapidly and effortlessly. Once the stone blocks were set in place, the craftsmen made their appearance; toil was replaced by creative human work. In a liberated community the combination of industrial machines and the craftsman’s tools could reach a degree of sophistication and of creative interdependence unparalleled in any period in human history. William Morris’s vision of a return to craftsmanship would be freed of its nostalgic nuances. We could truly speak of a qualitatively new advance in technics — a technology for life.

Having acquired a vitalizing respect for the natural environment and its resources, the free decentralized community would give a new interpretation to the word need. Marx’s “realm of necessity,” instead of expanding indefinitely, would tend to contract; needs would be humanized and scaled by a higher valuation of life and creativity. Quality and artistry would supplant the current emphasis on quantity and standardization; durability would replace the current emphasis on expendability; an economy of cherished things, sanctified by a sense of tradition and by a sense of wonder for the personality and artistry of dead generations, would replace the mindless seasonal restyling of commodities; innovations would be made with a sensitivity for the natural inclinations of man as distinguished from the engineered pollution of taste by the mass media. Conservation would replace waste in all things. Freed of bureaucratic manipulation, men would rediscover the beauty of a simpler, uncluttered material life. Clothing, diet, furnishings, and homes would become more artistic, more personalized, and more Spartan. Man would recover a sense of things that are for man, as against the things that have been imposed upon man. The repulsive ritual of bargaining and hoarding would be replaced by the sensitive acts of making and giving. Things would cease to be the crutches for impoverished egos and the mediators between aborted personalities; they would become the products of rounded, creative individuals and the gifts of integrated, developing selves.

A technology for life could play the vital role of integrating one community with another. Rescaled to a revival of crafts and a new conception of material needs, technology could also function as the sinews of confederation. A national division of labor and industrial centralization are dangerous because with them technology begins to transcend the human scale; it becomes increasingly incomprehensible and lends itself to bureaucratic manipulation. To the extent that control is shifted away from the community in real terms (technologically and economically), centralized institutions acquire real power over the lives of men and threaten to become sources of coercion. A technology for life must be based on the community; it must be tailored to the community and the regional level. On this level, however, the sharing of factories and resources could actually promote solidarity among community groups; it could serve to confederate them on the basis not only of common spiritual and cultural interests but also of common material needs. Depending upon the resources and uniqueness of regions, a rational, humanistic balance could be struck between autarky, industrial confederation, and a national division of labor.

Is society so “complex” that an advanced industrial civilization stands in contradiction to a decentralized technology for life? My answer is a categorical no. Much of the social “complexity” of our time originates in the paperwork, administration, manipulation, and constant wastefulness of capitalist enterprise. The petty bourgeois stands in awe of the bourgeois filing system — the rows of cabinets filled with invoices, accounting books, insurance records, tax forms, and the inevitable dossiers. He is spellbound by the “expertize” of industrial managers, engineers, stylemongers, financial manipulators, and the architects of market consent. He is mystified by the state — the police, courts, jails, federal offices, secretariats, the whole stinking, sick body of coercion, control, and domination. Modern society is indeed incredibly complex, complex even beyond human comprehension, if we grant its premises: property, “production for the sake of production,” competition, capital accumulation, exploitation, finance, centralization, coercion, bureaucracy, and the domination of man by man. Linked to each of these premises are the institutions that actualize it — offices, millions of “personnel” forms, immense tons of paper, desks, typewriters, telephones, and of course rows upon rows of filing cabinets. As in Kafka’s novels, these things are real but strangely dreamlike, indefinable shadows on the social landscape. The economy has a greater reality to it and is easily mastered by the mind and senses, but it too is highly intricate — if we grant that buttons must be styled in a thousand different forms, textiles varied endlessly in kind and pattern to create the illusion of innovation and novelty, bathroom cabinets filled to overflowing with a dazzling variety of pharmaceuticals and lotions, and kitchens cluttered with endless imbecile appliances. If we singled out from this odious garbage one or two goods of high quality in the more useful categories, and if we eliminated the money economy, the state power, the credit system, the paperwork, and the police work required to hold society in an enforced state of want, insecurity, and domination, society would become not only reasonably human but fairly simple.

Behind a single yard of high-quality electric wiring, to be sure, lies a copper mine, the machinery needed to operate it, a plant for producing insulating material, a copper smelting and shaping complex, and a transportation system for distributing the wiring — and behind each of these complexes are other mines, plants, machine shops, and so forth. Copper mines of a kind that can be exploited by existing machinery are not to be found everywhere, although enough copper and other useful metals can be recovered as scrap from the debris of our present society to provide future generations with all they need. But even if copper can be furnished only by a nationwide system of distribution, in what sense would there still have to be a division of labor in the current sense of the term? There need be none at all. First, copper could be distributed, together with other goods, among free, autonomous communities, between those that mine it and those that require it. This distribution system need not require the mediation for centralized bureaucratic institutions. Second, and perhaps more significant, a community that lives in a region with ample copper resources would not be a mere mining community. Copper mining would be one of many economic activities in which it is engaged — a part of a larger, rounded, organic economic arena. The same would hold for communities whose climate is most suitable for growing specialized foods or whose resources are rare and uniquely valuable to society as a whole. Each community would approximate local or regional autarky. It would seek to achieve wholeness, because wholeness produces complete, rounded men who live in symbiotic relationship with their environment. Even if a substantial portion of the economy fell within the sphere of a national division of labor, the overall economic weight of society would still rest with the community. If there is no distortion of communities, there will be no sacrifice of any portion of humanity to the interests of humanity as a whole.

A basic sense of decency, sympathy, and mutual aid lies at the core of human behavior. Even in this lousy bourgeois society, we do not find it unusual that adults rescue children from danger, even at the risk of imperiling their own lives; we do not find it strange that miners risk death to save their fellow workers in cave-ins, or that soldiers crawl under heavy fire to carry wounded comrades to safety. What shocks us are those occasions when aid is refused — when the cries of a girl being stabbed are ignored in a middle-class neighborhood.

Yet there is nothing in this society that would seem to warrant a molecule of human solidarity. What solidarity we do find exists despite the society, against all its realities, as an unending struggle between the innate decency of man and the innate indecency of society. Can we imagine how men would behave if this decency could find full release, if society earned the respect, even the love, of the individual? We are still the offspring of a violent, blood-soaked, ignoble history — the end products of man’s domination of man. We may never end this condition of domination. The future may bring us and our shoddy civilization down in a Wagnerian Gotterdammerung. How idiotic it would all be! But we may also end the domination of man by man. We may finally succeed in breaking the chain to the past and gain a humanistic anarchist society. It would be the height of absurdity, indeed of impudence, to gauge the behavior of future generations by the very criteria we despise in our own time. Free men would not be greedy, one liberated community would not try to dominate another because it had a potential monopoly of copper, computer “experts” would not try to enthralled grease monkeys, and sentimental novels about pining tubercular virgins would not be written. We can ask only one thing of the free men and women of the future: to forgive us that it took so long to get there and that it was such a hard pull. Like Brecht, we can ask that they try not to think of us too harshly, that they give us their sympathy and understand that we lived in the depths of a social hell.

But then, they will surely know what to think without our telling them.

The Fetishization of Needs

(from The Ecology of Freedom, 1982)

Scarcity is not merely a functional phenomenon that can be described primarily in terms of needs or wants. Obviously, without a sufficiency in the means of life, life itself is impossible, and without a certain excess in these means, life is degraded to a cruel struggle for survival, irrespective of the level of needs. Leisure time, under these conditions, is not free time that fosters intellectual advances beyond the magical, artistic, and mythopeic. To a large extent, the “time” of a community on the edge of survival is “suffering time.” It is a time when hunger is the all-encompassing fear that persistently lives with the community, a time when the diminution of hunger is the community’s constant preoccupation. Clearly, a balance must be struck between a sufficiency of the means of life, a relative freedom of time to fulfill one’s abilities on the most advanced levels of human achievement, and ultimately a degree of self-consciousness, complementarity, and reciprocity that can be called truly human in full recognition of humanity’s potentialities. Not only the functional dictates of needs and wants but also a concept of human beings as more than “thinking animals” (to use Paul Shepard’s expression) must be introduced to define what we mean by scarcity.

These distinctions raise a second and perhaps more complex problem: scarcity can not only impair human survival but impede the actualization of human potentialities. Hence scarcity can be defined in terms of its biological impact and also its cultural consequences. There is a point at which society begins to intervene in the formation of needs to produce a very special type of scarcity: a socially induced scarcity that expresses social contradictions. Such scarcity may occur even when technical development seems to render material scarcity completely unwarranted. Let me emphasize that I am not referring here to new or more exotic wants that social development may turn into needs. A society that has enlarged the cultural goals of human life may generate material scarcity even when the technical conditions exist for achieving outright superfluity in the means of life.

The issue of scarcity is not merely a matter of quantity or even of kind; it can also be a socially contradictory hypostatization of need as such. Just as capitalism leads to production for the sake of production, so too it leads to consumption for the sake of consumption. The great bourgeois maxim “grow or die” has its counterpart in “buy or die.” And just as the production of commodities is no longer related to their function as use-values, as objects of real utility, so wants are no longer related to humanity’s sense of its real needs. Both commodities and needs acquire a blind life of their own; they assume a fetishized form, an irrational dimension, that seems to determine the destiny of the people who produce and consume them. Marx’s famous notion of the “fetishization of commodities” finds its parallel in a “fetishization of needs.” Production and consumption, in effect, acquire suprahuman qualities that are no longer related to technical development and the subject’s rational control of the conditions of existence. They are governed instead by an ubiquitous market, by a universal competition not only between commodities but also between the creation of needs — a competition that removes commodities and needs from rational cognition and personal control.

Needs, in effect, become a force of production, not a subjective force. They become blind in the same sense that the production of commodities becomes blind. Orchestrated by forces that are external to the subject, they exist beyond its control like the production of the very commodities that are meant to satisfy them. This autonomy of needs is developed at the expense of the autonomy of the subject. It reveals a fatal flaw in subjectivity itself, in the autonomy and spontaneity of the individual to control the conditions of his or her own life.

To break the grip of the “fetishization of needs,” to dispel it, is to recover freedom of choice, a project that is tied to the freedom of the self to choose. The words freedom and choice must be emphasized: they exist conjointly and are tied to the ideal of the autonomous individual who is possible only in a free society. Although a hunter-gatherer community may be free from the needs that beleaguer us, it must still answer to very strict material imperatives. Such freedom as it has is the product not of choice but of limited means of life. What makes it “free” are the very limitations of its tool-kit, not an expansive knowledge of the material world. In a truly free society, however, needs would be formed by consciousness and by choice, not simply by environment and tool-kits. The affluence of a free society would be transformed from a wealth of things into a wealth of culture and individual creativity. Hence want would depend not only on technological development but also on the cultural context in which it is formed. Nature’s “stinginess” and technology’s level of development would be important, but only as secondary factors in defining scarcity and need.

The problems of needs and scarcity, in short, must be seen as a problem of selectivity — of choice. A world in which needs compete with needs just as commodities compete with commodities is the warped realm of a fetishized, limitless world of consumption. This world of limitless needs has been developed by the immense armamentarium of advertising, the mass media, and the grotesque trivialization of daily life, with its steady disengagement of the individual from any authentic contact with history. Although choice presupposes a sufficiency in the means of life, it does not imply the existence of a mindless abundance of goods that smothers the individual’s capacity to select use-values rationally, to define his or her needs according to qualitative, ecological, humanistic, indeed, philosophical criteria. Rational choice presupposes not only a sufficiency in the means of life with minimal labor to acquire them; it presupposes above all a rational society.

Freedom from scarcity, or post-scarcity, must be seen in this light if it is to have any liberatory meaning. The concept presupposes that individuals have the material possibility of choosing what they need — not only a sufficiency of available goods from which to choose but a transformation of work, both qualitatively and quantitatively. But not one of these achievements is adequate to the idea of post-scarcity if the individual does not have the autonomy, moral insight, and wisdom to choose rationally. Consumerism and mere abundance are mindless. Choice is vitiated by the association of needs with consumption for the sake of consumption — with the use of advertising and the mass media to render the acquisition of goods an imperative — to make “need” into “necessity” devoid of rational judgment. What is ultimately at stake for the individual whose needs are rational is the achievement of an autonomous personality and selfhood. Just as work, to use Marx’s concepts, defines the subject’s identity and provides it with a sense of the ability to transform or alter reality, so needs too define the subject’s rationality and provide it with a capacity to transform and alter the nature of the goods produced by work. In both cases, the subject is obliged to form judgments that reflect the extent to which it is rational or irrational, free and autonomous or under the sway of forces beyond its control. Post-scarcity presupposes the former; consumerism, the latter. If the object of capitalism or socialism is to increase needs, the object of anarchism is to increase choice. However much the consumer is deluded into the belief that he or she is choosing freely, the consumer is heteronomous and under the sway of a contrived necessity; the free subject, by contrast, is autonomous and spontaneously fulfills his or her rationally conceived wants.

In summary, it is not in the diminution or expansion of needs that the true history of needs is written. Rather, it is in the selection of needs as a function of the free and spontaneous development of the subject that needs become qualitative and rational. Needs are inseparable from the subjectivity of the “needer” and the context in which his or her personality is formed. The autonomy that is given to use-values in the formation of needs leaves out the personal quality, human powers, and intellectual coherence of their user. It is not industrial productivity that creates mutilated use-values but social irrationality that creates mutilated users.

Scarcity does not mean the same thing when applied to a “savage,” peasant, slave, serf, artisan, or a proletarian, any more than it means the same thing when it is applied to a chieftain, lord, master, noble, guildmaster, or merchant. The material needs of a “savage,” peasant, slave, serf, artisan, and proletarian are not so decisively different from each other, but the most important differences that do arise derive from the fact that their individual definitions of scarcity have changed significantly as a result of differences between need structures. Often, the needs of these oppressed classes are generated by their ruling-class counterparts. The history of white bread in the anthropology of needs, for example, is a metaphor for the extent to which tastes associated with gentility — not with physical well-being and survival — are turned into the needs of the lowly as compellingly, in the fetishism of needs, as the very means of survival. Similarly, the ascetic rejection by the lowly of their rulers’ needs has functioned as a compensating role in imparting to the oppressed a lofty sense of moral and cultural superiority over their betters. In both cases, the fetishism of needs has impeded humanity in using its technics rationally and selecting its needs consciously.

Our own skewed concepts of scarcity and needs are even more compelling evidence of this fetishism. Until comparatively recent times, needs retained some degree of contact with material reality and were tempered by some degree of rationality. For all the cultural differences that surrounded the concept of scarcity and needs in the past, their fetishization was almost minimal in comparison with our own times. But with the emergence of a complete market society, the ideal of both limitless production and limitless needs became thoroughly mystified — no less by socialist ideologues than by their bourgeois counterparts. The restraints that Greek social theorists like Aristotle tried to place on the market, however much they were honored in the breach, were completely removed, and objects or use-values began to infiltrate the lofty human goals that society had elaborated from the days of their conception in the polis. The ideals of the past, in effect, had become so thoroughly bewitched by things that they were soon to become things rather than ideals. Honor, today, is more important as a credit rating than as a sense of moral probity; personality is the sum of one’s possessions and holdings rather than a sense of self-awareness and self-cultivation. One could continue this list of contrasts indefinitely.

Having demolished all the ethical and moral limits that once kept it in hand, the market society in turn has demolished almost every historic relationship between nature, technics, and material well-being. No longer is nature’s “stinginess” a factor in explaining scarcity, nor is scarcity conceived as a function of technical development that explains the creation or satisfaction of needs. Both the culture and the technics of modern capitalism have united to produce crises not of scarcity but of abundance or, at least, the expectation of abundance, all chit-chat about “diminishing resources” aside. Western society may accept the reality of economic crises, inflation, and unemployment, and popular credulity has not rejected the myth of a “stingy” nature that is running out of raw materials and energy resources. Abundance, all the more because it is being denied for structural economic reasons rather than natural ones, still orchestrates the popular culture of present-day society. To mix solid Victorian metaphors with contemporary cnes: if “savages” had to perform heroic technical feats to extricate themselves from the “claw and fang” world of the jungle and arrive at a sense of their humanity, then modern consumers in the market society will have to perform equally heroic ethical feats to extricate themselves from the shopping malls and recover their own sense of humanity.

To “disembed” themselves from the shopping mall, they may require more powerful agents than ethics. They may well require a superfluity of goods so immense in quantity that the prevailing fetishism of needs will have to be dispelled on its own terms. Hence the ethical limits that were so redolent with meaning from Hellenic times onward may be inadequate today. We have arrived at a point in history’s account of need where the very capacity to select needs, which freedom from material scarcity was expected to create, has been subverted by a strictly appetitive sensibility. Society may well have to be overindulged to recover its capacity for selectivity. To lecture society about its “insatiable” appetites, as our resource-conscious environmentalists are wont to do, is precisely what the modern consumer is not prepared to hear. And to impoverish society with contrived shortages, economic dislocations, and material deprivation is certain to shift the mystification of needs over to a more sinister social ethics, the mystification of scarcity. This ethos — already crystallized into the “lifeboat ethic,” “triage,” and a new bourgeois imagery of claw-and-fang called survivalism — marks the first step toward ecofascism.