Self-Management and the New Technology

Self-management in all its rich and varied meanings has always been closely wedded to technical developments — often to an extent that has not received the explicit attention it deserves. By emphasizing the association between the two, I do not mean to advance a crude, reductionist theory of technological determinism. People are completely social beings. They develop values, institutions, and cultural relationships that either foster or inhibit the evolution of technics. It need hardly be emphasized that basic technical inventions such as the steam engine, so vital to capitalist, indeed to early industrial society were known to the Hellenistic world more than two millenia ago. That this major source of power was never used as more than a plaything attests to the enormous hold of ancient values and culture on the evolution of technics generally and specifically on eras that were not assimilated to a market-oriented rationality.

But it would be equally crude and in its own way reductionist to deny the extent to which technics, once it is established in one form or another, contributes to humanity’s definitions and interpretations of self-management. This is evident today when self-management is conceived primarily in economic terms such as ‘workers’ control,” “industrial democracy,” “workers participation,” indeed, even as radical anarchosyndicalist demands for “economic collectivization. The fact that this unadorned economic interpretation of self-management has preempted other interpretations of the term, notably forms reminiscent of the municipal confederations of medieval society, the French revolutionary sections of 1793, and the Paris Commune, will be discussed later. This much is clear: when we speak of “selfmanagement, today, we usually mean one or another form of syndicalism. We mean an economic formation that involves the way in which labor is organized, tools and machines deployed, and material resources rationally allocated. In short, we mean technics.

Once we bring technics into the situation, however, we open the way to a number of paradoxes that cannot be dismissed by bellicose rhetoric and moral platitudes. If the role of technics in shaping society and thinking has often been overstated by writers as disparate in their social views as Marshall MacLuhan and Jacques Ellul, its influence in forming social institutions and cultural attitudes cannot be dismissed. The highly economistic meaning we so often impart of the term “self-management” is itself damning evidence of the extent to which industrial society “industrializes” the meaning to terms.[28] The words “self-management” become intellectually dissociated into their components and ideologically opposed to each other. “Management” tends to preempt “self”; administration tends to assume sovereignty over individual autonomy. Owing to the influence of technocratic values over thinking, self-hood — so crucial to the meaning of libertarian management in all aspects of life — is subtly displaced by the virtues of efficient administrative strategies. Accordingly, “self-management” is increasingly promoted for functional rather than liberatory reasons, even by the most committed syndicalists. We are urged to think that small is beautiful” because it yields the conservation of “energy” rather than a human scale that renders society comprehensible and controllable by all. Self-activity and self-management are seen as aspects of industrial logistics that resolve economic and technical problems rather than moral and social ones. Thus the very technocratic society that denies selfhood to humanity establishes the terms of discourse for those who wish to replace it by a libertarian one. It reaches into the sensibility of its most radical opponents by establishing the parameters for their critique and practice, in short, by “industrializing” syndicalism.

No less paradoxical is the limited nature of “self-management” itself when it leaves its technical premises unquestioned. Can we comfortably assume that collectivized enterprises controlled by workers have changed the social, cultural, and intellectual status of workers to a decisive degree? Do factories, mines and large- scale agricultural enterprises become domains of freedom because their operations are now managed — however anarchis- tically — by workers’ collectives ? By eliminating economic exploitation have we actually eliminated social domination? By removing class rule have we removed hierarchical rule? To state the issue bluntly: can present-day technics remain substantially the way it is while the men and women who operate it are expected to undergo significant transformation as human beings?

Here, notions such as “workers’ control,” “industrial democracy,” and “workers’ participation” face the challenge of an exploitative technics in its sharpest form. Perhaps no more compelling argument has been advanced against syndicalist notions of economic organization than the fact that modern technology is intrinsically authoritarian. Such arguments, as we shall see, come not merely from overtly bourgeois ideologists but from seemingly “radical” ones as well. What underpins these arguments from all parts of the political spectrum is a shared assumption that technics is socially neutral. The functional view that technics is merely the instrumental means for humanity’s “metabolism” with nature is broadly accepted as given. That factories are the loci of authority is reduced to a “natural fact” — in short, a fact beyond the purview of ethics and social consideration.

Tragically, when ethical views of technics are removed from their historic and social context, the functional view tends to prevail for precisely the same reason that the ethical view fails — for both views assume that technology is always a matter of mere design, a “given” that is either efficient or not. Only recently have we begun to see a popular questioning of technics as merely “given,” notably with respect to nuclear power installations. The notion that even the “peaceful atom” is intrinsically a “demonic atom” has become very widespread as a result of the Three-Mile- Island meltdown at Harrisburg. What is perhaps most significant about this nuclear “incident” is that critics of nuclear power have focused public attention on new, ecologically sound, and implicitly more humanistic technologies that await development and application. The distinction between “good” and “bad” technics — that is, an ethical evaluation of technical development — has taken root on a scale that is unknown at any time in the past since the early Industrial Revolution.

What I propose to emphasize, here, is the need for proponents of self-management to deal with technics in the same ethical context that anti-nuclear groups deal with energy resources. I propose to ask if the factory, mine, and modern agricultural enterprises can legitimately be regarded as an acceptable arena for a libertarian concept of self-management — and if not, what alternatives exist that can legitimate that concept on a new ethical, social, and cultural level. This responsibility becomes all the more crucial today because “self-management” has increasingly been denatured to mean a mere technical problem in industrial management, one that renders it palatable to sophisticated sections of the bourgeoisie and to neo-Marxian tendencies. “Workers’ control” may even become fashionable management strategy as long as workers consent to remain merely workers. Their “decisions” may be viewed as desirable — indeed, “productive” — if they contribute to the technical rationalization of industrial operations, however “radical” the rhetoric and colorful the institutions within which they “manage” industry.

Yet if self-management remains no more than another form of management of existing forms of technics; if toil is socialized or collectivized rather than transmuted into meaningful self-expression — and if these feeble, indeed, insidious, modifications of the material conditions of life are equated with “freedom” — self-management becomes a hollow goal. Viewed from this perspective, the very concept of self-management requires reexamination if freedom is itself to be rescued from the semantics of technocracy. We would do well to examine some basic conceptions of “self” and “management” — particularly in relation to technological development — before the two words are recoupled again as a liberatory social ideal.

Selfhood has its authentic origins in the Hellenic notion of autonomia, of “self-rule.” The word “rule” deserves emphasis. That autonomia or “autonomy” has come, in our own time, to mean merely “independence” is evidence of our gross simplification of terms that often had a rich ethical meaning in premarket eras. Greek “selfhood” was intimately associated with rule, social rule, the capacity of the individual to directly participate in governing society even before he could manage his economic affairs. The very term “economics,” in fact, denoted the management of the household — the oikos — rather than society, a somewhat inferior, even if necessary, activity by comparison with participation in the community or polis.

Selfhood, I would claim, was thus associated with individual claims to power within society rather than the management of material life. To be sure, the ability to exercise power within society — and thereby to be an individual, a “self” — presupposed the leisure and material freedom afforded by a well-managed household. But once this oikos was granted, “selfhood” presupposed considerably more, and these presuppositions are tremendously significant for our own age, when the self has become grossly powerless and individuality has become little more than a euphemism for egotism.

To begin with, selfhood implied the recognition of individual competence. Autonomia or “self-rule” would have been completely meaningless if the fraternity of selves that composed the Hellenic polis (notably, the Athenian democracy) was not constituted of men of strong character who could discharge the formidable responsibilities of “rule.” The polis, in short, rested on the premise that its citizens could be entrusted with “power” because they possessed the personal capacity to use power in a trustworthy fashion. The education of citizens into rule was therefore an education into personal competence, intelligence, moral probity, and social commitment. The ecclesia of Athens, a popular assembly of the citizen body that met at least forty times a year, was the testing ground of this education into self-rule; the agora, the public square where Athenians transacted almost every aspect of their affairs, was its authentic school. Selfhood, in effect, originated first and foremost in a politics of personality, not in processes of production.[29] It is almost meaningless etymologically to dissociate the word “self” from the capacity to exercise control over social life, to “rule” in the Greek sense of the term. Denied its characterological meaning — its connotations of personal fortitude and moral probity — selfhood dissolves into mere “egohood,” that hollow, often neurotic shell of human personality that lies strewn amid the wastes of bourgeois society like the debris of its industrial operations.

To divest selfhood of these personal traits is to be irresponsibly footloose with any term to which the word “self” is appended. “Self-activity,” to use another common expression, implies the activation of these strong character traits in social processes. It, too, rests on the demanding foundations of a politics of personality that is educative of the individual, formative of his or her capacity to intervene and directly alter social events, and, carried into action itself, to enter into a shared social practice. Without the personal judgment, moral force, will, and sensibility to be active in this full and direct sense of the term, such a self would atrophy and its activity would be reduced to a relationship based on obedience and command. Self-activity, in this sense, can only be direct action. But direct action, like rule, can only be understood as the predicates of a self that is engaged in the social processes these terms denote. Self, the education toward selfhood, and the exercise of selfhood — almost as a daily gymnastic in the making of individuality — is an end in itself,, the culmination of what we so flippantly call “self-actualization.

Anarchist organization and its policy of direct action is, by definition, the educational instrument for achieving these time- honored goals. It is the agora, as it were, for a politics of personality. The “affinity group” form, at its best, is a unique form of consociation based on a mutual recognition of competence in all its members or, at least, the need to attain competence. Where such groups cease to educate toward this goal, they become mere euphemisms. Worse, they “produce militants rather than anarchists, subordinates rather than selves. Optimally, the anarchist affinity group is an ethical union of free, morally strong individuals who can directly participate in consensual rule because they are competent and live in a mutual recognition of each other’s competence. Only when they have attained this condition and thereby sufficiently revolutionized themselves as selves can they profess to be revolutionaries — to be the citizens of a future libertarian society.

I have dwelt upon these aspects of the term “self” — and only space prevents me from dealing with it in the detail it deserves — because it has become the weakest link in the concept of “selfmanagement.” Until such selves are minimally attained, selfmanagement becomes a contradiction in terms. Self-management without the “self” that is expected to engage in this “managing,” in fact, turns into its very opposite: hierarchy based on obedience and command. The abolition of class rule in no way challenges the existence of such hierarchical relations. They may exist within the family between sex and age groups, among disparate ethnic groups, within bureaucracies and in administrative social groups that profess to be executing the policies of a libertarian organization or a libertarian society. There is no way to immunize any social formation, even the most dedicated anarchist groups, from hierarchical relations except through the wisdom of “self-consciousness” that comes from the “self- actualization” of the individual’s potentiality for selfhood. This has been the message of western philosophy from Socrates to Hegel. Its plea for wisdom and self-consciousness as the sole guide to truth and insight remains even more compelling today than it did in earlier, more articulated social eras.

Before turning to the challenge posed by technics in the process of “self-formation,” it is important to remember that self- rule — autonomia — historically precedes the modern notion of “self-management.” Ironically, the fact that autonomia denotes “independence” with its implications of a free-wheeling materialistic bourgeois ego rather than a socially involved individual is significant. Self-rule applies to society as a whole, not merely to the economy. Hellenic selfhood found its fullest expression in the polis rather than the oikos , in the social community rather than the technical. Once we cross the threshold of history, selfmanagement is the management of villages, neighborhoods, towns, and cities. The technical sphere of life is conspicuously secondary to the social. In the two revolutions that open the modern era of secular politics — the American and French — self-management emerges in the libertarian town meetings that swept from Boston to Charleston and the popular sections that assembled in Parisian quatiers. The intensely civic nature of selfmanagement stands in marked contrast to its crassly economic nature today. It would be redundant, given Kropotkins impressive work in this field, to explore earlier social periods for evidence of this juxtaposition or enter into additional details. The fact remains that self-management had a broader meaning in libertarian practice than it has at the present time.

Here, technics must be assigned a greater role in producing this change than it ordinarily receives. The tool-using artisan nature of pre-capitalist societies always provided a material space for a subterranean libertarian development, even when politically centralized states had attained a considerable degree of growth. Beneath the imperial institutions of European and Asian states lay the clannic, village, and guild systems of consociation that neither army nor tax farmer could effectively demolish. Both Marx and Kropotkin include classic descriptions of this archaic social network — an ancient, seemingly faceless world impervious to change or destruction. The Hellenic polis and the Christian congregation added the rich tints of individuality — of selfhood and self-consciousness — to this tapestry until self-management acquired the resplendent colors of a highly individuated world. In the urban democracies of central Europe and Italy, as in the polis of the Greek promontory, municipal self-management in towns scaled to comprehensible human dimensions reached a colorful, if brief, effloresence in the fullest sense of the term. The norms of a socially committed individualism were established that were to haunt the American and French revolutions centuries later and define the most advanced concepts of self and management into our own time.

There can be no return to these periods — either socially or technically. Their limits are only too clear to excuse an atavistic yearning for the past. But the social and technical forces that were to destroy them are even more transitory than we tend to believe. I will focus, here, on the technical dimension to the exclusion of the institutional. Of the technical changes that separate our own era from past ones, no single “device” was more important than the least “mechanical” of all — the factory. At the risk of casting all caution to the winds, I will aver that neither Watt’s steam engine nor Bessemer’s steel furnace was more significant than the simple process of rationalizing labor into an industrial engine for the production of commodities. Machinery, in the conventional sense of the term, heightened this process vastly — but the systematic rationalization of labor to serve labor in ever-specialized tasks totally demolished the technical structure of self-managed societies and ultimately of workmanship — the “selfhood” of the economic realm.

We must pause to weigh the meaning of these remarks. Artisanship relies on skill and a surprisingly small toolkit. Skill, in fact, is its real premise: training and long experience in a rich variety of expressive, often artistic tasks; highly purposeful, often intellectual activity; dexterity of fingers and coordination of body; the challenge of a rich variety of stimuli and subtle expressions of self. Its background is the work song, its spirituality the pleasure of articulating in raw materials their own latent possibilities for acquiring a pleasing and useful form. Not surprisingly, Plato’s deity is literally a craftsman who imprints the forms on matter. The presuppositions that support these artisan traits are obvious — a roundedness and fullness of personal virtuosity that is ethical, spiritual, and esthetic as well as technical. True craftsmanship is loving work, not onerous toil. It arouses the senses, not dulls them. It adds dignity to humanity, not demeans it. It gives free range to the spirit, not aborts it. Within the technical sphere it is the expression of selfhood par excellence — of individuation, consciousness, and freedom. These words dance throughout every account of well-crafted objects and artistic works.

The factory worker lives merely on the memory of such traits. The din of the factory drowns out every thought, not to speak of any song; the division of labor denies the worker any relationship to the commodity; the rationalization of labor dulls his or her senses and exhausts his or her body. There is no room whatever for any of the artisan’s modes of expression — from artistry to spirituality — other than an interaction with objects that reduces the worker to a mere object. The distinction between artisan and worker hardly requires elucidation. But two significant facts stand out that turn the transformation from craft to factory into a social and characterological disaster. The first fact is the dehumanization of the worker into a mass being; the second is the worker’s reduction into a hierarchical being.

There is a certain significance in the fact that this devolution of the artisan into a mere toiler was adduced by Marx and Engels as evidence of the proletariat’s intrinsically revolutionary traits. And it is precisely in this gross misjudgment of the proletariat’s destiny that syndicalism often follows in the wake of Marxism. Both ideologies share the notion that the factory is the “school” of revolution (in the case of syndicalism, of social reconstruction) rather than its undoing. Both share a common commitment to the factory’s structural role as a source of social mobilization.

For better or worse, Marx and Engels express these views more clearly than syndicalist — and anarchosyndicalist — theorists. Conceived as a mass being or a class being, Marx’s proletariat becomes a mere instrument of history. Its very depersonalization into a category of political economy ironically frees it of every human trait but need, “urgent, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need...” As pure “class” or social “agent,” comparable to the pure, disenchanted social world produced by capitalism, it has no personal will but only a historical one. It is an instrument of history in the strictest sense of the term. Thus, to Marx, “The question is not what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat considers as its aim. The question is what the proletariat is, and what, consequent on that being , it will be compelled to do.”

Here, being is separated from person, action from will, social activity from selfhood. Indeed, it is the very divestiture of the proletariat’s selfhood — its dehumanization — that gives it the quality of a “universal” social agent, one that gives it almost transcendental social qualities. My quotations, taken from The Holy Family of the early 1840s, were to permeate Marx’s writings for decades to follow. Without bearing them in mind during readings of Marx in his later works, these works become

unintelligible — all rhetoric about the moral superiority of the proletariat notwithstanding to the contrary.

Accordingly, it is not surprising to find that for Marx the factory provides a virtually ecclesiastical arena for the schooling of this social “agent.” Here, technics functions not only as a means for humanity s metabolism with nature but for humanity’s metabolism with itself. Together with the centralization of industry through competition and expropriation, “the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production,” declares Marx in the closing pages of volume one of Capital. “The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it... This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.” (My emphasis — M.B.)

The importance of these famous lines by Marx lies in the revolutionary function they assign to the factory, its role in training, uniting, and organizing the proletariat “by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production.” The factory, one might very well say, almost “fabricates” revolution with the same impersonality that it “fabricates” commodities. But even more significant is the fact that is “fabricates” the proletariat itself. This specific view is intrinsic to syndicalism as well. Paradoxically, the factory structure in both cases is not merely a technical structure; it is also a social structure. Marx tends to disdain it historically as a domain of necessity, one whose invasion into life must ultimately be attenuated by the free-time required for communism. Syndicalism hypostasizes this structure; it forms the contours for a libertarian society. Both, however, underscore its significance as a technical arena for social organization, whether it be for the proletariat as a class or for society as a whole.

We arrive at the troubling fact that this structure, far from functioning as a force for social change, actually functions as a force for social regression. Marxism and syndicalism alike, by virtue of their commitment to the factory as a revolutionary social arena, must recast self-management to mean the industrial management of the self. For Marxism this poses no problem. Selfhood can never exist within the factory walls. The factory serves not only to mobilize and train the proletariat but to dehumanize it. Freedom is to be found not within the factory but rather outside it. For freedom “cannot consist of anything else but of the fact that socialized man, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power...” Marx observes in volume three of Capital. “But it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day is its fundamental premise.”

Obviously, the factory conceived as a “realm of necessity” requires no need for self-management. Indeed, it is the very antithesis of a school for self-formation like the agora and the Hellenic notion of education. For contemporary Marxists to ape their syndicalist opponents by demanding “workers’ control” of industry is a travesty of the very spirit of Marx’s concept of freedom. It is to demean a great thinker in his own name on terms that are completely alien to his ideas. Appropriately, Engels, in his essay “On Authority,” draws Marx’s critique of anarchism to its harshest conclusions precisely on the basis of factory operations. Authority, conceived as “the imposition of the will of another upon ours,” as “subordination,” is unavoidable in any industrial society, including communism. It is a natural fact of modern technics, as indispensable (in Engels’ view) as the factory itself. Engels then proceeds to detail this view against the anarchists with the philistine exactitude of the Victorian mind. Coordination of industrial operations presupposes subordination to command; indeed, to the “despotism” of automatic machinery and the “necessity of authority,... of imperious authority” to managerial command. (My emphasis — M.B.) Engels never fails us in our narrowest prejudices on this score. He deftly skips from the commanding role of cotton-spinning machinery to the “instantaneous and absolute obedience” required by the captain of a ship. Coordination is dutifully confused with command, organization with hierarchy, agreement with domination — indeed, “imperious” domination.

What is more interesting than the fallacies of Engels’ essay is its insidious truths. The factory is, in fact, a realm of necessity — not a realm of freedom. It is a school for hierarchy, for obedience and command, not for a liberatory revolution. It reproduces the servility of the proletariat and undermines its selfhood, its capacity to transcend need. Accordingly, insofar as self-management, self-activity, and selfhood are the very essence of the “realm of freedom,” they must be denied at the “material base” of society while they are presumably affirmed in its “superstructure” — at least as long as the factory and the technics of capitalist production are conceived merely as technics, as natural facts of production.

On the other hand, viewed as a social arena, we must further conceive that this dehumanized realm of necessity — riddled by “imperious authority” — can somehow enlarge the class consciousness of a dehumanized working being into a universal social consciousness; that this being, divested of all selfhood in its daily life of toil can recover the social commitment and competence puresupposed by a sweeping social revolution and a truly free society based on self-management in the broadest sense of the term. Finally, we must conceive that this free society can remove hierarchy in one realm while “imperiously” fostering it in another, perhaps more basic one. Carried to its fullest logic, the paradox assumes absurd proportions. Hierarchy, like overalls, becomes a garment that one discards in the “realm of freedom” only to don it again in the “realm of necessity.” Like a see saw, freedom rises and falls at the point where we place our social fulcrum — possibly at the center of the plank in one “stage” of history, closer to one end or another at other “stages, but in any event strictly measurable by the length of the “working day.”

Syndicalism shares this fatal paradox no less than Marxism. Its redeeming virtue lies in its implicit awareness — virtually explicit in the works of Charles Fourier — that technics must be divested of its hierarchical and joyless character if society is to be freed of these burdens. With syndicalism, however, this awareness is often warped by its acceptance of the factory as the infrastructure of the new society within the old, as a model for working class organization, and as a school for the humanization of the proletariat and its mobilization as a revolutionary social force. Hence, technics raises a startling dilemma for libertarian concepts of self-management. From what source are workers — indeed, all dominated people such as women, young and elderly people, ethnic groups, and cultural communities — to acquire the subjectivity that fosters selfhood? What technologies can supplant the hierarchical mobilization of labor into factories? And finally, what constitutes “management” that involves the fostering of authentic competence, moral probity, and wisdom ?

The answer to each of these questions would require a sizable work in itself. In this article, I will confine myself in cursory fashion to the second question: the new, potentially non-hierarchical technologies that could supplant the factory as the technics for a libertarian society — one which I identify with anarchocom- munism.

Technics is no more a “natural fact” than our chemically treated food crops and our synthetically fermented beverages. Even Marx is obliged to treat it in a social context when he sees it in term of its class functions. Far from being a “given,” it is potentially the most malleable of humanity’s modes of “metabolizing” with nature. The institutions, values, and cultural shibboleths with which humans engage in a “metabolic” relationship with the natural world are often less amenable to change than the tools and machines that give them material tangibility. Their “primacy” over social relations, technological determinists notwithstanding to the contrary, is mythic. They are immersed in a social world of human intentions, needs, wills, and interactions.

The factory exhibits this social dimension with a vengeance. Its appearance in the world was determined not by strictly mechanical factors but organic ones. It was a means for rationalizing labor, not for implementing labor with tools. Once this fact is fully weighed, the factory ceases to enjoy the autonomy it acquires from Engels and his acolytes. It is a “realm of necessity” only insofar as a need remains for its existence. But this need is not strictly technical; to the contrary, it is largely social. The factory is the realm of hierarchy and domination, not the battleground of “man’s” conflict with nature. Once its functions

as an instrument of human domination are questioned, we can reasonably ask how valid is the “need” for its perpetuation. By the same token, money, weapons, and nuclear power plants are instruments of a society gone mad. Once the insanity of society is lifted, we can also ask how valid is the “need” for their perpetuation. “Need” itself is a socially conditioned phenomenon — a fact not unknown to Marx by any means — that may be intrinsically rational or irrational. The “realm of necessity” thus has highly elastic, perhaps ineffable boundaries; in fact, it is as “necessary” socially as the vision one has of freedom. To separate one from the other inexorably is sheer ideology, for it may well be that freedom does not “base” itself on the “realm of necessity” but really determines it.

To Fourier, this conclusion was implicit in the best lines of his writings. The two “realms” of necessity and freedom were resynthesized into a higher level of societal behavior and values in which joy, creativity, and pleasure were ends in themselves. Freedom had subsumed necessity and joy has subsumed toil. But such sweeping notions cannot be advanced abstractly. They must be established concretely — or else the rich possibilities of reality become elusive categories that deny the claims of imagination. Hence the enormous power of utopian thinking at its best: the ability to show almost visually what so often remains the abstractions of competing ideologies. Consider concretely, indeed utopistically, the alternatives that may turn arduous work into festive play: a harvest that is marked by dancing, feasting, singing, and loving contrasted with the monotony of gang labor or deadening mechanization. One form of harvesting reinforces community; the other, isolation and a sense of oppression. The same task performed esthetics may be a work of art; performed under the lash of domination, it becomes an ignominious burden. The identical task under conditions of freedom is an esthetic experience; under conditions of domination, it becomes onerous toil. To assume that every arduous task must be a tormenting one is a social judgment that is determined by the social structure itself, not simply the technical conditions of work. The employer who demands silence from his employes is, in fact, an employer. The same work may be performed playfully, creatively, imaginatively, even artistically in the absence of social constraints that identify responsability with renunciation and efficiency with sobriety.

Elsewhere, I have assessed and inventoried the technical alternatives that are available to existing forms of technology.[30] Since this assessment, there is much I would add and much I would reject in the technical aspects of my account. Perhaps more important than any details which can now be found in such outstanding books like Radical Technology by British anarchists are the principles I would want to emphasize here. A new technology is emerging — a technology no less significant for the future than the factory is for the present. Potentially, it lends itself to a sifting of existing technics in terms of their ecological integrity and their impact on human freedom. On its own terms, it can be a highly decentralized technics that is human in scale, simple in construction, and naturalistic in orientation. It can acquire its energy from the sun and wind, from recycled wastes and replenishable “resources” such as timber. It affords the possibility of making food cultivation into a spiritually and materially rewarding form of gardening. It is restorative of the environment and, perhaps more significantly, of personal and communal autonomy.

This new technology may rightly be called a “people’s technology.” The French-intensive community gardens spontaneously opened by ghetto dwellers in gutted neighborhoods of New York, the hand-crafted solar panels that are gradually appearing on the rooftops of tenements, the small windmills that have been reared aloft beside them to generale electric power — all, taken together, express new initiatives by ordinarily passive communities to reclaim control over the material conditions of their lives. What counts is not whether a food cooperative can replace a giant supermarket or a community garden the produce supplied by agribusiness or a wind-powered generator the electricity supplied by a smothering public utility. The cooperatives, gardens, and windmills are the technical symbols of a resurgence of selfhood that is ordinarly denied to the ghetto “masses” and a growing sense of competence that is ordinarily denied to a client citizenry. The factory image of the city, even of citizenship, has already gone so far in repressing the smallest sparks of public life that technical and institutional alternatives may be able to go far enough to restore a sense of self-management in its traditional civic forms.

If one grants the silence that exists in factories today, the most important voices for self-management in any popular sense are heard from the neighborhoods of municipalities (perhaps its most traditional source), from feminist and ecological movements, from “masses” that have acquired a new stake in personal, cultural, sexual, and civic autonomy. The new technology to which I have alluded has not initiated this development. If anything, it may well be the result of a new sensibility of selfhood and competence that an overbearing technocratic society has produced as a result of its own repressive excesses. Solar and wind power and community gardens are vastly older technical strategies than the factory. That they have been revived as a people’s technology suggests a driving need to disengage from a social system whose greatest weakness and strength is its all-encompassing nature. But these alternative technics provide a new, perhaps historic context for social change. They impart the tangible possibility for a recovery of self-management with all the rich nuances of the past, albeit without a return to the past. Their concreteness makes them thoroughly utopian, even realistically rather than visionary. Finally, as educative devices for community, they tend to create a politics of personality that compares only with the anarchist “affinity group” as an educative arena.

Alternatives are today in conflict on a scale comparable only to the breakdown of traditional society on the eve of the capitalist era. The same new technology can also become a corporate technology — the bases for solar power utilities, space satellites, and an “organic” agribusiness comparable only to the highly chemicalized one so prevalent today. The decentralized gardens, solar panels, windmills, and recycling centers can be centralized, industrialized, and structured along rationalized hierarchical lines. Neither Marxism nor syndicalism can comprehend the nature of these alternatives, much less their subtle implications. Yet rarely has there been a greater need for theoretical insight into the possibilities that lie before us, indeed, the historically new directions which humanity may follow. In the absence of a libertarian interpretation of these directions, of a libertarian consciousness that articulates the logic of this new technical framework, we may well witness the integration of a people s technology into a managerial and technocratic society. In which case, we will have been reduced like a Greek chorus to lamentations and incantations to a fate that leaves the future predetermined and cruelly destined to efface the entire human experience. This may be a heroic posture — but it is also a futile one.