Capitalism and Technology:
To Whose Benefit,
At What Costs?

by Doug Dowd

This is a paper given as the keynote address for the 32nd Annual Pacific Northwest Labor History Association Conference, May 19–21 2000, Tacoma, Washington

The theme of of the conference was "From Artisanship to Information Age: Lessons for Labor's Struggle."

Introduction

In 1917, as war ripped Europe apart, the already famous Einstein wrote to a friend that “Our much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.” Subsequently, in showing that E=mc2, Einstein paved the way for the making of a bomb that destroys a city in one fell swoop, and for the USA and USSR to build tens of thousands of such bombs, enabling mankind to wipe itself and most other species off the map in a matter of days.

Einstein — a pacifist, mind you — fought valiantly and long against the use of the atomic bomb both before and after Hiroshima. His was neither the first nor the last instance of a “father of invention” discovering that once the genie is out of the bottle it is also up for grabs; the most recent instance has to do with contemporary scientific/technological advances. That will be examined later on.

Any technological development, simple or complicated, can be used both constructively and destructively; in which direction it will go clearly depends entirely upon who has the power to decide upon the why, the when, and the how of its use — and, in consequence, who will benefit and who and what will be harmed.

The use and misuse of technology coincides with the evolution and survival of our species, from knives and spears to computers. The focus here will be confined to the modern era and Western technology except to note that whether in the prehistoric past or today, one thing has not changed: technology serves the interests of the most powerful. That there often have been “collateral benefits” for the non-powerful, is of course true. But.

It is a very large “but.” Over technology's history, its many dimensions have increasingly shaped and permeated all of human and social existence. In the beginning that was so most obviously for workers, whose exploitation rose and whose whole way of life was ruined as industrialization took hold. Ah! economists have said for over two hundred years and still say: but in the long-run, all this is for the good of all.

How such economists define “the good” and the reference of “all” is itself a problem; as also is their obliviousness to the decadence and corruption and environmental destruction that have characterized industrial capitalism; of which, more later.
At least, economists typically say, exploitation — if it ever was, they will also say — is no longer a hallmark of industrialization; indeed, quite the opposite, as witness the levels of real income of industrial workers in the strongest countries. That may be seen, they say, as a portent of what lies ahead for those in the emerging economies, if they follow the guidelines set out for them by others' experience. There is much wrong with that observation; let us focus first on exploitation.

Not only in the the poorer but also in the richest economies exploitation is in fact rising, in both cases facilitated by technological “progress.” In the “emerging economies,” accelerating from the 1970s to the present, it is clear that hundreds of millions have had their lives ruined, lost their lands, fled to hostile cities, and been subjected to brutal exploitation in ways and degrees at least repeating and usually exceeding those of the industrial revolution.

And, as regards the poor countries, something more: Whatever might be said about “the long run” when it was applied to what became the rich — and imperializing — nations, it cannot be said for what have been and in different and even worse ways today, remain, the imperialized societies. A vital basis for the move to strength of the now-rich countries was their ability to steal the resources of what became the Third World (including their human resources, both as slaves or desperate “free” workers). There is no such world for the “emerging economies” to exploit (with apparent but not meaningful exceptions such as Taiwan, Singapore, or South Korea); and their natural and human resources continue to be exploited, even more intensively.

But surely the good times roll in the rich countries? For at least a large minority (as “good times” are defined), yes; for the majority, not quite; and for that majority's bottom half, not at all. The United States is the richest of all nations, now at its richest. As we have approached that peak, worker exploitation has been rising: Business Week (Dec 6, 1999) reported that the average worker (not just the poorest) put in 260 hours more in 1999 — that is six weeks of extra work — than in 1989, with little or no wage increases. As will be remarked later, that “phenomenon” is a consequence, as usual, of the combination of business power and the uses to which new technologies can be put: in this case, not least, the new “information“ technology.

But there is more. In the past century, to the exploitation of workers must be added the manipulation of consumers (in terms both of borrowing and spending) and citizens (through the now utter corruption of the political process) and the quickening destruction of nature — all of this expedited by media technology and hurried along by business power.

I proceed next to examine the first major steps in all those directions, for reasons that I trust will become evident. In doing so, it may be thought that, except for details, nothing much has changed; unfortunately, that is wrong. An examination of the particulars, the scope, and the depths of looming disasters shows a major change for the worse from even the major agonies of the industrial revolution, for both rich and poor nations. One reason for that is the much greater potency of technology today; another is the much greater concentration of business power now than ever before — and the accompanying geographic and social breadth wherein and how it is used.

“As the twig is bent, so inclines the tree”

For present purposes, it all began with the enclosure movement in agriculture in 18th century England. The associated destruction of “the bold peasantry” provided Britain's industrial capitalism with an exploitable, because powerless, working class.

Technology, defined as the set of relationships between human beings and nature, comprises not only tools, machinery, computers, and jets, but also organization. Thus, as capitalism was taking firm hold in Britain, a major organizational change in agriculture — from independent small farmers to large estates using wage labor — also meant disaster for the fabled “yeomanry” (small independent farmers), a devastating process being repeated wholesale in the Third World economies in our own day, often in the name of the “green revolution” (where green does not signify Greens).

Enclosure meant that hundreds of thousands of farm families (formerly sustained both by farming and the putting-out system of cottage industry) had their lands and thus their entire productive lives pulled out from under them. It was rationalized then, as now, in the name of efficiency: it was the “downsizing” that fed the early industrial revolution. But for the displaced families, the cultivation of their small plots had not been a matter of efficiency or inefficiency; it was, instead, their living and a way of life. What was true then is so now, whether for deskilled industrial workers or uprooted peasants.

The chaos accompanying the changes meant a combination of fear and helplessness for those “enclosed out.” The Irish poet Goldsmith characterized the process famously, in 1770: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates and men decay.…”

By 1790, 80 percent of the cultivable land of England had been appropriated by 2,000 to 3,000 families. The largest percentage of those pushed off the land had literally nowhere to go: they were prohibited from leaving their parish, where the number of jobs was much exceeded by the number of those needing them; nor were there other jobs: the first factory utilizing the combined technological advances of cotton textiles and of steam power was not until 1815. Until then, two to three generations of numberless ex-farming families languished in poverty and desperation, barely — or not — surviving, dependent upon what today is called welfare.

In that pre-industrial world, the so-called Poor Laws required the landed gentry to provide for the “poor” (which then meant the unemployed). Malthus was from such a family; he who, in 1798, became influential with his continuing tracts against the poor and any and all attempts to keep them alive. Although, as part of the gentry, Malthus was against industrialism, the arguments he made were vital for the creation of the cruel industrial workhouses of his day. Like Reagan in our time, Malthus served industrialism well in his own day, and his arguments have been revived to that end.

Malthus's sole virtue was that he didn't mince words.
His famous theory that population must increase faster than food supplies he used to argue that, for their own (and others') good, the poor should be left to starve, and “to hasten disease upon them.” In fact, from his day to ours food supplies  — though not their availability to the poor — have always increased faster than population. Nonetheless, in our sentimental and dishonest era, we have learned to spin Malthusian ideas, in the name of “tough love.”

Britain thus created the “satanic mills” (Blake). As the early stages of textile technology in weaving and spinning were introduced in the 18th century, they gave birth to the first workers' riots; they erupted intermittently, becoming famous with those of the machine-breakers (or Luddites) of the early 19th century. But then as now, those who protested technological change were not protesting the technology as such, but the ways in which it was — or was not — used. And in our time?

Technology run amok, business in charge, democracy de-fanged

The industrial revolution is usually seen as taking place in the years (roughly) 1750–1850. After, there were two other periods of pronounced and rapid change, from the 1860s into the 1920s, and from the 1930s to the present. The second period moved beyond coal and steel and steam into mass production and global steam-powered transportation (by rail and ship) and concomitant cheapness in just about everything: food, raw materials, power, fuels, and (as noted) transportation itself — and began the era of production dependent upon physics and chemistry: upon, that is, science. And thus was laid the basis for the third period, our own, with its jets and container ships, its electronics, its synthetics.

Among the many differences between the earlier periods and the present one stands out: technology, which once had its reference entirely to production processes, now infiltrates and conditions every nook and cranny of existence: in all of civilian and military production still, of course, but now also in health care, education, finance, in entertainment, in “information,” in…everything.

This could have meant a redistribution downward of income, wealth and power, especially considering that it occurred in the very period in which political democracy — for the first time — had come to characterize all the leading industrial capitalist powers (including the fascist powers, before and then after their fascist years). Concentrated economic power has now deepened and spread to become concentrated socioeconomic and political power — in turn controlled principally by the economically powerful. Call it what you will — “the establishment,” “ruling class,” “power elite,” concentrated power continues to preside over the use and misuse of past and present technological advances.

Vital in their ability to maintain and solidify, indeed to extend their power, has been the role of media technology — in conjunction with consumerism, it will be argued later — in winning for them “the hearts and minds” of the general population; that is, their acquiescence, or even enthusiasm, pretty much no matter what.

Beginning in the 1920s in the United States, and becoming full-blown by the 1960s, that “consciousness industry” (Ensenzberger) had been created. Subsequently, it has been maintained and strengthened through the formal and, even more, the informal educational processes of the media, under the broad or narrow guidance and financing of the business world. Its victories have accordingly spread throughout the entire social process. We cannot examine that whole spectrum here; what will be attempted, in desperate brevity, is the interaction between three presumably separate fields of battle: consumerism, work, and politics.

Consumerism began in the United States in the 1920s, and was abruptly derailed by the depression. It came raging back into new strengths after World War II, facilitated by a long period of economic expansion, the politically accomplished “social wage” (which released money for consumer expenditures), and an always more sophisticated media world. But consumerism must be distinguished from consumption; it differs from consumption as gluttony does from three square meals a day. Consumerism does not have reference to the satisfaction of normal human needs; rather, as Paul Baran has put it, it depends upon us having been “taught to want what we don't need and not to want what we do.”

Again, there is much more to it. First, we are “taught&148; to act in that manner by the deliberate appeal to the irrational in us: to our envy, our insecurities, our fears, and so on. Second, the always rising levels of buying that must accompany consumerism (if it is to serve its prime function of keeping business profitable) also require something else: slipping and then plunging into debt. We may be brief: from 1978 to early 2000, household debt (which excludes mortgage debt) rose from from 62 to 102 percent of disposable (after-tax) personal income. (Business Week, Nov 20, 1999,  and New York Times). In 1960, even 50 percent would have been seen as on the wild side.

The persuasive powers that lead people to borrow and buy so precariously (bankruptcies are also skyrocketing) are facilitated by technologies controlled by business power; that, combined with the ongoing weakness of unions, centrist-right politics, and downsizing-outsourcing, have made workers always more vulnerable to pressure to work more without being paid more. The average worker's extra 260 hours work (noted earlier) is explained by that, more than anything else. Nor does it end there: an increasingly widespread practice is for workers to have their timecards punched at the usual hour ending the day, and then go on working; and the accelerating increase of part-time temporary workers, although it serves a useful purpose for some, is, for most not a choice but all they can get. One reason for that, of course, is neatly expressed in a recent piece in Fortune Small Business (April 2000): “Temporary employees are beloved by many employers, because they're cheaper and more flexible than those you put on payroll.” “Cheaper” for more than one reason: no union, no pensions or health care…no problem.

And then there is the obscene waste of human resources and possibilities that is contained in the large share of production that is humanly and socially useless, whether that refers to the common practice in durable consumer goods of “deliberate obsolescence” (carried to perfection in computers now), nor the gross waste of the military. But waste is not to be measured that simply; it must be thought of also as the desirable alternatives foregone. Those wastes might well be seen as social criminality, considering how all those workers and all those resources could have been used to enhance their own and others' lives and their societies. Nor have we taken time to do more than mention ongoing and increasing environmental waste, much of it destructive waste.

The foregoing is not merely or mostly a litany of annoyance and outrage. It describes an ongoing crisis whose proportions have already been lethal on a large scale and that threaten to expand always further. And then there are the latest technological marvels.

Some of you will have read a feature article in the New York Times of March 13, 2000, headlined “Technologists Get a Warning and a Plea from One of Their Own.” The one is Bill Joy, chief scientist at Sun Microsystems. His fears concern developments issuing from robotics, genetics, and nanotechnology. Concerning the latter, Mr. Joy sees the expected increase of computer capabilities by a thousand-fold as having the potential for “the accidental release of a submicroscopic self-replicating mechanism that could cause widespread destruction.” It was such possibilities, one reads, that drove Theodore Kaczynski over the edge.

Of the abuse and misuse of technology, there will be no end, so long as it is capital's wants, not human needs and possibilities, that guide its use. Marx put it forcefully long ago:

Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil.…(Capital, I, 645) All told, then, no matter who we are, where we live, or what we do for a living, our work is cut out for us, if we are to live in a safe, sane, and decent society.

What we can and must do

The existence of political democracy provides ordinary people with the means to change the society for the better, of course, both through unions and diverse political efforts. But such opportunities mean little unless they are used, and they are unlikely to be used without a two-sided effort: to unlearn what we have been socialized to take as “common sense” and replace it with good sense: to learn the full realities of the interaction of business power with our much-praised technological progress and, most importantly to teach ourselves the ways to mount a broad and deep political movement that does not depend upon crumbs from the table of establishment politics.

Such a movement, in my opinion, must have organized labor at its center if it is to succeed; but organized labor by itself can at most gain benefits for its own members; it cannot gain the power to overcome the extensive applications of business power to the larger social process — within which, as has been seen, organized labor can be weakened — let alone to “civilize” technology.

If, acting together, we are make gains toward that end, there is much to do; high on that list is what we have to unlearn, as well as to learn: habits are harder to break than to make, and “unlearning” is no easy task. That is not because of some intrinsic complexity in the matters to be shucked off, but to the sticking-power of ideology — another term for what we call “common sense,” for what we have come to take for granted in distinguishing between good and bad, right and wrong, desirable and horrible. A large part of the difficulties in forming a strong political movement sits in that seat of “common sense.” With sufficient learning we will learn to set that aside in favor of good sense.

This being the business society par excellence, what we have most to unlearn is the ideology that serves the business system — and not only because that ideology guides policy also in the realms of government, the media, and (among other areas) education.

Our ideology tells us to see the business system — now with the smiling face of “the free market” — as simultaneously competent, efficient and responsible. Some of that is so; more of it is not. In an era when technology's powers, already immense, are always multiplying, we cannot trust business — whose driving force is, after all, the search for individual gain — to make decisions affecting all the people, all the time, all over; and all of nature as well. There have been too many Pinto bumpers, too many thalidomide babies, too many Love Canals, too many lung cancers, too many… — and too much denial and obstructionism all along the way. So it's up to us.

Much work was done in the past, of course; good work, with good results, both before and after World War II, to civilize “rugged capitalism” here and (even more) elsewhere — work that gave many of us effective unions, pensions, health care and better wages, along with laws against discrimination of most kinds, and so on. But: 1) since the 1970s, much that was won has been in a process of regression; moreover, 2) there was much that needed winning earlier that was never fought for at all, let alone won.

As noted earlier, ours is richest society in the world, now at its richest. It is time overdue for its human and natural resources and its technologies to be used properly and for the people as a whole, here and over the entire globe. A program seeking to move in that direction might well include the following as a substantial starting point:

 • Equal opportunity for all, “from womb to tomb”; — full access by all children to an educational system that provides not just training (but does at least that) but also provides young people with the opportunity to understand and to appreciate their society, themselves, and nature;

  • A publicly-funded universal health care system that meets all the needs of everyone, both for prevention and cure;

  • Affordable housing for all;

  • A social security system that provides for the comfort and security of the aged and the disabled, funded not by payroll
deductions (unless they are progressive, not “flat” up to $72,600 and then zero, as now) but by progressive taxation;

  • The establishment of a livable wage as the minimum wage for all;

  • The adaptation of contemporary technology to serve the needs of transportation, electric power, agriculture and industry in such fashion as to minimize damage to workers and the citizenry in general and (as in the case of
transportation) the present and worsening madness and dangers of congested cities and highways; — the elimination of those techniques or products and processes which, in agriculture and industry, poison the soil, the air and water, and/or the workers, produce “brown lung disease,” asbestosis, and many other diseases avoidable by the proper use of technology;

A moment's reflection on those proposals would reveal that — as in various elements of the New Deal of the 1930s — a very important accompaniment of those increases in human and social well-being would be the creation of innumerable decent jobs and incomes for workers and for businesses. And, it may be assumed, a substantial lessening not only of unemployment and poverty, but of street crime, drug addiction, and the like.

So long as we have a capitalist society, the needs of business must be recognized, of course; but there is a vast difference between needs of a healthy business and the lust for profit and power that has characterized the rise of giant corporations here and over the planet — corporations who rule not only their own business but the social process itself.

Thus, and among the specific changes noted above (and others not noted), we must fight for a new principle: that the burden of proof for any contested matter involving business ways and means would be, not on the community, but on the business involved; that in turn entails a rethinking and judicial redoing of social assumptions and priorities — not least those concerning “rights.” In the very nature of a capitalist society, property rights have always taken precedence. Implicit in the laundry list earlier put forth are human rights. Some have been won in recent decades; they have become a legitimate cause of action, through efforts emanating from the bottom and the middle of humanity. The victories can and must be added to.

It is inexcusable that in a world as rich as this that there should be a rising number of not only poor, but desperately poor people, including in our own country. However vital that is to those affected here, however — and it vital indeed — it is a small matter compared with the terrible increase in global poverty — an increase, let it be understood, that is a direct consequence of the very processes that have made our country (and some others) rich. It is unconscionable as a matter of ethics; that should be enough; in addition, however, there is the fact that we are entwined with all the peoples — and soils, and forests, and rivers — of the world. The familiar notion of us all being in the same boat has never been so applicable as now.

The odds of winning are very much against us; seemingly more than ever. It has seemed so in earlier times, too; and that “seeming” has turned out to be mistaken. We cannot know without trying; what we can know is that in this time, considerably more than ever, not to struggle against the rising tide will allow graver consequences than ever before in history.

June 23, 2003