I posted the following excerpt from new left thinker, André Gorz's Strategy for Labor, because it strikes me as highly relevant, in spite of what many are calling the next big wave of the labor movement in America, convulsing throughout the mid-west and elsewhere.
Within the period that followed the post-war epoch, and especially following Reagan's historically unprecedented assault on worker's rights and trade-union activity (firing the air-traffic controllers in the early 80's), technocracy has come in league with union structure and in vogue within union ideology. To a degree, this is inevitable within a capitalist society, as elucidated famously by Lenin and of course before that by Marx. The worker will not realize his potential so long as his trade-union makes sure he is not taken advantage of and assures him a decent wage, and so on. Lulled and bribed into veritable inactivity.
Marx, in The Holy Family, says, "The slavery of civil society is ostensibly the greatest freedom, because it appears to leave the individual perfectly independent. The individual considers as his own freedom the movement (no longer curbed or fettered by a common tie or by man) of his alienated life-elements, like property, industry, religion; in reality, this movement is the perfection of his slavery...." Let us find this difference which amounts to "slavery", where it lies between freedom and independence.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------"The decadence of political democracy, which technocracy likes to attribute to the senility of the parties and to the backwardness of political ideologies relative to economic realities, has therefore in fact some deeper reasons: it derives from the incapacity--which is in turn due to cultural and educational backwardness--of individuals, organized or not (the owners, political "elites," the bourgeoisie as a class, organized workers), to perform for themselves the management of social production and of society, on whatever level--local, regional, national; the industrial branch, the sector, the city.
Technocratic power, therefore, arises much less as a new form of the direct domination of monopoly capital and more as a contradictory and mediated form of this power. While its members are most often of bourgeois origin, technocracy is not generally the errand boy of the monopolies and does not necessarily wield power as their representative. It is rather the mediator between the particular and contradictory interests of the capitalists on the one hand, the general interest of capitalism on the other, and finally the general interests of society.
The power of the technocracy cannot simply be identified with the direct, totalitarian power of monopoly capital, even though it also is a totalitarian power and even though this power is exercised in fact for the benefit of monopoly capital. Technocrats are much more than the trustees or the representatives of the power of the bourgeoisie as a class; they are rather a "caste": because they alone are specialized in the tasks of coordination and synthesis, they cannot accomplish these tasks without having--and without demanding, by virtue of their work, as an inherent requirement of their work--autonomy with regards to all interests, including the various interests of capitalist groups.
By its very function, technocracy tends therefore to locate itself "above the classes," to deny the necessity for class struggle, to set itself up as mediator and referee and in so doing to enter into contradiction with the classes. The famous "depoliticization" of the masses which technocracy pretends to take note of is not a fact it observes; it is rather the end it pursues, the result it wants to obtain--and does obtain in a very limited degree. "Depoliticization" is the ideology of technocracy itself. The so-called "neutrality" of the State is the ideology which justifies the power and the domination which technocracy is led to claim for itself by the logic of its situation.
The conflict of technocracy with the working classes as well as with the bourgeoisie is always profoundly ambiguous: this caste refuses from the outset to make decisions on the political terrain. Objectively progressive (or "on the Left") in its conflicts with the monopolies, technocracy is subjectively conservative ("on the Right") in its conflicts with the working class.
Attempting to eliminate in advance the question of power, which it thinks can be held only by professional managers, it tries to keep a clear conscience in the midst of the contradictory criticisms to which it is exposed. Toward the monopolies it internalizes the conservatism of which the Left accuses it by showing that the rationalization measures which it proposes consolidate and protect the capitalist system. Toward the labor movement it boasts of its conflicts with the monopolies in order to underscore its objectively progressive role.
This double game is obviously a mystification: to pretend to keep a balance between a bourgeoisie which is in power and a working class which is not is necessarily to play into the hands of the former. Technocracy is conservative ideologically (subjectively) to the very degree that its objective progressivism serves it as an alibi in its efforts to consolidate the existing System, to arbitrate its conflicts, and to absorb the anti-capitalist forces.
It shares this conservatism with all technicians insofar as they are empiricists. Conductor of an apparatus which interests him only for its smooth and efficient functioning, the technician cares a great deal more for the instrument than for the ends it serves. He lives from the beginning in a ready-made rationality with predetermined purposes which his work and his education do not lead him to question. The only truth, for him, is smooth functioning; and he sees value only in immediately applicable propositions. The rest is utopia."
-André Gorz
from Strategy for Labor (in The New Left Reader, p. 45-47)
No comments:
Post a Comment