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life-long skilled factory position has been replaced by day labor,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