lecture 4, "a northern world view: yankee society, antislavery ideology..."
david blight
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from a northern point of view, how do we get to this passage? story of a yale college junior, abolitionist, who enlisted in the first regiment he could get into--the sixth new york cavalry. had denounced the gov't he's serving in 1861 and 1862 for its failure to explicitly make the war a war against slavery. by march 1863, he had concluded that emancipation would indeed be achieved by the war (january 1863 is the emancipation proclamation). killed in april 1865, in the last major engagement of the civil war.
how do you get to this man? bright, connected-enough--but he gave it all up for a cause he saw more worthy. and if, in general, you can come to understand white, young, Northern, Yankee, Anglo-Saxon fighters, who believed strongly in the War of 1861 (and who, despite racism in the North against immigrants and African-Americans, eventually supported a war that came to be waged on slavery).
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if the South was a slave society, the North was a market society--booming by the 1820s/1830s/1840s (this began, even, in the late 18th century). this booming commercial, consumerist society with its faith and defense in free labor--that ideology would be something that a lot of white Southerners would actually fear.
a time of roads, railroads, technological innovation--1800/1810/1820, you can actually find, in the North, a fear of technology.
the "market revolution", of course, was driven by the growth of cities, which became centers of economic activity. it's that time when 18th century subsistence farmers (who engaged in "mixed agriculture", growing all kinds of foodstuffs for themselves) gave way to commercial farmers producing for a much larger market (cities on the East coast, and even a global market). it's a time when the home and farm became their own domestic factory--the vast majority were still farmers, but they began to buy things on the market (from a peddler, or a store in town).
this all, of course, leads to a change in "mentalitites"--brought about fundamental alterations in aspirations, habits, activities, in conceptions and definitions of work and leisure. it would fundamentally change the conception of a "laborer"--becoming part of a collective force, put into opposition against Capital and manufacture.
there's a habit in the US to think that the idea of "individual rights" began with the Bill of Rights--but this got profoundly shaped by the "market revolution"
it's going to change the idea of mobility, where you can go and how.
and--this is crucial--it's going to change, for Northern people (and immigrants), people's conception about what they can give their children. the idea that if labor is left free, the small guy has a chance--rooted in "free labor" ideology is this idea of social mobility. especially in a society that had this thing called "the West."
even such American concepts as "self-reliance" is changed by the Market revolution--people keep seeing evidence that shows them that, in the face of the market, their individualism is not so powerful.
the level of ideas, thinking, and common behaviour, would bring about a combination of tremendous, broad optimism (possibly like we've never experienced since), simultaneous to a certain sense of anxiety/dread/despair. it will lead to great wealth (fortunes in railroads by the 1840s and 1850s, and the textile industry, and on Wall Street), but, also, inequality will grow.
the workplace would become less personal, as factories emerged. women went to work, most famously in Lowell factories in MA. for the first time, in significant numbers, young girls and young women left the realm of domesticity.
the market revolution would also lead to environmental degradation--people worried a lot about the destruction of natural habitats (rivers, etc.)
it came, also, with boom and bust cycles--a crisis in 1837, and in 1857 (which would play a part in the story of the Civil War).
even the idea of what a child is (of childhood), and the family, undergoes a revolution in 20 or 30 years. by the 30s and 40s in an immigrant family, a child meant a wage. in the growing middle-class of course, there was a more modern definition of childhood--the child was to be a protected youth. "parenting", as moral guardianship.
the market revolution was a tremendous engine for the idea of "progress"--America was growing, and it was now going to be the nation of "progress". it looked like it could expand, forever. as walt whitman wrote, in poem after poem, America would be the beginning of a "new man". a new start for humankind.
AND: "if you come to believe we are the hope for humankind--we are "progress", and our creed is written down in the constitution--what have you done? you've said, we are really special, and we are really important, and we are really good. you've kind of set yourself up, haven't you?" the doctrine of progress, prof is arguing, has always bred its contradictions.
1820s New York, 1820s/1830s Philadelphia, 1850s Chicago (railroad capital of the world).
part of the change to the North, of course, was immigration--in the 1830s, 600,000 immigrants came to the US, almost all from western Europe. in the 1840s, 1.5 million. in the 1850s, almost 3 million more. by 1852/1853, Boston and New York had 50% foreign-born populations. it's close to this in Philadelphia.
all this, of course, was fueled by the transport revolution. the eerie canal, which was profitable from 1820-1880s. 300 such canals built in the 1850s. steamboats became the romantic symbol of this revolution (though they too brought dread; 1/3 of all steamboats built in the 1850s, exploded!).
and then, of course, railroads--no continent, you could argue, had ever been as ready-made as the US for railroads. they revolutionized an American sense of time, ability to travel, manufacturing--and it made Chicago, Chicago. it made the first multimillionaires, the first great fortunes. and it became a great example of the relationship between the Federal Government and Business--they were built, by and large, by government subsidies, and a tremendous amount of corruption. had a lot to do with linking northeast with northwest, which created a certain sense of isolation in the South.
and, at this time, we can identify also the idea of manifest destiny--which prof is calling an inherently white supremacist idea, that was a part of American culture from the outset. the idea that we have to expand, colonize, and civilize this continent.
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NOW, in any society changing this much, this fast (doubling its population, in 20 years; if the rate of population growth from 1820-1850 had been sustained, over time, we'd have today roughly 1.5 billion people in the US), both reform/change and anxiety are inevitable.
four major reform periods of American history (a period in which people became professional reformers; whole movements, magazines, etc.), in prof's opinion. the first is this era, 1820s-1850s, ante-bellum America (emphasized most obviously by the anti-slavery movement). the second great era is the progressive era, a great response to urbanization/industrialization/immigration. the third is, in all likelihood, the New Deal (incredible emergency/crises over question of what government owes its people, etc.). the fourth is the 60s--civil rights movement, vietnam war, etc.
in Am. history, reform crusades have had to do with one of several objects/purposes/problems.
the first is the industrializing process: we've been leaving the history of this reform ever since our first market revolution.
the second is racial equality: and we're still having that reform movement.
the third is gender equality.
the fourth is peace.
the fifth kind of American reform is religious and individual morality--and here it takes on some distinctly American characteristics.
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to be anti-slavery in America by the 1820s and 1830s was to face a host of barriers: sanctity of US constitution, depth of pro-slavery argument. abolitionists did not believe they would see the end of slavery in their lifetime.
and last point: one of the barriers for an anti-slavery activist, whatever your reasons, is the simple fact that the United States was a republic, and that the sides that owned those slaves, their leaders were free to defend their system. they were free to dissent--they were republicans (small R), as well. the greatest tragedy of American history, perhaps, is that this struggle could not be resolved politically.
Showing posts with label progress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label progress. Show all posts
Monday, March 30, 2009
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
notes on capital
chapters 26-33: primitive accumulation
(873-874): worth flagging this page, as it outlines the contrast between Marxist and liberal positions on force/conflict within capitalist production.
(874-875): "so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production."
(875): Marx making explicit the normative consequences of the transition toward the "double freedom" of the proletariat: at once free from serfdom and the "fetters of the guilds" ["and it is this aspect of the movement which alone exists for our bourgeois historians"], and at the same time "robbed of all of their own means of production." Quite clearly, here, we are speaking of the dialectics and contradictions of historical progress.
(876): The last sentence contains all that is regrettable about Marx's "universalizing" of the British experience--by making Britain the "classic form" of expropriation of rural areas, he, quite unwittingly and against his more explicit instructions, inspired failed attempts to read quite different histories through this classic, universal lens.
(877): Feudalism finished by the fourteenth century--the vast majority of the population as "small peasants."
(878): FN #3, fascinating. reflections on Japan and liberal attitudes toward the Middle Ages, possibly hinting at a contempt for Whiggish interpretations of history's march that ought to dampen the spirits of crude Marxist modernizers.
(879): here Marx, in the manner of this entire book, leaves the question of the state-society interface open to history, without compromising the thrust of his class analysis.
(880): implicit in this is an appraisal of legislation's utility in the face of history's march. and, to be honest, marx is not very generous, especially if we're speaking of big sweeps. what this implies for agency, i think, is less clear, since these are cosmetic laws authored and implemented largely by kings at the behest of tradition. (see also 885). at the same time, it is important to stress that the identity between legislation and ruling class interests is not trivially true, in that--as one sees with the reports on proletariat health after the corn laws--a class can be economically ascendant but politically (and temporarily) relatively impotent. yet of course these are exceptions that can be assimilated into the rule.
(884): the theft of state assets at "ridiculous" prices--where have we heard that before?
(886): "the identity between the wealth of the nation and the poverty of the people" -- a not-so-indirect rejoinder to liberal triumphalism.
(887-888): "'Upon the whole, the circumstances of the lower ranks of men are altered in almost every respect for the worse.'" it should be clear, then, that we are not speaking of the Marx of the modernizers' imagination. or, at least, he does not share their totalizing fixation with the future, even if they would agree on policy forward. there is room, in other words, for a recognition of place.
(888): again, the non-identity between the "nation" and the "people" -- the bourgeois becomes the torch bearer for the "nation", a move which allows him to speak in the name of the people he dispossesses.
(889): dating enclosures: late 1400s to late 1700s
(892): hinting at the perpetual nature of primitive accumulation, much like harvey's position
(893): an interesting side-note to Marx on nature: here, in this portrayal of expropriation, the small farmer simply forms another part of the natural backdrop. he is dead to the bourgeois' history, precisely he--like all else that is "natural," precedes it. an alternative, very literal embedding of the "social" in the "natural."
(896): important passage, for two reasons: (a) prefigures the problems of the third world, in that the peasantry is being thrown onto a market that cannot properly absorb it (b) prefigures Foucault, in that the peasantry has to be disciplined into accepting an entirely new routine and set of values (cf. the listed punishments for vagabondage)--has to be "modernized." Lumpen activity is theorized in this context, and has to be done so in the contemporary Third World, as well (gangsterism, terrorism, etc.)
(899): "Even at the beginning of the reign of Louis XVI, the Ordinance of 13 July 1977 provided that every man in good health from 16 to 60 years of age, if without means of subsistence and not practising a trade, should be sent to the galleys."
(899-900): here Marx clearly seems to overstate his case, making normal a state of affairs that is highly idealized. against this passage, it is important to re-assert Harvey's reminder that primitive accumulation and the State are always important tools for the ruling class--in that sense, Marx's account is far too kind; the notion that this violence is transitional and particular to a specific epoch needs refutation.
(902): the first minimum wage, where before there were only maximum wages being proposed.
(903): the sordid history of bourgeois positions on trade unions, including the French Revolution's banning of them in 1791! liberty means, as it always has for the bourgeois, the liberty of a particular class. the timelessness of the worker's oppression, then, is here made clear.
(910): Marx's suggestion here, that observers are too ready to see the large-scale capitalist without also appreciating his dependence on a plethora of networks of smaller-scale production, resembles Arrighi's critique of the Euro-centrism of theories of the Big Corporation. We do have to ask what this means for theories of centralization/concentration--and it is not sufficient to say that it "opens them up to history", even if that is true and important.
(910-911): a further important point--expropriation is not simply important to the reconfiguration of structures of production, but it also is critical to reconfiguring consumption. it is only once the workers are divested from the right to produce their own means of subsistence that they become dependent on a market. (to this one can append Marx's Foucaultian moments--they have to be "taught" how to consume).
(915): "the author should have reminded himself that revolutions are not made with laws."
(916): Marx on violence, implicitly: "Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power."
(916-917): Marx on the colonies, hardly an apologist for empire.
(918): Marx here makes a critical chronological intervention, in stressing that colonialism (as commercial supremacy) is coeval with manufacture, and that it helps mature industry. In other words, colonialism was critical for industrial predominance. By the late 19th century, this has changed--one can only sustain commercial supremacy if industrial forces are already sufficiently matured. This is important in better understanding the changing nature of colonialism, itself.
(920): Arrighi's narrative is here being prefigured, as Marx recounts the shifting centers of the international credit system. But, I think, there is a clear need to make it more systematic than what is presented here, as Arrighi does.
(920): Capital as "the capitalized blood of children"--unforgiving, and absolutely correct.
(921-922): These passages are key to any comprehensive Marxist theory of the state. Especially if we are going to argue that primitive accumulation is a continuous feature of life in modern capitalism, then the State--as provider of "original" capital--has a continuous, protective role to play (in other words, the bailouts can be represented as a kind of primitive accumulation).
(923): Marx's re-telling of the historical crimes of capitalism makes for important reading. Why do liberals never have to "own up" to these crimes when endorsing this system of production, the way that commies in the case of their own beliefs? There is something to be said here about Walter Benjamin and the stealthy cloaking of past crimes in the narrative of present progress.
(924): "Liverpool grew fat on the basis of the slave trade"
(926): "...capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt"
(928): Though my own obsession with the normative implications of Marx's dialectics is important, it is also moot. Because Marx is, of course, not suggesting that we stop (or try to stop) history at any given stage of its advance. It is not a case of deliberating on the principles we find superior, and working to embody them in a world of our making. Rather, history advances quite in spite of our best efforts. We can observe dialectics, amidst all this (and the implications of that attentiveness for the bourgeois historians are important), but we cannot intervene.
(929): Why the proletariat? "...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." Might a close-reading of this passage be in order, especially concentrating on those three words, "trained, united, organized."
(929): This is important (and was argued on preceding pages, as well): when Capital mobilizes to argue that it defends the cause of private property, it falls to us to remind the ideologues that this is one kind of private property--or, rather, the private property of one class, in particular. what's more, in the process of primitive accumulation, this system has little problem in obliterating the private property of millions of small producers and peasants. (see also 931)
(932): speaking of the colonial imperative to transform structures of production in the colony, Marx invokes the schematics of uneven development: "In the interest of the so-called wealth of the nation, he seeks for artificial means to ensure the poverty of the people."
(932): absolutely foundational to this entire process is this point that Capital is not simply a wad of cash ready to be deployed, but a wad of cash ready to be deployed in a particular social relation: "property in money, means of subsistence, machines and other means of production does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if the essential complement to these things is missing the wage-laborer, the other man, who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will... capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things.
(938-939): excellent passages against which to develop a history of emigration--again, as always, this speaks of a Marx for whom theory is open to history, even if the framework's contours are established, as well.
chapters 26-33: primitive accumulation
(873-874): worth flagging this page, as it outlines the contrast between Marxist and liberal positions on force/conflict within capitalist production.
(874-875): "so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production."
(875): Marx making explicit the normative consequences of the transition toward the "double freedom" of the proletariat: at once free from serfdom and the "fetters of the guilds" ["and it is this aspect of the movement which alone exists for our bourgeois historians"], and at the same time "robbed of all of their own means of production." Quite clearly, here, we are speaking of the dialectics and contradictions of historical progress.
(876): The last sentence contains all that is regrettable about Marx's "universalizing" of the British experience--by making Britain the "classic form" of expropriation of rural areas, he, quite unwittingly and against his more explicit instructions, inspired failed attempts to read quite different histories through this classic, universal lens.
(877): Feudalism finished by the fourteenth century--the vast majority of the population as "small peasants."
(878): FN #3, fascinating. reflections on Japan and liberal attitudes toward the Middle Ages, possibly hinting at a contempt for Whiggish interpretations of history's march that ought to dampen the spirits of crude Marxist modernizers.
(879): here Marx, in the manner of this entire book, leaves the question of the state-society interface open to history, without compromising the thrust of his class analysis.
(880): implicit in this is an appraisal of legislation's utility in the face of history's march. and, to be honest, marx is not very generous, especially if we're speaking of big sweeps. what this implies for agency, i think, is less clear, since these are cosmetic laws authored and implemented largely by kings at the behest of tradition. (see also 885). at the same time, it is important to stress that the identity between legislation and ruling class interests is not trivially true, in that--as one sees with the reports on proletariat health after the corn laws--a class can be economically ascendant but politically (and temporarily) relatively impotent. yet of course these are exceptions that can be assimilated into the rule.
(884): the theft of state assets at "ridiculous" prices--where have we heard that before?
(886): "the identity between the wealth of the nation and the poverty of the people" -- a not-so-indirect rejoinder to liberal triumphalism.
(887-888): "'Upon the whole, the circumstances of the lower ranks of men are altered in almost every respect for the worse.'" it should be clear, then, that we are not speaking of the Marx of the modernizers' imagination. or, at least, he does not share their totalizing fixation with the future, even if they would agree on policy forward. there is room, in other words, for a recognition of place.
(888): again, the non-identity between the "nation" and the "people" -- the bourgeois becomes the torch bearer for the "nation", a move which allows him to speak in the name of the people he dispossesses.
(889): dating enclosures: late 1400s to late 1700s
(892): hinting at the perpetual nature of primitive accumulation, much like harvey's position
(893): an interesting side-note to Marx on nature: here, in this portrayal of expropriation, the small farmer simply forms another part of the natural backdrop. he is dead to the bourgeois' history, precisely he--like all else that is "natural," precedes it. an alternative, very literal embedding of the "social" in the "natural."
(896): important passage, for two reasons: (a) prefigures the problems of the third world, in that the peasantry is being thrown onto a market that cannot properly absorb it (b) prefigures Foucault, in that the peasantry has to be disciplined into accepting an entirely new routine and set of values (cf. the listed punishments for vagabondage)--has to be "modernized." Lumpen activity is theorized in this context, and has to be done so in the contemporary Third World, as well (gangsterism, terrorism, etc.)
(899): "Even at the beginning of the reign of Louis XVI, the Ordinance of 13 July 1977 provided that every man in good health from 16 to 60 years of age, if without means of subsistence and not practising a trade, should be sent to the galleys."
(899-900): here Marx clearly seems to overstate his case, making normal a state of affairs that is highly idealized. against this passage, it is important to re-assert Harvey's reminder that primitive accumulation and the State are always important tools for the ruling class--in that sense, Marx's account is far too kind; the notion that this violence is transitional and particular to a specific epoch needs refutation.
(902): the first minimum wage, where before there were only maximum wages being proposed.
(903): the sordid history of bourgeois positions on trade unions, including the French Revolution's banning of them in 1791! liberty means, as it always has for the bourgeois, the liberty of a particular class. the timelessness of the worker's oppression, then, is here made clear.
(910): Marx's suggestion here, that observers are too ready to see the large-scale capitalist without also appreciating his dependence on a plethora of networks of smaller-scale production, resembles Arrighi's critique of the Euro-centrism of theories of the Big Corporation. We do have to ask what this means for theories of centralization/concentration--and it is not sufficient to say that it "opens them up to history", even if that is true and important.
(910-911): a further important point--expropriation is not simply important to the reconfiguration of structures of production, but it also is critical to reconfiguring consumption. it is only once the workers are divested from the right to produce their own means of subsistence that they become dependent on a market. (to this one can append Marx's Foucaultian moments--they have to be "taught" how to consume).
(915): "the author should have reminded himself that revolutions are not made with laws."
(916): Marx on violence, implicitly: "Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power."
(916-917): Marx on the colonies, hardly an apologist for empire.
(918): Marx here makes a critical chronological intervention, in stressing that colonialism (as commercial supremacy) is coeval with manufacture, and that it helps mature industry. In other words, colonialism was critical for industrial predominance. By the late 19th century, this has changed--one can only sustain commercial supremacy if industrial forces are already sufficiently matured. This is important in better understanding the changing nature of colonialism, itself.
(920): Arrighi's narrative is here being prefigured, as Marx recounts the shifting centers of the international credit system. But, I think, there is a clear need to make it more systematic than what is presented here, as Arrighi does.
(920): Capital as "the capitalized blood of children"--unforgiving, and absolutely correct.
(921-922): These passages are key to any comprehensive Marxist theory of the state. Especially if we are going to argue that primitive accumulation is a continuous feature of life in modern capitalism, then the State--as provider of "original" capital--has a continuous, protective role to play (in other words, the bailouts can be represented as a kind of primitive accumulation).
(923): Marx's re-telling of the historical crimes of capitalism makes for important reading. Why do liberals never have to "own up" to these crimes when endorsing this system of production, the way that commies in the case of their own beliefs? There is something to be said here about Walter Benjamin and the stealthy cloaking of past crimes in the narrative of present progress.
(924): "Liverpool grew fat on the basis of the slave trade"
(926): "...capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt"
(928): Though my own obsession with the normative implications of Marx's dialectics is important, it is also moot. Because Marx is, of course, not suggesting that we stop (or try to stop) history at any given stage of its advance. It is not a case of deliberating on the principles we find superior, and working to embody them in a world of our making. Rather, history advances quite in spite of our best efforts. We can observe dialectics, amidst all this (and the implications of that attentiveness for the bourgeois historians are important), but we cannot intervene.
(929): Why the proletariat? "...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." Might a close-reading of this passage be in order, especially concentrating on those three words, "trained, united, organized."
(929): This is important (and was argued on preceding pages, as well): when Capital mobilizes to argue that it defends the cause of private property, it falls to us to remind the ideologues that this is one kind of private property--or, rather, the private property of one class, in particular. what's more, in the process of primitive accumulation, this system has little problem in obliterating the private property of millions of small producers and peasants. (see also 931)
(932): speaking of the colonial imperative to transform structures of production in the colony, Marx invokes the schematics of uneven development: "In the interest of the so-called wealth of the nation, he seeks for artificial means to ensure the poverty of the people."
(932): absolutely foundational to this entire process is this point that Capital is not simply a wad of cash ready to be deployed, but a wad of cash ready to be deployed in a particular social relation: "property in money, means of subsistence, machines and other means of production does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if the essential complement to these things is missing the wage-laborer, the other man, who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will... capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things.
(938-939): excellent passages against which to develop a history of emigration--again, as always, this speaks of a Marx for whom theory is open to history, even if the framework's contours are established, as well.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
from "questioning technology: a critical anthology", eds. john zerzan and alice carnes, 1988:
[lewis mumford, "authoritarian and democratic technics"] "Democracy" is a term now confused and sophisticated by indiscriminate use, and often treated with patronizing contempt. Can we agree, no matter how far we might diverge at a later point, that the spinal principle of democracy is to place what is common to all men above that which any organization, institution, or group may claim for itself? This is not to deny the claims of superior natural endowment, specialized knowlege, technical skill, or institutional organization: all these may, by democratic permission, play a useful role in the human economy. But democracy consists in giving final authority to the whole, rather than the part, and only living human beings, as such, are an authentic expression of the whole, whether acting alone or with the help of others. (13)
(...) We surrender some of our autonomy when ill or criplled: but to surrender it every day on every occasion would be to turn life itself into a chronic illness. The best life possible - and here I am consciously treading on contested ground - is one that calls for an ever greater degree of self-direction, self-expression, and self-realization. In this sense, personality, once the exclusive attribute of kings, belongs on democratic theory to every man. Life itself in its fullness and wholeness cannot be delegated. (13)
(...) The tension between small-scale association and large-scale organization, between personal autonomy and institutional regulation, between remote control and diffused local intervention, has now created a critical situation. If our eyes had been open, we might long ago have discovered this conflict deeply embedded in technology itself. (14)
(...) My thesis, to put it bluntly, is that from late neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two tecnologies have recurrently existed side-by-side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable. If I am right, we are now rapidly approaching a point at which, unlesss we radically alter our present course, our surviving democratic technics will be completely suppressed or supplanted, so that every residual autonnomy will be wiped out, or will be permitted only as a playful device of government, like national balloting for already chosen leaders in totalitarian countries. (14) [how does this escape depending on the dubious assumption that a deeply democratic ethos prevailed in the pre-neolithic period? unless it is the technic that is democratic - but then that would require faith in the progress that the man-friendly technic would produce, correct?]
(...) [democratic tecnhics] What I would call the democratic technics is the small scale mehthod of production, resting mainly on human skill and animal energy but always, even when employing machines, remaining under the active direction of the craftsman or the farmer, each group developing its own gifts, through appropriate arts and social ceremonies, as well as making discreet use of the gifts of nature. This technology had limited horizons of achievement, but, just because of its wie diffusion and its modest demands, it had great powers of adaptation and recuperation. This democratic technics has underpinned and firmly supported every historic culture until our ow day, and redeemed the constant tendency of authoritarian technics to misapply its powers. Even when paying tribute to the most oppressive authoritarian regimes, there yet remained within the workshop or the farmyard some degree of autonomy, selectivity, creativity. No royal mace, no slave-driver's whip, no bureaucratic directive left its imprint on the textiles of Damascus or the pottery of fifth century Athens. (15)
(...) [authoritarian technics] ...authoritarian technics is a much more recent achievement: it begins around the fourth millennium B.C. in a new configuration of technical invention, scientific observation, and centralized political control that gave rise to the pecuiar mode of life we may now identify, without eulogy, as civilization. Under the new institution of kingship, activies that had been scattered, diversified, cut to the human measure, were united on a monumental scale into an entirely new kind of theological-technological mass organization. In the person of an absolute ruler, whose word was law, cosmic poewrs came down to earth, mobilizing and unifying the efforst of thousands of men, hitherto alltoo-autonomous and too decetralized to act voluntarily in unison for purposes that lay beyond the village horizon. (15)
(...) The new authoritarian technology was not limited by village custom or human sentiment: its herculean feats of mechanical organization rested on ruthless physical coercion, forced labor and slavery, which brougt into existence machines that were capable of exerting thousands of horsepower centuries before horses were harnessed or wheels invented. This centralized technics drew on inventions an dscientific discoveries of a high order: the written record, mathematics and astronomy, irrigation and canalizatoin: above all, it created complex human machines composed of specialized, standardized, replaceable, interdependent parts - the work army, the military army, the bureaucracy. (15) [Weber's "modern" here becomes post-neolithic]
(...) ...it created the fist economy of controlled abundance: notably, immense food crops that not merely supported a big urban population but released a large trained minority for purely religious, scientific, bureaucratic, or military activity. (16)
(...) as long as agriculture absoved the labor of some 90 per cent of the population, masss technics were confined largely to the populous urban centers. (16)
(...) But there were even greater weaknesses: the system had no inner coherence: a break in communication, a missing link in the chain of command, and the great human machines fel apart. Finally, the myths upon which the whole system was based - particularly the essential myth of kingship - were irrational, with their paranoid suspiciouns and animosities and their paranoid claims to unconditional obedience and absolute power. For alll its redoubtable constructive achievements, authoritarian technics expressed a deep hostility to life. (16)
(...) Up to now, following the optimistic premises of nineteenth century thikers like Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, we have regarded the spread of experimental science and mechnaical invention as the soundest guarantee of a peaceful, productive, above all democratic, industrial society. Many have evey comfortable supposed that the revolt against arbitrary political power in the seventeenth century was causally connected with the industrial revolution that accompanied it. But what we have interpreted as the new fredom now turns out to be a much more sophisticated version of the old slavery: for the rise of political democracy during the last few centuries has been increasingly nullified by the successful resurrection of a centrlaized authoritarian technics - a technics that had in fact for long lapsed in many parts of the world. (17) [weberian, most certainly]
(...) At the very moment Western nations threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducting coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system might be in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanisitc purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that has now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dmiensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our owng age: pyschologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and comulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual cost to life. (17)
(...) Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most serious weakness: its original dependenc upon resistant, sometimes actively disobedient servo-mechanisms, still human enough to harbor purpoes that do not always coincide with those of the system. (17)
(...) ...its power in every form tends to increase without limits, in quantities that defy assimilation and defeat control, whether we are thinking of the output of scientif knowledge or of industrial assembly lines. To maximize energy, speed, or automation, without reference to the complex ocnditions that sustain organic life, have become ends in themselves. (17) [much like effiency for free-market zealots]
(...) The center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible pesonality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all its human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the sacred priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret knowledge by means of which total control is now swiftly being effected, are themselves trapped by the very perfection of the organization they have invented. (18)
(...) In this new systems-centered collective, this Pentagon of power, there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike Job's God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied. Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated. (18)
(...) Do not misunderstand this analysis. The danger to democracy does not spring from any specific scientific discoveries or electronic inventions. The human compulsions that dominate the authoritarian technics of our own day date back to a period before even the wheel had been invented. The danger springs from the fact that, since Francis Bacon and Galileo defined the new methods and objectives of technics, our great physical transformations have been effected by a system that deliberately eliminates the whole human personality, ignores the historic process, overplays the role of the abstract intelligence, and makes control over physical nature, ultimately control over man himself, the chief purpose of existence. (18)
(...) Why has our age surrendered so easily...? The answer to this question is both paradoxical and ironic. Present-day technnics differs from that of the overtly brutal, half-baked authoritarian systems of the past in one highly favorable particular: it has acecpted the basic principle of democracy, that every member of society should have a share in its goods. By progressively fulfilling this part of the democratic promise, our system has achieved a hold over the whole community that threatens to wipe out every other vestige of democracy. (19) [surely not suggesting that everyone is equally subjugated?]
(...) The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member of the comunity may claim every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care, entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires. Once one opts for the system no further choice remains. (19) [very well-put]
(...) I would not belittle, still less deny, the many admirable products this technology has brought forth, products that a self-regulating economy would make good use of. I would only suggest that it is time to reckon up the human disadvantages and costs, to say nothing of the dangers, of our unqualified acceptance of the system itself. Even the immediate price is heavy; for the system is so far from being under effective human direction that it may poison us wholesale to provide us wiht food or exterminate us to provide national secuirty, before we can enjoy its promised goods. (19) [so this is less a call to return to the pre-neolithic era, and more a demand to dismantle bureaucracy]
(...) Once our auhoritarian technics consolidates its powers, with the aid of its new forms of mass control, its panoply of tranquilizers and sedatives and aphrodisiacs, could democracy in any form survive? That question is absurd: life itself will not survive, except what is funneled through the mechanical collective. The spread of a sterilized scientific intelligence over the planet would not, as Teilhard de Chardin so innocently imagined, be the happy consummation of divine purpose: it would rather ensure the final arrrest of any further human development. (20)
(...) What I wish to do is to persuade those who are concerned wth maintaining democratic institutions to see that their constructive efforts must include technology itself. There, too, we must return to the human center. We must challenge this authoritarian system that has given to an underdimensioned ideolgogy and technology the authority that belongs to the human personality. I repeat: life cannot be delegated. (20)
(...) ...we had better map out a more positive course: namely, the reconstitution of both our science and our technics in such a fashion as to insert the rejected parts of the human personality at eveyr stage in the process. These means gladly sacrificing mere quantity in order to restore qualitative choice, shifting the seat of authority from the mechanical collective to the human personality and the autonomous group. (20)
(...) I trust I have made it clear that the genuine advantages our scientifically based technics has brought can be preserved only if we cut the whole system back to a point at which it willl permit human alternatives, human interventions, and human destinations for entirely different purposes from those of the system itself. At the present juncture, if democracy did not exist, we would have to invent it, in order to save and recultivate the spirit of man. (21)
[lewis mumford, "authoritarian and democratic technics"] "Democracy" is a term now confused and sophisticated by indiscriminate use, and often treated with patronizing contempt. Can we agree, no matter how far we might diverge at a later point, that the spinal principle of democracy is to place what is common to all men above that which any organization, institution, or group may claim for itself? This is not to deny the claims of superior natural endowment, specialized knowlege, technical skill, or institutional organization: all these may, by democratic permission, play a useful role in the human economy. But democracy consists in giving final authority to the whole, rather than the part, and only living human beings, as such, are an authentic expression of the whole, whether acting alone or with the help of others. (13)
(...) We surrender some of our autonomy when ill or criplled: but to surrender it every day on every occasion would be to turn life itself into a chronic illness. The best life possible - and here I am consciously treading on contested ground - is one that calls for an ever greater degree of self-direction, self-expression, and self-realization. In this sense, personality, once the exclusive attribute of kings, belongs on democratic theory to every man. Life itself in its fullness and wholeness cannot be delegated. (13)
(...) The tension between small-scale association and large-scale organization, between personal autonomy and institutional regulation, between remote control and diffused local intervention, has now created a critical situation. If our eyes had been open, we might long ago have discovered this conflict deeply embedded in technology itself. (14)
(...) My thesis, to put it bluntly, is that from late neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two tecnologies have recurrently existed side-by-side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable. If I am right, we are now rapidly approaching a point at which, unlesss we radically alter our present course, our surviving democratic technics will be completely suppressed or supplanted, so that every residual autonnomy will be wiped out, or will be permitted only as a playful device of government, like national balloting for already chosen leaders in totalitarian countries. (14) [how does this escape depending on the dubious assumption that a deeply democratic ethos prevailed in the pre-neolithic period? unless it is the technic that is democratic - but then that would require faith in the progress that the man-friendly technic would produce, correct?]
(...) [democratic tecnhics] What I would call the democratic technics is the small scale mehthod of production, resting mainly on human skill and animal energy but always, even when employing machines, remaining under the active direction of the craftsman or the farmer, each group developing its own gifts, through appropriate arts and social ceremonies, as well as making discreet use of the gifts of nature. This technology had limited horizons of achievement, but, just because of its wie diffusion and its modest demands, it had great powers of adaptation and recuperation. This democratic technics has underpinned and firmly supported every historic culture until our ow day, and redeemed the constant tendency of authoritarian technics to misapply its powers. Even when paying tribute to the most oppressive authoritarian regimes, there yet remained within the workshop or the farmyard some degree of autonomy, selectivity, creativity. No royal mace, no slave-driver's whip, no bureaucratic directive left its imprint on the textiles of Damascus or the pottery of fifth century Athens. (15)
(...) [authoritarian technics] ...authoritarian technics is a much more recent achievement: it begins around the fourth millennium B.C. in a new configuration of technical invention, scientific observation, and centralized political control that gave rise to the pecuiar mode of life we may now identify, without eulogy, as civilization. Under the new institution of kingship, activies that had been scattered, diversified, cut to the human measure, were united on a monumental scale into an entirely new kind of theological-technological mass organization. In the person of an absolute ruler, whose word was law, cosmic poewrs came down to earth, mobilizing and unifying the efforst of thousands of men, hitherto alltoo-autonomous and too decetralized to act voluntarily in unison for purposes that lay beyond the village horizon. (15)
(...) The new authoritarian technology was not limited by village custom or human sentiment: its herculean feats of mechanical organization rested on ruthless physical coercion, forced labor and slavery, which brougt into existence machines that were capable of exerting thousands of horsepower centuries before horses were harnessed or wheels invented. This centralized technics drew on inventions an dscientific discoveries of a high order: the written record, mathematics and astronomy, irrigation and canalizatoin: above all, it created complex human machines composed of specialized, standardized, replaceable, interdependent parts - the work army, the military army, the bureaucracy. (15) [Weber's "modern" here becomes post-neolithic]
(...) ...it created the fist economy of controlled abundance: notably, immense food crops that not merely supported a big urban population but released a large trained minority for purely religious, scientific, bureaucratic, or military activity. (16)
(...) as long as agriculture absoved the labor of some 90 per cent of the population, masss technics were confined largely to the populous urban centers. (16)
(...) But there were even greater weaknesses: the system had no inner coherence: a break in communication, a missing link in the chain of command, and the great human machines fel apart. Finally, the myths upon which the whole system was based - particularly the essential myth of kingship - were irrational, with their paranoid suspiciouns and animosities and their paranoid claims to unconditional obedience and absolute power. For alll its redoubtable constructive achievements, authoritarian technics expressed a deep hostility to life. (16)
(...) Up to now, following the optimistic premises of nineteenth century thikers like Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, we have regarded the spread of experimental science and mechnaical invention as the soundest guarantee of a peaceful, productive, above all democratic, industrial society. Many have evey comfortable supposed that the revolt against arbitrary political power in the seventeenth century was causally connected with the industrial revolution that accompanied it. But what we have interpreted as the new fredom now turns out to be a much more sophisticated version of the old slavery: for the rise of political democracy during the last few centuries has been increasingly nullified by the successful resurrection of a centrlaized authoritarian technics - a technics that had in fact for long lapsed in many parts of the world. (17) [weberian, most certainly]
(...) At the very moment Western nations threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducting coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system might be in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanisitc purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that has now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dmiensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our owng age: pyschologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and comulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual cost to life. (17)
(...) Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most serious weakness: its original dependenc upon resistant, sometimes actively disobedient servo-mechanisms, still human enough to harbor purpoes that do not always coincide with those of the system. (17)
(...) ...its power in every form tends to increase without limits, in quantities that defy assimilation and defeat control, whether we are thinking of the output of scientif knowledge or of industrial assembly lines. To maximize energy, speed, or automation, without reference to the complex ocnditions that sustain organic life, have become ends in themselves. (17) [much like effiency for free-market zealots]
(...) The center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible pesonality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all its human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the sacred priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret knowledge by means of which total control is now swiftly being effected, are themselves trapped by the very perfection of the organization they have invented. (18)
(...) In this new systems-centered collective, this Pentagon of power, there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike Job's God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied. Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated. (18)
(...) Do not misunderstand this analysis. The danger to democracy does not spring from any specific scientific discoveries or electronic inventions. The human compulsions that dominate the authoritarian technics of our own day date back to a period before even the wheel had been invented. The danger springs from the fact that, since Francis Bacon and Galileo defined the new methods and objectives of technics, our great physical transformations have been effected by a system that deliberately eliminates the whole human personality, ignores the historic process, overplays the role of the abstract intelligence, and makes control over physical nature, ultimately control over man himself, the chief purpose of existence. (18)
(...) Why has our age surrendered so easily...? The answer to this question is both paradoxical and ironic. Present-day technnics differs from that of the overtly brutal, half-baked authoritarian systems of the past in one highly favorable particular: it has acecpted the basic principle of democracy, that every member of society should have a share in its goods. By progressively fulfilling this part of the democratic promise, our system has achieved a hold over the whole community that threatens to wipe out every other vestige of democracy. (19) [surely not suggesting that everyone is equally subjugated?]
(...) The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member of the comunity may claim every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care, entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires. Once one opts for the system no further choice remains. (19) [very well-put]
(...) I would not belittle, still less deny, the many admirable products this technology has brought forth, products that a self-regulating economy would make good use of. I would only suggest that it is time to reckon up the human disadvantages and costs, to say nothing of the dangers, of our unqualified acceptance of the system itself. Even the immediate price is heavy; for the system is so far from being under effective human direction that it may poison us wholesale to provide us wiht food or exterminate us to provide national secuirty, before we can enjoy its promised goods. (19) [so this is less a call to return to the pre-neolithic era, and more a demand to dismantle bureaucracy]
(...) Once our auhoritarian technics consolidates its powers, with the aid of its new forms of mass control, its panoply of tranquilizers and sedatives and aphrodisiacs, could democracy in any form survive? That question is absurd: life itself will not survive, except what is funneled through the mechanical collective. The spread of a sterilized scientific intelligence over the planet would not, as Teilhard de Chardin so innocently imagined, be the happy consummation of divine purpose: it would rather ensure the final arrrest of any further human development. (20)
(...) What I wish to do is to persuade those who are concerned wth maintaining democratic institutions to see that their constructive efforts must include technology itself. There, too, we must return to the human center. We must challenge this authoritarian system that has given to an underdimensioned ideolgogy and technology the authority that belongs to the human personality. I repeat: life cannot be delegated. (20)
(...) ...we had better map out a more positive course: namely, the reconstitution of both our science and our technics in such a fashion as to insert the rejected parts of the human personality at eveyr stage in the process. These means gladly sacrificing mere quantity in order to restore qualitative choice, shifting the seat of authority from the mechanical collective to the human personality and the autonomous group. (20)
(...) I trust I have made it clear that the genuine advantages our scientifically based technics has brought can be preserved only if we cut the whole system back to a point at which it willl permit human alternatives, human interventions, and human destinations for entirely different purposes from those of the system itself. At the present juncture, if democracy did not exist, we would have to invent it, in order to save and recultivate the spirit of man. (21)
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