Desecrating the Production Fetish
Introductory Note - Unless otherwise noted, sources: Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty (1955), a collection of her writings from the 1930s; Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958); Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine (1970); Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1964).
These are all thinkers and insights largely lost to contemporary political thinking, such that you can say we have any contemporary political thinking. The various common themes and insights are as striking as their absence from today's thought.
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From the inside of any established political, cultural, or value system, it is both difficult to think outside the system or at times truly understand the ingrained system itself. Ironically, the longer any such system is in place, many aspects promoted as foundational have little bearing on the present reality.
Presently, many current widely held political, cultural, and societal values offer hollow, misdetermined understandings that obscure more than enlighten the actual societal order and processes. The greatest deficiency is a complete lack of any understanding of technology's determining role in regards to industrial order, what we label modernity.
In his essential book, The Technological Society (1964), French technology historian Jacques Ellul wrote, “Political motivations do not dominate technical phenomena, but rather the reverse.” Without understanding how technology shapes technological society, there is little ability to create politics, establish meaningful culture, or assign and uphold social values, whether economic or ethical.
In ancient societies, ends were justified in the guise of various gods across the heavens, modernity saw industrial machines enshrine production as the ultimate end. Production became the modern fetish. The ability to break societal subjugation to production comes not with considering new ends, but in grasping the importance of means. It is only with a reconsideration and reorganization of means can humanity break from the constraints of unending, meaningless gross production.
Industrial society, modernity, is defined in this piece as the last two and half centuries mass harnessing of fossil fuels to power mechanization and the resulting political and cultural organization created. Two thinkers who helped define for better and worse the processes of industrialism are Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Both agreed production was the era’s most essential economic end. Limitless production became the alpha and omega of accepted economic value, simultaneously obscuring any greater understanding.
Smith’s Wealth of Nations is a long and brilliant description of the developing organization of production that became the industrial standard. Especially important is Smith’s understanding of the division of labor as production’s essential method. In the “Introduction to the Second Book,” Smith writes, “The quantity of materials which the same number of people can work up, increases in a great proportion as labour comes to be more and more subdivided.” In Smith’s interpretation, production’s true lever is the division of labor. Smith wrote at the dawn of the mass harnessing of fossil fuels, which, combined with the division of labor, resulted in industry’s production cornucopia.
It matters not what political label is slapped on them, all industrial economic values sit atop the dominant value of limitless production. In the 1930s, French political thinker Simone Weil astutely points to production as the central pillar of Marx’s thought. In Marx’s eyes, the development of the forces of production are “the true motive power of history. Every social system, every dominant class has the ‘task’, the ‘historic mission’, of carrying the productive forces to an ever higher level.” Weil reveals the great fallacy of Marx’s political conclusion that “the essential task of revolutions consists in the emancipation not of men but of productive forces.”
With industrialism, production became the dominant and in ways the exclusive force shaping society. In part, it also became invisible. Like some ancient sky god, production became all giving and all valuing, revealing itself to the faithful in quarterly Gross Domestic Product epiphanies. Greater production determined greater society, including political ends and cultural designs.
Marx’s paradise of limitless production has since been a goal shared by all industrial market economists. However, outside ownership of the means of production, industrialism’s organizational aspects have largely been ignored, dismissed, or given wand waving alternatives with state ownership of production on one end of the spectrum and free market mega-corporation order on the other. Weil correctly noted the great faults of all such political economy thinking with “the worker’s complete subordination to the undertaking and to those who run it is founded on the factory organization and not on the system of property.” Even with state ownership, the worker remained subject to the determining forces of production.
With the industrial division of labor, specialization, which arose from the great scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries came to dominate all organizational structure. Agrarian society was overwhelmingly comprised of farmers, who were not specialists. They were responsible for all activity on their land. Similarly, the craftsmen of agrarian society, while specialized in trade, were in no way as specialized as the factory cog assembly worker or corporate/government office bureaucrat.
With industrial labor, the process of specialization automatically disempowers the individual. In 1958, democratic thinker Hannah Arendt writes, “The society of jobholders, demands of its members a sheer automatic functioning, as though individual life had actually been submerged in the over-all life process of the species and the only active decision still required of the individual were to let go, so to speak, to abandon his individuality, the still individually sensed pain and trouble of living, and acquiesce in a dazed, ‘tranquilized,’ functional type of behavior.”
Over the last centuries, the human element comprising the means of production were valued as simple cogs on a giant global production gear. All individual work was valued by production and its end – more production.
Twentieth century American technology historian Lewis Mumford used the term “technic” to represent the methods, the means, of human organization. Technic is both technology in and of itself and as importantly the social, the human organization created above, beneath, or along side the technology. Mumford defined technology and its social organization together as technic. An easy example of this is the internal combustion engine. The engine and vehicle are the technology, while the factory, streets, gas stations, and supermarket parking lots are the organization springing from the technology. Together, all are components of technic.
Jacques Ellul advanced the same concept, though he used the French term technique. Ellul writes, “Technique’s own internal necessities are determinative. Technique has become a reality in itself, self-sufficient, with its special laws and its own determinations.” In practice, techniques have largely been conceived as apolitical even though “the state is no longer caught between political reality and moral theories and imperatives. It is caught between political reality and technical means.”
Ellul adds,
“In fact, technique is nothing more than means and the ensemble of means. This, of course, does not lessen the importance of the problem. Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends. Any other assessment of the situation is mere idealism.”
However, there is one end, at times obscured even to the otherwise astute insight of Ellul’s. That end is simply more production. This exclusive end obscures complex and necessary assessment of means. Overwhelmingly and harmfully, industrial political economy looked at technique as irrelevant to any end beyond production, thus, Ellul concludes, “Technique’s own internal necessities are determinative. Technique becomes a reality in itself, self-sufficient, with its special laws and its own determinations.” Hence, Weil’s insight it was not property that subordinated industrial labor, but the factory organization.
Ellul stresses, “Technicized man literally no longer exists except in relation to the technical infrastructure....the convergence on man of a plurality, not of techniques, but of systems or complexes of techniques. The result is an operational totalitarianism; no longer is any part of man free and independent of these techniques.”
Technology as media – “something in a middle position” – increasingly defined human social interaction and also determined humanity’s relations to the greater natural systems from which we evolved. By the 21st century, technology became so ubiquitous as to create technological environments that removed the individual from any interaction with nature. The easiest example of this is climate control, where people go from controlled environments inside their homes to controlled temperature transport, work, and markets. It needs to be added all things encountered in a market today are technologically created, all derived with various techniques.
In her 1943, The Need for Roots, Simone Weil wrote, “Facing nature, the member of a technical civilization holds the position of a god, but he is a slave of society.” Or as Ellul put it two decades later, “It is easy to boast of victory over ancient oppression, but what if victory has been gained at the price of an even greater subjection to the forces of the artificial necessity of the technical society which has come to dominate our lives?”
Intrinsically integrated into the value of production is necessity. This has never been well understood as production became the dominant value. Questions concerning necessity, what is necessary, go back to the Greeks, playing an integral part in philosophy ever since. Philosophy defined here simply as thought concerning the valuing of life. In recent philosophic thought, Hannah Arendt succinctly defines necessity as what's “necessary for the maintenance of life itself." Necessities are needs never quenched, eternally reoccurring cycles of the life process, biological processes such as eating and sleeping, endlessly repeated, only ever temporarily satiated.
From the beginning of the Agrarian age, what humanity does to provide necessity can broadly be defined as work. Here, both necessity and work should be considered very general definitions, opposed to conveying rigorous, stringent meaning. Greater specificity, specialism, restricts political values. In the 21st century, to create a functional politics, it is essential to loose the constraints of specialism with a closer consideration of the collective whole. Such meaning can only be gained in subjective relation to the other specialized parts and the whole itself.
With agrarian technique, work essential to meeting necessity was increasingly defined by technology, such as the hoe, the plow, and scythe. To provide better understanding, we can split, again very generally, the question of work into two categories: first, the work defined by necessity; secondly, all other work. Say for example a hunter's arrow directly provides essential sustenance as opposed to a diner's fork, which is not necessary.
Separating essential work for necessity from other work can also obscure value, most especially in an ever more technologically complex society. Arendt writes, “The easier that life has become in a consumers' or laborers' society, the more difficult it will be to remain aware of the urges of necessity by which it is driven, even when pain and effort, the outward manifestations of necessity, are hardly noticeable at all.” As societal specialization increases with technological complexity, any individual’s work can have little or nothing to do with necessity except for the modern necessity of gaining a paycheck, thus “necessity characterizes the technical universe.” (Ellul)
Understanding necessity is required for any devaluing of gross production. This is by no means easy. With necessity or more accurately and literally manufactured necessity, the need for production becomes infinite, never quenched. “The further the technical mechanism develops which allows us to escape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial technical necessities.” (Ellul) The easiest example here again being the automobile, where a nation, the US as best representation, makes their entire transportation infrastructure reliant on the automobile, the automobile becomes necessity.
This question of necessity is key to politics. In regards to producing actual needs, the question of technique, how organization is designed, is politics. However, with production not essential to necessity, the first question becomes whether it should be produced at all. Today, all such questions are pushed aside with production being the dominant or exclusive value. Simone Weil brilliantly ascertained this predicament,
“To desire is nothing; we have got to know the material conditions which determine our possibilities of action; and in the social sphere these conditions are defined by the way in which man obeys material necessities in supplying his own needs, in other words, by the method of production. A methodical improvement in social organization presupposes a detailed study of the method of production, in order to try to find out on the one hand what we may expect from it, in the immediate or distant future, from the point of view of output, and on the other hand what forms of social and cultural organization are compatible with it, and, finally, how it may itself be transformed.”
In consumer society, and it’s a mistake to consider consumption the end, it’s just another means of production, artificial desires are propagated by ubiquitous advertising based on various instinctual necessities. The only way to create value beyond simple production is in purposeful design and redesign of the techniques of production, putting value into means. Reorganizing production requires reorganizing the social, cultural, and political by assessing the whats and hows of any given technology adopted for any given productive purpose and in turn how their techniques have or will impact social, cultural, political organization.
In looking at the techniques constructed with and around industrial technology, several important results become apparent. Most essential, technology destroys the past. In so doing, it destructs social organization that preceded it. Ellul writes,
“Technical progress causes the disappearance, as Jerome Scott and R. P. Lynton put it, of that ‘amalgam of attitudes, customs and social institutions which constitute a community.’ Communities break up into their component parts but no new communities form. The individual in contact with technique loses his social and community sense as the frameworks in which he operated disintegrate under the influence of techniques.”
Technology’s destruction of the past is recorded and most easily understood with industrial technologies subversion of agrarian society. “The furious components of mechanized industry conspired to remove the traditional valuations of humanity,” Mumford writes “contracting or expanding or diverting human needs to those that are required to keep such an economy in operation.” Previously established culture is berated as obstacles to progress, with progress simplistically defined as more production. “The latest technical proposal, instead of having to establish its right to be recognized and accepted, rather challenges society to take it over at once, and at any cost; whilst any reluctance to do so immediately is looked upon as reprehensible.”
With the adoption of industrial technology, the independent farmer and craftsman became the mass laborer. With universal electrification, a societal electromagnetic spectrum was inserted into established community, which across history from its African beginnings, had been face to face. With this electromagnetic spectrum, the screens it produced became a completely destructive social element. The technology itself becomes pseudo-community creating ahistorical social values subservient to the technology itself.
Industrial technique overwhelms individual initiative “pursuing its own course more and more independently of man. This means that man participates less and less actively in technical creation, which, by the automatic combination of prior elements, becomes a kind of fate. Man is reduced to the level of a catalyst. Better still, he resembles a slug inserted into a slot machine: he starts the operation without participating in it.” (Ellul)
Such constraint and restriction becomes even greater with automation. While automation is promoted as liberating, particularly in relation to the latest generation of compute marketed as AI, it is in fact just as much a constraint to human freedom. Mumford writes,
“Once automatic control is installed one cannot refuse to accept its instructions, theoretically the machine cannot allow anyone to deviate from its own perfect standards. And this brings us to the most radical defect in every automated system: for a smooth operation this under-dimensional system requires equally under-dimensional men, whose values are those needed for the operation and the continued expansion of the system itself. The mindsets so conditioned are incapable of imagining any alternative.”
Here Mumford shows two other essential aspects of technology completely ignored with its societal dominance. First, without any real assessment of the technology and its social impacts, the technology completely disregards the human element. Secondly, societal adoption of and adaption to any given technology automatically makes alternatives to the techniques established difficult if not impossible. A systemic rigidity as opposed to flexibility is achieved. “Automation has a qualitative defect that springs directly from its quantitative accomplishments, briefly, it increases probability and decreases possibility.” (Mumford)
“Under-dimensional man” is the perfect definition of what’s been created with industrialism and specialization. Societal automation threatens to create worthless man. To change direction we need to move from deriving all value from production, Mumford’s “quantitative accomplishments.” What is produced and how needs greater value than simple quantity. We need to value what and how work is defined. A redefining of work, not an ending as our current belly slithering Tech-oligarchs tempt. To revalue work it is essential to revalue production. Mumford concluded,
“Surely the time has come to reconsider the abolition of work. If work has been an integral part of human culture, and thus one of the active determinants of man's own nature for at least a half a million years – and had perhaps its beginnings a million and a half years earlier – in the little hominid ape that many anthropologists have too hastily identified as "man" – what will remain of man's life if these formative activities are wiped out by universal cybernetics and automation?”
With modernity, work as an essential element in shaping the nature of Homo sapiens was replaced by technology. Labor’s limitless production sought redemption in endless consumption and the slave’s endless dream of leisure. As to the emptiness of the latter, Ellul reminds us, “Only see what leisure has made of the bourgeois classes of society.”
A restructuring of work starts by relegating specialization, replacing under-dimensional man with a multi-dimensional person. Weil sublimely expresses the idea,
“We want to form whole men by doing away with that specialization which cripples us all...by giving the workman the full understanding of technical processes instead of a mere mechanical training; and to provide the understanding with its proper object, by placing it in contact with the world through the medium of labour.”
Weil revalues work, moving it beyond mere labor with the addition of information, more helpfully considered here as knowledge. In this sense, labor becomes not simply a cog in the gear of the production machine, but questions why and how the cog is turning and what the machine produces. This requires understanding the machine’s place in the greater world, the resources and energy it requires, and the techniques that bring resources and energy to the machine. Most importantly, questioning the necessity, if it is necessary at all, of the machine’s production. Thinking needs to be valued as work, a necessary labor of all.
The corporation is the great technique of industrial production. Revaluing production requires a reorganization of the corporate structure, most especially “’the degrading division of labour into manual and intellectual labour’, the very foundation of our culture, which is a culture of specialists.” (Weil) Yet this is not simply an internal reorganization of the corporate structure, but just as much a reorganization of contemporary societal structures the corporation has largely been responsible for creating.
Any thought on such a process requires valuing information, more specifically the value of knowledge. Markets alone are completely insufficient mechanisms for valuing information. Most especially, in theory, markets in large part value according to scarcity, information’s greatest value is its ubiquity and having an ability for the individual or an organization to utilize it. Information without an ability to apply it in one way or other is either entertainment or waste.
While it is necessary for every individual to become more knowledgeable of their work and how it interconnects with the larger world, only as a citizen, not simply as a worker, can this knowledge be applied in ways to gain its full value. This requires fundamental reorganization of government. Government needs to be more participatory, most importantly, allowing much greater participation in decision making. A restructuring of government to be more dynamic by devolving decision making to the greatest number.
Once again, participatory decision making, the definition of democracy, requires much better information techniques. All technology evolves from science, our ever growing knowledge of the functioning natural processes of ourselves, the world and the universe. The greater our scientific knowledge, the more information we have facilitating the development of more technology – the more technology, the more information, the greater technological complexity of any given society, the more information.
Out of industrialism came new informational techniques, universal public education a good example. However, there were many others, some nefarious. Ellul writes, “There is a permanent factor operating in the United States to facilitate the application of propaganda technique: the rapidly developing and remarkable mechanism of public relations. This technique is a system of propaganda applied to all economic and human relations.”
These processes have never, in a mass public way, been looked at with sufficient critique. Just the opposite, they are considered essential to the value of limitless production. The American PR and Advertising industry annually produces some hundreds of billions of dollars of information product, all done not with the idea of sharing knowledge or healthy communication, but with extreme prejudice and disregard for verity, valued simply for the ability to generate more production. Most detrimentally, these same processes have been adopted by the political process leading to ever increasing failure of governance. Now, humanity stands at the threshold of much of these processes of propaganda becoming automated, with all current problems of rigidity and centralization of power becoming ever more acute.
In looking at societal reorganization, we need to start with the individual, the worker and the citizen, understanding reorganizing their roles requires a restructuring of the corporation and government. Supplanting production as the single determining value doesn’t mean production isn’t important, but limitless production as fetish needs to be desecrated. We need to decide what is enough.
In order to come to terms with what is enough, we need to place value on the means, starting by valuing work and the citizen as ends in themselves, not just as means to more production. A valuing of information not as a means for more production, but by its ability to organize techniques requiring less resources and less energy. None of this can be accomplished through the deification of gross production.
Weil wrote,
“The organization of the natural environment, capital equipment, armaments, methods of work and of warfare; this factor occupies a special position owing to the fact that, though it acts upon the form of social organization, it in turn undergoes the latter’s reaction upon it. Furthermore, this factor is the only one over which the members of a society can perhaps exercise some control.”
We need to look at the process and results of production not just as ends in themselves, but part of a greater whole, an entirely and endlessly cyclical process, the process of life. We have created an immensely complex technological society, yet the interactions of its parts and its interaction with the greater natural world is at best insufficient and at worst destructive to the entire system. The production fetish has lost its charm.
