#marxism — Public Fediverse posts

Thinking about technology and ideology.

I honestly think that an alarming number of authors that are frequented in 'marxists' circles, such as Zizek, maintain a misleading conception about what "ideology" is, probably as a heirloom from freudianism and psychoanalysis. Their definition of ideology is much like "a way of thinking", or "a prescription over our forms of desire". And, indeed, ideology is a moulding force over our volition and idiosyncrasy, but it's much more subtle that a "mind-control-like thing". Ideology is the way in which the world is presented to us.

You are not "indoctrinated into an ideology", and, being fair, there is no such a thing as a single coherent ideology. Instead, you are presented "ideological representations" of reality in the form of reified social relations. The commodity is an ideological object that we introduce in our daily lives. Gender is an ideological object securing the social reproduction of labour forces, capital and authority. The point is: social relations, power, modes of production... are all interwoven when it comes to our verily cognitive recognition of the world. We learn as long as we live, we live in the social world, the social world is mediated by ideological objects; therefore, we learn how to interpret the world through ideological representations. Also our conceptions about what "nature" and "objectivity" is are formulated upon an ideological basis.

Now let's transfer this thought to the interpretation of the modes of production under capitalism.

When studying the rise of capitalism, we often read that this new mode of production won over the Ancien Régime because of its "superior productivity" and "eficiency". This isn't accurate. "Eficiency" is a highly ideological category to evaluate a mode of production. Eficient for whom? Even "productivity" is not as objective as it may seem. Reading André Gorz, I found that, at the begining, there was not such as thing like a "higher production" of the manufacture over traditional craftmanship. What was really determinant for the success of manufactures was that the concentration of the work force allowed for a higher level of control and, therefore, higher levels of exploitation. That is to say, the history of manufacture and the factory is a history of the evolution of control over the worker. The higher "eficiency" of capitalism was the eficiency to maximize capital accumulation.

Since then, our technological innovation in the terrain of production has been developed under the conditions of capitalist exploitation. The higher levels of production are not a sign of the superior capacity of capitalism to generate new products and higher numbers of commodities; on the contrary, it is a sign of how capitalism colonized human creativity and innovation and forced us to imagine new technologies of production that need human submission to function. As Marx analyzed in his "Capital", the worker who loses knowledge over the production process is alienated and, instead of being a living user of its means of production, becomes themself into a dead compound of a great machine. The scientific knowledge of the process of production turns itself against the worker and serves as tool for the despotic authority of the capital.

We often think about technology and science as "neutral" and inoffensive by themselves, but this is an ideological representation. Yes, indeed, "technology" and "science" as abstract identities, understood the former as the ideation of tools and processes, and the former as the achievement of "true knowledge" of the world, are not a "capitalist" thing my themselves. BUT technology and science do not exist in a social vacuum, in reality they get realized under the social relations of capitalism and mediated by ideological forms and objects, thus, the products of "technological and scientific innovation" conform themselves to ideological forms, specially when it comes to their implementation to the production process.

Calm down, this post is not a "technology bad, return to monke" thing, all the contrary. What I want to express is that the valorative categories that we use in order to appraise the mode of production are moulded by capitalist representations of reality and, more important, that technological innovation under capitalism obeys to such a representation of reality. Capitalism "productive superiority" is a myth if we understand "productivity" as a measure for the fulfillment of our necessities. The only productive superiority of capitalism stands when it comes to the production of "commodities" as a social relation, which are an ideological representation of the economic production and is founded over the possibility of a market economy.

That's why an "intermediate state capitalism economy before the achievement of communism" like the one defended by many marxists is impossible, as they defend this intermediate stage as a method to the "development of the means of production". Such a development of the means of production would be an illusion, as the means or production that you will be developing would be the capitalist ones: the ones that maximize the reproduction of capital and capital accumulation. You would be appraising "eficiency" and "productivity" with the same measures as the capitalist, insofar as you conceive technology and technological innovation as a neutral thing.

The truth is that, under the conditions of an emancipated society, with an economy of free communities following their self-fulfillment, technology and the means of production would evolve following very different criteria. A specific technology that is "efficient" under certain material conditions may not be efficient when it is transferred to a different social context. The tecnology that is "efficient" under capitalism won't be efficient in communism.

I consider this as an argument against stage/transition authoritarian communism. We should strive for the anarchist prefiguration, here and now, of the society that we want to live in in the future. Only by following this project can we discover which technologies will be functional to our autonomy and our relation to the world.

#Ideology #Technology #Productivity #Communism #Efficiency #Productivism #Scarcity #Post-Scarcity #Anarchism #Alienation #Prefiguration #Marxism #Reification #State #AntiState #AntiStatism