http://www.takver.com/history/hooton_tech.htm
The short version...
Anarcho-technocracy is the theory of Direct Action on Things. It is
anarchist, inasmuch as it states that all government over men must be
replaced by the administration of things; it is technocratic, in that it
contends this administration can be encompassed, in this era of increasing
technological complexity, only by the technicians. It comprises the other
political theories, which in reality, if not avowedly, all have the same
end in view. In particular, it comprises and furthers democracy, our own
brand of political theory.
Democracy is not the rule of the majority of the people over a minority,
which inevitably becomes the rule of a minority over the majority, a rule
over the people; it is not self-government, the rule of the people over the
people, which is a physical impossibility -- it is the rule of all the
people, over something else, something other than and outside the people.
There is only one thing outside the people to be ruled -- that is their
material environment, that part of that environment transformed in
industry, the machines. Democracy becomes inevitably Industrial democracy.
In doing this it transforms political terms, methods, institutions. It
transforms politics itself -- from politics, which is a matter of the
government of men, into technics, which is a matter of the Government of
Things.
Democracy can't see this role it plays. All it can see, at its best, is
full human power. But that power is blind, misdirected -- it is expressed
indiscriminately on both men and things. It needs the insight of anarchism,
a later development in political thought, which realises that no political
power should be imposed on men. . . . Democracy in lifting the people to
power makes the people free. Democracy merges then into anarchy, the demand
for full human freedom. The democrat, to the extent that he carries his
theory to its conclusions, is, and must be an anarchist. Freedom and power
are not mutually opposed -- they are identical. Freedom is power. Moreover
this real power must take a form which they both dread -- that is
dictatorship. We hate dictatorship. But that is only because all
dictatorships we have known have been tyrannies over men, over us. It is
the height of folly to oppose dictatorship, when we are the dictators, when
it is our dictatorship -- and when it is imposed only on things. We can be
a ruthless, arbitrary and as autocratic as we like -- with this subject
"class." What is needed, as contradictory as the terms may seem, is a fully
human, a democratic dictatorship. One that does not impose its power on any
human being whatsoever -- an Anarchist Dictatorship. Anarchism, not
realising how closely bound it is to democracy, thinks it must oppose any
sort of power, but in actuality it seeks it. It found it, in the workers --
in syndicalism. And so we had the programme, Anarcho-syndicalism. But since
then technology has transformed work and the workers out of all
recognition. Machines are "the workers" to-day. We are all keeping machines
out of jobs. And the only effective human personnel, the key personnel, are
the scientists -- the technicians. We might know an axe, or a hammer, or
sickle; but we wouldn't know the components of the uranium atom if we saw
them. We can't see them -- they are concepts of physics, mathematics. We
depend on specialists, on technicians. And it so happens that they have
their programme, their movement -- Technocracy. And anarchism, if it is to
keep pace with modern developments, and retain its position in the vanguard
of social advance, must ally itself with this movement. This new alignment
is what I try to cover in the clumsy, but accurate, amalgam:
Anarcho-technocracy.
These two heads are not contradictory -- they are complementary. The
technicians will rule things, the material resources of the community, all
right -- but they nowhere disavow intent to rule us. Their regime needs the
qualification of anarchism -- that there can be no government over men. But
the anarchists repudiate all government. They need the technicians to point
out that there can be a government after all -- over things. . . . It will
almost certainly be objected that all this is using the terms, rule, power,
government, etc., falsely, out of their context. But it is precisely this
transformation in our terms and in the customary contexts for them which
characterises this shift from politics to technics. We have to lift our
political terminology up bodily and apply it in a new context, in a new
direction, on to things in a new material world.
The old politics based on the workers in general is out. We cannot have the
"General Strike" -- what is needed is the Particular Strike, of the
scientists. If2 the workers, the people generally, jacked up against war, a
handful of scientists could still rub them out with an atomic weapon . . .
. The socialists still talk about the abolition of wage slavery. They can
only talk about it. The technician does it, by abolishing the wage slave --
by replacing the human slave by a machine. Machines need no wages.
Moreover, they need no bureaucracy -- no manpowers, police, clerks, snivel
servants -- to drive them to work. The technicians abolish the State, as we
know it, simply by abolishing us -- as slaves. But we don't want to be
abolished -- we cling to our slave mentality, fight for our status as
workers, as political subjects, as the people. We think the State will be
removed, but that we will remain to flourish. But while the people, while
vast sprawling populations persist, the problems -- of decentralisation,
distribution, social service, etc., etc. -- the "Welfare State" will
persist. The anarchists and communists say that the State will be
abolished, or "wither away." Implied in this is that the people will
continue to proliferate and prosper. This is an idiot, top-heavy travesty
of all reality. We say, on the contrary, that the "State" -- the new rule
of the engineers -- must be strengthened; and that the people will --
"wither away."
We dread the technicians as a new ruling class. But we do not need to be
the new ruled class. We must resist them, and the regrettable fact is that
we may have to, for the technician, in common with most of the rest of us,
is conditioned to accept some form of control over human beings as
necessary in any regime. But in that conditioning he ceases to be a
technician in the strict sense of the word. We must strengthen his own
innate interest and theory, as a technician, in things, so that he will
control things exclusively. But the trouble is we tend to despise his
interests and values. It is the fashion to sneer at productivity. But what
greater value is there? The man who can make a pot, or grow a turnip, or
open an atom, is worth more than all the priests, all the politicians, all
the psychologists who ever existed. This holds despite all the
falsifications of the last 50,000 years. Productivity will hold as a value
as long as man lasts. It will be superseded only when man becomes more than
man, when he is superman; when it is succeeded in our scale of values by
creativity. But the politicians, and their idiot apes, the Lawrences,
Aldous Huxleys, Mumfords, Toynbees -- all our "thinkers" sneer at
scientific production. The only sphere in which productivity reigns is that
wherein it is not needed -- in the mass production, in the reproduction of
humankind. Well, the technician counts that out, too. He doesn't need large
populations to do his bidding. And we don't. We want a small society -- one
of quality, not quantity, in which every human being can be powerful and
free. We need a small society, as Greek society was small. And like the
Greeks we need slaves, a vast politically subject "class" to rule. We have
this in things, in the forces of organised matter, in the machines.
The engineers must rule. Who else could rule in a machine age -- the Golden
Philosopher King? All the political philosophies from Plato to Marx must be
shot on to the scrap heap. We tend to think of technocracy as a crank cult
of the thirties. This is tragic stupidity. A decade or two is nothing in
the march of events. And there have never been enough cranks in the world.
Of course, in adopting technocracy, in adapting it to our needs we must
dissociate it from its present advocates. Its original theory is weak. And
in practice it has gone the way of all human organisations. It has swung
into line behind American nationalism. It would organise the material
resources of the North American continent,3 and not a global abundance. It
will finish advocating bigger and better atomic weapons. It needs the
vision and principles of anarchism. The first thing we have to do is frame,
or help the engineers to frame, a theory and programme of world power. The
next thing we have to do is build the organisation which will make that
power an effective reality. . . . We must organise -- but we must organise
matter, not men. All organisations up to the present, including
technocracy, have failed because they have set out to organise human beings
-- to discipline, rule their own members. They have been miniature human
political states, and, where they have attained power, actual human states
as we know them. They will always be that. There is only one way we can
avoid making this mistake -- that is to build a scientific organisation,
one that imposes no rule of any kind on any of its members, one that
imposes its rules only on things.
But, as I say, this can only be the briefest of introductions to this
subject. There remains only one thing I should add: Apart from the
theoretical task before us, or while we are waiting for the scientists
proper to reach full social-political consciousness for themselves, there
is something we can do, as ordinary workers, as principled people, as
artists. We can, we must get together, pool our material resources, our
equipment, build our own workshops, our own houses, the things we need for
ourselves. This may seem only a feeble effort to parallel modern science,
which makes efforts at industrial co-operative democracy seem vain. But it
is essential that we provide examples, nuclei of how material cultures can
function in freedom. . . . This may seem, and indeed it is, utopian. But we
must have utopias. All we have to do is make them modern. The utopias of
the past have been rural, oriented to the green corn and the vile compost
of our past. We want our utopia in the heart of our city, in the heart of
Sydney. We need an urban utopia. We should not rest until we have rebuilt
Sydney, scrapped its hideous transportation, pulled down its idiot
architecture, fashioned it to fit the needs of civilised man.
HARRY HOOTON.4
