Manpower: Towards a New Anti-Technological Cause

Forward

The ideas put forth are not meant to be original. Many readers may claim most of the ideas such as the critique of Leftism is simply a reduced carbon-copy of Kaczyski’s Industrial Society and Its Future. This is largely true. The purpose of this work is to condense the ideas from Kaczyski and others into a more layman-friendly, print-out friendly piece. It is also a critique of ‘Neo-Luddism’, which I haven’t found outside of Techie criticisms.

In addition, the ideology presented below is a synthesis of philosophical anarchism or political nihilism, anarcho-primitivism and Kaczyski’s own anti-tech ideas. Thus, one may see a large collection of varying ideas. Eclectic is a term to use here.

For Wildness,

Sal Sobre La Heridas

Introduction

From the actions of the quasi-labor movements of the 19th century Luddites, to the 1970’s-1990’s radical anti-tech campaign of Theodore Kaczyski and the deceased anti-globalization movement; skepticism of the myth of progress has been present in the last few hundred years.

This skepticism has developed alongside the development of Industrial technologies such as mass communication and transportation, as well as surveillance systems and advanced weapons.

Now, as we are reaching a tipping-point of environmental sustainability and mass violence, the ‘luddite’ movement can be argued to have stagnated. It has maintained reformist attitudes, concerned more with liberal environmental issues and socialist-labor rhetoric. This is Neo-Luddism.

Such a source of these attitudes is Chellis Glendinning’s Notes toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto, published in 1990. The content is a fair analysis of the reality of the old Luddite’s goals: concerned more with “hurtful” technology and free-market capitalism. In addition, Glendinning puts forth a program in which technologies of our time should be rejected: television; nuclear, chemical, genetic, electro-magnetic and computer technologies.

I agree these technologies should be rejected, but this shows Glendinning and the old Luddites were concerned more with certain technologies rather than the basis of the larger issues themselves: the whole of the present technological and economic system of their (and our) time.

The reality is, we must object, in a revolutionary manner, all Industrial technologies. Such a view means a break with ‘Neo-Luddism’. Neo-Luddites are again, reformists and labor activists. The Social Democrats of technology.

A New Ideology

Anti-Technology (Anti-Technologist, Anti-Tech) is a reaction to two main components of society: the basis of present society, technological and economic advances (the totality of modern civilization) and the failed reactions to it. Such failed reactions are anarcho-primitivism, neo-luddism and radical environmentalism.

If Anti-Tech shares ideas with these groups, what are those ideas?

Anti-Technology rejects technology for reasons such as the centralization of power into the hands of a technocratic class (beyond the bourgeoisie), environmental degradation, the removal of individual and small group autonomy and dignity.

The details have been laid out from works of individuals such as Jacques Ellul, Theodore Kaczyski, Edward Abbey and organizations such as the early EarthFirst! movement.

Unlike Neo-Luddism, Anti-Tech rejects all technology, in the sense of industrial technologies. Many within AP would like a total return to a non-civilized way of life, but such a goal is idealistic, as after the collapse of world-wide industry, history will not be guided by revolutionaries.

As such, Anti-Tech creates a revolutionary value system based on the rejection of industrial technology, and the exalting of ecological systems outside of systematic human control (Wild Nature), community, self-reliance and dignity.

This is where the largest divide of Anti-Technology and Neo-Luddism is. The Neo-Luddites want to keep industrial society within a framework, based on communal and organic design.

Anti-Tech, however, wishes to see a sort of ‘collapse’ of techno-industrialism, meaning all technologies based on the principles and developments from the Industrial Revolution, on a global scale.

Anti-Technologists should question the legitimacy of the state, morality, ideology and mass-economics, all in addition to the core critique of techno-industrial society and civilization.

This is because we push for the highest state of personal autonomy, or in the least, giving people a chance to find it. Post-Collapse, the power of states, churches and other large institutions will be severely weakened.

We can be described as anarchists, populists, nihilists, primitivists (in the general use of the term) but people will choose to use or not to use these secondary-labels, as Anti-Technologist should come first. (For example, the author of this uses all previously listed labels as complementary to Anti-Tech.)

Activism or Revolution?

Despite the similar surface-level goals of Anarcho-Primitivism (AP) and Anti-Tech, AP is concerned more with non-revolutionary politics. It is a programme for activism, for the sake of activism. It has more in common with political Leftism than a truly revolutionary movement that seeks the goals AP claims to uphold. In fact, it more concerned with these ideas than the collapse of industry or civilization!

Political Leftism, in the Western sense, is a programme of activism: gay rights, animal rights, women’s rights and other such movements. Interestingly, many leftists do not fit into these groups, and seek to ‘protect’ them. They align with these groups as long as it is in their political interests.

Should a gay-man not align with a Leftist, the Leftist becomes frustrated, because in their eyes, the gay-man belongs to their movement. He is a token marginalized person of the Left. The Leftist does not believe the gay-man can help himself.

When a marginalized person or group does not align with Leftism, or specific Leftist movements (say, Marxism-Leninism), the Leftist will become hostile and reject that individual or group. They may call them Uncle-Toms or self-hating, when in reality, the Leftist is self-hating, or hating of others.

Activism for the sake of activism, best put as reformism (usually social or basic economic reforms such as gay marriage and universal healthcare), takes away from revolutionary potential. Some may argue it serves as a breeding pool of revolutionary potential and values, but this is uncommon at best and ahistorical at worst. For example, the Bolsevhik’s reformist policies came from pre-developed revolutionary notions, as a means to an end.

However, reformism, either for the sake of, or for a means to an end, is not suited for the purposes of Anti-Tech.

This is because we are not seeking seats in the government, nor a revolution to seize it. We are not revolting to embrace a global communist society, nor enforcing some ‘green radicalism. There is no Anti-Tech Party.

Our goal, as stated above is simply: the abolition of the present technological and economic system, a rebellion against modern civilization

Anti-Technologists, then, should avoid such activism. Not because we don’t believe gay men and women, animals, trans-people and people of color don’t deserve the same respect as others, but because such activism does not suit the purposes of an anti-technological revolution.

Reject The Dichotomy

The sins of the Left does not absolve the Right. The Right is dogmatic, hypocritical and equally hating of others. When their idealistic vision of the world is questioned, they become frustrated, too. They want medical and communicative technologies and economic growth. But they also want tradition. You cannot maintain your nation’s or tribe’s traditions while pushing for technological and economic growth.

Both the Left and the Right are assimilative programmes. As with the current technological and economic system, we should also reject political ideologies of Left and Right. Not in the way fascists are a ‘third-way’, but we call for a full break from such thinking.

In other words: Reject the dichotomy, fight for autonomy.

The (Expansive) Nature of Technology

Neo-Luddism and AP are often subject to the irrational conclusion that technology is unnatural, which in the following section, we will discuss.

(See Ted Kaczynski’s Why the Technological System Will Destroy Itself for a deeper exploration of the following ideas).

The nature of technology is simply that: a nature. It has functions that are defined by itself, and functions that are influenced by other factors such as the material conditions around it. Very similar to biological organisms like Humans.

Technology, say for example, like capital, is an expanding force. It seeks, by its non-sentient nature, to expand and solve its contradictions. It is a technical evolution, per say. The evolutionary capability of technology does not come from its physical, mechanical aspects. Rather, it comes from two reasons:

1. The development and usage of technologies by institutions (ie, states or corporations)
2. The ideas and social attitudes (myth of progress, rationalization)

1, expanded- If industrial technology was not an efficient method of production, transportation and warfare, it would not be used. It would be weeded out by social evolution, replaced by another system, or perhaps no system may have come close.

2, expanded — Glendinning does put quite well in her manifesto that: “As philosopher Lewis Mumford pointed out, technology consists of more than machines. It includes the techniques of operation and the social organizations that make a particular machine workable. In essence, a technology reflects a worldview. Which particular forms of technology — machines, techniques, and social organizations — are spawned by a particular worldview depends on its perception of life, death, human potential, and the relationship of humans to one another and to nature.” For the same reason as point a, if these industrial technology proved unfit to uphold these ideas, it would be rooted out by another system.

These reasons don’t show just the ways technology is able to be developed and grow, but it also serves to benefit the reasons. What I mean is that because technology proved efficient for warfare, it allowed advanced militaries to win, and expand, improving their systems as others rose to challenge them. The same can be said for the worldview of progress and rationalism- such ideas influenced the creation of industrial technologies, and those technologies expanded those ideas.

The technological-system and its development can then be understood to be a sort of evolution, as mentioned earlier, placed under evolutionary pressure and forced to adapt, as a biological species would. This is not a conscious choice on the part of the system, just as the evolution to grow legs was not intended by the animals who left the seas.

As such, the development of the system of industrial technology is a natural occurrence of social evolution.

The Bureaucracy of Technology

The Industrial Revolution can be best understood as a factory revolution, based on rationalization, a term we will use often here.

It is best we describe it now:

Rationalization is the method of social and technical organization that places emphasis on: efficiency, predictability, calculability and dehumanization. Such an idea first came from Max Weber, and later expanded upon by thinkers within the Marxian field such as Adorno and Lukács.

Because technology requires and also reinforces a culture of rationality, in the sense we used above, it does so too with bureaucracy.

Weber went to explain how such an organizational discipline emphasizes the need of bureaucracy:

“It is horrible to think that the world could one day be filled with nothing but those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving towards bigger ones — a state of affairs which is to be seen once more, as in the Egyptian records, playing an ever-increasing part in the spirit of our present administrative system, and especially of its offspring, the students. This passion for bureaucracy … is enough to drive one to despair. It is as if in politics … we were deliberately to become men who need “order” and nothing but order, become nervous and cowardly if for one moment this order wavers, and helpless if they are torn away from their total incorporation in it. That the world should know no men but these: it is such an evolution that we are already caught up, and the great question is, therefore, not how we can promote and hasten it, but what can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parcelling-out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life.”

For this society to function (which has existed and does now), a knowledgeable group of technicians (those from engineers, programmers, certain politicians and benefactors and so on) must exist to keep the system running, creating dependency on that singular group. A dependency on such a group creates the cog in the machine social order.

Of course, the cog in the machine concept raised here by Weber is one of the greatest examples of the removal of individual dignity. The whole array of technologies and the present economic system could simply not operate if we were to return to an artisan-based society.

What we are speaking on here is not just a political-bureaucracy, but a social-bureaucracy, a fixed state of the individual, bound up in the larger society. And as we have explained above, it is always expanding, meaning, there are less and less places to hide.

This is not to say bureaucracy did not exist before the industrial revolution, but since then, individuals and small-groups are more easily subject to scrutiny from larger organizations, bureaucracy and political leaders. Such methods would include expansive prisons, surveillance systems such as street cameras, and online-monitoring.

Corporations, governments and other organizations (scientific, data collecting, advertising, etc) all take advantage of these processes. Where governments can track our personal experiences, corporations and advertising firms can capitalize on it, for example.

It is also unreasonable to hope all citizens can learn and maintain proper security culture, online and when unplugged. This is because effective methods take dedication and mindfulness and a larger (but perhaps growing?) population do not immediately see the need for such personal security.

‘Socialized Technology’

Much of the concerns raised can be attributed to current applications of technology, not possible future ones. Communists may raise concerns that industry, capital, commodity production, class societies are the issues — not technology.

While it is true that technology may look radically different under Communism, it is faulty to assume we will know for certain, the functions of such an expansive system.

We can frame it in a way Communists will likely agree with: movements that simply restructure or reorganize capital are not truly revolutionary. The movement may alter the expression of capital, allow it to reorganize and generalize, but it is fundamentally the same.

The same can be said for technology — a restructuring of the system does not necessarily change the system’s basic properties. Expansion is the largest threat of the system, and perhaps communism, after eliminating the contradictions of producers (proletariat) and exploiters (bourgeoisie), the system may find new ways to expand even faster. It is also possible that after eliminating the profit-motive, technologies may generally speaking, become eco-friendly. Still, we cannot guarantee that outcome and ecological damage is only a part of the larger puzzle.

Who Is The Revolution?

No movement ever succeeded without support from a dedicated and motivated ‘base’, the larger support, either from fully-formed members or supporters within the masses. These values also should extend to the core, the professional and leading revolutionaries. They should also exemplify values of discipline, unity, dedication, pragmatism, and most importantly, they should be inspiring.

The movement needs to develop where the pains of society are most felt, and apply itself to those conditions. The lumpenproletariat (vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes- as Marx put it), those living in ‘ghettos’ or slums, the underpaid factory worker, the illegal immigrant -those living in the ‘shadow’ of progress.

This is not the White Savior complex in the way Modern Leftists are paragons of false virtue for marginalized groups, but in the way Lenin and Bakunin preached the downtrodden are capable of the highest consciousness.

The privileged bourgeois-minded college kid is not as likely to be committed to these ideas, but only appear to be so. (Not to say some bourgeois-minded people won’t be useful in their own way.)

Bakunin said of such lower members of society:

that eternal ‘meat’, […] that great rabble of the people (underdogs, ‘dregs of society’) ordinarily designated by Marx and Engels in the picturesque and contemptuous phrase lumpenproletariat. I have in mind the ‘riffraff’, that ‘rabble’ almost unpolluted by bourgeois civilization, which carries in its inner being and in its aspirations […] all the seeds of the socialism of the future…

Of course, we do not claim hold on a socialist future, but rather no future at all, a negation of progress!

Water Seeds, Build Revolutionaries

Early revolutionaries, those who are likely to form the ‘core’ of the movement- the leaders and major theorists, need to apply themselves to local communities. This means spending time in places that may be alien to them, such as ‘slums’ or ‘ghettos’ and put aside one’s personal opinions of the locale and the people who live there.

(In reality, if you are repulsed by the people and not the conditions or the larger issues that put them there- you are not wanted in this movement.)

Such starting points may differ, depending on your geography and audience, but you are not there to save anyone, you are there to make revolutionaries, to be the gardener of the seed that is in many of them: that of revolution.

Primarily, the ‘riffraff’ and ‘rabble’ struggle to stay above just surviving, and many struggle to even make it there. Giving them the resources to build and tend gardens, create community watchmen and so on will allow the revolutionaries an audience. The movement is built, off the shoulders off a beneficial relationship.

I feel the need to say this again: You are not here to save anyone.

You are here to guide, and make revolutionaries. Direct their anger, primarily away from ‘pseudo-issues’ such as immigration, or the liberal-conservative divide. Instead, their minds and hearts should be directed towards techno-industrial society.

Online ‘activism’, such as debates are no use to us. The major use of the internet should be publications and research, nothing more.

Revolutionary Philosophy And Organization

All actions in the name of the movement, within these local communities and abroad, will alter and manifest as the revolutionaries learn from experience.

In the words of Edward Abbey in his work, The Monkey Wrench Gang, “We’ll work it out as we go along. Let our practice form our doctrine, thus ensuring precise theoretical coherence” (pg 69).

That being said, should future revolutionaries find what has been laid out above does not manifest in creating revolutionary actions and values, it should be discarded, either in bits or in whole.

On a personal level, The Revolutionary Catechism by Sergey Nechayev (1869) should be of heavy influence to members of the movement, especially the ‘core’ group, the leaders. It outlines, in simple terms, that a revolutionary’s primary concern be the revolution itself, becoming almost a manifestation of the movement itself. Nechayev believed the Church, State, etc., operated with violence and amoral character, and to fight these institutions, a revolution should act in the same way to negate these larger forces. We apply the same logic to the Techno-Industrial system.

The movement’s conception of organization should take from Lenin, Stalin and Mao’s concepts of party organization and philosophy, ie Vanguardism and Democratic Centralism. To save time, below are listed works that serve as good introductions to the idea of party organization and discipline:

• Lenin’s What Is To Be Done (1901)
• Lenin’s Freedom to Criticize and Unity of Action (1906)
• Chapters VII and VIII of Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism (1953)
• Mao’s Combat Liberalism (1937)

It should be noted that, just because we find inspiration in the ideas of Communists does not mean we agree with their overall ideology (ie, Marxism and Marxism-Leninism) or actions done in the name of those ideologies. However, we have found that the organizational and disciplinary theories from these leaders were effective in achieving primary, first goals.

Again, if future revolutionaries find these organizational ideas are not effective, they should be discarded. It is likely we will have to adapt or completely rework our organization, but what was laid out above gives the movement a basic framework, in which to operate from.

A Final Note

The term ‘Anti-Tech’ (or the other forms we find it used above) is also used by Kaczynki, but we extend the critique in a more open manner against civilization and metaphysical enslavement (ie, religion, moralism, the state) in ways that compliment the goals at large.

We understand people who have identified with this label before us may not totally agree with our message and expansion of the definition. In all seriousness, we don’t care. A label is simply an identifier, and drama around the title is a waste of breath, and obsession over finding a new label is an equal waste of time. Should, down the line, the title of this ideology or any breakaway ideology change, so be it.

This may be a piece I revisit in the future, as the movement and myself evolve. By all means, I am open to criticism on the points presented, especially about organization and philosophy.

I have also chosen to not write in detail, the future of the movement’s actions, because I cannot control it, and revolutions are rarely, if at all, subject to predictable cause-and-effect decisions. This is one major issue I see with Kaczynski’s idea of revolution, even if I agree with the larger premises he has laid out.

Such ideas I do agree with are that the system will not likely collapse on its own any time soon, nor will it collapse because of purely revolutionary action. Instead, revolutionaries need to keep a keen eye out for weaknesses, or where the system is struggling. At this point, revolutionaries need to be ready and motivated to kick the legs out from under the system, be it communication systems, power-plants, etc.

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I want to thank those who looked over this piece for conceptual and logical errors. I have abstained from fixing a majority of the finer grammatical errors, because in my mind, I want the piece to look friendly, and readable, and I was much less concerned with the grammatical errors, within reason, of course.

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Also, Medium’s formatting sucks, I apologize.