Will we be a technocracy?

IS THE NWO CHANGING AMERICA FROM A REPUBLIC TO A TECHNOCRACY?  THE PUSH IS ON!

Technocracy:  Old Fallacies in a New Disguise - A PRIMER ON THE CHANGE IN GOVERNANCE IN AMERICA

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A distortion of truth can be as misleading as a downright lie. A new craze called Technocracy has swept America and is now being lapped up eagerly by all kinds of muddleheaded people in Great Britain. It is based on a distortion of the facts and leads to thoroughly unsound conclusions. The word itself means Government by technicians or engineers. 


Technocracy, however, has come to mean much more than that. Some ten years ago a group of American engineers and scientists concluded that “scientific discovery and modern engineering skill have now armed mankind with powers which would insure it a life of leisure and plenty if only they were properly employed.”
 
Arguing from this sort of evidence the technocrats speak glibly of each man’s output increasing “thousands of times,” and they see this increase at work with special force in recent years. The flaw is that they have left entirely out of account the vast amount of labor needed for the construction of the modern flour mills and blast furnaces and for the provision of fuel, transport, etc., to supply them with raw material and distribute their products. 


Without this information (and the United States Government Committee on Technological Unemployment has just reported that such information relating to separate trades is not available. See Industrial and Labour Information. I.L.O. January 2nd, 1933), the comparisons have little value and are in fact utterly misleading. Productivity does not increase at anything like the rate they claim.


Their false assumptions have led the technocrats to wildly extravagant conclusions which their admirers in Great Britain have promptly swallowed. They talk about production having reached the stage at which it can almost entirely dispense with human labor. 


Now if it were true that the past 25 years have brought technical changes causing the labor needed in production to drop to “levels approaching zero,” we would be faced with unemployment in the neighborhood of 100 per cent. Instead of which the technocrats themselves place unemployment in U.S.A. at not more than 20 per cent.  There is, of course, a displacement of workers going on, but the extent of such displacement is small compared with the unscientific guesses of these “scientific” investigators. contractions of capitalist trade and production, each in turn produces its new or revived distortions of theory.


The truth lies in neither camp. Capitalism plunges into periodic crises of “overproduction” and exhibits its permanent contradictions of extreme wealth and extreme poverty not because of machines or the lack of them, or because of high or low productivity, but because the means of production and distribution, including the machines, are privately owned and controlled by the capitalist class. 


The remedy (vaguely glimpsed by some of the technocrats) is to make the means of life the common property of society and have goods produced solely for use instead of for sale and profit-making. The method (and this the technocrats entirely ignore) is the capture of political power by an organized Socialist majority.


One word in conclusion. It is obvious that the technocrats know nothing of the studies made by Marx. (They actually reject him as obsolete because they imagine that he advocated the continuance of the money system whereas in fact he recognized, as does every Socialist, that the money system will pass away with the passing of capitalism.) Marx's approach to this problem was really scientific and contrasts strikingly with the haphazard methods and hampering prejudices of these American engineers.
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Source: Socialist Standard, February 1933.

Edgar Hardcastle

Transcription: Socialist Party of Great Britain.
HTML Markup: Michael Schauerte
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.