To put an end to the fable of self-management in an industrial environment

“Contrary to what revolutionary doxa affirms, the class distinction is not so much between those who own the means of production and those who do not have them as between those who design these means of production (drawing and Design) and their performers (considered robots or animals). The means of production is to be criticized in itself, because if it belongs to the bourgeoisie, it is because it was designed to convey the values of the bourgeoisie. The intrinsic way of doing things of a means of production determines a way of organizing itself socially. No neutrality. The ways of doing things of the bourgeoisie themselves contain class division, perpetuate it and legitimize it. For example, a nuclear power plant requires perforce a hierarchical, centralized, secure, capitalist social organization, etc. The question of ownership of the means of production must serve not so that our class appropriates what does not belong to it, but to define, to question, to find out what it needs to appropriate or not.”

— Sebastián Cortés, Radical antifascism? On the industrial nature of fascism, 2015

In order to maintain themselves in power or to progress through the hierarchy, members ofintelligentsia For more than a century now, leftists have been exploiting the same lie — self-management of the industrial system would be materially possible and its advent would only depend on political will. Most social and ecological problems could finally be solved when the big industrial firms and the state are in the hands of the right people to be self-managed according to democratic, anti-authoritarian principles, etc. This is also what Lenin promised in 1917 in The State and the Revolution, only a few months before drafting the decrees creating the Cheka, the political police responsible for hunting down opponents of the Bolshevik regime^[1].

Let's start by recalling the definition of self-management given by the National Center for Textual and Lexical Resources:

“Management of an agricultural or industrial enterprise ensured by a committee elected by the workers of the enterprise itself^[2] ”

Wikipedia adds that self-management would be part of anarchist or libertarian philosophy, while specifying that it involves the establishment of direct democracy, which implies:

• The elimination of any distinction between managers and managers (Principle of one person, one vote);
• The transparency and legitimacy of decisions;
• The non-appropriation by some of the wealth produced by the community;
• The assertion of the ability of humans to organize without a leader^[3].

But these commendable principles are inapplicable in a mass society, much less so in an industrialized mass society. This intellectual scam that is the self-management of the industrial system does not withstand critical analysis for long. Here are some elements to debunk this umpteenth myth spread by the left so that the human animal learns to love its technological leash.

Summary of the article:

1. Technology is not neutral
2. Dispossession is at the heart of the industrialist political project
3. Authoritarian techniques produce authoritarian societies
4. Looting, destroying, standardizing: a material necessity for industry
5. War, the engine of technical progress
6. The technological environment imposes hierarchy
7. In an industrial environment, technocracy is the ruling class
8. A mass society is always overbearing

1) Technology is not neutral

The idea of self-managing the industry is based entirely on False hypothesis : the technology would be socially and politically neutral, it would not produce its own effects and it would be possible to separate the good effects from the bad ones. Marxist theorists — and many environmentalists trapped by the left — consider that the majority of the problems of our time are attributable to the capitalist economic system. The industrial revolution and the resulting system of infrastructures, factories and machines would have no connection with the social and ecological disasters that have been growing exponentially over the past two centuries. So we are in the presence of people who present themselves as scientists and materialists, but who deny any influence of technological infrastructure on the recent evolution of human societies, their collective imagination, their social morals and norms.

Historians, sociologists, anthropologists and philosophers have shown for decades already that industrialization was at the origin of an upheaval in the world that far exceeds that of all political and religious revolutions combined. Author of an essential book on the Luddite revolt, Kirkpatrick Sale notes that

“This upheaval has not only revolutionized the face of production, but has transformed its places and purposes, the composition of the workforce, the structure of markets, population and settlement movements, as well as the role of the family and communities.^[4].”

It is interesting to note here that the same effects have occurred all over the world in industrializing countries, regardless of the political regime. Industrialization has produced a cultural standardization of the world unprecedented in history, a process of homogenization that has accelerated with the colonization of the world by the Internet and screens.^[5].

2) Dispossession is at the heart of the industrialist political project

The industrial revolution marked the end of the technical autonomy of artisans and peasants. Industrial development could not have taken place if these groups had continued to design their production tools themselves. This task is now being confiscated by a scientific and technical elite trained in leading schools, specialists who apply a new ethic to tool design. Quantitative variables such as efficiency, power, and growth must take precedence over all other aesthetic, religious, or moral considerations that once held back technical progress and limited the destructive power of pre-industrial civilizations.

Among other things, the introduction of machinery was to discipline the workforce by destroying the autonomy of workers. This change in production methods made the know-how and experience accumulated in the handling of tools obsolete, which amounts to possession, and therefore a loss of power over the production process. In Technocriticisms, for example, the historian François Jarrige was interested in the reasons that prompted landowners to mechanize agriculture.

“The mechanization of threshing and mowing takes time: while it began in the middle of the 19th century, it only became widespread very gradually, by marginalizing oppositions and criticisms. From 1852 to 1873, the number of steam threshers increased from 81 to 6,000 in France. In areas of small polyculture or viticultural monoculture, their use remains rare because they are not very profitable and farmers do not have sufficient resources to acquire or rent them. In the North or in the rich countryside of Lyon, on the other hand, they are imposed under the pressure of agricultural committees and agricultural societies which organize demonstrations to convince the hesitant. Construction factories were created, itinerant mechanical threshing companies appeared and crisscrossed the countryside. To impose these innovations, the proponents of mechanical methods use the language of progress, efficiency and order at the same time: mechanization must discipline workers because, “with beating machines, surveillance is infinitely easier.” Mechanization is in fact taking place in a context of social conflict and machines are designed as weapons to intimidate the workforce. In 1859, the Journal de Chartres recommended their use because “the day when the first harvester appeared in our countryside would be the day that marked the end of the independence of the ploughmen”. For large rural owners, the machines must thus “free farmers from despotism organized by labourers”. Technology was initially thought of as a tool for control and domestication, a means of imposing order against the persistent insubordination and threatening autonomy of workers.”

To conclude here, seeking to reappropriate means of production originally designed and introduced to dispossess human communities is an insane undertaking, and therefore futile.

3) Authoritarian techniques produce authoritarian societies

“Anarchism presupposes, in all likelihood, a low standard of living. It does not necessarily involve starvation and discomfort, but it is incompatible with the existence of air conditioning, chrome, and the accumulation of gadgets that are now considered desirable and civilized. The sequence of operations involved, for example, in the manufacture of an airplane is so complex that it necessarily involves a planned and centralized society, with all the associated repressive apparatus. Unless there is a sudden change in human nature, there is no way of reconciling freedom and efficiency.^[6].”

— George Orwell

The steam engine, the cutter, the stamping machine, the rolling mill, the computer, the nuclear power plant, the chainsaw, the MRI scanner and the bulldozer are to be classified among the authoritarian techniques^[7]. For their construction and operation, these machines depend on an international network of sites for the extraction of raw materials (tens of thousands of mines and oil wells), on a network of infrastructures and fast means of transport (ports, container ships, tankers, trucks, trucks, trucks,, highways, oil and gas, highways, oil and gas pipelines, highways, oil and gas pipelines, motorways, oil and gas pipelines, railways, electrical networks, etc.), on abundant human resources (made dependent on industry to survive), sites where to dispose of waste, an army and a police force to monopolize resources and expel traditional autonomous peoples from areas to be “developed”, etc. A system built by and for large centralized, hierarchical and authoritarian organizations — states and multinational firms — with the aim of increasing their power.

This system of interdependencies with global ramifications places industrialized societies in a noose. As technological power increases, more humans depend on the industrial system, the more resources are rapidly dwindling, and the more constraints on the population must increase to prevent the system from collapsing. It is no coincidence that the technocrat Jean-Marc Jancovici praises the authoritarian management of multinationals or believes that a “Chinese-type system” is the model to follow for managing energy constraints.^[8]. You could say that the industrial system “naturally” tends towards authoritarianism and totalitarianism because of its material structure. The proof with China. With its concentration camp system^[9], its widespread surveillance, its technological genocides^[10], the communist dictatorship established 80 years ago in China propelled the country to the top of the world hierarchy. The optimum of such a system? Human cattle in cans, fed by machines, shot with tranquilizers, connected 24/7 to the metaverse.

In short, you cannot democratically manage a system designed from the beginning to coerce. It's like trying to make a brick fly.

To go further on the links between authoritarianism and industry, read” Industrialism is authoritarianism ”.

4) Looting, destroying, standardizing: a material necessity for industry

Another reason that makes the apostles of self-management pass for sweet dreamers is the consumption of resources and the production of waste from an industrial system. For an equal population, the raw material needs of an industrial society far exceed those of an agrarian society. To produce in industrial quantities, raw materials are needed in industrial quantities. You need transport infrastructures to transport them and communication infrastructures to allow the different parts of the system to adapt to each other, to function effectively together. (And infrastructures alone consume a huge part of the world's resources for their construction and maintenance).^[11]). Human communities that were formerly materially and politically autonomous must be destroyed in order to create sufficient demand capable of swallowing up industrial production. This explains why the nation-state political system, with an enslaved, materially dependent, and culturally uniform population, colonized the planet.

Raw materials (oil, gas, iron, copper, copper, aluminum, aluminum, aluminum, titanium, titanium, titanium, titanium, rubber, rubber, gold, silver, zirconium, nickel, etc.) must be found somewhere, on land already occupied by humans, forests, aluminum, aluminum, titanium, titanium, titanium, titanium, rubber, rubber, rubber, gold, silver, zirconium, nickel, etc.), you have to look for them somewhere, on land already occupied by humans, forests, rivers, leopards, chimpanzees or elephants. Is it worthy of a so-called “advanced” culture to destroy the habitat of other species in the name of Progress? What can we do to democratically open and self-manage tens of thousands of open pit mines around the world, often on tribal lands? How to democratically self-manage the millions of tons of toxic waste from the mining industry alone, “the main producer of solid, liquid and gaseous waste from all industrial sectors combined”^[12] ”? How to build energy infrastructure, transport and an electrical network without expropriating rural populations, without ruining their grasslands, crops and hunting grounds? Industrial culture cannot coexist with other cultures.

In fact, no human group worthy of the name would let foreigners come and plunder their resources, cement and pollute their lands and rivers without coming up in resistance.^[13]. The human animal does not like change, especially when it is imposed by strangers from a distant capital. That is why there is also a symbiotic relationship between industrialism and militarism. Conquest and war are the udders of industry, and none Soviet of workers will not change this reality.

5) War, the engine of technical progress

The historical context in which European countries industrialized is often deliberately ignored by fans of silo thinking. However, thousands of years of history teach us that the modern obsession with technical change is not “natural” in human animals.^[14]. What is natural for this bipedal primate is to be attached to its land, to its own, to the habits and customs of its culture. The human animal has a vital need for stability, and technical progress is destabilizing its society. A powerful impetus was needed to shake up the slow and peaceful environment of the autonomous village: war^[15].

One of the main drivers of technical progress is therefore competition between individuals, between businesses, and between nation states. Businesses and nations quickly realized that the most technologically advanced would end up dominating all the others. And this is to maintain their hegemony, in other words to maintain the Status Quo, that these entities invest billions in scientific research and the development of new technologies.

In the 20th century, competition with capitalist countries also served as a catalyst for industrialization in communist countries. The objective of the Russian, Chinese and Cuban communists was to free technical progress from all its obstacles at the national level in order to supercede the capitalist West in power, and then to crush it militarily. Without this extremely powerful stimulus that is the war of all against all, without an atmosphere that creates insane psychological pressure on human groups, the industrial system would probably be doomed to collapse. Indeed, the threat of an external enemy to the nation is a powerful social link without which it would be difficult or even impossible to mobilize the masses, to demand sacrifices from them and the acceptance of new constraints.

In this regard, it should be borne in mind that many so-called “civilian” technologies were originally developed for military purposes. This is the case of the computer (originally developed to design nuclear bombs).^[16]), nuclear energy (the first nuclear reactor was developed to build the atomic bomb^[17]), GPS, the Internet, drones, exoskeletons and numerous biotechnologies.

6) The technological environment imposes hierarchy

“The 500 steps of the integrated circuit manufacturing chain will involve up to 16,000 subcontractors, spread out in dozens of countries around the world. Clearly, if globalization were to be reduced to one object, it would undoubtedly be the electronic chip... See instead: “The quartz mine is probably located in South Africa and silicon plates are produced in Japan, explains Jean-Pierre Colinge. Photolithography devices come from the Netherlands, one of the largest vacuum pump manufacturers operates in Austria, and their ball bearings are made in Germany. To reduce costs, chips are probably packaged in Vietnam. Then they are shipped to the FoxConn group, in China, to be integrated into iPhones. And to optimize all of these processes, the TSMC group used software developed by Italian and Scottish universities in the past.^[18]””

— Guillaume Pitron

Another element completely absent from the thinking of the proclaimers of self-management is the speed at which decisions must be made within the technosphere. Take the example of a factory owned by the tire manufacturer Michelin, which imports rubber from former colonies in Southeast Asia for this purpose. As wheeled boxes colonize the Earth's surface, the demand for tires increases. To avoid being overtaken by the competition, Michelin must do what is necessary to seize new markets (lobbying, corruption, marketing and Tutti quanti.). It also needs to increase and probably diversify its tire production. The management and managers of each department of the company meet, make the necessary decisions, and the elements lower in the hierarchy apply the guidelines to adapt the group to the new situation. As for the agro-industrial rubber suppliers who exploit rubber monocultures (for example the billionaire Bolloré), they must also increase their production as soon as possible if they want to keep their customer Michelin.

Hierarchy therefore allows large interdependent organizations to adapt quickly and survive in a competitive and unstable environment. Imagine for a moment that direct democracy was introduced into this decision-making chain. Imagine endless discussions that lead to trade-offs between the interests of the company and those of the employees. Imagine recurring conflicts leading to dead ends that call for new long and painstaking debates, etc. The right decisions would not be made on time (if ever), the company would fail to adapt and would end up shutting down. Self-management would simply amount to suicide for any large globalized industrial firm.

Confusing islands of socialism and anarchy with “participatory capitalism”, self-managers respond with their usual examples (Catalonia in 1936, the Mondragon cooperative in the Basque Country, etc.^[19]). Others will retort that self-management is only feasible outside of capitalism, in a non-competitive, i.e., a monopoly environment. But even in a monopoly situation, a globalized company of 20,000 people could hardly function effectively.

Moreover, obtaining a monopoly implies having a strong central power capable of expropriating bosses and preventing the emergence of new competitors. Nothing is more authoritarian than a monopoly situation. Since self-management is a much less effective mode of governance for large organizations — states, firms or political parties — than hierarchical and authoritarian management, self-management has no chance of being adopted and spreading in our hypertechnological world.

7) In an industrial environment, technocracy is the ruling class

Technocrats are both products and architects of the industrial revolution (inventors, entrepreneurs, engineers, technicians, scientists, managers, managers, senior officials, etc.). Marxist theory did not anticipate the importance that this emerging class would become, or that it would do anything to maintain its hegemony, for example by defining technical progress as an end in itself. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Polish anarchist Jan Waclav Makhayski was one of the first to provide an analysis of this class of “new masters”.^[20] ”.

The nobility and the clergy depended materially on the army to coerce, subdue, and drain the formerly mostly peasant population. In the same way, the powers and privileges of technocracy depend materially on the existence of an industrial system. Our entire industrial way of life — objects and machines, buildings and infrastructures that we use every day — was designed by ambitious technocrats and manufactured by zombified masses.

Direct democracy is an impossibility in such an environment, for the simple reason that specialists and experts have the knowledge. And knowledge is power. Because nature is incredibly diverse (or unfair depending on your point of view), most people lack the intellectual capacity to master the physical principles that make it possible to build complex machines, factories, buildings, buildings, bridges, bridges, electrical grids, or nuclear power plants.^[21]. Only minds with a predisposition to mathematics succeed. In industrialized environments, decisions are therefore made by those who know. The others listen and execute. This inequality of abilities and cultural capital is imposed by the simple existence of the industrial system, and therefore makes any democratic management project perfectly utopian.

8) A mass society is always overbearing

Another common belief in the modern imagination is that the tendency of human primates to crowd together like cattle in overcrowded, noisy, and unhealthy urban centers is natural. According to geographer Guillaume Faburel, who agrees with the analyses of anthropologist James C. Scott^[22], the big city is still the product of a central authority.

“But where does this passion for being fat come from? Although it is not new, there is nothing “natural” about it: its appearance is always the expression of a political gesture wanted by the authorities. Etymologically, the metropolis is the capital of a province, the mother city, a creation of empires over several millennia, but whose multiplication accelerated during the colonial era. And, since the first groupings of ancient Mesopotamia and the city-states that punctuated the whole of long history, they have always had the same function: to group populations to satisfy economic and political ends.^[23].”

To increase its power, facilitate tax collection and political control, the State has an interest in multiplying and concentrating its human resources.

“The economic need is that of bringing the workforce closer to the means of production in order to be able to have personnel “permanently” — an ancient logic, already at work in the era of the first sedentarization of populations and which, already, aimed at increasing agricultural yields through concentration. Over the past two centuries, rapid urbanization was necessary to obtain the productive returns of the Industrial Revolution. Today, it is more a question of keeping key workers or “first chores” within reach, in concrete suburbs and impoverished peripheries, in order to operate metropolitan mega-machines and increase their financial returns.^[24].”

Without the hypercentralized, authoritarian and hierarchical organization that is the state, the big cities would collapse. Autonomy and democracy are only viable on a small scale, the historian Lewis Mumford tells us.

“Democracy necessarily occurs mainly in small communities or small groups, whose members have frequent personal contacts, interact freely and know each other personally. As soon as it involves a large number of people, democratic association must be completed by giving it a more abstract and impersonal form.

As historical experience shows, it is much easier to destroy democracy by creating institutions that will only give authority to those at the top of the social hierarchy than to integrate democratic practices into a well-organized system, run from a center, and which reaches its highest degree of mechanical efficiency when those who work there have no personal will or purpose.^[25].”

We find the same material impasse as above (the impossibility of democracy in a highly technological society). Hoping to establish democratic practices in a society shaped by authoritarian practices, self-managers are pursuing a pipe dream.

To go further on the observation and the strategy for exiting the technological cycle, read the article” Our priority? Protecting Life ”.