Fascists and communists share the same cult for technology

Below we have reproduced an excerpt from the excellent Technocriticisms: from the refusal of machines to the contestation of technosciences, a book by the technical historian François Jarrige published in 2014. Critics of the technological system are often associated by the left with “reactionaries” or “fascists” while the right denounces them as “traitors to the nation.” As for the extreme right, it is constantly trying to reappropriate technocriticism, like this Action Française conference on technology.^[1]. As is often the case with the extreme right, this opposition is a decoy, since other Action Française videos are entitled “Why save our industry?^[2] ? or even “National mobilization: let's save our factories^[3] ! ”.

Obsession with the quest for power in order to push the exploitation of nature to its peak, desire for deliverance from the terrestrial human condition by technical means, blindness to the neutrality of technology, all shared characteristics (left and right) that explain why we reject conventional political divides (see the Principle No. 9 of the Resistant).

Exalting machines in the age of extremes (by François Jarrige)

In the first half of the 20th century, enthusiastic imaginations of technical progress continued to circulate widely. Discourses on technology are part of the nationalisms that prevailed in the “age of extremes”. David Edgerton even speaks of “techno-nationalism” and the “celebration of the inventive citizen” as an important component of the nationalism of that time.^[4]. Indeed, each nation intends to ascribe the merits of innovations against its competitors, and thereby prove its superiority. While the theme of hostility to machines persists — the German communist playwright Ernest Toller (1893-1939) thus took up the subject of machine breakdowns in a play he wrote in prison in 1922 and which was translated into English the following year.^[5] —, the criticism of techniques seems more and more like a betrayal and a threat to national greatness. But the exaltation of machines also varies from country to country, it is expressed through varying political and aesthetic categories, even if there are numerous circulations. In the United States, the triumph of the “Machine Age”, of which Henri Ford became the prophet, was accentuated during the interwar period. Numerous works have described this “machine age”, which is evident in objects such as TSF and consumer goods, in skyscrapers and factories, but also in speeches and attitudes that “extravagantly idealize the machine” and its ability to create a fairer and more efficient society.^[6]. The “idolatry of the machine” is found in a multitude of cultural productions, such as the commercial photographs that Charles Sheeler made for Ford, showing factories and their machines. In architecture, cinema, photography, emerging industrial design, everywhere triumphs an aesthetic shaped by the age of machines^[7]. European journalists flock to the American continent to observe the changes taking place: the cult of efficiency, rationalization, the mass production of consumer goods, but also the new modernist aesthetic seem to have given the country the secret of prosperity.^[8]. This “age of machines” also shapes multiple cultural productions. The development of the musical current of” Big Bands ”, an ancestor of jazz, in America in the 1920s could be interpreted as the translation by black American populations, victims of segregation, of the new machinist aesthetic. The syncopated rhythm of the music would reflect the acceleration produced by industrialization and the mechanization of work and urban life.^[9]. In the field of architecture and urban planning, rational and industrialized aesthetic designs are also required. It was at this time that Le Corbusier formulated his famous modernist slogan according to which “the house is a machine for living in”.

In the interwar period, the exaltation of industrial and technological greatness also emerged as an essential component of fascist states.^[10]. Fascist political regimes do not break with previous heroic imaginations or with the machine cult that developed in liberal societies. On the contrary, they push them to their extremes, while adapting them to their repressive, authoritarian and racist projects. Technology is emerging as a central element of the totalitarian political imaginaries of the “age of extremes.” Despite their irreducible differences, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR impose excessive policies based on the intensive use and constant valorization of technologies, even if the goals and objectives attributed to techniques may vary from country to country.^[11]. Far from the ideal of neutrality and objectivity on which techno-scientific activities were built, much research now emphasizes the links that exist between forms of political organization, the practices of scientists and engineers, and national “technological styles.” The cases of Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR have drawn particular attention, as science and technology have been essential instruments in the construction of these regimes and their political imaginaries. In the 1930s, both Nazism and Stalinism were deployed by making intensive use of the most modern technologies. The “totalitarian machine,” as Paul Josephson calls it^[12], is characterized by the central role granted to the State as an actor in the development and dissemination of technologies and by a marked tendency to gigantism, which is embodied, for example, in the buildings of Albert Speer, the architect of the Nazi regime, or in the “Seven Sisters of Moscow”, the skyscrapers wanted by Stalin. Nature as well as humans must be enslaved, controlled and put at the service of power.

The relationship between modernity, fascist regimes and technology has caused numerous historiographical debates since the 1980s.^[13]. While fascist rhetoric certainly calls for a return to the past, fascist ideologies are however never traditionalist movements; as Eric Hobsbawm notes, the past to which they refer is primarily an “artifact of discourse”, and their traditions have largely been “invented.” While fascists apparently reject the exalted “modernity” and “progress” in liberal democracies, in practice they formulate a “set of delusional beliefs in technical modernity” — which can be found, for example, in the Futurism manifesto (1910), making the machine the symbol of modernity in art. Continuing with previous technological fundamentalisms, fascisms create an original blend of “conservative values” and faith in the “assured mastery of contemporary high technology.”^[14] ”. In Germany in particular, technology is widely used in the service of the expansionist and totalitarian project of the National Socialist regime. The Nazi Party quickly mobilized engineers and technicians in its ranks. Once cleansed of those classified as Jewish, engineers are clearly promoted within the regime. New communication techniques are widely used by propaganda. Shortly after the Nazis took power in 1933, Hitler adopted a vast plan to build highways — reserved for cars — supposed to symbolize the supremacy of the regime. These Autobahnen must embody the superiority of German technology, its ability to improve and exceed culture^[15]. Hermann Goering, responsible for coordinating and implementing the 1936 quadrennial plan, which was to make the country self-sufficient, decreed a 150% increase in wood production by 1937, and required the cultivation of 2 million additional hectares. Achieving these goals requires the massive use of the latest techniques, such as pesticides, motor vehicles and chemical fertilizers.^[16]. In Nazism, the acclimatization of modern technology took the form of what the historian Jeffrey Herf called “reactionary modernism.^[17] ”. This ambiguous expression describes the mixture of “enthusiasm for modern technology and rejection of the Enlightenment and the institutions of liberal democracy” that characterizes German conservative movements. Contrary to what we sometimes read, the reactionary political criticism of the Enlightenment is perfectly suited to an unwavering enthusiasm and faith in the powers of technology. The romantic and critical Enlightenment traditions of German nationalism did not result in a rejection of modern techniques, but on the contrary in their overvaluation as one of the foundations of the greatness of the Reich. According to Herf, “reactionary modernism” is that cultural project that characterizes the specificity of the “German path to modernity”, leaving “all the room for technical progress” and none for democracy.^[18].

This “techno-fascist” synthesis has its roots in the experience of the Great War, in the defeat and in the intellectual crisis of the 1920s. In Germany, the “conservative revolution” was accompanied by an acceptance of industrial society and techniques that appeared to be the means of power. For conservative thinkers, Germans are a people of technicians and organizers who must impose their supremacy in the technical and industrial civilization in the making.^[19]. Before the Nazis came to power, the German right was divided on the question of techniques: while some, like Spengler and Heidegger, to whom we will return, continue the previous pessimistic and decadent criticism, others, like Jünger, on the contrary, are developing a “techno-fascism” announcing the emergence of a new order made possible by the deployment of technology.^[20]. For many German nationalists in the 1920s, only advanced technological development could restore the power of the nation. The writings of Ernst Jünger embody this reconciliation of right-wing intellectuals with technology: “Our generation is the first to come to terms with the machine and to see in it not only utility but also beauty,” he wrote in 1929^[21]. For Jünger, technology is not a neutral tool that liberal and bourgeois democracies could master. Modern technology is inherently authoritarian and therefore requires the establishment of a strong state. On the other hand, the refusal of technical progress risks hampering national recovery and the emergence of the new redeemer.

Hitler himself, far from being a traditionalist rejecting the industrial world in favor of a return to the agrarian simplicity of the German peasant, constantly extols modernization and technology. Faced with democratic regimes that he considers weak and decadent, modern technologies require the establishment of a state strong enough to lead them in favor of the power of the “Aryan race”. In Mein Kampf, it also defines the Weltanschauung Nazi (worldview) as “based on the Greek spirit and German technique^[22] ”. In 1939, Goebbels delivered a speech on technology at the Berlin Motor Show in which he set out what could be compared to a summary of the technological imaginary of Nazism: “We live in the age of technology. The accelerated pace of our century affects every aspect of our lives. There is hardly a company that can escape its powerful influence. This is why a danger is unquestionably looming: technology will make people lose their souls. National Socialism has never rejected or fought against modern technology. On the contrary, one of its main tasks was to support it consciously, to fill it with an inner soul, to discipline it and to place it at the service of our people and their cultural level. [...] While the bourgeois reaction to technology was to oppose it with incomprehension, even with open hostility, and while modern skeptics considered it to be the most profound source of the collapse of European culture, the National Socialism understood how to seize this soulless framework of technology for the fill with the rhythm and the warm impulses of our time.”

Unlike Germany, which was one of the main industrial and technical powers in the world at the beginning of the 20th century, Russia still remained largely rural, despite the reform attempts at the end of the tsarist era. After coming to power, the Bolsheviks put in place a policy aimed at modernising the country and establishing a powerful industry by giving priority to innovations. While the fascist regimes seem to exalt the technique without the workers, a way of circumventing the social question, the USSR on the contrary intends to carry out the revolution and emancipate the proletariat through the machine. After the October Revolution of 1917, the development of industrial machinery seemed all the more important and urgent because it was through it that socialism should be built.^[23]. At that time, futurist novels and utopian treatises described the “new Soviet man” as a “Prometheus of the mechanical age.” In his sci-fi novel Engineer Menni (1913), the Bolshevik physician and philosopher Alexander Bogdanov thus describes a utopian society located on the planet Mars in the 23rd century where all forms of individuality have disappeared and where production is now fully automated and controlled by machines^[24]. Everyone also knows Lenin's famous formula for the 8th.^E Congress of Soviets in 1920: “Communism is Soviets plus electricity.” Proletarian art, for its part, inaugurated a new form of aestheticization of the machine. In the 1920s, the so-called “productivist” artistic movement aimed to merge art and industrial techniques, the artist and the engineer; the work of art created by the engineering artist was now confined within the limits of technical rationality.^[25].

During the 1930s, technological gigantism became one of the key elements of the Stalinist consensus. The Promethean dimension of the revolution and the representation of the demiurge party, which was conceived as the sole repository of science and technology, shape the Soviet imaginary of techniques. The teleology of progress is embodied in major projects, in the cult of pioneering heroes and the man master of mechanical instruments. Major technical projects must be accompanied by a combination of pride in national greatness and adherence to the bright future proposed by the regime. In his writings, Stalin never ceases to extol the modernity of machines against the “medieval forms” of ancient peasant work and “scattered small farms”. To catch up with the capitalist countries and prove the superiority of the regime, he relies on “the widespread use of machines and electrification”, and affirms the need to create “large farms based on the collective cultivation of the land, the use of agricultural machines and tractors, the use of agricultural machines and tractors, the application of scientific processes for the intensification of agriculture”. “There are no other ways out”, he concludes.^[26].

This strategy of technical intensification and industrial transformation began in the second half of the 1920s, when the country emerged from the crisis. After 1930, the volume of industrial production increased by almost 9% per year. New sectors such as the automotive, chemical and machine tool manufacturing industries are emerging. Technical development is based primarily on the massive importation of Western processes (a quarter of the equipment put into service in the USSR from 1928 to 1941 would have been imported).^[27]). The regime extols heavy industry and stigmatizes the routines of peasants and artisans. In the 1920s, the peasant became the enemy and peasant agriculture was declared “obsolete”. Although techniques are entering the daily lives of populations very slowly, if objects and equipment remain rare for most Soviets, the authorities orchestrate machine festivals, grandiose productions responsible for educating the masses. Technology is becoming a central element of Soviet culture, some parents call their children “Tractors” or their daughters “Electrification”, and the construction of the Moscow subway must reflect this technological superiority of the Soviet man.^[28]. The USSR became a productivist regime whose horizon was the incessant overcoming of production standards. The final victory of socialism depends on the country's ability to catch up with and surpass the technologies of capitalist countries, and this machine myth is widely shared abroad.^[29]. In 1929, the adoption of the Five-Year Plan launched industrialization at breakneck speed. The developing working class was tightly controlled and the propaganda of the “Stakhanovist” movement (1935) combined the exaltation of productivity and the tight control of the workforce. In the countryside, the Plan involves the collectivization of land, the development of industrial agriculture and the liquidation of kulaks, these peasant owners who gradually became the target of the regime. Fiercely opposed to these reforms, the kulaks rose up during numerous riots that broke out in the countryside, with farmers sometimes preferring to massacre their livestock and destroy their property rather than deliver them to collective farms. Millions of refractory peasants are finally executed or deported with their families. These peasant protests and uprisings sometimes take the form of “machine breakdowns”. Described as “Luddites” in Anglo-American historiography, they bear witness to the very strong resistance to collectivization.^[30]. As the supremacy of the machine becomes the ultimate symbol of the new order, any questioning or criticism of the regime's technical choices is perceived as a betrayal of the socialist ideal. Between the middle of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th century, the age of machines triumphed and, with it, a new definition of technique, articulated with the ideology of progress, was imposed. Technology is no longer a complex set of skills that allow human ingenuity to be achieved. It is becoming the destiny of the world, it aims at gigantism, at the overcoming of all limits, in the name of the infinite expansion of production and the complete domestication of nature. However, this enthusiastic and heroic imaginary of technical progress has never been the only way to think about the technical phenomenon. Many people criticize and challenge the surge in techniques and warn against the evolution of industrial societies subject to their increasingly gigantic equipment. Behind the celebration of technological progress, there remain numerous criticisms of their imperialist expansion and the deadly “civilization” they engender.