Technocracy, a class at war with life

“Technocracy is an aristocracy based on knowledge, expertise, and skill.”

— Marius Blouin, From Technocracy: the powerful class in the technological age, 2023.

In the Technocene, technocracy dominates in all political regimes, whether left or right, authoritarian or liberal. Both architect and product of the industrial revolution, this social class ignored by Marxist theory is made up of technical and scientific experts. They are the designers of the technological system that has been devastating our only Earth for over 150 years now, and their power to cause harm increases mechanically with the progress of technology and science. These knowledge capitalists^[1] are accumulating knowledge about nature in order to better wage war against it, in other words to force it to execute their will to power.

Bernard Charbonneau, founding father of ecology in France, warned us several decades ago: the destruction of nature could further strengthen the dominance of the technocrats at the head of industry and the state^[2]. Ready to do anything to maintain their power and privileges, this class of parasites instrumentalize the ecological movement in order to present themselves to the plebs as the best able to administer the disaster. It is the famous “resilience” bludgeoned by propaganda. Bow your back, prefer submission to revolt, that is their message. After organizing the destruction of the world, a member of the Polytechnic sect such as Jean-Marc Jancovici has the arrogance to present himself as a savior. Their solutions? Less democracy and freedom. More control and constraints. More scientists and engineers. More machines and industries.

If we want to permanently end the global social and ecological carnage, the first thing we need to do is identify the enemy and then study it with the utmost care. This article makes a modest contribution to the resistance.

The technocratic class

Definitions

Let's start by defining the object of our study. According to the National Center for Textual and Lexical Resources, technocracy is a

“System (political, social, economic) in which the opinions of technical advisers (managers, administrative professionals) determine decisions by giving priority to technical data over human and social factors”

Wikipedia gives a similar, and comprehensive definition:

“Among the characteristic and recurring features of the concept of technocracy, we find the emphasis on the competence and methods of the technician and the scientist, identified with the notions of rigor and rationality. These notions are opposed to the supposed characteristics of man and the political system, or of the businessman, who are considered venal, incompetent and subject to private interests working in a direction contrary to the interests of society. In a technocracy, technical and leadership skills are selected more through bureaucratic and meritocratic processes based on knowledge and performance, than through democratic procedures.”^[3]

Hatred of human nature — indeed of nature at all events, unpredictable and indomitable — as well as contempt for politics are antiphons of technocratic discourse. The technocrat is crazy about power and control. Nothing should be left to chance, everything must be planned, programmed, controlled.

The professor of international relations Philippe Braillard gives three main characteristics of technocratic ideology:

• A strong tendency to belittle the political: the technocratic discourse is presented as a neutral speech that is not biased by ideology, because it is based on Science^[4] ;
• The desire to impose technical and scientific rationality on the political field;
• A crucial place given to planning and all that it involves (centralization of power, coercion, propaganda, social engineering, etc.^[5].).

In short, technocracy is a form of government where the designers and administrators of modern technology — scientists, engineers, managers, and experts of all kinds — wield great power. This is a particularity specific to industrial societies that evolve under the physical constraints of their material base — infrastructures, factories and machines. In a technologically advanced society, the architects and managers of the technostructure, on whom we have been made dependent for the least of our needs, are responsible for the ills that affect the population.

Let's illustrate our situation with an example. In the wild, a wild animal obtains its food and water, seeks partners, moves, takes care of itself and reproduces in a manner that is consistent. standalone — without external intervention. In modern livestock farming, which is similar in many ways to modern industrial society, livestock spend the majority of their lives in closed environments and their ability to move is extremely limited. It is dependent for food and water, for health and for reproduction.

If we take up the Marxist analysis, the only one to blame in our example would be the bourgeois owner of the farm. But what about the responsibility of the scientists and technicians who created the scientific and technical knowledge that led to the abjection that is factory farming? What about the responsibility of the engineers who developed the machines and infrastructures for industrial farming? These people made factory farming materially possible. Those who design and perfect enclosures are at least as responsible — if not more so — than pen owners. The former collaborate with the latter by providing them with ever more effective means to impose their domination. Besides the two classes — knowledge capitalists and capitalists of wealth — have largely merged today^[6].

In his vast study of technocracy, the author Marius Blouin writes that “the combination of the two classes within the technostructure is indissoluble”, they live “in symbiosis with each other, and with The Technician System (Ellul, 1977).” He illustrates his point with examples:

“Vulgar, sub-Marxist, sub-anarchist criticism only ever sees the Richard in the entrepreneur, the lazy owner of capital, incapable outside of financial plots. Far from it, the entrepreneurs of the 19th century — like those of startups and PMIs today — are often, and above all, ^[7]The engineer of the box. It is even on the basis of this competence (in addition to market research) that their banks and associates provide them with investment capital. It goes without saying that the State, ministries, the Caisse des Dépistations et Consignations, the European Union, local authorities, research centers and universities are now multiplying investment funds to support the creation and development of businesses. All you need is a patent, a certificate of ownership filed or purchased, on this or that innovation, the sponsorship of a professor or a businessman — but they now have double quality — and the fees graduated from MIT, Polytechnique, and a multitude of less prestigious schools, can Create your box and Of value. This is how Alphabet, Google's parent company, is now surpassing Apple, which had itself surpassed IBM in terms of market capitalization. All of these mega-companies playing an overwhelming role in the packaged transformation of the contemporary world, recently created and owned by young engineers — not heirs to old capitalist families.”^[8]

According to a study cited by the economic journal Les Echos, only 30% of the richest people in the world inherited their wealth (compared to 60% in France). The journalist adds: “It is better to study engineering to become rich.^[9].”

An intellectual bourgeoisie

Marxist theory, which did not anticipate the rise of the “intellectual bourgeoisie”, still serves as a prism of analysis for most social movements. On the one hand, an immense proletariat (the 99%); on the other hand, the rich capitalists (the 1%). The reality is quite different. The industrialization of the last two centuries has allowed an elite of scientists and technicians to rise in power, a class that likes to represent itself on the side of the oppressed while actively serving the 1%. How? Through the continuous production and application of new scientific and technical knowledge, by continuing to operate the technological system that humbles us, destroys us, and devastates the world.

According to the Diplomatic world, “this social layer resulting from the “meritocracy” transmits its privileges to its descendants, like the aristocracy of the past^[10].” In 1958, the English sociologist Michael Young published The Rise of Meritocrity, a novel where he describes a dystopian future where government is provided “not so much by the people as by the smartest people.” “Intelligent” is certainly not the most appropriate qualifier for an elite that glorifies the suicide of humanity and the annihilation of the biosphere. That said, Young writes some very sensible stuff elsewhere.

“The ranks of scientists and technologists, artists and teachers have swelled. Their education was adjusted to their high genetic destiny. Their power to do good has been increased. Progress is their triumph; the modern world is their monument.”^[11]

This intellectual elite, coming from the most selective schools and universities, represents a fraction of about 5 to 10% of Western working populations. This share includes the richest 1% but far exceeds them. These elites work as liberal professions, work in laboratories or occupy the top echelons of business organizations. They receive monthly dividends from their educational and cultural capital.

“These “heads full of brains” do not have the means of production, but knowledge that they monetize to the owners, who delegate to them the supervision of businesses, the control of producers and the organization of work, the care of increasing productivity through technology.

[...]

In the United States as in Europe, there is a gap between the small minority of long and selective graduate graduates (5 to 10% of the population of Western countries) and the others. The emphasis placed in recent years on the opposition between the 99% of the population and the richest 1% diverts attention from the larger group that has benefitted from meritocratic competition for half a century, and without which the 1% cannot establish or perpetuate their dominance. While this vision of class struggle has the advantage for the meritocrats who popularize it by placing themselves on the side of the oppressed, alongside cleaning ladies, it obliterates two crucial phenomena identified by Young in his fable of foresight: the monopoly of political power held by intellectuals, and the increasingly hereditary nature of their domination.”^[12]

If this dominance by theintelligentsia existed to a lesser extent in the pre-industrial world, it intensified considerably as

“the industrial revolution and the expansion of education reinforced the weight of graduates and accentuated the heterogeneity of the group: the domestication of the masses, and of a large fraction of the graduates themselves, took place in the name of economic rationality and the “skills” validated by the State that its implementation requires.”

The emergence of this new social class, which was ignored by Marx and Engels, was noticed as early as the 19th century by many observers.

“The first analyses that portray intellectuals as a new social class based on the monopoly of knowledge and aspiring to power appeared in the 19th century, along with the vast qualified public services, the first major corporate administrations and then the centralized workers' parties. Saint-Simon (1760-1825) dreamed of an order dominated by scientists and industrialists (the bees) who would turn the nobility and the clergy (the hornets) back to their vanity. On the other side of the Rhine, the modern state imagined by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is based on enlightened officials who would form, according to the philosopher, a “universal class” (Principles of the philosophy of law, 1821). A few decades later, in his Writings against Marx, Mikhail Bakunin will rebel against the perspective of a socialist state: “All this will require immense science and a lot of heads full of brains. It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, the most despotic, the most arrogant and the most contemptuous of all regimes.” A “socialism of intellectuals” rather than workers' power, as deplored in 1905 by another anarchist, Jan Waclav Makhayski, in The Bankruptcy of Nineteenth-Century Socialism.”

The insight of Makhayski is worth the detour, who wrote in 1905 that

“in all countries and states, there is a huge class of people who have neither market nor industrial capital and, despite everything, live like real masters. It is the class of educated people, the class of the intelligentsia.

They do not own land or factories, and yet enjoy incomes comparable to those of capitalists, medium or large. They have nothing, but just as the big and medium capitalists are “white hands”, like them exempted their whole lives from manual labor; and if they participate in production, it is only as engineers, directors, managers; they therefore appear to the workers, slaves of manual labor, they therefore appear to the workers, slaves of manual labor, as masters and leaders identical in every way to the capitalists-entrepreneurs.”^[13]

History of Technocracy

Technocratic thinking developed at the same time as the scientific and technical advances that led to the Industrial Revolution, between the 17th and 19th centuries. In his Discourse on the method (1637), René Descartes called on his contemporaries to “surrender themselves as masters and owners of nature”, while Francis Bacon imagined in New Atlantis (1627) a world government presided over by scientists. But as Marius Blouin recalls in his study on technocracy, it was Saint-Simon who really developed this new ideology in the 19th century.

” Technocratic ideology was born under the term “industrialism”, at the same time as the class that embodied it, and under the pen of the French Saint-Simon (1760-1825), one of Marx's masters of thought, whose ideal summarized by Engels was to “replace the government of men by the administration of things”. What in the age of the Internet (the netting), of the smartphone (the Teleflic) and the QR code (Quick response code) borders on a done deal.”^[14]

Others claim that Saint-Simon was a “pre-Marxist socialist.”^[15] ”. The industrialist philosopher opposed hornets (nobility, clergy and lawyers), an idle and therefore illegitimate class, to bees (workers, scientists, engineers, engineers, factory owners). The main political positions were to be occupied by the heads of the bees, that is, the captains of industry, because

“France has become a major manufacturer and the French Nation has become a major workshop. This general factory must be managed in the same way as private factories.”^[16]

Later, Lenin would say that the company should be run like a vast “factory”.^[17] ”.

Auguste Comte, a disciple of Saint-Simon and founder of the philosophical current called “positivism”, continued to spread technocratic ideology in the 19th century. According to him, political regimes must be supplanted by a social authority made up of administrators from pure and applied sciences. An industrial society must be run by engineers and scientists.

With the industrialization of the world, the technocratic movement crossed borders and took off in the United States in 1888 when Edward Bellamy, a journalist by training, published Looking Backward. “Forgotten by all but a few historians and activists”, this novel was “the greatest bookseller of the 19th century, in the United States, behind Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe^[18].” Bellamy describes a utopian society where greed, ferocity, insecurity, and madness are a thing of the past. The State supplies citizens through national stores, workers retire at 45, machines replace physical work, money is abolished, prisons make way for hospitals, everyone receives the same income (foreshadowing the universal income) and everyone has a consumer credit card issued by the industrial community.

“The ideal society of the year 2000 following Bellamy is a nationalized, hierarchical, centralized and managed company based on skills, where everyone produces according to their abilities and receives according to their needs that are the same for all. A society whose growing prosperity is based on scientific progress, technical rationality and the rise of productive forces.

In short, it is the ideal displayed by bureaucratic socialism in the USSR, throughout the socialist camp and even in the satellite suburbs of France and Italy, by the supporters of planned economies and nationalizations.”^[19]

It was the inventor and engineer from Berkeley William Henry Smyth who, in a series of articles published in 1919, gave his name to this new social class. Smyth believes that science is propelling the rise of technocracy, of a humanity that is technical in itself and in the world. For Smyth, everything is machine — the world, nature, society, the human body. Crises are reduced to temporary dysfunctions in the social machine caused by the interference of plutocrats and other funders. What is needed is a social evolution directed towards a national goal, all overseen by a new ruling class of scientists, engineers, technicians, executives, managers, and directors.

The economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) also played an important role in the spread of technocratic ideology. He has published several essays under the title The Engineers and the Price System (1921) translated into French fifty years later by Engineers and capitalism. He is also the author of Leisure class theory (1899), a book celebrated by the techno-progressive media The Wind Rises (LVSL) which associates the “systematic destruction of our environment” with the “financial system”, and not with the industrial system. Veblen opposes the efficiency of engineers to the greed of the capitalist entrepreneur who would cause convulsions in the techno-industrial system. To remedy this, Veblen praises a managed, centralized, streamlined economy, planned by engineers who represent for him the true productive, intelligent, competent, disciplined class.

Following Smyth, Bellamy and Veblen will develop from 1920 in the United States a technocratic movement led by the engineer Howard Scott. He founded successively the Technical Alliance and Technocracy Incorporated. The first is a kind of Think Tank, a group of engineers, scientists and technicians who published a study called Energy Survey of North America. The second is a political party. Like the scientists who wrote the Meadows Report commissioned by the Club of Rome, or even our national Jean-Marc Jancovici, Howard Scott was convinced that the industrial system was inexorably heading for total collapse. The plan for organizing society that Scott proposes resembles the proposals of contemporary eco-Marxists: nationalization of all industries, abolition of the monetary system in order to replace it with a system based on an objective unit of energy, distribution of social credit to all citizens, abolition of political parties and government (the only official figures are the technical leaders of productive and distributive units). Following a disastrous opinion piece by Scott on the radio, Scott's movement gradually collapsed from 1933 to dissolve into the movement of New Deal of Roosevelt.

This is probably one of the few times that technocracy has made the mistake of publicly displaying itself as a political movement. Usually, technocracy stays away from executive functions and prefers to take on the less risky role of consultant and influencer. And when it participates concretely in the exercise of power, technocracy does so without saying its name, under the label of reformist or revolutionary political parties. Technocracy has understood how to skilfully exploit the left/right alternation to maintain power.

In France, technocratic ideology also developed in the 1920s and accelerated from the 1930s during the Great Depression, following the influence of X-Crise, a group founded in 1931 by polytechnicians led by the engineer Jean Coutrot. French technocrats want to “substitute a conscious economy for a blind economy.”^[20] ”. With the help of macroeconomic models and econometrics, the State would be in a position to plan and organize the effective development of society, without snags or crises. To do this, leaders must obviously be based on scientific data and not be influenced by political ideologies. Since then, the same scientific and technical nonsense has been used by left and right technocrats at every crisis in the techno-industrial system, and today more and more by environmentalists.

Why the class struggle is insufficient

Reading our article, the reader could conclude that it is enough to abolish technocracy to get rid of our problem. That would be a strategic blunder. According to the revolutionary syndicalist Sebastián Cortés, it is the means of production that determine social relationships. It is therefore the industrial system — the enclosure of our example seen above — that must be criticized and combated.

“The class distinction is not so much between those who own the means of production and those who do not own 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 necessarily requires a hierarchical, centralized, 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 should or should not appropriate. What belongs to the ruling class is immediately suspicious, and we need to ask ourselves the right questions before using it benevolently under the pretext that we would have owned it.”^[21]

He adds that

“claiming ownership of existing means of production is not enough, insofar as, by their very design, these means of production deprive the individual of any capacity to decide for himself and with his peers what and how to produce.”

In concrete terms, this means that limiting ourselves to a strict class struggle, without taking into account the physical infrastructure, will not solve the problem. If the anti-tech movement simply abolishes technocracy without dismantling the industrial system, a new technocracy will quickly come to power. Because self-management is impossible in the industrial system. It is the material base that conditions social relationships and not the other way around. And if revolutionaries simply abolish the capitalist bourgeoisie and the financial system, that would not solve anything either. As Marius Blouin notes, the system could very well one day do without money as a means of power, because these means have often varied throughout history.

“Capitalists are first and foremost Power enthusiasts who accumulate the Means of power in the society of their time; cows, land, weapons, money, machines. Let these means change, they change the means. [...] Thus the search for financial gain and surplus value could disappear under technological capitalism, as an engine of accumulation, in favor of that of direct means of power as the promoters of transhumanism pursue.”^[22]