A while ago I read a couple of reviews about some documentary that depicted the everyday work within a nuclear power plant. The journalists praised the female director of this documentary for humorously portraying the male workers and their pathetic, albeit a little quirky, masculinity. The nuclear power plant itself was basically depicted as a dangerous plaything that only existed because men, as Nietzsche said, like danger and play. Unsurprisingly, the director praised German chancellor Angela Merkel for her plan to shut down every single German nuclear reactor by 2022.
Unfortunately, it cannot be said that alt-right et al. have a more rational view regarding technology and technological progress; with the future looking bleak, they romanticize the past instead. (It sometimes seems as if the only group left having a positive view on technology are a bunch of tumblr trannies with cyberpunk-fueled fantasies about implants and about having their “female” brain transplanted into the shell of a young Scarlett Johansson.) Sure, not all of them go so far as to regularly quote the Unabomber, but despite not being able to agree about which period of the past they should romanticize the most (Sparta? The Dark Ages? Nazi Germany?), there seems to be an at least emotional consensus about technological progress having enabled women to go crazy. Without technology, their reasoning goes, females had to drop their stronk womyn act and would instead rely on stronk men again to protect them from spiders and bears.
Not even mentioning the more libertarian concerns about technology and surveillance, one cannot help but think of Tibullus’ (55 BCE – 19 BCE) famous Tenth Elegy when being confronted with this ideological pessimism in regards to the alleged consequences of technology: “Quis fuit, horrendos primus qui protulit enses? / Quam ferus et vere ferreus ille fuit! / Tum caedes hominum generi, tum proelia nata, / tum brevior dirae mortis aperta via est.” (“Who was he, who first forged the fearful sword? How iron-willed and truly made of iron he was! Then slaughter was created, war was born to men, then a quicker road was opened to dreaded death.”) Of course, the great poet quickly lets this Roman soldier preparing for battle realize that we should not blame the inventor or the invention, and that “slaughter” was not just born with the sword. And what Tibullus was aware of, Marx and Engels recognized, either: “Every step forward in production is at the same time a step backwards in the position of the oppressed class, that is, of the great majority. Whatever benefits some necessarily injures the others; every fresh emancipation of one class is necessarily a new oppression for another class. The most striking proof of this is provided by the introduction of machinery, the effects of which are now known to the whole world.”
If technological progress occurs during the advancement of a struggling class, “its consequences are in most cases good”, e.g. they result in a higher life expectancy, better health care, clear drinking water, less toothache and being able to call your father who would probably already be dead from something heart related already if it weren’t for modern medicine. However, if technological progress occurs during the downfall of this class and only comes into the hands of a ruling class that doesn’t have to face any resistance, its consequences will be mostly bad, e.g. result in surveillance, abolition of cash in favor of electronic money, drone strike terrorism, workers being replaced by machines or essentially being turned into parts of a machine (the most soul-destroying probably being the jackhammer), fatherhood tests being made illegal, mass-immigration in countries that already suffer from unemployment being promoted, and so on and so forth. (If you hope for sexbots to eventually replace women you’ll be disappointed, because robots that could replace women would soon be outlawed, while male workers will continue to be replaced by machinery.)
Oscar Wilde put it best in his essay about The Soul of Man under Socialism: “All work of that kind (=that slaves had done before) should be done by a machine.” Leon Trotsky agreed: “The material premise of communism should be so high a development of the economic powers of man that productive labor, having ceased to be a burden, will not require any goad, and the distribution of life’s goods, existing in continual abundance, will not demand – as it does not now in any well-off family or ‘decent’ boarding-house – any control except that of education, habit and social opinion. Speaking frankly, I think it would be pretty dull-witted to consider such a really modest perspective ‘utopian.’” Nothing else is what Lenin summarized by saying that “Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country.” The Soviet power (Soviet meaning council) represented freedom, but without electrification, back then synonym for an unbelievable ease of working conditions, freedom was illusory.
Whatever you otherwise dislike about Marxism, Marxism is not a primarily “moral” enterprise, it’s not a secularized Christianity. No priest ever said that Christianity is impossible without the “electrification of the whole country” – but Communism without technology is. So don’t let us make the mistake Albius Tibullus warned us about more than 2000 years ago. It’s not the sword nor the inventor of the sword that is evil; it simply depends on in whose hand said sword is. If you are oppressed by a monopolized ruling class working against your very best interests, it’s not the technology that is the problem but the fact that this one ruling class still holds all the power in its hands.
