The Mechanization of Work: Paradise or Purgatory?
For the last decade or so technological utopianism has proven decidedly unfashionable. Economic stagnation, rising unemployment, energy shortages, environmental pollution, and the growing concern about nuclear annihilation have all contributed to an atmosphere in which technological growth is seen more as the problem than as the solution. The books which have attracted public attention in this periodThe Limits to Growth (Meadows, 1972), The Closing Circle (Commoner, 1971), Business Civilization in Decline (Heilbroner, 1976), The Fate of the Earth (Schell, 1982)clearly reflect this concern. Even the dramatic breakthrough in microelectronics technologyan advance which, in another context, might be viewed as offering the potential for emancipation from toil and necessityis more often than not regarded with pessimism and fear. Such terms as "jobless growth," "automatic unemployment," and even the "collapse of work" have raised the spectre of rampant involuntary technological unemployment in an industrial world already suffering the effects of economic decline. This technological pessimism runs counter to a strong tradition in the literature of social theory which has upheld the emancipatory potential of advanced technology. Human development was made synonymous with overcoming scarcity. Writing in 1846, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels insisted that in order to achieve a revolutionary transformation of society, the productive forces must develop to a level where they can overcome necessity and material want; otherwise poverty would merely be socialized: "[The] development of productive forces is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced." This, view was echoed by Keynes. Writing in the midst of the Great Depression, Keynes was able to look beyond the miseries of the moment toward a more abundant future where the struggle for subsistencewhat he termed the "economic problem"could at last be overcome. Once economic and technological