Notes on technocracy

George Novack's view is contained here:

Technocracy

Before the collapse of 1929, “permanent prosperity” was the fondest illusion of the American middle class. The crisis shattered this Utopian myth beyond repair. New illusions were needed. In the darkest days of the depression at the end of 1932 along came Technocracy to inflame the imaginations and revive the hopes of the petty bourgeoisie.

The oracles of this up-to-date American model of Utopia cloaked their revelations in an impressive garment of pseudo-scientific jargon, embroidered with charts, formula; and graphs. They spoke with the magistral authority of scientific investigators, who had been engaged for ten years at Columbia University in a survey of the energy resources of North America. The theoretical conclusions of these engineer-economists were extremely bold and radical.

On the one hand, the Technocrats informed the world that capitalism was on its death-bed. Modern technology and power production had dealt “the price system” one smashing blow after another and would shortly dispatch it entirely. Meanwhile, unemployment and mass misery would increase at a rapid rate.

On the other hand, the Technocrats brought forward the results of their survey of “the continental capacity of production” to prove that either the existing or potential plant (they did not state which) could manufacture enough goods for everybody. Poverty was an anachronism. America stood upon the threshold of a New Age of Plenty, in which no-one need work more than four hours a day and all would have an increase equal to twenty thousand dollars a year.

Surely the average level of economic life could be raised to unprecedented heights, once the fetters of capitalism were struck from the nation’s productive forces. But the particular cases cited by the Technocrats, and their estimates as a whole, were grossly exaggerated, vague and incomplete. Their statistics were promptly riddled by technical experts, and, when it was thought that they advocated the abolition of capitalism, the Technocrats themselves were disavowed by the Columbia authorities.

The ideas of the Technocrats were of the same shoddy character as their statistics. They attempted to explain the course of history and the causes of great social changes by a simple-minded technological determinism: the dominant mode of motive power in production was the motive force of history. They enthroned one factor among the forces of production and submitted the whole historical process to its sway. This enabled them to set aside any consideration of the social relations of production and the class struggles issuing from them, and to give easy answers to the most complex historical questions.

They explained the inevitable collapse of capitalism, for example, by pointing to four salient features of its decay: the disparity in the rates of growth of population, production and debt; the steady decrease in the number of man-hours per unit produced, manifested in technological unemployment; the mounting burden of debt claims upon industry, and, finally, the progressive tendency toward further mechanization, rationalization and electrification of industry. To a Marxist all these phenomena are aspects of that historical tendency of capitalist accumulation in which, under the spur of competition, constant capital increases at the relative expense of variable capital. To these petty bourgeois ideologists, however, they appeared as revolutionary discoveries, and were used by them as a weapon to beat the bourgeoisie.

The practical proposals of these radicals were tame and lifeless. They repudiated political action and announced that they were preparing for the automatic collapse of capitalism. When Doomsday arrived (and it was close at hand), the representatives of the people would dispossess the owners of industry and call upon the Technocrats to take charge of production for the common good, instead of for the profits of the privileged few.

The Technocrats talked while American capitalism slid downhill. It hit bottom when the banks closed on March 4, 1933. Alas for the Technocrats! On the very day American capitalism came to a standstill, Technocracy disappeared. Instead of turning to the Technocrats, the incoming Democratic administration beckoned to the big bourgeoisie and its agents. Between them, the New Deal was improvised – and the hullaballo about Technocracy was drowned in the ballyhoo for the New Deal.

A new Messiah approached in the person of President Roosevelt; a new rainbow on the horizon in the shape of the New Deal. The pragmatic middle classes hastened to forget the pipe-dreams of Technocracy to follow the pied-piping of the President. And, as a final touch of irony, the only class that dared to challenge the capitalist control of industry was the aroused working class, whom the Technocrats had contemptuously dismissed as economically obsolescent and politically powerless.