C. Ceorge Benello

Paper given at the Anarchos Institute conference, "Intellectuals and the State," Montreal, }une 5th & 6th, 1982

if we consider anarchism is its relation to socialism, I see anarchism, by virtue of its concern with freedom and human relatedness, as focussing on issues of human organization, especially self-organization. Anarchism has perhaps been weak on the macro level, or at least divided: it has vacillated between theories of armed revolution and propaganda of the deed on the one hand, and on counter-institution building on the other. At certain times and places it has combined the two, as in the 1930's in Spain. I will not pause to argue whether the weakness in broad strategy derives from any inherent difficulty in organizing in a libertarian fashion on the larger level or is simply a product of lack of numbers and opportunity.

The focus on self-organization characteristic of anarchism is I believe theoretically important for several reasons:

It reflects the fact that a comprehensive theory of social change must 'build the future into the present' by developing within it the forms that are to characterize the new society. If these forms are to be self-organizing and democratic, they must develop along with the movement itself. Any theory that is exclusively focussed on classes and masses may be able to mobilize large numbers of people, but lacks per se the understanding of group and organization formation necessary to create the New Society. Thus it runs the danger of thermidorean relapses into new forms of authoritarianism which produces a class system within a statist bureaucracy.

It also reflects the fact that voluntaristic organization is in an important sense a higher form of organization, requiring forms of individual commitment, consciousness and group skills which traditional top-down organization overlooks. Just as it is easier to enlist assistance in

a project requiring collective action by either threats or offers of reward ? ie. appealing to extrinsic motivations of fear, security or gain, so

it is easier to build organizations based on these motivations than it is to involve people in the more complex intrinsic motivations implied by voluntaristic and cooperative action. As a system involving extrinsic rewards and threat systems becomes institutionalized, it develops its own ongoing stratification, hence making it appear as if the ruling class involved bore sole responsibility for the inequity. But this personalizing of the problem neglects the realities and difficulties involved in developing liberatory organization.

3. Self-organizing theory reflects the affirmative side of anarchist doctrine in which social forms are created which embody the values that are rhetorically affirmed. This is the most genuine type of praxis, ! believe. There are obvious ethical dimensions involved in making theory accord with practise. More importantly, the need to create self-organizing voluntaristic organization, from the perspective of anarchist theory (certainly that of Landauer and Buber), can be seen to be both basic and universal. Unless the basic units of a society are self-organizing, the State, whether it is formally democratic or not, takes on the top-down character of whatever is at the base. Democracy must start with the nuclear units of a society.

Anarchism has not developed, in my view, any adequate theory that explains the existence of inherent constraints which exist prior to external forms of oppression, although the anarchist dictum that wherever there is oppression, somewhere down the line there is consent recognizes the existence of such constraints. These constraints derive from a number of sources; and there is a need to analyze them in detail (1). They fall under several categories.

1. The broadest and most philosophically derived constraint comes from the fact that contra the Freudo-Marxists, who speak of a return to "polymorphous pre-genital sexuality", and the creation of a genital rather than armored personality, the achievement of personal liberation can be seen as a process of struggle and self-mastery lasting though a life time, characterised by stages of development and certainly related to if not necessary to the achievement of any broader social liberation. The Freudo-Marxists (in some contrast to Freud himself) tended to see liberation in Rousseauistic terms: "man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains." The work of Kohlberg and others suggests that psychosocial development proceeds in stages starting with an infantile egoism and moving outward and toward a capacity for ever-increasing identification

with larger goals and spheres of value, it is also true that a culture as a whole can represent a particular stage of psychosocial development-witness the American culture of individualism?and this can either further facilitate or hinder psychosocial development to a stage where the level of cooperation needed to achieve successful voluntaristic organization is made possible (2).

Related to the above is the human tendency to organize with a minimum of effort, in the interest of short-term task achievement, rather than going through the more difficult process of involving people in the ongoing self-organizing process. Top down organization is always quicker and easier to create, as suggested earlier. This in turn institutionalizes organizational forms calculated to get ahead with the job at the expense of developing organizational forms capable of taking into account the varied needs of all the members. Where voluntaristic and cooperative organization is the cultural norm, it undoubtedly is not hard to propagate. Where, as in this country, it runs counter to the norm, it is all the more difficult. But culture aside, a look at two-person paradigms should indicate that it is always true that in the short term, extrinsic motivation is always easier to rely on than intrinsic involvement. Where individualism is the rule, moreover, the founding person or group will naturally tend to retain ownership of the organization, and find ways to enlist others who are needed with a minimal giving out of organizational benefits. Organizationally, capitalism can be seen as the playing out of this principle.

There are also the constraints deriving from a machine technology?again related to the above?which too easily shape (and warp) the social forms into a machine-like mirror image, with people subordinated to machines. The assembly line is the ruling example. Faced with the capacity for mass production, and given the prior existence of organizational ownership by the initial founding group, the tendency is to allow the machines to dictate the terms of work, making workers into machine tenders, since again in the short term, this appears to promise the greatest productivity and hence rewards. A machine technology reinforces tendencies already there and mystifies the resulting labor forms by making it appear that they derive from the pure principles of efficiency as such, or from the very nature of the production technology. Recently, a literature has developed which explores and demystifies this phenomenon (3).

4. finally, there are constaints deriving from the laws of scale, and cause large organizations to develop status, monetary rewards, and a clustering of power at the top ail of which constitute extrinsic rewards. These are needed as substitution for the fact that intrinsic rewards occur most naturally in small groups where the contribution of individual members makes a difference (4). Thus large organizations are per se more difficult to organize democratically, requiring a micro structure of group formations. In Yugoslavia, the experience has been that worker councils alone are insufficient to establish a participative process, since workers in large plants feel out of touch with their representatives on the council. Hence a system of work units has been established made up of groups of at most 200 workers. These groups function usually with a large degree of autonomy, often operating like independent subcontractors within the plant. The Mondragon system of worker cooperatives in northern Spain develops several new production cooperatives a year, none of them larger than 400 workers; it has found that beyond that size, the plants do not function as effectively.

For the reasons indicated above, i understand anarchism as requiring a theory of liberatory organization combining the individual and the social, the personal and the political. Such a theory must be based on a recognition of the natural constraints that come in the way of developing this kind of organization and must have an understanding of the techniques needed to deal with them. Since large formal task-oriented organizations constitute both the most important and most difficult field for the development of liberatory organization and the overcoming of these constraints, I believe that anarchist practise requires an understanding of the techniques and theory needed to achieve this. It is for this reason that 1 see the field of self-management and self-organizing as being of primary importance. What the four principles briefly sketched out above all point to is the need to establish organizations in every sector which operate on intrinsic motivations, able to involve members because they are group-based and semi-autonomous, whether or not they form part of some larger organization. Issues of scale as well as organizational structure are thus of fundamental importance to anarchistic theory.

Seen from another perspective, the tendency to reify social forms can be understood as a problem independent of though related to the issue of human oppression. Social construction is inevitably a leap in the dark and an art form as well as a science which must be developed even

in the absence of oppression. And human oppression can itself be understood as an encrustation from the past deriving significantly from past failures to create liberatory social forms and liberated human beings. To use the language of theology, original sin derives not from some fatal flaw in human nature but from the failure to master inherent psychological, ecological and organizational challenges which result in reified social forms that oppress. Liberatory organization requires both skills and a higher level of consciousness and psychosocial development than does conventional organization. To create liberatory organization, it is indeed necessary to confront the weight of accepted tradition, reflected in oppressive and reified social forms. But this does not justify the revolutionist ideology that focusses exclusively on destroying the old, relying on revolutionary spontaneity to create the new forms that will embody the Good Society.

An understanding of this would ensure that anarchism does not enter into the confusions with nihilist practises that at times has been the case; destroying the state by killing off its leaders is an example of such practise. Struggle to create liberated spaces where liberatory organizations can be developed represents a very different sort of strategy, based on the recognition that oppression is not simply a product of evil people, but more basically is a product of entropic tendencies which make it easier to construct societies based on reward and punishment than on intrinsic motivation. This is particularly true today, where the vast investment in technology results in rationalized forms of oppression which are perceived as necessary if we are to benefit from the fruits of technological advance. In short, the industrial-technical system does not derive its force from the ruling elites that govern it, but from a very general belief in the necessity of the social forms that have almost everywhere been attendant on industrialization. As suggested, there are indeed strong forces that will tend to shape the social forms. But these should be resisted. Comparative anthropology teaches us that technologically sparse societies have a much better chance of developing in a more balanced and hence more liberatory fashion.

This allows us to understand theories of progress in a fashion different from the prevailing mode. If real progress is to come about, it must balance whatever potential derives from the extended mastery of technology with the enhanced capacity to create social forms which avoid the increased dangers of reification and a devolution to machine forms

of organization- Technological progress of itself leads to the development of technological and organizational monstrosities, and these agencies act so as to enslave human beings to their ends, preventing human growth and liberation. Each generation must thus reappropriate the social forms that it has inherited; all progress is abstract and unreal unless it is intimately related to the capacity to act back on and modify inherited social forms so as to fit them to the needs of those who had no hand in their creation (5). This responsiveness can only be guaranteed through extensive participation. Thus 'primitive' societies may well be socially more advanced because they are more capable of comprehending and institutionalizing within their culture perspectives on life and nature than is our own culture with its one-sided preoccupation with technological advance.

The inherent possibility of social misconstruction exists within all social forms, but it is the dominant institutions within a given society that set the tone and provide the structural achetype for ail the others. To change this archetype in the direction of greater liberation organizational alternatives must be created which are capable of fulfilling the original functions at least as effectively while at the same time addressing the key structural reasons why the archetype fails to encourage the development of the human potential. The general reasons why this is likely to happen have been briefly touched on. To understand the obstacles that are specific to the present?to advanced industrial society?it is necessary to understand the dominant institution within advanced industrial society: the corporation.

The corporation, as the embodiment of the major thrust of industrial society, is officially defined in the language of economic theory as motivated by the quest for profits. Marxism has analysed this in terms of the appropriation of surplus value created by labor, but this does not diverge from the basic model of motivation. Classical economic theory explains the quest for profits as a product of rational self-interest?Homo Eco-nomicus. Marxism, while drawing on class analysis, and dialectical materialism to explain the phenomenon, also focusses on economic determinants of behavior even if it sees them differently. It sees the production system as the basic determinant of the rest of the social system. It is possible to agree with this view, but to understand the forces that make for the primacy of the productive system in terms that differ from both classical economic theory and marxism.

To fully understand the dimensions of the problem, it is necessary to understand that the impetus toward industrialization and technological advance?the two are intimately related?derives not simply from greed, the lust after profits or appropriation of the surplus, but rather primarily reflects a fixation on the forms of power that technological advance has been capable of delivering. The machine multiplies human muscle power many times over; the computer and electronic technology multiply?both specific forms of mental power and communicationa! ability even more spectacularly. Human vision is carried into the very small, the very large, the very distant; time and space are mastered. There is thus an enormous magnification of human power, of the human senses, and of at least certain powers of the human mind.

Any historical explanation which focusses exclusively on economic forces neglects the extent to which the romance entailed by the vast increase of human power derived from technology dictates social forms, institutions, a relation to nature which can most easily contribute to this project. Today the current thrust is perhaps most clearly expressed in the widespread infatuation with the computer. But as with the development of freeways, where traffic always grows to a point where more are needed, computer technology increases the preoccupation with quantitative data and deflects from more thoughtful qualitative and global evaluation. Data multiplies to fill the processing capacity, and ,yet another technology has become functionally autonomous, an end in itself. Thus the reigning presuppositons of industrial technology are not questioned, and the explanation in terms of economic drives fails to illuminate their true character.

Any dominant fixation tends to become functionally autonomous and addictive, subordinating all other behaviors to its own imperatives. Conversely, in order to liberate from the fixation, it becomes necessary to address the forces which have caused the fixation in the first place, creating a reorientation and alternatives which bring things into better balance and destroy the addictive cycle. The corporate system draws on the infatuation with technological power to create profits; automobile advertising is a prime example. Today resource limitations and higher costs have turned attention elsewhere; it is likely that the computer may well replace the automobile as the vehicle for continued mass production in the magic of technology. Profits are of course a means to achieve corporate growth and hence more power. But the sense of power through

technology is widely shared by those who do not benefit from corporate profits; it is the larger motivation.

This analysis is consonant with the anarchist notion that wherever there is domination, there is also consent. The general acceptance of technological advance, and of the authoritarian social forms through which it is expressed are of one piece: domination is consented to because it brings with it the promise of extended power over nature, and this becomes a generally dominating social image. The tunnel vision which sees technological advance as the solution to all the problems of society is expressed, for example in a recent widely publicized book which envisions a "computopia" where computers will solve basic social problems. The book. The Information Society by a Japanese futurist, Yoneji Masuda, argues that computers can create a decentralized "Information Society" that can solve the problems of industrialization and create a computer Utopia. This vision subordinates social forms to the imperatives of technology, and hence is not concerned to undertake the task of developing a liberatory social order, since it would run counter to the unlimited development of technology, putting restraints on that development which derive from intrinsic consideration. To ask whether certain technologies are suitable, or can enhance the growth of those who use them would limit "progress" in ways which the advocates of unrestrained technological advance would find far too constraining.

Thus the reigning infatuation with technology as power is related closely to social domination, as Murry Bookchin has pointed out (6). Domination comprehends systems which are at once social and technical. One understands this when one sees the remnants of great cultures such as the Egyptian or the inca, which both produced massive monuments that were dedicated to the immortalization of their leaders. Lewis Mumford has noted the periodic appearance throughout human history of what he calls the 'invisible machine'~a machine made up of human parts?-and has noted that as technology has magnified and extended the limits of human power over nature, the 'invisible machine' has become both more powerful and more omnipresent (7). With the rise of technology, the temptation to create autocratic organization has increased.

There are of course important counter-trends, toward appropriate technology, ecological awareness, decentralism, and human growth. These trends are all closely related to anarchist thought, and anarchism should legitimately be on the forefront in developing both the theory and

the praxis of these alternatives. For this to happen, anarchism must develop in several ways:

It must develop an understanding of the hold of technological power on the popular imagination, of how this distorts social forms and trends toward massification, an infatuation with technological means, and a failure to consider the relation of these forces to genuine human interests. (Paul Goodman was expert at raising these sorts of questions.)

It must seek to develop strategies which relate liberatory organizational forms to liberatory uses of the technology, since the two are interrelated by virtue of the fact that it is the addiction with technology that further warps organizational forms beyond what might be expected otherwise.

3. It must move beyond its current involvement with largely cultural and educational alternatives, and develop a capacity to deal with the larger functions of formal organizations-?the functions at present resident largely within corporations ?including mainly those functions which address technological power. Thus it should concern itself with democratic work organization especially in those new areas of communication and information technology which are most likely to become the carriers of the dominant technological thrust. Above all, it should be concerned to develop liberatory organizations in product and service areas which are close to the heart of the present technological thrust, demonstrating through this how it is possible to both create liberatory organizations and a liberatory technology; just as the present uses of technology are fitted to the organizational forms which embody them, so alternatives to them must equally embody both form and content.

Put in somewhat over-simplified fashion, if the only problem confronting us was social inequality resulting from abstract historical forces or from the single-minded quest for profits, then counterposing to this a struggle for an egalitarian worker's state might have some meaning. But if the deeper problem is learning how to combat the thrust toward ever greater technological power and organizational giantism, then only participative, decentralist solutions embodying a humanized technology subject to broader and more comprehensive social purposes will do. Much of socialism has swallowed the reigning mythology of industrialism and technology. But anarchism has inherent reasons for allying itself instead with the new ecological consciousness, and these reasons derive from an understanding of how the popular consciousness has been formed by the technological fix, and of how the extensive investment in technology leads to social domination as well.

* * ?

The culture of industrialism has inevitably made work into a machine-like activity, subordinating the majority as workers to the technological dreams of grandeur of those who possess the means and knowledge to master the machines. But as consumers, this majority shares in the dream by possesion of the products that bring technological mastery; oppression in the workplace is countered by participation in the technological marketplace. Thus although a majority of the workforce is in-

volved in service and maintenance functions? in government, education, social services and the like?-the dream is still there: the power and the glory belong to the instrumentalities of production since it is here that the magnification of human powers is experienced most directly. Note that is also experienced by those who man the state apparatus?and through identification by their underlings?through the extensive involvement of the state in weapons systems possessed of a power and destructive potential that are unique. Not only the nuclear weapons but the jets, the missiles, the radar and communications, the tanks and battleships, all form part of a vast technological apparatus dedicated to destruction, deriving its rationale from the existence of similar systems of warfare technology possessed by other States.

Nowhere is the addictive character of technology seen more clearly than in this setting up of systems of mutual destruction, to the detriment of living standard, security, and peaceful forms of human progress. The urge to power thus finds its most apt expression in the warfare state, which links state domination with the technology of warfare; Randolph Bourne's observation, "War is the health of the State" takes on a magnified meaning here, clarified by the understanding of how technology contributes to the natural tendencies of the State toward self-aggrandizement at the expense of its people and makes these tendencies infinitely more lethal. The private corporation and the warfare state: these are the locci of the contemporary disease, and the two are closely intertwined on the material level by the urge to profits and on the cultural level by a shared investment in power through technology.

We shall not dwell further on the problem of the warfare state; its centrality to anarchist thought is only underlined by the analysis presented here. As to the corporation, the analysis suggests that if significant change is to be wrought here, it should involve both the organization and its products. The need to change corporate organization is non-controversial from an anarchist point of view. The need to change the corporate products follows from the need to create a new technology, one that is subordinated to and serves human needs. As with certain South Pacific tribes, who only adopt western technology if it does not disturb their social patterns, an appropriate and humane technology would be judged ?as Schumacher has pointed out ?according to whether it enhances rather than replaces human productivity and imagination.

The argument so far is to the effect that the libertarian thrust of

anarchism as a theory of human organization should be aimed squarely at the workplace, and particularly at the factories, the R & D corporations, and in general at the technological elite who are responsible for the new electronics and information technology. The greater flexibility of this new technology does indeed make it susceptible to humanization and decentralization, although the evidence so far indicates that that is certainly not where it is headed- But it is this technology which increasingly is coming to symbolize the thrust of technological advance, and in the process is creating the driving cultural image. As an image, it is perhaps less constraining than the machine image of the earlier industrial period. But the question is still how to humanize this technology and how to raise questions regarding the relation of this technology to broader human goals that cannot be answered from within the context of its assumptions. These questions are as important as questions of democratic and liberatory structure, given the fact that for the technological elite, the new technology is perceived as per se an enhancement of human freedom.

There is an argument made in some self-management circles that it is important not to involve the worker cooperative movement in attempts to instill social values. Worker cooperatives should be free to produce whatever they want?particularly given their general margtn-ality and the difficulty they experience in obtaining financing, skilled workers and management, and adequate markets. For those who have experienced the difficulty of developing successful examples of self-management, this argument is cogent. And yet, it is the magic of technological advance which most subtly holds the imagination not only of the producers, but most especially of the consumers of technology. From the side of the ecology movement, of those who espouse an appropriate technology which is neither capital nor energy intensive?Barry Commoner has shown the two to be intimately related ?the interest in creating more democratic forms of production is pronounced. My argument is that the proponents of worker management should recognize that the product does matter, and that worker managers who cater to the prevailing technological fix only narrow the scope of their potential influence.

In the last ten years or so a critique of the present thrust of technology has developed which has a power and depth to it that makes it too important to be ignored, it'steps outside of the prevailing assump-

tions regarding technology, and questions both its methods and its goals. An essay written in 1909 by C.R. Ashbee previsions a number of its themes: writing of Indian village communities, he questions whether the technological progress that has brought us away from them has improved the quality of life. The essay anticipates the critique of technology made today by questioning whether machines have not created social costs greater than their benefits. This question is echoed in the writings of Ivan lllich, who points out that labor-saving devices usually do not save labor: when production and maintenance time is factored into the overall life of a car, the average speed is reduced to around five miles an hour; likewise, iabor saving appliances, when the labor costs to buy them is accounted for, do end up substituting the labor required to earn them for whatever labor time is saved.

The analysis is powerful, because it suggests the irrationality inherent in the present commitment to technology. We sacrifice freedom in work in order to be able to purchase appliances, vehicles ?the accoutrements of technology?which mainly add to our sense of power. But the Faustian bargain is that we sacrifice the power to determine how or when we work, and for what purpose. The analysis demonstrates how intimately related the critique of technology and the critique of the workplace are, if we subject both to rational evaluation. The irrationality of the present commitment is further demonstrated in the field of energy. Howard Odum, who has developed the conception of net energy, points out that we are approaching a state where the energy required to extract more energy equals the energy extracted; there is not net energy gain. Odum, along with Herman Daly, Wilson Clark, Amory Lovins, and other advocates of a steady state economy have made the case against the present employment of technology in terms which are broad enough and scientific enough to demonstrate that the issue is not whether one prefers simplicity to complexity, a technology suited to human needs to a technology which dictates human needs?although these are important choices in themselves?but rather whether we are to use technology sanely, or continue to use it in ways that are in the end irrational.

Technology issues and workplace democratisation issues are thus closely related on several levels. They can be summarised as follows:

!. As Braverman has shown, technology has never been neutral when it comes to the workplace. The development of the technology of production owes far more to considerations of efficiency of control than it

does to any abstract desire for efficiency as such. Work has become highly rationalized; mental work has been split off from manual work; jobs have become mechanized. All of this makes workers more replaceable through de-skiiling, hence increases managerial power over workers, and allows for lower wage scales.

As noted already, technology has been fueled by the urge to dominate nature. The vision of vast extensions of human power and human perception has allied the quest for scientific knowledge with the quest for domination. And the result of this is a social order in which the control of technology and its magnification of human power has led naturally to the control of other human beings. It can perhaps be said that the net result has been a social order in which the discrepancies in power are perhaps greater and more glaring than the discrepancies in income. Those who command the corporate baronies of today possess powers to shape and reshape the environment that the most powerful of feudal princes could not dream of. Thus again, technology and the workplace .. -

Technology, as Mumford has pointed out, was necessary for the first of the megamachines?the machines made up of armies of human beings, building pyramids, walled cities, or fighting in the first continuing mass military machines?to come into existence. A written system of record keeping was necessary, at minimum. Later as technology developed further, a more intimate symbiosis between people and machines was posible. The end result is the intimate linking of human muscles and sensory apparatus to engine, radar, infrared night vision, computer sighting devices, and so on seen in fighter planes where sensory and motor activity is adapted to the specific needs of aerial warfare. Today's megamachines link mass organization to current technology and in the process destroy the natural forms of human association which anarchists seek?the small community, the voluntary and cooperative work association, the society based on norms and social sanctions rather than on the state and armed might. As the technology becomes more powerful, so does the megamachine. But the megamachine is the antithesis of freedom in work and voluntary association around common purposes.

4. On the positive side, freedom in work is linked with an appropriate technology, based on a human scale, where neither the technology nor the organization of work make workers into machine tenders. Any efforts to create freedom in work must bring the present

runaway technology under control. Here the focus in on the technology of production. But the technology of production is linked to the technology that produces its products. The lack of concern for human beings as workers is of a piece with the manipulation of human beings as consumers: passive workers, following orders, and passive consumers, advertised into buying, just as there should be worker control, so there should be consumer control, so that products last, are reasonably priced, and meet needs as defined by consumers, not by the producers. Technology in general, not simply its application in the workplace, needs to come under democratic control.

**?

There is in most human beings a natural urge toward m. stery of the environment. Psychologists point out that a key factor in psychosocial development is the development of various kinds of competence-coping skills. At least part of the challenge of technology lies in the human skills that it brings into play. These can be destructive, as in the case of weapons skills or the challenge of reckless driving. But they can also be constructive as in the case of laser surgery to remove cataracts or the same driving skills applied to public transportation, i have argued elsewhere that the urge to power grows most fertily in an environment of psychic scarcity {8}. In such an environment, in which the support systems traditionally provided by primary groups are lacking, the tendency to use technology as a vehicle for the expression of the power urge is strong. Where the security of community is iacking, one basic response is to seek security through power?over nature, and over other human beings.

Technology, in a society which is fragmented and devoid of the stability, rootedness in place, localism and cultural institutions which together can provide emotional security, becomes the most immediate vehicle for compensatory needs for power. It is hence not enough to combat the technology without seeking to change the social and political landscape in the direction of returning power to the local level and in the process building community. The answer to our runaway technology is social reconstruction. A healthy society would have built-in self-editing mechanisms, as Sapir called them, such that only those technologies would be adopted which were consonant with the cultural patterns. In the South Pacific, many native groups manifested this capacity? to reject western tools if they were disruptive of the established social patterns. But social patterns are the institutionalizations of certain values; where the institutions do not exist, the values are not perceived.

In anarchist circles as welt as elsewhere the dispute continues as to whether the primary locus for creating change should be the workplace or the community (9). It is argued, justly I believe, that without creating freedom in work, the sense of empowerment needed to restore community control cannot be developed. At the same time, the need for community and empowerment extends beyond the workplace into the community; the experiences of daily life encompass both. At present, it would

seem as if the debate as to where to begin should remain at the level of tactics, and not be elevated to the level of theory. Those in the ecology movement and in the more political community organizing groups are sympathetic to workplace democracy. Those involved with workplace democracy are often concerned that they not alienate workers by imposing an alien ideological burden on them, one which will make their work more difficult. With significant success in either sphere, one can foresee the probability of convergence: successful experiments in workplace democracy usually result in consonant developments in the community. Conversely, it was Scandinavians, with a tradition of consumer cooperatives, who first created the West Coast plywood cooperatives?flawed but nevertheless important examples of workplace democracy in this country. Hence to argue either position to the exclusion of the other seems arbitrary and limiting.

Also, the magic of technology is experienced in both areas. As community members and consumers, people spend an average of over six hours a day watching television. They spend more hours enclosed in their vehicular steel cages, admittedly not out of choice but out of necessity. They allow their communities to be paved over by the auto-industrial complex but at the same time the youth of the society glories in the power and freedom provided by the automobile; technology both satisfies and warps human needs. As workers, there is a general blind acceptance of the continuing fragmentation of work and the subordination of workers to machines. Unions do not include technological issues in bargaining agreements (although in Europe these issues are beginning to be raised). But in general, the legitimacy of technological imperatives is beyond question, and the power-political motives which dictate the development of one technology and not another are well concealed by specialized knowledge and technocratic expertise.

The argument then is that the primary focus for an anarchist critique should be the extent to which the contemporary investment in technology has deformed both work and community life together. There can be no real freedom in work, if this is true, without a freeing of the imagination away from the dominance and preoccupation with technological forms of power and mastery. Democratizing automobile assembly lines is not enough; the real question is whether cars themselves are necessary or should be replaced, and whether there are not priorities that are so much more pressing that cars?and jets and space shots and much

else?should simply be abandoned in favor of projects that contribute more directiy to human growth and human wisdom. Thus the aims of technology, and not simply the organizational methods which it uses, must be put into question. Its deformation of the social landscape must be challenged, as well as its pillaging of the natural landscape.

Again: if the simple motivational model obtained, and technology served the profit of the masters only, then the workplace could easily be seen as the primary field of struggle. But humans are the willing consumers?and slaves?of the technological imperative. While the constraints of human nature, entropy, and organizational size are always with us, these constraints differ from that imposed by technology in that technology alone not only resists efforts to organize in a liberatory fashion, but pulls in a different direction. The lure of the megamachine, its power and its glory, captivates both by its logic and its magic, its logic is necessitarian: technology must be free to go where rt will, and social forms must accomodate it. Its magic is linked with nationalism ?another magic?and with corporate greed. But while greed is decried, and the current lethal form of nationalism is questioned, there is little general questioning of the general goals of technological advance, although the ecology movement is a partial exception ? partial in that it questions the impact of technology on the natural environment without fully enough exploring its impact on the social environment.

The challenge is to accord technology a place within a larger vision which consciously controls subordinate elements in the interests of human growth. But to accomplish this, a level of consciousness and planning is necessary which at present does not exist. The primary expression of such a consciousness should be in the organizing of communities and workplaces which are deliberately structured so as to be participative, coherent, ecologically sound, and continuously responsive to the needs of the inhabitants. The result would be a different social reality, a culture which would act back on its members so as to encourage different behaviour patterns and different norms. In its time, Bellamy's Looking Backward had a widespread influence on the thinking of progressives; Bellamy societies sprang up in many places, and Bellamy's particular form of Utopian socialism became the dominant form of progressive thinking. More recently Callenbach's Ecotopia has also been influential, though certainly less so than Bellamy's work in its time. But this proves the importance of vision as a force for change.

The primary field for the expression of alternate visions is of course society itself. We suffer an extraordinary dearth of social experimentation, when one considers the extent of dissatisfaction with what we have. Social imagination is perhaps at all times a scarce commodity. But today, large amounts of human creativity are channeled into the development of new technologies, while little if any goes into the development of new social forms. Of course new technologies pay while social experimentation is achieved if at all outside of the market system; there is no profit in developing more suitable social alternatives. This leads to a concluding thought: anarchism is known best for its refusal to accept arbitrary and coercive authority. This is the negativity of anarchism which Dave Weick has written of. Anarchism rightly stresses social control in opposition to the coercive control of the state, the corporation, the school, and whatever other institution seeks to impose its will on us. But if, as this analysis suggests, the project of creating liberatory social forms requires the surmounting of deeply imbedded constraints that are inherent in human nature and human social organization, then anarchism should engage itself in the project of constructing workplaces and communities which address these constraints and conquer them. Anarchism should exemplify the social vision which is the natural and logical expression of its principles.

footnotes

1. I have described these constraints in some detail in two arti cles: "Work Manage ment in Organizations: Paradigms and Possi bilities," Humanity and Society, Vol If. No 2, May 1978, and "Toward a Grounded Theory of Humanist Organization," Human ity and Society, Vol IV, No 2, June 1980.

2. Ernest Becker in his fast writings, especially "The Denial of Death" and "Escape from Evii," develops a the ory of freedom as an end attainment in marked contrast to the views of Herbert Mar- cuse in Eros and Civili zation and Norman O. Brown in Life Against Death. For a good sur vey of the psychology of staged development see jane toevtnger [with Augusto Blast), Ego Development

3, This literature stems maily from Harry Braverman's important work, labor and Monopoly Capital Monthly Review Press, 1975.

Mancur Olson's book. The Logic of Collective Action, Harvard University Press, 1965, is the best treatment of this subject.

In my article "Toward a Grounded Theory of Humanist Organization," above, f develop a theory of social construction based on the dialectic developed by Berger and Luckman in The Social Construction of Reality, which draws implications from their book which they themselves might not accept.

The idea is found in Bookchin's important essay "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought," found in Post-Scarcity Anarchism.

The idea of the 'invisible machine' serves as the major focus for Lewis Mum-ford's two volume work The Myth of the Machine, Vols ! & II. Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich, 1970.

This argument forms the basis of "The Wasteland Culture." an article w'hich first appeared in Our Generation, and saw its widest circulation in Recent Sociology No I, edited by Hans Peter Dreitzel, Macmillan paperback. 1969.

A valuable contribution to that debate is "The Workplace and the Community: Murray Bookchin, Hannah Arendt, and the Politics of Work," by Peter Kardas, a paper given at the Anarchist Institute meetings in Montreal, !une4-6.1982.

Note: As the putative manufacturer of a three wheel high mileage commuter car, I can probably be accused of democratizing the production process while ignoring the product, in defense I would argue that since there is no transportation revolution in sight and we are stuck with freeways, one might as well produce a sensible gas efficient vehicle to at least challenge the four wheel orthodoxy. Perhaps if s a weak argument.