The Left’s Problem with Technology

A critique of automation, cybernetics, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

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Vaccines, online education, puberty blockers—these are some of the most divisive “culture war” issues in politics today.  However, many of the so-called “culture wars” in post-pandemic America can be more accurately described as “technology wars.” While culture and technology are inextricably linked, to reduce these debates to mere differences in “culture” obscures the fact that one of the greatest divisions among Americans pertains to the role and purpose of technology in our lives.

The growing unity of a populist “right” and “left” in opposition to the professional-managerial class (PMC) has clarified the central position of technology in contemporary American politics. The PMC—academics, NGO employees, scientists, techies, and teachers, among others in this simultaneously motley yet homogenous crew—has flourished during the pandemic. Generous work-from-home arrangements have replaced commutes and a new form of virtual social life substitutes Zoom, Discord, and Slack for in-person relationships. These measures were initially justified in the name of “stopping the spread,” but soon became second nature to many members of the PMC, who embrace them as morally righteous alternatives to the now dubious activity of face-to-face interaction.

On the other side of the divide, we find the American majority of workers, the poor, and disaffected members of the middle class. This other America transcends the now outmoded descriptors of “right” and “left” and struggles for unity on labor issues, foreign policy, and—just as significant yet most often overlooked—the question of technology. Indeed, one of the most significant characteristics of this new populist convergence is a suspicion of new technologies, be they experimental vaccines, gain-of-function research methods, AI algorithms, hormone therapies, or digital pedagogies.

The advent of COVID-19 and the subsequent acceleration of the Fourth Industrial Revolution has brought the question of technology to center stage in the political drama unfolding between the PMC and the American majority. Despite its centrality in the current political landscape, few on the self-styled “left”—reformist or revolutionary—have made the effort to seriously engage with the technology question. More often than not, they have by default accepted the PMC and ruling class position that technological advancement is both inevitable and beneficial. From angsty anarchists to self-righteous Stalinists, debonair democratic socialists to turgid Trotskyites, professional leftists have written off skepticism toward technology as, at best, an example of undeveloped consciousness and, at worst, conspiracy theory.

In this essay, I will trace the history of the left’s uncritical technological optimism—and even utopianism—from Karl Marx’s anti-Luddism through the Soviet space program. I will then build on this analysis to investigate the technocratic fantasies of full automation and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. I close with a call for a renewed critique of technology in response to the Great Reset’s all-out assault on the human being.

Left Technotopianism: Past, Present, and Futur(ist)

“What graciousness was in its aspect, what benevolence, what music flowed from its lips: science was heard and the savage hearts of men were melted, the scabs fell from their eyes, a new life thrilled through their veins, their apprehensions were ennobled, and as science spoke, the multitude knelt in love and obedience.”

—An Owenite socialist paean to the steam engine, New Moral World (1837)

Once the domain of fringe meme culture, the futurist fantasy of Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) has in recent years gained mainstream adherents on the left. The Atlantic describes FALC as “a strong brew of technological determinism, sunny utopianism, and souped-up socialism” where “robots do all the work” and “humans enjoy the fruits of their labor in equal measure.” Verso Books, one of the world’s most influential left publishing houses, expanded the audience for these ideas with the 2019 publication of Aaron Bastani’s book, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto.

How did an ideology that advocates the abolition of human labor gain such popularity with leftists? If Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 are any guide, leftist thought would be expected to put labor at the heart of its definition of the human being. However, this is no longer the case. A historical perspective on the left’s approach to technology can help us understand how leftists shifted from conceptions of alienated labor to calls for the abolition of labor. Indeed, we find that the left has often aligned with the ruling class on questions of technology. Rather than defend labor’s consistent skepticism of and resistance to the imposition of untested technologies on the working class, professional leftists have silenced workers’ longstanding critique of technology.

By the time Marx begin work on his magnum opus, Capital, his earlier humanist theories of labor and subjectivity had given way to a focus on the critique of political economy. The romantic concepts of “species-being” (Gattungswesen) and “alienation” were exchanged for abstract meditations on the flows of capital itself. This “epistemological break” between the “early” and “mature” Marx opened the door for his trenchant critique of the Luddites in Capital. Marx believed that the Luddites’ attacks on machinery at the onset of the First Industrial Revolution were misguided and even a cover for the “reactionary” machinations of counterrevolutionary politicians. In Volume 1 of Capital, Marx wrote that “It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used.”

Marx’s dismissal of the Luddite movement as the manifestation of primitive, undeveloped worker consciousness artificially separated the social relations between labor and capital from the technology imposed by capitalists on workers. What emerged from this false dichotomy was the equally false idea that technology was somehow neutral or even beneficent by default. This position paradoxically aligned Marx with the very utopian socialists that his closest associate, Friedrich Engels, subjected to critique in his classic materialist tract, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. For example, the Owenites, followers of nineteenth-century Welsh utopian socialist Robert Owen, exhibited what historian Maxine Berg has called “a wondrous excitement over the machine.” These socialists viewed the new mechanistic technology not as an instrument of class rule imposed by capitalists on the working class but, instead, as a harbinger of future prosperity under socialism.

Berg observes that the Owenites’ positive view of the machine was widespread among the nineteenth-century European middle class. Middle class intellectuals “actively eulogized the progress of science and technology” even as they were “challenged on both sides, by Tory and radical working class opinion.” By the end of the nineteenth century, it was this middle class technotopianism—embraced by liberals and socialists alike—that won out over the critical opposition from both romantic conservatives and the industrial proletariat.  

By the early twentieth-century, the idea that unrestrained technological advance was inevitable and beneficial came to dominate the leftist movement. Once a critic of Taylorism—the “scientific management” of workers—as “man’s enslavement by the machine,” V.I. Lenin succumbed to the technotopian Zeitgeist in 1918. He stated unequivocally that “[i]t is essential to learn that without machines, without discipline, it is impossible to live in modern society.” Lenin’s about-face on machines would go on to influence Soviet conceptions of social progress and development which dutifully heeded his warning: “master the highest technology or be crushed.”

This philosophy reached new heights during the space race. Many artists and intellectuals aligned with the world communist movement waxed poetic about Sputnik and the triumph of humanity over previously perceived limits to technological development. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev decided in 1967 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution with nothing other than a spectacular meeting of two Soviet spaceships. Despite warnings from cosmonaut and Soviet hero Yuri Gagarin that the spaceship—which his friend Vladimir Komarov was set to board—was riddled with multiple structural flaws, party leaders determined that the show must go on.

Komarov was shot into space and, on a day that was supposed to commemorate the historic achievement of the world’s first socialist revolution, Komarov’s spaceship failed, and he was plunged to his death. Aware before take-off that he would likely die, Komarov stipulated that his remains must be displayed in an open casket. We remember his death today from his charred and shrunk body captured in this photo with Soviet officials looking on. 

Komarov’s tragic death is but a dramatic example of what can happen when technological advancement is equated with social progress. The roots of this ideology on the left can be traced back to both the utopian socialist reverence for the machine and the Marxist misunderstanding and rejection of the Luddites.

Challenging Marx’s dismissive caricature of the early British industrial workers, David Noble argues in his brilliant book, Progress Without People, that the Luddites “were not against technology per se.” Instead, they sought to resist the reduction of human beings to “mere factors of production for enterprise,” indistinguishable from the machines that were introduced indiscriminately by managers on the shop floor. The Luddites’ “heroic defence of society” against technological and economic determinism was neither irrational nor immature but, rather, exhibited an advanced form of working-class consciousness that placed the “point of production” at the heart of the technology question. In so doing, the Luddites brought the issue of technology down from the lofty abstractions of petite bourgeois futurists and grounded it concretely in the lifeworld of the proletariat. 

Leftists are quick to point out that political democracy is a farce without “workplace democracy.” However, workplace democracy is an equally absurd concept without workers’ ability to veto new technologies that lead to both unemployment and alienation. Until there is technological democracy—the power of the people themselves to determine how and why technologies are implemented—true people’s democracy will remain out of reach. The intellectual left and labor union bureaucracy’s rejection of the Luddites as backward and ignorant undergirds the eventual triumph of technology over the human in the Soviet Union as well as contemporary PMC-driven technotopian theories like Fully Automated Luxury Communism. To critique the technophilic tendencies of the left is not to oppose technology as such. Rather, it is a pivotal step toward putting true technological democracy on the ideological agenda. 

The End of Labor: A Technocratic Fantasy

“When capital enlists science in her service, the refractory hand of labor will always be taught docility.”

—Andrew Ure, “The Philosophy of Manufacturers” (1835)

Charles Babbage, the inventor of the mechanical computer, was one of the first to fantasize about automated industry. In the wake of the Luddite movement in the early nineteenth century, Babbage “contemplated the computer-run factory.” Ever earlier, in the late eighteenth century, utilitarian and anarchist philosopher, William Godwin, imagined a future where human labor would be displaced by machines. In classic middle-class fashion, Godwin argued that the “utility” of machines could not be disputed despite the “alarm” that they caused among “the labouring part of the community.”

Godwin and Babbage were hardly alone. Steven E. Jones observes in his cultural history of Luddism that “a utopian future in which human labor is taken over by machines seemed reasonable to many progressive thinkers in the era of the French Revolution.” This now familiar technocratic fantasy, first expressed in the early decades of the First Industrial Revolution, became closer to reality in the aftermath of World War II.

Propelled by massive Cold War investment in military technology, the Third Industrial Revolution pushed beyond Second Industrial Revolution innovations, like commercial electrical power and the Fordist assembly line, into the realm of “automation” and “cybernetics.” Indeed, automation and cybernetics—terms both coined in 1947—became the watchwords of the Third Industrial Revolution. And this time the countercultural left joined the technotopian party. Stimulated creatively by avant-garde cultural movements like the Fluxus collective and nourished intellectually by the Macy Conferences on cybernetics, the Third Industrial Revolution promised to go far beyond its predecessors. It would do this by uniting the physical and social sciences in an effort to predict, manage and, ultimately, transform the psychological reality of the human being.

It was in this countercultural milieu that anthropologist Gregory Bateson could team up with alt-futurist Stewart Brand to ponder “cybernetic frontiers.” Meanwhile, author Richard Brautigan dreamt of a “cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers” in his 1967 poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” Lest this technophilic imaginary be restricted to the realm of male fantasy, Shulamith Firestone called for a “cybernetic communism” in her 1970 feminist classic, The Dialectic of Sex, certain in her “conviction that technology holds the key to the emancipation of women and children.” Donna Haraway’s still influential “A Cyborg Manifesto,” first published in 1985 the British Trotskyist monthly, Socialist Review, solidified technotopianism as the ideology of choice for a new generation of left feminists.

This metamorphosis from counterculture to cyberculture abandoned the sentimentality of the neo-Luddite hippies and the presentist anxieties of the environmental movement to turn fearlessly toward the future. The smoking craters in the minds of these counterculture burnouts could now be filled with complex systems theory, information technology, and artificial neural networks.

While these artists and intellectuals foretold futurist fantasies, the concrete realities of automation and cybernetics were playing out on the shop floor of America’s factories. In 1963 James Boggs wrote his remarkably clairvoyant work, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook. He argued that the central “dilemma before the workers and the American people is: How can we have automation and still earn our livings? It is not simply a question of retraining or changing from one form of work to another. For automation definitely eliminates the need for a vast number of workers, including skilled, semi-skilled, unskilled, and middle-class clerical workers.”

Boggs drew on his experience working in Detroit’s auto factories to contend that the ostensible pillar of working-class power—the labor union—was rendered “helpless” in the face of automation. The union had “become incorporated into all the contradictions of the capitalist system and is today fulfilling the same functions for the American state as the Russian trade unions do for the Russian state.” The fact that barely ten percent of American workers are union members today speaks to the prescience of Boggs’ analysis.

Martin Luther King Jr., too, turned to the central question of technology as he expanded the Civil Rights movement beyond the confines of de jure equality. King made the case in 1967 that the world was in the throes of a “triple revolution”: a technological revolution of automation and cybernation; a revolution in weaponry with the development of the nuclear bomb; and a human rights revolution of the world’s people for freedom. Like Boggs, King understood that developments in automation and cybernetics were essential for the Afro-American people to understand, being, as they were, disproportionately employed in working class jobs that were threatened by planned obsolescence. 

But King did not stop there: beyond the material suffering augured by advancements in automation, he honed in on the spiritual degradation wrought by a society that puts “science and technology” before “morals and ethical religion.” King traced the roots of this distorted hierarchy of priorities back to the philosophy of “practical materialism” that undergirded both American capitalism and Soviet socialism. King argued that the belief in technology as an indicator of social progress not only leads to the material degradation of working people, but also erodes the essence of our humanity, which resides in “the within of a man’s life, which is the realm of culture” rather than “the without that is the realm of civilization.”

Boggs and King’s Black perspective on the Third Industrial Revolution stands as an alternative to the dominant left view—Marxist and countercultural alike—of technology as a self-correcting, autonomous panacea for social ills. To return to the example of space exploration, the 2021 documentary film, Summer of Soul, powerfully captured how white Americans—enthralled with the achievement or promise of middle class life—cheered on the moon landing as a massive national and technological achievement. At the same time, Black Americans broadened and deepened the working class critique of technology by protesting the moon landing as an example of a warped ideology that put wanton space exploration above the lives of the starving masses right here on earth. This sentiment was captured best in Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 song, “Whitey on the Moon,” which just as easily could have been written in reference to today’s billionaires in space.

From Digital to Artificial: The Fourth Industrial Revolution

“One of the features of this Fourth Industrial Revolution is that it doesn’t change what we are doing, it changes us.”

—Klaus Schwab (2016)

Developments in the Third Industrial Revolution went hand-in-hand with neoliberal efforts to outsource industrial production, casualize labor, and destroy the power of workers with or without a union. However, the economic contradictions of neoliberalism began to deepen with the financial crisis of 2008 and soon became unmanageable after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Arch neoliberal Hillary Clinton’s defeat by a candidate who ran on a platform of opposition to both free trade agreements and endless wars signaled the end of an era, but it was still unclear what would come next.

With the onset of COVID in 2019, the imposition of draconian lockdowns and travel restrictions in 2020, and the breakdown of global supply chains in 2021, the crumbling neoliberal status quo began to give way to something new. The founder of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, seized this opportunity to promote his 2016 book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, and pushed to make its ideas a reality through a “Great Reset” in the post-pandemic world.

Schwab argues that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is “fundamentally changing the way we live, work, and relate to one another” and would soon be “unlike anything humankind has experienced before.” Driven by advancements in “artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, the internet of things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage and quantum computing,” the Fourth Industrial Revolution will not simply make digital technologies more widespread and efficient; it will go beyond the digital into the realm of the artificial.

This Great Reset promises to finally realize William Godwin and Charles Babbage’s dream of the fully automated factory. What’s more, it threatens to expand this vision to fully automated social relations in virtual spaces like the Metaverse. Central to this project is the displacement of the irreducibly human capacity of logical reasoning by the all-encompassing domination of data and patterns. Indeed, artificial intelligence and the machine learning techniques that underly it cannot currently deploy logic or an understanding of causation. Instead, they simply identify patterns in massive amounts of data, which they process at incredible speeds to accomplish particular technical tasks. These so-called intelligent machines know not what they do, but they do it better than any human could ever imagine doing.

This reduction of intelligence to rapid pattern processing removes the human being not only from the production process but also from history itself. For technotopian futurists like Ray Kurzweil, artificial intelligence will soon surpass human intelligence leading to “the singularity,” a hypothetical future epoch in which humans as biological entities will be outmoded and displaced by artificial intelligence. Though these technological fantasies are most likely unattainable, due to the computer’s lack of consciousness, the most powerful men in the world, such as self-described “utopian anarchist” Elon Musk, are actively preparing for the obsolescence of the human being by pouring millions of dollars into research on brain-computer interfaces.

Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies are dependent on incredibly energy-intensive computer systems. Coupled with the mass proliferation of smart phones and, soon, IoT devices for individuals, this new world order—despite its superficial environmentalist rhetoric—will entail ecological destruction the likes of which we have never seen in human history. Part and parcel with this destruction will be the vicious exploitation and neo-colonization of Africa, the source of the majority of the world’s rare earth metals which the United States and China struggle to control.

Although an insatiable Western imperialism threatens Chinese sovereignty, and American and Chinese political leaders publicly clash, the two countries have never been more economically interlinked. As Glenn Greenwald has convincingly argued, China does not fit into the old “enemy” boxes constructed by American Cold War and War on Terror rhetoric. This is because the two countries are so intertwined. The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) funding of American nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which, in turn, funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is but one example of this complex, co-dependent relationship. 

Furthermore, Xi Jinping’s speech at Davos in 2017 set out precisely to defend economic globalization against a rising populism across the world. The Communist Party of China decided in 2021 to grant exclusive ownership rights to private equity giant BlackRock as well as to investment banks Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase for their respective operations in China. In September of the same year, China applied to join the “Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership” free trade agreement (abandoned by Trump in 2017 when it was called the Trans-Pacific Partnership). These recent developments underline the economic imbrication of “communist” China and the “capitalist” West in a world system that increasingly defies both of these outmoded Cold War labels.

What’s more, the United States and China agree wholeheartedly on the inevitability and necessity of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies. Asia Times columnist David Goldman notes that China is leading the way in the Forth Industrial Revolution, highlighting its fully automated warehouses, remote control mining, “smart factories” run by self-programming robots, and driverless taxis, all tied together by global 5G supremacy. 

Though each nation may strive for technological superiority over the other, America and China share the goal that these new technologies must be developed and applied as soon as possible in order to usher in a new age of 5G-driven “progress.” Like the “scientific” and “utopian” socialists of yore, American and Chinese political elites—despite their significant differences—find themselves paradoxically unified on the question of technology. Their shared commitment to a vague idea of “progress” challenges us to recall Leo Tolstoy’s realization that “to live according to progress” is to live like “a person being carried along in a boat by the waves and the wind; without really answering, such a person replies to the only important question—‘Where are we to steer?’—by saying, ‘We are being carried somewhere.’”

Toward a Renewed Critique of Technology

In this essay, I have attempted to trace a history of the left’s technophilic past and connect this legacy to an analysis of automation, cybernetics, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This is not to take away from the tremendous intellectual and political achievements of Marx and Lenin, not to mention the Russian and Chinese Revolutions. To truly learn from these historical thinkers and revolutionary experiences, we cannot reduce their contributions to dogma but, rather, must interrogate received ideologies—such as the inevitability and beneficence of technological advancement—from the perspective of a world in the midst of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. As the categories of “left” and “right” disintegrate in the contemporary American political landscape and the Great Reset supplants the inherited categories of “socialism” and “capitalism” on a global scale, we must strive to turn these converging crises into opportunities for an alternative vision of the future.

Intelligence experts and political scientists warn that a deindustrialized and divided America is on the verge of civil war. Meanwhile, China’s understanding that a robust real economy must be maintained alongside finance puts it in a much better position than the United States to successfully implement Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies. The Chinese people will ultimately determine whether they will embrace the Great Reset in exchange for a nascent doctrine of “common prosperity.” In the United States, a common political language and purpose—not to speak of common prosperity—is a pipe dream. The ruling class finds itself utterly distrusted and disliked by the American people, who are, on the whole, deeply suspicious of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies.

Within these dire yet fertile conditions, intellectuals—though objectively members of the PMC—must take the American majority’s critique of technology seriously and seek to subjectively align with the perennial working class demand for technological democracy. As David Noble writes, intellectuals “must strive to overcome—in themselves and in others—the collective fear of being human and free, a fear now reified and ratified in fixed ideas and solid-state circuitry. To do this, they must champion a new common sense that insists without compromise upon the primacy of people’s lives over the strange and estranging myths of automatic destiny.”

Such a project will entail an intellectual battle with the technotopian ideological onslaught that has for generations seduced left intellectuals into its fold. With a professional left under the suffocating grip of the PMC, these technotopian tendencies are stronger than ever. However, the burgeoning unity between “left” and “right” populism against the imposition of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies is reminiscent of the unified opposition to machines from both conservative romantics and radical industrial workers during the First Industrial Revolution. An understanding of this history and the unpredictable alliances it produced should inspire us in our struggle against the Great Reset.  

As the vague concept of “culture wars” gives way to the more accurate descriptor of “technology wars,” the decisive role of technology in class struggle becomes clear. By questioning the false equation of technological advancement with social progress, intellectuals can begin to revitalize the critique of technology. This tradition of critique is a noble one, spanning from the proletarian Luddites in England to Black radicals like James Boggs and Martin Luther King Jr. in America, and must be renewed if we wish to identify and transform the real contradictions in contemporary society. Confronted with the bitter realities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, this is not merely a struggle against technological unemployment but also a struggle for the very right to be a full human being.