Elegant
Technology
What is the proper way to define a class?
First, prove the existence of a group with boundaries;
Second, explain what the members of the group
have in common.
The features of cultural commonalty will be explained
in chapter four, but first there is this little problem of showing
that producers constitute a class.
Class analysis is often based on income, but because a producer-predator analysis
postulates that there are rich and poor members of producers and predators,
the difference is fundamental yet esoteric.
Certain social scientists believe that membership in a class is determined
by an individual's class awareness. This seems a reasonable requirement except
the problems it creates in a country such as the United States where the notions
of class and class interest have not been discussed in public for 40 years.
Class notions are so unusual in American political discussions that the brief
appearance of "class" politics in Jesse Jackson's, 1988 campaign
made even his supporters uncomfortable.
The producers' existence is validated by the common intuition. We know that
producers exist because we can see what they have built. A building implies
a builder. Similarly, we know predators exist because we can see people taking
by force or fraud something that belongs to someone else. The main defining
criteria is their differing strategies for survival. In a real sense, producers
and predators are occupational rather than monetary definitions.
Establishing the existence of producers and predators is simple enough, but
as we shall see, many people are not clear examples of either one. Modern social
scientists classify most occupations of advanced industrialization as service
occupations.
The existence of service occupations does not destroy the producer-predator
duality. Service, after all, implies an allegiance to another person or agenda.
For most of recorded history, "service" was merely another name for
producers. Societies were pretty simple--there were those who ruled and those
who served.
Because service often implies loyalty, it has become a tradition for those
who would consider themselves a part of the service sector to identify with
the ruling values of predators. Disruption to this social order did not occur
until producing servants became economically important enough to forge a separate
agenda and value set.
Figure : 3.1
The chapter illustrations are animated at:
Pre-Industrial Revolution
Upper (those who rule--predators)
Lower (those who serve--producers)
There were layers of stratification within each group, but one thing was absolutely
clear: the lowest member of the ruling classes was above the highest member of
the serving classes.
The industrial revolution ended this neat arrangement. For the first time, producers
achieved real power, but because industrialization, especially in England, was
grafted onto feudal stock, the social arrangements were only slightly modified.
Rich and powerful producers acted much like the worst of the old predators. This
was the world as Marx described it.
Figure: 3.2
Early Industrialization
(esp. England)
Marx's Worldview
Marx's petit bourgeoisie were the servants who did the dirty business of predation--not
to be confused with the servants who cleaned the stalls. These latter were
still lumped together with the producing peasants, builders, and mechanics
to form the proletariat.
The late nineteenth-century American Populist writers were not as critical
of business enterprise as Marx. Going into business, after all, was the main
element of the American dream. Though there was not much evidence, the populists
believed that producers could become successful and still maintain their producer
attitudes. It was possible to reach the top without cheating anyone.
Figure: 3:3
The chapter illustrations are animated at:
Socio-Economic Distribution
Late 19th--Early 20th Century esp. USA
This graph is meant to show that, though a few producers had become rich, most
were to be found at the bottom of the social order in any meaningful sense. The
gap is meant to represent the emerging awareness of a separate agenda. Populists,
Marxists, and progressives of all stripes agreed to and organized around the
notions of difference.
The world got its first populist-producer billionaire in Henry Ford. Social progressives
were enchanted. Ford seemed to have found the magic formula. He made his fortune
producing something, paid his workers well, hired racial minorities, and embraced
the 8-hour day. Better yet, when he made his fortune, he spent it on improving
his product, opening a museum glorifying the history of the producing classes,
and promoting causes like the end of World War I. John Reed, the American Marxist
buried in the Kremlin wall, was convinced for a time that Ford's production theories
and Marx's social theories would
result in a Utopia.
By the same token, Ford's capitalist comrades were horrified. In spite of his
incredible wealth and power, Ford was shunned by the wealthy and powerful for
his ideas. As shown in the chart, the predators still held power and chose to
make the 1920s miserable for both Ford and the class he championed. The idealism
at Ford Motor lost its luster when the firm began to lose money.
In the end, Ford was to become a tightfisted, union-busting tyrant. Even so,
important producer legacies remain:
Producers have their own business-management-leadership
style that is successful--there is no need to emulate the predators;
Clean fortunes are possible--class conflict
need not be between the rich and poor but between the producers--who
believe everyone can be rich in every meaningful sense; and the
predators--who believe only a few can be really rich.
The producers now had an economic agenda with a proven track record. This led
to political success. It can be argued that, in the period between 1945 and
1970, the producer agenda dominated the political economy of the industrial
states and the thinking of most of the rest.
Power, in all its forms, in the later stages of industrialization is far too
fragmented to enable one to state clearly that the producers are absolutely
ascendant. (It seems as if most modern social science is dedicated to proving
that no one has any power anymore. In a sense they are correct. No one seems
to have real power because many persons and groups seem to have some. If a
social scientist chooses to ignore the possibility of producer power, the fragmentation
of power looks even more bewildering.)
In fact, a chart of power--both economic and political--might look something
like this.
Figure 3.4
Economic Distribution
(by occupational type)
This graph is probably misleading even if accurate. The newly significant service
sector is, in reality, a convenient, but confusing, classification device because
garbage collectors, bankers, and kings can be so classified.
With a huge service sector that can include bankers and royalty, there remain
genuine predators. At the top are persons whose income is derived from ground
rent or bonds, military rulers, and the like. At the bottom are the petty
thieves.
Figure: 3.5
The chapter illustrations are animated at:
Social Distribution
(by interest group)
There may be three basic occupational types but there remain only two agendas.
Those who would serve are forced to choose between those who would produce and
those who will not. It is possible for royalty and bankers, persons once considered
the essence of predation, to serve the interests of producers. Kings and princes
can be regularly seen pushing the products of their native countries worldwide.
Bankers who live modest lives while promoting the economies of their communities
are a regular fixture of the American Midwest.
Such are exceptions. Most bankers are predators, think as predators, and if not,
serve the interests of predators. It is rare for any royalty (or anyone else
living off inherited wealth for that matter) to justify income
with real service.
An interesting picture emerges. It turns out that industrial societies do not
need many real producers because they are so efficient. A single farmer can produce
enough food to feed several hundred people. A punch press operator can make more
parts in one year than he can consume in a century.
Producers find few natural allies in the service sector. The exception concerns
those associated with industrial maintenance. The difference between building
an automobile and repairing one is very small. If the goal is not merely an automobile
but an automobile that runs, they are economically identical since an automobile
that is inoperative has no (or negative) value.
Socially, maintenance and production people share an important similarity--both
must understand and use tools. If the fundamental difference is between producers
who use tools, and the predators who use weapons, then maintenance people are,
in fact, Real Producers though they are usually classified as
service workers.
If maintenance allies itself naturally with production, the rest of the service
industries pose more problems for producer recruitment to their agenda. It seems
the only certain way to create producers is to put tools in their hands and teach
them to use them well.
Producers have appealed to the lower classes of the service sector through notions
of class solidarity. This has not worked well. Trade unions look down on industrial
unions and have joined forces only out of dire necessity. Producers can be awful
snobs.
The upper classes of the service sector produce a whole different set of problems
for producer recruitment. Because upper class members of the service sector are
unlikely to use tools to produce anything, the predisposition of history is toward
the predator agenda.
Even this picture is pretty primitive. As societies
have become more complex, more sophisticated representations are neceassary.
Late 20th Century industrialized societies are at least three-dimensional;
Fig. 3.6
In purely economic terms, whether a person is rich or poor, politically
conservative or progressive is of minor importance compared to whether
he or she produces goods or services that materially benefit the
community i.e. make the economic "pie" expand.
Class Conflict
The rise to prominence and power of the producing classes would tend to mitigate,
one would suppose, the conflicts of class. In fact, something of the sort has
happened. Serious scholars have portrayed the United States as a classless
society. Ninety-five percent of the Japanese think of themselves as members
of the middle class.
People do not talk of America as a classless society any longer, but class
conflict has grown exceedingly complex since the issue was last raised. Any
simplistic description of class conflict in terms of rich versus poor is probably
doomed to fail because it is irrelevant.
The fact that both major interest groups contain upper, middle, and lower economic
classes does not end battles between these groups but, in fact, provides a
wider assortment of possibilities for conflict. The conflicts are of four major
types: predator against producer, predator against predator, producer against
producer, and producer against predator.
Predators against Producers
This is the oldest conflict. One who does not produce food and shelter for
oneself must get someone else to do it. The predators have been extremely
inventive over the years. Their methods have included slavery, imperialism,
usury, ground rents, tithes, and taxation.
Of course, since the very upper predator crust does not do anything productive
at all, servants who share the predator mentality have always surrounded them
to do the actual work of profit taking, tax gathering, and rent collection.
The real work of predation has been done by sheriffs, IRS agents, lawyers,
judges, and an army of bureaucrats. Overseeing all this activity is the clergy
(or other moral leaders) whose job it is to see that everyone agrees this is
the best possible arrangement.
Predators against Predators
This conflict is usually called war. History books are filled with the lurid
accounts of these conflicts to which nothing can be added here. Within a given
society, predator-predator conflicts are rare because loyalty is a big predator
virtue while treason is a big predator sin. As a result, while tales of revolution
and coups d'etat are common, historically they are quite rare. There are also
recorded instances of bankers ruining kings, but these are even more rare.
Producers against Producers
Though widely misunderstood, producer-producer conflicts are common. They usually
center around the issues of automation. The sophisticated tools associated
with industrialization enable anyone with access to this tooling to copy exactly
any product. The producer with the best original design and the best tooling will
eliminate those producers with inferior products.
In the beginning of the industrial revolution, these producer-producer conflicts
boiled over in social revolt as artisans were displaced by factories. The Luddite
movement saw these displaced artisans smash sophisticated factory tools. The
Luddite movement generated little sympathy. Few consumers were likely to complain
about cheap factory-produced goods that were clearly superior to the more expensive
goods produced by artisans. What really finished the Luddite impulse, however,
was the realization that industrialization would also produce cheap, but sophisticated,
tools. These tools would allow the small producer to fill the gaps in production
left, deliberately or otherwise, by the large producer.
Small producers seek niches for their efforts for very good reason. Direct
competition with a large, established producer is extremely difficult. A large
producer has production experience, established ties to suppliers, known marketing
outlets, and access to finance. Unless the technology of the small producer
is far superior, there is no chance in a direct competition.
There are examples of new producers displacing old ones--such as when the $5
quartz crystal-microchip watch proved to be more accurate than the $5000 mechanical
watch produced by the Swiss. Even today, the Swiss, with a four-hundred year
head start in watchmaking, have not fully recovered from the competition of
an upstart. Such examples are not rare.
Producers against Predators
When one thinks of attacks of producers on predators, strikes, boycotts, and
sabotage are what come to mind. And in fact, these are about the only options
available to lower class producers.
Upper class producers have an option that they have frequently exercised: simply
make things so very complicated that only those who made them know how they
work. This has been the strategy of choice as producers have sought to increase
their power. It has been highly effective. The world that producers have created
by the end of the twentieth century is so complex that it is a rare predator
who has even the vaguest notion how the world works.
Even the specialist servants of predation have a hard time understanding the
smallest slice of the world they pretend to govern, regulate, or defraud. Producers
go out of their way to make matters difficult (the most interesting little
producer secret is that every extant process of production can be explained
to any reasonably alert 9-year-old.) What makes a producer a genius is the
ability to solve problems that have not been solved before. Once found, a good
solution is "obvious." Even so, the predators and their servants
exhibit an odd trait that makes this process of obfuscation easy.
Preservation of Archaic Traits
Predators do not know much about producers (and their work) for an interesting
reason that goes beyond the producer's tendency to make his work obscure. In
many respects, predators do not know about the work of producers because they
believe it to be beneath their dignity to know. They are fashionably ignorant.
The automobile provides a perfect example of a subject about which ignorance
is quite fashionable indeed.
It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the automobile on industrial
society. It affects everything from city planning to sex. It is economically
very important with millions of jobs at stake. Its impact on the environment
in the form of resource depletion, air and water pollution, and the production
of toxins is enormous.
Resource requirements affect international relationships. Rhodium, necessary
for the production of catalytic converters used to fight air pollution, can
only be found in commercial quantities in the Russia and South Africa. To fight
air pollution, the United States has been forced to deal with one government
or the other on a normal commercial basis. The choice of South Africa was for
years the subject of a loud political debate and an object lesson in Cold War
insanity.
One might assume that a subject of this import would demand widespread knowledge.
In fact it has, but an odd phenomenon has occurred--those most likely to make
major judgments on the future of the automobile are the ones with the least
knowledge. Government transportation officials, environmentalists, car critics,
and the like regularly make public pronouncements in which they mispronounce
basic automotive terms, confuse facts, and generally give the impression they
know absolutely nothing about the real automobiles that people drive.
More oddly, they seem genuinely pleased with their ignorance--treating it as
if it were a badge of social stature. They even claim that their ignorance
of the nuts and bolts of a subject allows them to arrive at more objective
policy decisions. Now it is a fact that automotive policy decisions can be
well formulated without knowing how a transmission operates. It is also a fact
that such people regularly make preposterous decisions because they do not
understand the subject.
Even if a person were to arrive at a policy-making group with genuine automotive
knowledge, that person would be tempted to hide this knowledge for fear of
being labeled a motorhead. In the august company where such policies are formed,
the motorhead would be found guilty of a cultural crime--knowing what only
the servants are supposed to know.
Producers know this social rule well. They have learned that scientific and
technological issues are not to be discussed in polite company. As Veblen pointed
out, the ability to do anything useful is suspect. Thorough knowledge of a
subject demonstrates ability and experience, precisely the sorts of thing "important" members
of society cannot have.
Ironically, people are not born fashionably ignorant--they pay good money to
become that way. This cost is usually involved in getting a "liberal" education.
The Danger of Preserved Predatory Traits
The greatest problems facing the industrial states do not stem from conflict,
but rather from a rough sort of cooperation. Such cooperation is not voluntary
but is rooted in the oldest of the power arrangements: predator power is cultural,
economic, military, and political while producer power stems from a mastery
over physical processes.
In spite of its seeming obsolescence, predator power is still very real. In
the United States, predator values dominate the cultural forums. There are
many reasons but one is significant. The National Security Act of 1947 put
the United States on a perpetual wartime footing--a fact which dominates economic
decisions, distorts political institutions, censors newspaper reporting, and
muddles the educational processes. The Soviet Union, the putative object of
this war, was forced by this action to choose a similar set of values which
have caused similar problems. Because of their commitment to the predatory
values of militarism, these two nations were often called superpowers. They
have also been called the "Klutzes of the North" by Gore Vidal for
their persistent problems with production.
Unwilling to challenge predator power or its values directly, producers historically
have found themselves in the unfortunate position of increasing the powers
they seek to thwart. Producers have made war more deadly with their weapons,
authoritarianism more pervasive with big-brother computers and surveillance
technologies, and demagogues more influential with television. If this were
not enough, the producer's failure to challenge the notions of wealth, monetary
policy, and usury has multiplied the predatory aspects of their own industrial
enterprise. To succeed under such assumptions, a producer is forced to violate
nature even as he is exploited. As a result, the main crises of industrialization
is the environmental crises.
The predators disavow any responsibility for their role in the industrial rape
of the planet and their response is as old as history. Return, they say, to
the Garden of Eden. Go backward to a time when the producers did not present
such ghastly problems. Roll back the social gains of the producers and the
problems they have caused will disappear.
There is no retreat from producer problems. Industrial-environmental problems
have already been created and they would not vanish even if the producers and
industrialization were to disappear overnight. There is no Garden of Eden solution.
Producers are responsible for the magnitude of our environmental problems.
Only they understand their scope. Only they can create a solution for problems
that already exist.
The implications of this reality are enormous. It means that rather than a
return to predator values that have so characterized the 1980s worldwide, producer
influence must be extended further into the cultural, economic, and political
arenas--arenas where producers traditionally have feared to tread.
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