Technocracy Is Not Socialism Or Communism

The implication contained in all these warnings to stay indoors during the heatwave was plain: we the people are so stupid that we cannot be trusted to stay safe when the sun comes out. Again, it is the same message of democratic incapacity, the same insistence that human beings are so stupid that democracy can never work – the same case for an elite appropriation of politics. Politics, the profoundly human science of the human good, is to be taken out of the hands of human beings and vested in the hands of a knowledge elite. How strange to see conservatives criticise these developments as ‘socialist’ and ‘communist.’ To the contrary, this war on the commons is the culmination of capital’s great disembedding, separating human beings from the land, from their means of living, from others, from God and nature, and ultimately from themselves. As Terry Eagleton wrote in After Theory (2004), no social system has been more transgressive of the natural and moral order than capitalism, a fact that ought now to be obvious:

No way of life in history has been more in love with transgression and transformation, more enamoured of the hybrid and pluralistic, than capitalism. In its ruthlessly instrumental logic, it has no time for the idea of nature – for that whose whole existence consists simply in fulfilling and unfolding itself, purely for its own sake and without any thought of a goal.

We are on the receiving end of this transgression and transformation on a global scale. To condemn it as ‘globalism’ is profoundly inadequate, seeing only the surface and missing entire the specific drivers and dynamics. If you don’t properly identify the nature of a problem then you will never be able to resolve it.

It is easy to understand why conservative critics would equate Globalism and Technocracy with Socialism and Communism. There are some superficial features shared in common. Marx saw socialism as emerging from the capital system’s globalising and socialising tendencies. Marx identified the capital system as the universal mode of production, giving birth to a universal proletariat in charge of universal means of production. It’s a simple enough thesis that now appears to be falsified by the internal divisions of the working class. But Marx here built upon another objective development of the capital system, the concentration and centralisation of capital as an unsocial socialisation. Marx sought to socialise this development on a global basis to deliver socialism. Although superficially similar, technocracy and socialism are entirely contrary, marking the difference between bureaucratisation and democratisation, collectivism and communitarianism. They are the deadliest of enemies: the victory of the one is the destruction of the other.

For too long now, technocracy has prevailed over socialism, in the same way that members of the knowledge class have supplanted and subordinated the working class. Many who see themselves as socialists in the vanguard tradition persist in aligning with ‘progressives’ advancing the interests of ‘ordinary’ people, failing to see that they are betraying socialism to a bureaucratic collectivism. Socialism is collectivist and autocratic only in its Stalinist incarnation, a bureaucratic collectivism which subordinates its subjects to external regulation and diktat. In a Technocracy, Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat is replaced by the dictatorship of the officials. Max Weber dismissed Marx’s vision of socialism as a ‘pathetic prophecy.’ He felt that the socialist utopia would take the form of a dystopian Scientific Dictatorship which would imprison all for a long time to come. He described socialism as a ‘housing for the new serfdom.’

Historically and intellectually, Technocracy is allied with Scientism, the bad metaphysics of the modern age. Its origins lie in the work of Henri de Saint Simon, not Marx. Technocracy and Communism have different roots, different aims, and different outcomes. Politically, Technocrats and Communists have been rivals with contempt for one another. State socialists, however, in both the reformist and revolutionary traditions, have been more than happy to advance a technocratic politics over the heads of the people, on the assumption that their knowledge of objective class position gives them insight into the true interests of the people. Treating the working class as an objective ‘it’ rather than a revolutionary subject enables knowledgeable elites to plan and act on their behalf, regardless of the wishes and demands of actual proletarians. The same mentality can be observed in the prescriptions of the global technocrats as they plan the transition out of the extractive economy – the working class may protest, but ‘it’s all for their own good.’

In Zbigniew Brzezinski teamed up with David Rockefeller to found the elitist Trilateral Commission. He argued that Marxism was a necessary stepping-stone to the final age, the Technetronic Era. In this analysis, the Communists were the useful idiots easing the path to Technocracy, to be cast aside once a full-blown Technocracy emerges. I made the suggestion to a Green ‘friend’ that green activists may well be the useful idiots of those with plans to extend and entrench the corporate form, asking who has the power and resources to push technology to the scale required by ambitious climate programmes. He unfriended and blocked me without a word. Make of that what you will. I am left wondering whether he is one of the useful idiots and my words had struck a raw nerve. People who seek to silence and suppress the doubts of others are usually seeking to silence and suppress their own doubts. That he is a prominent organiser and coordinator made me think something much more sinister – he is working for the technocracy and cultivating a green mass of useful idiots and I had blown his cover. It has happened a few times now.

The trappings of Communism (or socialism) may entice radicals demanding ‘system change’ in. But close analysis quickly reveals that there is no system-change involved in technocratic designs, no restructuring of power relations, no uprooting of the accumulative capital logic, and no supplanting of social forms. The result may be an anti-politics that is collectivist and autocratic, but conservatives who persist in frightening themselves and others with the ‘boo’ words of socialism and Communism are not merely wrong, they are playing into the hands of the Technocrats. You can never solve a problem if you misidentify it in the first place. The conservatives are merely helping the Technocrats in eliminating socialism, they are doing nothing to check technocratic tendencies and will be picked off themselves. On current trajectories we are on course for a society managed ‘rationally’ by scientists and engineers employing the ‘science’ of social engineering and behaviourism, the very antithesis of democracy. Cold, calculating, collectivist, autocratic and decidedly not socialist and democratic. It is no surprise to see this technocratic vision crawling all over environmentalism.

It is the warp and woof of environmentalism. You can see it plainly stated in the works of The Club of Rome, explicit demands that the governments of the world hand over the keys of the economy to a panel of ‘expert’ (scientists, engineers, people like them). Technocracy has been the historical rival to socialism since Saint Simon. You can see it in the work of economist Thorstein Veblen, who argued for the revolt of the engineers, dismissing the working class as mere tools without knowledge and skill. The Technocratic vision was spoon-fed to the United Nations by Gro Harlem Brundtland, a member of the Trilateral Commission, in his book Our Common Future (1987). Entire libraries could be filled with books such as this, with the same message repeated over again, the rational restraint and regulation instituted from above by the knowledge class, the new ‘universal class’ of techno-bureaucratic managerialists. For a long, long time I criticised the absence of a critique of political economy, I criticised the democratic deficit at the heart of the proposals, the democratic pessimism in fact. I had thought to persuade Greens that they were missing a political and ethical dimension, only to be met with indifference. I see plainly that they had been missing nothing – they are technocrats, members of the knowledge class who think they know better, aligned with global bureaucratic, unelected bodies accountable to no one. No wonder they love the EU, it is their vision of a global environmental planning agency.

It is the very antithesis of the ecological society. The UN has stated on numerous occasions now its intentions to replace the Free Enterprise system with Sustainable Development. Conservatives brought up to consider socialism and communism as the only alternatives to capitalism condemn this as socialist and communist. They therefore miss their targets, leaving the technocrats free to carry on their work of subversion. The deceit takes in leftist politicians and activists, of course, such as Ocasio-Cortez with her Green New Deal. I wrote an article at the time which argued that the New Deal isn’t socialist at all, neither in its origins, intent, or current formulations. Going back to Keynes, the purpose of new deal economics is to save capitalism from socialism not supplant it with socialism. In its new formulation, the new deal entails a Green Technocracy and Sustainable Development. But we live in an age when socialists don’t seem to have the first idea what socialism is, for the reason they have no organic roots with the working class and working class communities. If you don’t learn from history you are condemned to repeat it. With respect to technocracy, it is crucial to obtain an accurate diagnosis of the problem so that we can identify the enemy we are really fighting – and that is Technocracy.

We have been living through a crisis with transformative potential for at least half a century now. The crises we face are not mere accidents to be remedied by piecemeal reforms but indicate something badly wrong in the structures of the system itself, requiring a fundamental reformation. This revolutionary moment is being canalised into sterile channels on account of the failure to define precisely the nature of the problem and the protagonists. Technocracy is the dread enemy of socialism and is currently occupying the radical terrain, diverting the revolutionary moment so as to detail it.

Conservatives keep warning of socialism/communism. They should be so lucky. The fact is that this anti-politics is being driven by technocrats and the technocratic mentality has sunk so deeply into the ‘progressive’ mind that people demanding system-change can’t see that they are being deflected and diverted. When you ask political and moral questions, questions of democratic norms and consent, only to be met with non-negotiable, unquestionable ‘climate facts and figures,’ you should know that you are in the presence of technocrats.

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