A response to Andy Pollack's "Information Technology and Socialist Self Management." - Monthly Review, vol. 49, 1997

Monthly Review, March, 1998 by David Bellin, Jeremy Raw

Andy Pollack (MR, Vol. 49, No. 4, 1997) summarized his perspective on technology by saying that "the implementation of IT (information technology), its full use, and the purposes for which it is used, thus bring us back to the question of power, and which social groups wield it. The U.S. left has done far too little during this century to explain how the massive organizational and technical apparatus of existing society could be used in a different way."

While we are in sympathy with his first point regarding the importance of questions of power, to suggest that computers and technology simply need to be used "in a different way" is misleading. If anything, the problem with technology, is not a failure to attain its "full use," but rather its overuse in stultifying and alienating corporate environments. Rather than dream up new tasks for existing technology, we need to set people free to re-evaluate technology from top to bottom, becoming, in the process, its masters rather than its slaves.

Pollack seems to have quite a different agenda, one which displays an alarming degree of technological determinism, and a weakness for the language of marketing brochures touting the latest developments in networking and processing power:

Now the technical basis for the process of managing (goods and services) has taken huge leaps forward.... Computer innovations could put to rest skepticism about purely technical barriers to democratic planning.... Were there to be a revolution in any country in the world tomorrow, the Internet would put to rest the claims about the unfeasibility of a socialist economy.... Such computers could solve any of the distributional bottlenecks said to make socialist planning impossible.... Microsoft sells an array of programs sufficient to perform most of the computing tasks that would be necessary for grassroots economic decision-making.

For our part, we do not want to reappropriate Microsoft's marketing hyde, we want to dismantle it, see though it, and then combat it as we set our own working-class-oriented priorities. Pollack's article reminded us of the views once popular in the Soviet Union, which called for adopting the "best" of capitalist technology and management techniques, such as Taylorism. Worse, even though Pollack pays lip service to a broader realignment of power, suggesting that "IT" is "a tool for administering power, not a way of seizing it," he continues to be driven by a primitive view of the socialist relationship to technology, under which data entry operators rather than capitalist managers decide what to put into the computers, and socialist accounting is merely capitalist accounting with a different payee on the bottom line.

Consider this sentence, which would never pass muster on any topic other then technology: "Supercomputers long ago reached a level sufficient to run the millions of simultaneous equations that would have to be solved to plan a modern socialist economy." We might as well observe that "the productive capacity of the steel industry long ago reached a level sufficient to meet the needs of a modern socialist economy." Yet the problem is not that we need to solve so many equations. It is that we continue even to conceive of the socialist project in such terms.

Pollack's central claim is that "IT developed for internal company use could be used in a self-managed society by workers." This is about as significant as saying that the workers in a Toyota plant will be able to use the robotic paint sprayer after the revolution. Sure they can. But so what? Should we seek to take over the current means of production, or should we change them? Is it enough to get our hands on the steering wheel, or should we question the need for cars? It seems to escape Pollack's world view that we might have excellent reason not to use today's corporate information technology in a "self-managed society" (his words; we would prefer to have "workers' self-rule"). We might actually want to manage production through collective decision-making based on actual human interactions. In fact, we might even want to destroy "IT developed for internal company use," and replace it with other mediated forms developed through the struggle to transform the workplace itself. To claim that we will simply turn the capitalists' tools to our own benefit, with little change, is a dangerously simplistic view.

Pollack's misinterpretation of Deep Blue, the chess computer, is singularly revealing in this regard: "[T] his machine, like others of its ilk, is normally used to predict the behavior of complex systems such as weather changes, ecological shifts and other systems that are more complex than any economy." Though Deep Blue is in some ways a "massively parallel" machine, it is not technically a supercomputer. Furthermore, it is actually highly specialized, not only in software but at the deepest level of hardware, to the singular task of playing chess. Thus, the offhand "others of its ilk" belies the actual essence of technology under capitalism: its adaptation to precise tasks in a very narrow and specific social context. We should worry less about how to reuse such machines, and more about the significance of the social priorities they reveal - for example, building a machine to play a game better than people, or even accepting that "modeling" is the best approach to certain "complex systems" at all.