POLICIES Workers and technology

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Technology represents the accumulated experience of humanity's struggle to achieve mastery over nature.

It is the knowledge of how to apply the tools with which human labour can transform nature into useful objects to meet our needs and desires.

But technology does not exist independently of history, and its value can only be assessed by analysing the part that it plays in social life.

The growth of capitalism was completely bound up with the enormous technological advances of the Industrial Revolution.

By using new machinery and new processes, the rising class of industrial employers was able to produce goods on a scale barely dreamed of before.

Dominance

It was the developments in physical science and engineering which gave them the basis to introduce factory production, and gain complete dominance over the market.

But to gain this position, the capitalists needed to employ human labour.

They did so with a vengeance. In return for virtually ceaseless work in terrible conditions, workers received wages that were scarcely enough to keep them alive in the slums of the industrial towns.

In reacting against this situation, which destroyed their precarious stability as artisans or smallholders in the former society, some groups began campaigns of machine-breaking.

Reactionary

But despite the strengths of this militancy, such a response was in essence reactionary.

What the Luddites did not see was that the machines, which today were the instruments of oppression, could in the future be transformed into the tools of liberation.

Capitalism had plunged millions into an abyss of human misery and degradation.

Progressive But at the same time it had developed the productive forces of mankind to an extent that no other economic system could have achieved at that stage.

For all its barbarities, capitalism overall played progressive historical role in this early phase.

But capitalists did not, and do not enter into production from humanist motives. Their aim is profit.

Commodities are produced within capitalism not primarily because they can satisfy human needs, but because they can be sold to realise profits for individual capitalists.

Such a system of production could not continue to utilise technological advances in a way that benefitted humanity as a whole.

Major obstacle

It was even forced to distort more and more the real gains which had already been made.

Inevitably, capitalism passed over from a progressive phase into its present role as the major obstacle to the further development of the productive forces.

The anarchy and perpetual conflicts within a system grounded in competition for markets and profits lead directly to economic crises of crippling severity.

In the epoch of imperialist decay, these same contradictions create trade wars and thrust the whole of humanity into global warfare.

Capitalism can offer the world no prospect but that of barbarism in every area of social life.

Yet even in this period, bourgeois class rule still permits certain advances in technology to be employed.

As the pressures to gain markets intensify, capitalists frantically seek for ways to produce their commodities more cheaply.

More sophisticated machinery, computerisation, the use of transistors or advanced circuitry or other methods may give them the opportunity to undercut their rivals and win control of the markets.

issues But these developments cannot be detached from the reality of history, and viewed in idealistic terms as purely 'progressive' They take place within class society, and in the context of the class struggle they inevitably become class issues.

Such techniques are introduced only when they further the interests of the individual capitalists concerned.

This is shown clearly enough by the actions of companies in suppressing and sabotaging certain new discoveries.

Where their sole aim is to prevent other concerns from undermining their own trading position, they will regularly buy up rights from inventors--and then not even utilise them for themselves!

Unemployment.

But these grotesque episodes are only one aspect of the situation.

Where new technology is introduced, it does not come alone but is attended by parallel developments.

Employers gladly seize the chance of such upheavals to force through speed-up in disguised forms, and generally worsen working conditions to their own advantage.

But above all such changes herald unemployment.

Machinery with higher capacity for output is not now installed so as to provide the commodities for new and expanding markets.

The capitalist's markets are saturated, and even contrailing as the crisis grips siill narder.

Cheaper production The:: ?1T0.752 Rabbit If the plant is more efficient, but output remains stable, then of course less workers are needed for production. Such a shift makes economic sense only if the employer can reduce the workforce.

Where. a quick killing on the market is necessary before competitors follow suit, then employers can will 'shed labour' by declaring immediate redundancies.

Work sharing

Where the advantages are to be gained in the longer term, then they can take the softer option and argue for that favourite ploy of union bureaucrats, 'natural wastage' This is simply a bourgeois cuphemism for the long-term destruction of jobs.

Our answer to hoth these atalks is clear and unequit300030 0: 22# vureces cur improve ine uge of all in the future.

If it is to mean that fewer must be established under the control of elected workers' committees.

This is not a demand to be confined to one factory. It is the general demand with which unemployed and employed workers must unite to combat all unemployment.

Where management refuse to concede this demand their pleas and protestations must be met with the demand that they open all their accounts and prove their inability to pay.

'Bankruptcy'

Whether their claims that 'bankruptcy' threatens them are genuine or not, we fight alongside these demands for the private poet: :::he= Industrial Revolution.

But to employ these gains to its profit, it was forced to employ wage labour, and so created in the proletariat the class which would bring about the downfall of bourgeois rule.

Workers have no interest in perpetuating capitalism.

Socialism alone can satisfy their demands by developing the productive forces to the stage where universal scarcity and want can be abolished.

Historic role

In that development, the technological advances made through history will be fully employed within a planned economy to benefit humanity as a whole.

As the necessary goods are produced to meet international needs, then further innovations will release workers from these labours to develop their full human potential in every area of life.

Technology will then begin to fulfil its historic role, which is not to enslave men and women but to liberate them.

From the shopfloor or the dole queue such a prospect may seem a utopian mirage.

But the struggle for socialist revolution can be advanced even from today's conditions and . today's struggles for lesser demands.

By mobilising workers as a class with its own independent interests, the fight against the attacks made with new technology by the bourgeoisie is an integral and vital part of that battle, and the Trotskyist programme of transitional demands the key weapon to place in the hands

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hours of work are available, then work sharing on full pay