It is not the working class, but the capitalist class that undertakes the organisation of industry and the control of the market for profitmaking. This is no accusative statement. It is the claim boastfully and triumphantly made on behalf of employers and capitalists generally, by themselves and their political apologists. And surely no more discreditable admission of their personal incompetence, or the unserviceableness of their functions could be desired, than this of their cwn, that they are unable to conduct the production and exchange of the country, with even such bare efficiency as will allow of their paying the paltry wages demanded by their workers, or of their obtaining for themselves the no more than petty profits which they allege their businesses afford. What object can there be in producing commodities at all, if neither those who make them, nor those who Organise those who make them, nor those even who sell them, can get a “living wage” out of the undertaking?
And if neither the workers can get wages, nor the employers profit, to whom does the enormous sum of our industrial profits go – a sum admittedly sufficient, even with our present recklessly wasteful methods of production, to richly supply all our material needs as a nation, and of which at present the workers, some four-fifths of the nation, only obtain one-third? Who are the clever knaves, and how do they get their greedy fingers in. who contrive so successfully to deplete the workers of the reward of their labour, and the astute employers of their tender percentages? And why don’t the employers, the “captains of industry,” the “statesmen of commerce,” as they have, with prodigious flattery, been designated, seize hold of these wicked thieves and have them publicly arraigned for their crimes? Truly, if matters stand as said “captains” and “statesmen” protest upon all occasions of dispute with their workmen, they must either be imbeciles, and fit only to be confined in lunatic asylums, or themselves be the knaves, or the abettors of the knaves, in which case they should be stripped of their “captains’” uniforms, and deprived of their “statesmen’s” seals, and sent to the places which they have prepared for their less dangerous, but more unfortunate professional brethren.
And if we inquire we shall find that our worst suspicions of the capitalists are confirmed at every turn. Their everyday actions, their mode of life, their places of abode, the company which they keep, and even their antecedents, all track them down as men of evil principles and unrighteous deeds.
J Bruce Glasier, Socialism and Strikes, 1920
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“This time when people are excited about Socialism, and when many who know nothing about it think themselves Socialists, is the time of all others to put forward the simple principles of Socialism regardless of the policy of the passing hour. I say for us to make Socialists is the business at present, and at present I do not think we can have any other useful business. Those who are not really Socialists—who are Trade Unionists, disturbance-breeders, or what no—will do what they are impelled to do, and we cannot help it. At the worst there will be some good in what they do; but we need not and cannot heartily work with them, when we know that their methods are beside the right way. Our business, I repeat, is the making of Socialists, i.e. convincing people that Socialism is good for them and is possible. When we have enough people of that way of thinking, they will find out what action is necessary for putting their principles into practice. Until we have that mass of opinion, action for a general change that will benefit the whole people is impossible. Have we that body of opinion? Surely not. . .Therefore, I say, make Socialists. We Socialists can do nothing else that is useful, and preaching and teaching is not out of date for that purpose; but rather for those who, like myself, do not believe in State Socialism, it is the only rational means of attaining to the new Order of Things” (Commonweal 15th November 1890)
“Fellow Citizens, We come before you as a body advocating the principles of Revolutionary International Socialism; that is, we seek a change in the basis of Society—a change which would destroy the distinctions of classes and nationalities. As the civilised world is at present constituted, there are two classes of Society—the one possessing wealth and the instruments of production, the other producing wealth by means of those instruments but only by leave and for the use of the possessing classes. These two classes are necessarily in antagonism to one another.” (Socialist League Manifesto)
“No better solution would be that State Socialism, by whatever name it may be called, whose aim it would be to make concessions to the working class while leaving the present system of capital and wages still in operation: no number of merely administrative changes, until the workers are in possession of all political power, would make any real approach to Socialism.” (ibid)
“To the realisation of this change the Socialist League addresses itself with all earnestness. As a means thereto it will do all in its power towards the education of the people in the principles of this great cause, and will strive to organise those who will accept this education, so that when the crisis comes, which the march of events is preparing there may be a body of men ready to step into their due places and deal with and direct the irresistible movement.” (ibid)
"Our business, I repeat, is the making of Socialists, i.e., convincing people that Socialism is good for them and is possible. When we have enough people of that way of thinking, they will find out what action is necessary for putting their principles into practice. Until we have that mass of opinion, action for a general change that will benefit the whole people is impossible" ('Where Are We Now?', 1890, p. 226).
"Intelligence enough to conceive, courage enough to will, power enough to compel. If our ideas of a new Society are anything more than a dream, these three qualities must animate the due effective majority of the working people; and then, I say, the thing will be done" ('Communism', 1893, p. 229).
William Morris
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"Technology also replaces the familiar connection of parts to wholes; everything is just an exchangeable piece. For example, while a deer or a tree or a wine jug may “stand on its own” and have its own presence, an automobile does not: it is challenged “for a further conducting along, which itself sets in place the promotion of commerce.” Machines and other pieces of inventory are not parts of self-standing wholes, but arrive piece by piece. These pieces do share themselves with others in a sort of unity, but they are isolated, “shattered,” and confined to a “circuit of orderability.” The isolated pieces, moreover, are uniform and exchangeable. We can replace one piece of standing reserve with another. By contrast, “My hand ... is not a piece of me. I myself am entirely in each gesture of the hand, every single time.”
Human beings too are now exchangeable pieces. A forester “is today positioned by the lumber industry. Whether he knows it or not, he is in his own way a piece of inventory in the cellulose stock” delivered to newspapers and magazines. These in turn, as Heidegger puts it in “The Question Concerning Technology,” “set public opinion to swallowing what is printed, so that a set configuration of opinion becomes available on demand.” Similarly, radio and its employees belong to the standing reserve of the public sphere; everything in the public sphere is ordered “for anyone and everyone without distinction.” Even the radio listener, whom we are nowadays accustomed to thinking of as a free consumer of mass media — after all, he “is entirely free to turn the device on and off” — is actually still confined in the technological system of producing public opinion. “Indeed, he is only free in the sense that each time he must free himself from the coercive insistence of the public sphere that nevertheless ineluctably persists.”
But the essence of technology does not just affect things and people. It “attacks everything that is: Nature and history, humans, and divinities.” When theologians on occasion cite the beauty of atomic physics or the subtleties of quantum mechanics as evidence for the existence of God, they have, Heidegger says, placed God “into the realm of the orderable.” God becomes technologized. (Heidegger’s word for the essence of technology is Gestell. While the translator of the Bremen lectures, Andrew Mitchell, renders it as “positionality,” William Lovitt, the translator of “The Question Concerning Technology” in 1977 chose the term “enframing.” It almost goes without saying that neither term can bring out all the nuances that Heidegger has in mind.)
The heart of the matter for Heidegger is thus not in any particular machine, process, or resource, but rather in the “challenging”: the way the essence of technology operates on our understanding of all matters and on the presence of those matters themselves — the all-pervasive way we confront (and are confronted by) the technological world. Everything encountered technologically is exploited for some technical use. It is important to note, as suggested earlier, that when Heidegger speaks of technology’s essence in terms of challenging or positionality, he speaks of modern technology, and excludes traditional arts and tools that we might in some sense consider technological. For instance, the people who cross the Rhine by walking over a simple bridge might also seem to be using the bridge to challenge the river, making it a piece in an endless chain of use. But Heidegger argues that the bridge in fact allows the river to be itself, to stand within its own flow and form. By contrast, a hydroelectric plant and its dams and structures transform the river into just one more element in an energy-producing sequence. Similarly, the traditional activities of peasants do not “challenge the farmland.” Rather, they protect the crops, leaving them “to the discretion of the growing forces,” whereas “agriculture is now a mechanized food industry.”
Modern machines are therefore not merely more developed, or self-propelled, versions of old tools such as water or spinning wheels. Technology’s essence “has already from the outset abolished all those places where the spinning wheel and water mill previously stood.” Heidegger is not concerned with the elusive question of precisely dating the origin of modern technology, a question that some think important in order to understand it. But he does claim that well before the rise of industrial mechanization in the eighteenth century, technology’s essence was already in place. “It first of all lit up the region within which the invention of something like power-producing machines could at all be sought out and attempted.” We cannot capture the essence of technology by describing the makeup of a machine, for “every construction of every machine already moves within the essential space of technology.”
Even if the essence of technology does not originate in the rise of mechanization, can we at least show how it follows from the way we apprehend nature? After all, Heidegger says, the essence of technology “begins its reign” when modern natural science is born in the early seventeenth century. But in fact we cannot show this because in Heidegger’s view the relationship between science and technology is the reverse of how we usually think it to be; natural forces and materials belong to technology, rather than the other way around. It was technological thinking that first understood nature in such a way that nature could be challenged to unlock its forces and energy. The challenge preceded the unlocking; the essence of technology is thus prior to natural science. “Modern technology is not applied natural science, far more is modern natural science the application of the essence of technology.” Nature is therefore “the fundamental piece of inventory of the technological standing reserve — and nothing else.”
Given this view of technology, it follows that any scientific account obscures the essential being of many things, including their nearness. So when Heidegger discusses technology and nearness, he assures us that he is not simply repeating the cliché that technology makes the world smaller. “What is decisive,” he writes, “is not that the distances are diminishing with the help of technology, but rather that nearness remains outstanding.” In order to experience nearness, we must encounter things in their truth. And no matter how much we believe that science will let us “encounter the actual in its actuality,” science only offers us representations of things. It “only ever encounters that which its manner of representation has previously admitted as a possible object for itself.”
An example from the second lecture illustrates what Heidegger means. Scientifically speaking, the distance between a house and the tree in front of it can be measured neutrally: it is thirty feet. But in our everyday lives, that distance is not as neutral, not as abstract. Instead, the distance is an aspect of our concern with the tree and the house: the experience of walking, of seeing the tree’s shape grow larger as I come closer, and of the growing separation from the home as I walk away from it. In the scientific account, “distance appears to be first achieved in an opposition” between viewer and object. By becoming indifferent to things as they concern us, by representing both the distance and the object as simple but useful mathematical entities or philosophical ideas, we lose our truest experience of nearness and distance."
Mark Blitz: Understanding Heidegger on Technology
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