I have been made aware of this by Skip Sievert. This is a series of videos that explain a few of the basics of the Technocracy idea, many of which I think are applicable to a Communist society. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ps5vJrIxM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icPOfVeISi8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQFpES63OPc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV88ZQxZsCQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogat7OIaMkQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUix1sMPeJU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1rveZLku9g Please keep in mind that it is very North America-centric and that class struggle is hardly considered (if at all) in orthodox Technocratic analysis.
Interesting stuff.
Classical Skip. No it is not! No it is not! No, don't change that! Antirevisionist!
Maybe, but I like the fact that he is releasing all this material into public view.
Yep, me too. Although I am quite critical of a lot of aspects of Tech.Inc.
i will link these in the ST forum also.
I'll have a look at these videos.
As will I.
It's interesting from a historical perspective (they're apparently from 1980). But I'd be really interested in seeing an updated version, especially one that accounts for the leaps in IT.
It's interesting from a historical perspective (they're apparently from 1980). But I'd be really interested in seeing an updated version, especially one that accounts for the leaps in IT. www.technocracynet.eu
How is this different from communism (apart from the unconcern with classes)? Edit: A thought has just hit me: it seems like technocracy is like 21st Century guild socialism. Am I on the right track?
How is this different from communism (apart from the unconcern with classes)? As far as I am concerned, not much (apart from the class issue). Orthodox Technocratic analysis is rather different from that of Marxists and it was influenced by the ideas of Thorstein Veblen, or so I have heard (though, to be honest, I have not read any Veblen, so I cannot confirm or deny this). There is one difference that I can think of, though it is largely theoretical. Technocracy hardly deals, at all, with the social aspect, which, I believe erroneously, has led some to regard that it is possible to have a Technate alongside the State. Additionally, the orthodox Technocratic method of organising the Technate and filling its positions (nomination from below, appointment from above, which is displayed quite often in institutions that exist today (most likely those experienced by those who first thought up Technocracy)) can hardly be decibed as non-hierarchical. To me, however, that is not too much of a problem; the people (the Technical Alliance) who came up with it were not Anarchists (though the IWW was slightly involved in the '30s) and, if I remember correctly, did not have among their number any experts on human organisation and society (assuming any such experts exist. I am very skeptical of 'Sociology' and related fields). Of the top of my head, they had some engineers, a few architects, a forestry manager, a physician, a physical chemist and so on. This would have predisposed them, I think, to focus on the technical aspects. I think that it can be very nicely incorporated into Anarchist Communism with a few changes to some parts of it to make it compatible. In that sense it would be a subset of traditional Anarchist Communism; one way (the best! ) to run a future Communist society. For that reason, I consider myself an Anarchist Communist Technocrat, or Anarchist Technocrat for short (as it fits into my member title while the longer one does not). Edit: A thought has just hit me: it seems like technocracy is like 21st Century guild socialism. Am I on the right track? I am afraid that I know very little about Guild Socialism (apart from the fact that Bertrand Russell was one). Does it involved nomination from below and appointment from above? Most of the originators of Technocracy were professionals, and that was at a time when professionals were, possibly, less proletarianised than they are now. Maybe Professional Associations of the time (which, like Guilds, are Mutual Aid Associations) were organised in such a fashion which is why they visualised organisation like that. I know shamefully little about Anarcho-Syndicalism, I admit, but it seems to me that the Technocratic idea of 'functional sequences', which I do not know if the videos went into, share a certain resemblance with syndicates. This might explain the interest there was from the IWW. Also, Technocracy started to be formed as an idea in the 1920s and as a movement in the '30s (but only in the USA and Canada to any significant extent).
