TECHNOLOGY/GEMEINSCHAFT?

SPATIALIST TECHNICAL INNOVATION AS WEAPONIZING OF THE NATURALISTIC FALLACY

As promised, when I’m putting together new arguments in the process of writing the book (the first draft of which is damn near done!), I’m sharing them here. This is a topic that I’d originally hoped to explore in much more depth than I’ve had the opportunity to do. I still intend to get more into it. I may even add more material before the book’s final draft is ready to go. But for now, unsure about such prospects, I didn’t want to exclude it entirely. So, in the book, I’ve offered it as a kind of first pass, to perhaps stimulate further thought and exploration among those who share the interests explored on this substack. And likewise, I offer it here in the same spirit. Links are included for newer readers to help decipher the somewhat specialist nomenclature developed on this substack over the last couple years.

Nisbet has already introduced us to Kropotkin’s seminal book, Fields, Factories and Workshops. In that context, we were introduced to the idea of the industrial village; that it is neither inevitable nor especially desirable that industrial production should be concentrated in factories crammed into polluted cities, culturally and economically insulated from the patterns and associations of village life. In fact, though, Kropotkin’s book begins making a slightly different – though of course ultimately related – point. He emphasizes the apparent tendency of technological automation toward decentralization.

Kropotkin quotes from 18^th and 19^th century economists who gush over the beautiful symmetry of global trade based upon comparative advantage and national divisions of labor. The agricultural countries produce the food for the workers in the industrial countries, who then produce the industrial goods for everyone. Kropotkin does question whether this poetic symmetry is equally beneficial for all involved, but he’s ultimately focused on a different point. By the 1912 edition (orig. 1899), he is citing great reams of data which point to the same phenomenon: the decentralization of production. As more and more countries – even those such as India, which would have been presumed the hardcore case for globalist specialization – increasingly develop, they increasingly establish their own industrial capacities, relying less upon the presumed elegance of the global system. (Amusingly, Kropotkin speculates on what will be the effect when the day finally comes that China liberates its own industrial capacity.)

Kropotkin sees this decentralization of industry as a more generalizable tendency.¹ In his words: “Each nation—her own agriculturist and manufacturer; each individual working in the field and in some industrial art; each individual combining scientific knowledge with the knowledge of a handicraft—such is, we affirm, the present tendency of civilised nations.” It is this same clear tendency to decentralization globally, between nations, that Kropotkin anticipates within nations, removing industrial production from dirty, congested industrial cities. This more localized decentralization would reduce the strain on cities, increase the autonomy and productivity of villages, and improve the quality of life for the individuals in those villages, who will now enjoy a much more rounded, fuller life.²

I know to some readers this is all going to sound like Arcadian, if not utopian, nonsense. So, before evaluating Kropotkin’s arguments, let’s look at more recent historical research, the analytical focus of which has gone under the title of “flexible specialization.”

Under the hegemony of the spatialist managerial class, we’re all inclined to accept the story of industrial progress as a universal and purely rational imperative. We are to believe that we have the technology which we have because it expresses some technical inevitability intrinsic to the technology. As usual, though, this is just the deceit of the managerial class, which is always busy operationalizing the naturalistic fallacy. I’ve explored this topic in greater length than can be justified here in a review of Russell Reno’s 2018 book, Return of the Strong Gods. But here are some of key points I made there.

The naturalistic fallacy is the mistake of thinking that a naturalistic description of what is, in some way constitutes a prescription for what should be. Another expression of similar sentiment is David Hume’s is/ought problem: just because something is true, doesn’t mean it ought to be so. The essential distinction here is between empirical description and human values. From an evolutionary biology perspective, it’s understandable why some people would commit murder. Removing a rival could improve the murderer’s fitness through better access to resources, possibly status, or a more desirable mate. Evolutionary pressures select for those traits – physical or psychological – that improve fitness (as discussed on many other posts to this substack: for instance here and here). If a psychological disposition to commit murder, under the right conditions, serves fitness in that way, it will be selected as a fitness enhancing psychological trait in future generations.

This of course does not happen in isolation. Other, pro-social, traits are also selected for, and serve to mitigate the resort to murder as fitness enhancement.³ That doesn’t change the fact though that a willingness to resort to murder, given the right conditions, is an evolutionary adaptation. Again, though, what one thinks about this; whether murder is good or bad; when (e.g., patriotic war, self-defense, restoring family honor?) murder is good or bad, is a matter of values.

So, what we have is merely a description of what is. Acknowledging what is though, in no way constitutes an endorsement of the action at either a personal or social level. One can believe that no one should ever murder anyone, while still understanding that murder is a fitness enhancing trait selected for by evolutionary pressures. (And, therefore, is going to happen.⁴ )

However, the technocrats of the managerial class always aspire to disguise their own interests in the shroud of mere technical necessity.⁵ They purposefully (deliberately?) engage in the naturalistic fallacy; they act as if an accurate scientific description constitutes a value judgment. Managerial class ideology is largely grounded in a moralized weaponization of the naturalistic fallacy. Rather than being regarded as a methodological warning, the managerial class treats the naturalistic fallacy as a political validation.

During the COVID affair, this ploy was front and center with the constant incantations to “follow the science.” Somehow, science was supposed to dictate policy decisions. But of course, whatever benefit scientific knowledge provides toward informing the choice, policy making is always about values. Science might inform us about the means to achieve a policy end, or the potential consequences of a policy choice. The policy though is always based upon the values that are being politically privileged by the choice.

This shrouded fact of values-based choice disguised as technical necessity has always lurked within the claims about the rational and universal march of technological progress: in a very specific direction; always emphasizing and facilitating centralization of control and bureaucratization of administration. However, a group of historians, largely circulating around Charles Sabel, have emphasized the constant historical opportunities in technological development and deployment for forms of flexible specialization.

In a groundbreaking 1985 essay, Sabel and co-author Jonathan Zeitlin explored the alternative paths of technological development that were explored and often developed, depending upon the mitigating circumstances.⁶ They clarified in that essay what was at stake in their research, referring to the ongoing historians' debates about the breakthrough to mass-production capitalism in western Europe:

Was [that breakthrough] the result of the discovery, under favourable historical circumstances, of the only form of mechanization then realizable? If so, then there is an historical warrant to think that now, as then, the shape of industrial society will be substantially determined by an immanent logic of technological change. Or was the breakthrough to mass production the result of some implicit collective choice, arrived at in the obscurity of uncountable small conflicts, to favour this form of mechanization over other, technologically viable ones? In that case, social struggles, not the technologies themselves, will decide the questions of future industrial organization; and the buried machine economies of the past could provide valuable clues as to what might be possible under various conditions today.

Given my set up of this topic, readers will not be surprised to find out that the conclusions of their research leaned in the latter direction. They argue that the basic technological capacities enabled by technical innovation were always susceptible to being operationalized in ways that enhanced greater reliance upon the use of highly skilled labor.⁷ The choice to develop these techniques into fully, socially fleshed out technologies which had the reverse effect – reducing manufacturing’s reliance upon (relatively) autonomous labor – was one driven by concerns for managerial control, rather than out of rational, technical necessity. After examining the histories of several industries, including metalworks, silk, and munitions manufacturing, they conclude toward the end of their lengthy paper:

…the recent historiography of technology provides clear supporting documentation of the existence of a vision, utopian in the light of actually prevailing circumstances, of automatic machine production as a structuring principle of Anglo-American and particularly United States technological development. From the early nineteenth century on the enthusiasts of mass production seized on the introduction of one piece of equipment or organizational technique after another as a sign that skill, broadly defined as the active participation of labour in controlling the flow of production, would soon be superfluous in the factory. Like the ideas of the French engineers, this vision helped change the course of events precisely by declaring one future inevitable. The self-acting mule, the slide-rest lathe, the scientific management methods of Frederick W. Taylor, and numerically controlled machine tools - in case after case observers overestimated the extent to which innovation permitted automation and routinization of production and underestimated the extent new machines were used to increase the productive powers of skill rather than to eliminate it.

Later, Sabel and Zeitlin edited a 1997 collection of seminar papers by themselves and ten other historians on a diverse range of technological contexts, that more deeply explored and revealed the workings of these dynamics.⁸ The further industries studied in this collection included cutlery, calico-printing, watch making, textile manufacturing, combs and plastics, as well as wider examinations of the engineering and maritime industries. The following passages, from their introductory essay, summarize the core insights from this group of technology historians:

The central theme of this book is that the experience of fragility and mutability which seemed so novel and disorienting today has been, in fact, the definitive experience of the economic actors in many sectors, countries and epochs in the history of industrial capitalism. Precisely because they have been aware of the complex dependence of every form of economic organization on multiple and shifting background conditions, they have constantly experimented with institutional designs that until recently would have been judged economic solecisms.

…where many observers in the post-war period saw the economy as steadily increasing in efficiency through the ever more specialized use of resources, and therefore paying an acceptable price in increased rigidity for previously unimaginable increases in well-being, throughout most of the history of industrial capitalism, and again today, the economic actors have tried with considerable success to increase efficiency without jeopardizing and indeed sometimes even increasing flexibility.

…most firms in nineteenth – and early twentieth – century Europe and the United States, neither mired in tradition nor blinded by the prospect of a radiant future, carefully weighed the choices between mass production and what we would now call flexible specialization. Where possible, they developed sophisticated hedges for reducing their risks by avoiding a definitive choice in favor of either alternative.

The seminar's findings both in their substance and the form in which they are presented redouble our rejection of the standard distinction between actors and context and corroborate instead the alternative view of agency as the strategic, simultaneous constitution of actors and contexts. Firstly and most directly, both in large firms and industrial districts of small ones, the actors were astonishingly well aware of the choices they faced.

The upshot of all this, from the perspective of assessing the – allegedly, not only Arcadian, but utopian – ideas of Kropotkin’s industrial village is that it would be an historical error to presume that such a model is inherently impossible simply based on treating the present delineation of industrial resources, in their deskilling, centralized bureaucratic rationality as the universally inevitable outcome of the very logic of technical innovation. Such an error would shortchange the past and pillage the future.

There is no doubt much to be hashed out in the history, sociology, and industrial theory related to these topics. At this point, I leave it for readers to follow up on the sources provided here to come to their own conclusions. Clearly though the preponderance of the evidence from this group of historians is that the developmental directions of technical operationalization has been driven by social, economic, and political considerations. Not some intrinsic centralist or bureaucratic nature of the fundamental technical innovations.

If that is in fact true, Kropotkin’s ambitious visions for the industrial village cannot be dismissed out of hand simply because they are inconsistent with spatialist axioms about the inevitably progressive, universalist, and rationalist direction of technology. Such visions then become empirical questions which can be evaluated only by sifting out the self-interested choices surreptitiously smuggled into practical operationalization of technical innovation by a managerial class, motivated by its own pursuit of power and control.

Considering that technical operationalization which would facilitate the realization of Kropotkin’s industrial village could be a great boon to the maintenance of gemeinschaft (see here and here), it is hardly surprising that spatialists, like the managerial class, consistent with the long-term agenda of the French Enlightenment, enacted through the French Revolution, and the left generally, would be hostile to such operationalization. Their historic objective, as we’ve frequently seen (e.g., here, here, and here), is the eradication of obstacles – such as strong gemeinschaft relations and practices: organic communities, concrete institutions, tradition, custom, etc. – to their projects of commercial, cultural, administrative, and military expansion.

So, if Sabel and his colleagues are correct that there have always been available technical alternatives in the social and organizational development of technology, which were decentralizing, skill enhancing, and flexible, it is indeed only an empirical question whether such alternatives could be put into operation in ways which enabled Kropotkin’s industrial village, resuscitating the prospects for a renewal of gemeinschaft. Assuming otherwise based on the given world is to merely acquiesce to spatialist hegemony. Again, I leave it for the reader to explore these alternatives and their opportunities further.

This is where you’ll get the latest updates on the new book (aside of occasional posts to that thing Elon called…X? What?). So to keep your fingers on the pulse of this exciting distillation of the ideas explored on this substack over the last couple years, if you haven’t already, please…

And, if you know anyone else who’d enjoy following what we do here, please…

1. One could fairly point out that now, a century later, we find ourselves again in a situation where the globalized world production order is organized around alleged comparative advantage and national division of labor. From this perspective, it is valid to criticize any suggestion, as seemed to be Kropotkin’s assumption, that ultimately decentralization was inherent in the technology. Rather, as will be addressed later in the discussion, choices about how technology is operationalized are not dictated by some intrinsic logic of technique, but rather are self-interested, often so self-consciously self-serving as to be legitimately characterized as political.

2. For those interested, another, more contemporary anarchist, following very much in Kropotkin’s footsteps, who sought to bring these arguments more up to later 20^th century standards, was Murray Bookchin: Murray Bookchin, Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship, 1st edition (Montreal Que.: Black Rose Books, 1996); Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, 3rd ed. edition (Edinburgh ; Oakland, Ca: AK Press, 2004); Murray Bookchin, Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal Que.: Black Rose Books, 1980); Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society: A New Ecological Politics (Chico: AK Press, 2023).

3. I flesh these ideas out further in others books: Michael McConkey, Darwinian Liberalism (Vancouver, B.C.: Biological Realist Publications, 2018); Michael McConkey, Biological Realism: Foundations and Applications (Vancouver, B.C.: Biological Realist Publications, 2020).

4. There is a fascinating question of how maybe we should be rethinking our concept of criminal justice and incarceration in light of understanding this distinction. Addressing that topic would take this discussion too far afield, but for those interested some ideas about this might be found here: Eugenics and the Law, Today: Reaction Norm 9, 2019,

5. Such self-invisibility is in fact central to the class’s modus operandi: Michael McConkey, The Managerial Class on Trial (Vancouver, B.C.: Biological Realist Publications, 2021).

6. Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, “Historical Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Industrialization,” Past & Present, no. 108 (1985): 133–76.

7. Interestingly, the very first modest, scholarly paper that I ever got published made precisely this argument (and right about the same time!): Mike McConkey, “Technologies and techniques: A defense of an analytical distinction,” The Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 12, no. 1–2 (1988): 248–51.

8. Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, eds., World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Also of interest, along these lines, is Ash Amin, ed., Post-Fordism: A Reader, 1st edition (Oxford ; Cambridge, Mass: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995). It contains a good introductory essay to the then current state of flexible specialization scholarship authored by Sabel.