Surrender certain liberties for the duration of the war
Thu 8:16 pm +00:00, 6 Jun 2024“Total Conscription”
This slogan was seized upon by the technocrats as perfectly suited to their needs. The bare slogan of total conscription is a catch-all into which quite different contents can be poured. It can be given the democratic content of a real equality of sacrifice through the expropriation of the capitalists’ wealth to bear the war burden; or it can have the totalitarian meaning of a complete regimentation of society, and of labor in the first place.
Which of these two it means to technocracy should be clear enough from the foregoing. But the popular acceptation of the slogan expressed a deep desire of the people with which the technocrats attempt to conjure.
The technocrats’ proposal has three planks:
- Conscription of all men and women, 18 to 65, with all workers placed under a militarily-organized “technological command” coordinate with the Army and Navy.
- “National direction” of all industrial and commercial facilities.
- Suspension of all corporate and “ordinary” commercial operations, including the suspension of dividends, profits, taxes, etc.
Point 1 is clear enough. It has teeth in it. What does technocracy’s touted “conscription of business and wealth” add up to, according to its own explanation in its pamphlet, Total Conscription – Your Questions Answered.
To begin with, an obeisance is made in the direction of … “free enterprise”! This from the cynical Mr. Scott is only another indication of the new leaf they have turned over, and it is not the only similarity we shall find with the National Association of Manufacturers. “Free enterprise,” they write, is “motivated by the highest patriotism” – sure enough, but the trouble with it is that it just isn’t the most effective way to carry on the war. Conscription is necessary.
And what is this “conscription of industry” they propose? Is it nationalization of the war industries?
Not at all. The term “conscription” appears in sloganized statements, but it is explained to mean merely the “freezing” of corporate facilities for the duration of the war, and the “national direction” of them during that period. The private capitalists retain ownership. Six months after the war, all “conscripted” wealth reverts back to the pre-war status. No one’s monetary wealth – in the form of bank deposits, for example – may be touched or used by the government; it too is “frozen,” not taken over.
The government then is taking over “control” only of the industrial facilities – the factories, shipyards, mines, etc. Who will run them! The technocrats answer: they will continue to be run, “not under a political bureaucrat, but under the operating heads of the industry itself.”
The “conscripted” industries, then, are still owned by their capitalist masters, and are still run and operated by them – under a government coordinator. What the technocrats are proposing, even if we believe what they say, is the same fake nationalization which the government announced over the mines and plants closed by strikes. It is the same set-up which the Wilson government in World War I introduced in the railroad industry. This was nothing more than an attempt to save the capitalist system from the worst effects of its anarchy and planlessness and to nurse it through its war crisis in order to insure its continued existence after the “emergency,” with the incidental result of handing back to private exploiters a greatly strengthened and improved railroad industry.
Would it be “different” under technocracy’s proposal? Not possibly, since part of technocracy’s proposal is that all this is proposed for action by the present dollar-a-year-man government of Franklin D. Roosevelt, “the Commander-in-Chief” (page 6). This requirement is made pan of the plan, write the technocrats, who have poured out reams of words in scorn and vituperation of the Roosevelt regime, in order “to preserve national unity and stability.”
Does Howard Scott really believe that through pressure or otherwise the Washington agency of big business, including its stooge Congress, will “conscript business and wealth” in any way as to eliminate the enrichment of the class in whose interests this war is being fought? Perish the thought. Scott has not become so soft-headed as a result of his Pearl Harbor flip-flop. The demagoguery of the entire plan and its slogan is only underlined.
Threatening Words
The technocratic program is vehement enough in its protestations that it does not propose the elimination of the capitalist profit system or the expropriation of the capitalists’ means of production and wealth. It is vehement enough in its denial of any democratic control by the working masses over the nation’s resources. Vehement enough to make clear to its money masters and angels that there is nothing to be feared in its threatening words.
When it comes to the other half of the program – that which hits at labor – the technocrats’ platform becomes more concrete and realistic. This is right up its alley.
There is no shilly-shallying with respect to what labor must give up. “Americans must inevitably surrender certain liberties for the duration of the war,” we read in the program, and these principled opponents of democratic processes and popular freedom add: “in order that we may retain our greater liberties in the future,” with tongue in cheek.
All species of “voluntary participation” must be replaced by “compulsory national service” (page 5) and “technocracy contends (hat such national service must become the permanent national duty of all Americans” (page 13) – except, of course, for the “conscription of business and wealth,” which is not permanent but specifiedly only for the duration.
Nor are the technocrats too vague about what liberties must be given up. Specifically included is “their right to collective bargaining,” which “the people of America must freely [sic] surrender for the duration” (page 12). At the same time, the payment of all dues to trade unions is also particularly listed for suspension (page 8).
This then is the very modest proposal of Technocracy, Inc. – that the organized trade union movement be abolished … “for the duration,” as if after its disappearance from the scene, the trade unions could automatically snap back to pre-total conscription status, with the same facility as the railroads snapped back to their private corporations after World War I!
Throughout the program, the twin evils which are bracketed together are “war profits, war wages,” in the best style of the anti-labor demagogues, lumping the workers together with the war profiteers. Naturally nothing is said in this connection about the miserably illusory character of these “war wages” in the light of rising prices, the black market, taxes, compulsory deductions, etc. Indeed, while mentioning (elsewhere) that there is “price inflation,” the technocratic program has only kind words for the OPA and the “gallant efforts” (page 11) of its business-man control.
The Payoff – $50 a Month
The solution? “A national scale of pay.” And what is the scale? All wages shall be no higher than that of the Army and Navy.
Total conscription provides that all citizens shall serve on the same basis or scale of pay as the armed forces … The same scale of pay which aplies to the armed forces will apply to civilians alike … Technocracy takes the position that if it is good enough for the armed forces it is good enough for the rest of us! (Page 13)
IS $50 a month good enough for the servicemen? That is not questioned. The idea is to tear wage standards down to the pittance allowed by the military machine – and then let the (non-existent) trade unions raise them back again when the returning soldiers put their overalls on again!
And so these graph-and-chart experts, who have made such a hullabaloo about proving over again the socialist contention that this country is rich enough to provide plenty for all, who used to promise a technocratic paradise of equal compensation of $5,000 a year and over – now entice us with “compulsory national service” and $50 a month, with the well known Rickenbacker chatter about the foxholes!
This then is the technocratic program of “totalitarian conscription”:
- A fake “conscription of wealth” by the same political fakers who are busy fooling some of the people some of the time today;
- The present exploiting system to be maintained in the interests of “national unity”;
- The destruction of the trade union movement;
- Tearing wage standards down to the “national scale of pay” now doled out to the Army and Navy.
The Political Perspective of Technocracy
An attractive picture, is it not? As attractive as the technocratic prison-world painted by Howard Scott, to which it is a none too subtle approach. The two pictures have something else in common. Both express, in its most reactionary form, the desperate cry for security of the small middle class seeking to wrench itself free from the crushing control of big capital above by trampling on the working class below. Technocracy – as delineated by the planned direction of its propaganda appeals as well as by (he composition of its membership, confirmed by the nature of its expressed program – is one of the most conscious and explicit political movements of the middle class in the United States. Once again, it is identical in this respect with the Hitler movement under the German republic.
But as in Hitler’s case, demagogic success in mobilizing middle-class discontent and disorientation only produces a more suitable candidate for the role of tool of big business, by securing a mass following which the lords of finance cannot gain on the basis of their own naked program. And Howard Scott himself is under no illusions as to his own class role.
Scott – who rejects the ballot, or any other form of expression of the popular will, as the means of instituting technocracy – clearly expects to be “authorized” to step in and “take over” by the present masters. This is the meaning of his cautiously worded statement in his Introduction to Technocracy:
Around us we hear the rumbling of discontent that voices itself in Marxian philosophies … Bolshevism, communism, fascism and democracy are utterly impotent to deal with the advanced technological situation in which we, of the North American continent, find ourselves placed. None of these systems of thought and action will be given the mandate when the present system fails to function. (Page 27)
“Given the mandate” … by whom? The expression recurs in the only other passage in technocratic literature which says anything illuminating on their ideas of how technocracy is to come about. (In general, this interesting question is most intensively ignored.)
Technocracy, Inc., may take political action, but it would only do so when the organization is sufficiently trained, disciplined and widespread to permit the simultaneous execution of that action in all parts of one of this continent’s principal national entities. If Technocracy, Inc., takes political action it will be the last political action, as such action would be taken solely for the abolition of the price system and its accompanying political administration, and the transition into the functional mechanism of a technate.
At this stage, therefore, the objectives of Technocracy, Inc., are, first, the education of the people of North America to a realization of the conditions behind the social crisis and, second, the organization of all those willing to investigate and interest themselves into an informed, disciplined and functionally capable body whose knowledge and ability can be called upon to prevent chaos in North America at the time, now imminent, when the price system can no longer be made to operate. (Back cover of Introduction)
Meanwhile technocracy does not believe in “trying to make present conditions any better, or to obtain any concessions …” (Technocracy in Plain Terms, page 17)
That technocracy does not want “to make present conditions any better” we can enthusiastically accept as the truth in understatement, after reading its program for totalitarian conscription. What Scott is aiming at, however, is the same promise of a cataclysmic change which Hitler used to capture the imagination of people fed up with compromise and half-measures.
There is no doubt that the heart of technocracy’s appeal lies in its pseudo-socialism, its “black socialism,” its promise of a “scientific” collectivism – if only the people will kneel to an uncontrolled bureaucracy. The gulf between this proposal for a national bureaucratic collectivism on the one hand and proletarian socialism on the other, is clear today. It was dear to Gene Debs, who defined socialism as “government ownership of industry, plus people’s ownership of government.”
There is a common characteristic of the demagogues who take the name or ideas of socialism in vain – from the Stalin Communists who palm off the Russian bureaucratic prison-world as “socialism,” to the Hitlers and Scotts, who promise to hand down plenty and security to the people on condition that they be first gagged and bound. It is the common thesis that on no account must the masses of working people take their fate into their own hands, achieve their emancipation by their own power, guarantee their freedom and abundance by their own independent self-activity, and set up a government under their own control.
But without this condition, pseudo-socialist phrases are fascist demagogy, just as without it Stalin’s state control over industry is bureaucratic tyranny. Socialist plenty for all requires the democratic masses in control of their state, a workers’ government. This is the gulf between the technocratic nightmare and the socialist commonwealth.
More Immutable Proof Why Marxists Hate Technocracy – Part II
