Kolzene wrote:If we are to define a 'state' as: "...an organized political community living under a single system of government.", then since Technocracy does not use any form of political government, it is by definition a "stateless society": "...a society that is not governed by a state, or, especially in common American English, has no government." So there is no pretending involved. As for being "just managers," each person in a position of responsibility in the technical administration would by necessity have the required level of expertise in the field covered by their position. That is where the term technocracy comes from: "rule by skill."
But all communities are political and live under a system of government. I dispute that a "stateless society" is a coherent concept to begin with. Given that the technocrats would have control of the economic system, they would be state actors, since they would have to be incorporated into a bureaucratic system which defends itself and the order it has created.
It's not even plausibly horizontalist like pure communism, since it requires elites with specialist skills to engage in work that the majority cannot do, whereas communism imagines that specialization of labor must come to an end in order to have the highest stage of communist society that is truly classless. Now, certainly Marxism envisions a transitory period, but the entire point of that is that it is transitory due to the changes in the relation of society to the means of production in concert with the expansion of the productive forces.
Also, if we are going into where terms come from, then the fact that technocracy means "rule by skill", distinguishes it from rulerless anarchy (and Pure Communism by obvious extension).
Kolzene wrote:People do not pay anything for goods and services in a Technate, and there is no such thing as "energy credits". People simply consume what they want and whatever amount that is is measured in terms of energy so that the production sequences know how much of everything they need to produce for the next cycle so that there are not any shortages. The process happens out of the view of the consumer so there is no exchange taking place. That does indeed make it very different from money, and much more objective and scientific.
Ah, well that clears that up. I thought Technocracy had energy credits as the Technocracy equivalent of labor notes. This energy accounting system, even so, assumes limitless resources in order to not have to make any political decisions between different uses of raw materials. I don't really believe post-scarcity is possible, so I think the technocrats would have to compromise between increasing the supply of one product Vs another arbitrarily.
There are no value system neutral economic distributions.
Kolzene wrote:There is no causal relationship between Technocracy not being a form of government and there being no social classes. The lack of classes comes from the fact that there is no differentiation in purchasing power among the citizens.
That's not the only thing that creates a class. The technocrats have a different relationship to the means of production compared to the non-technocrat citizens. The technocrats are in control of the means of production, just as the bourgeoisie were. Ownership is not about pieces of paper, but how much control you have over a thing.
The difference in control between the technocrats and the masses is a difference in their relationship to the means of production. BLAM! Class conflict!
Kolzene wrote:Depends by what you mean by "elite" and "in charge". If by "elite" you mean some privileged class, then you are wrong. You could define it as "most qualified" and be correct however. As for "in charge", no one has any form of political power in a Technate, only the qualifications to do their job in making sure that the Technate operates as required. If one person does a better job managing a power plant than others with similar qualifications, then they are allowed to do the job. They receive no special considerations for doing so other than being allowed to do the job.
If one person does a better job than another, then who evaluates them? A council of their peers? What? You are glossing over the political decisions that would be required at every stage and would make it a government.
I'm also surprised at the positive Marxist reception here, since the idea that economic power can be separated from political power is a fundamentally anti-Marxist idea, but I guess I'll let them speak for themselves. This system appears to be a Dictatorship of the Technocrats and not of the proletariat. Marxists could imagine that they could slave the technocrats to the will of the proletariat, but then its not really Technocracy as a system in which supposedly non-political supply decisions are made by experts, with the proletariat as mere consumers.
Kolzene wrote:Not political control like you know it. They simply have the responsibility to make sure that it operates according to established requirements. They can't just do whatever they want like a CEO can.
Who decides what the established requirements are? The league of science? Democracy?
The technocrats by definition know more about the equipment than the masses, and you are giving them control over supply. How is this not inherently political? It is not conformable to just any possible government, because if you introduce democratic control over supply, you scupper the point of Technocracy in the first place, which is to have technicians modulate supply based on how people consume.
Kolzene wrote:For as long as you are not conflating politics and economics, and instead treating "left-wing" like is done with the Political Compass, then yes, Technocracy is perfectly comfortable for those of the "left" because it does centralize control of the economy for the purposes of supporting the population. If you think that left-wing means anything like being a dictatorship, then I would advise you not to conflate politics and economics, because they are different things, which is why the Political Compass is a much better description of reality than the simple left-right spectrum.
The political compass is an extremely poor indicator and I reject it. I call Technocracy right wing because it enshrines hierarchy and productive inequality very very firmly, and any humanitarian goal this services is inherently secondary due to where control is centered. Bourgeois ownership of production materially means scope for control, and the same is true here. For example; we should not consider a Fascist state more "left wing" if it doles out a Basic Income Guarantee.
Consumptive equality cannot be guaranteed without productive equality (The conditions for Pure Communism rest on both since all consume freely and all control equally), and since you have guaranteed productive inequality by setting up a system in which elite technicians have sole control of economic supply, any consumptive inequality will be inevitable, and the system will decay into state capitalism.
Now, you may counter that the technocrats are only making decisions to increase or decrease supply based on people's consumption, but without assuming post-scarcity to begin with, any outputs that share inputs require a decision on which of the outputs gets priority. Any products made of aluminium in a world of scarce aluminium require a decision as to which products should be prioritized. BLAM! Politics is knocking on your door and he's brought his friend Bureaucracy along.
If it's a system that is only supposed to operate when we have post-scarcity, then I expect you'll be waiting a long long time to have a chance at it, and by the time it becomes possible, I expect it be redundant. True post-scarcity would require some sort of overthrow of established physics. Any level of scarcity requires the political decisions about supply I detailed, which suddenly collapse Technocracy into the realm of political philosophy in which "experts" have free reign. This is Ayn Rand's Objectivism through a warped fairground mirror. Imagine if the technocrats went "Galt" if they didn't get more supply for themselves!
Long before the laws of physics are overturned and scarcity is banished to the phantom zone, we are far more likely to see the automation of labor, and as it accelerates, the requirement for experts to administer supply to be correspondingly reduced. Since technical experts themselves can be automated out of daily production processes, the control over supply can be democratic, horizontalist, and truly leftist, because instead of willful technicians in the production loop, decisions are being made by the masses and carried out by machines that are aberrant any biological evolved will, and only possess the drive for their repeated tasks (maintaining production, and mining more robots and resources at human command).
In the interim, we want engineers, computer scientists, and experts in robotics to continue to develop these possibilities (analogous to "expanding the productive forces" in Marxism), but what we do not want is a system in which they are given direct control over all production today (consider an automated army with the technocrats still in control). By the time such a thing is even thinkable as you describe, it would be rendered redundant by the automation paradigm. The scientists shall build us the robot with which we shall replace them!
(Speculative as this might be it does not, unlike "post-scarcity" require new physics).
Conclusion: Technocracy is therefore a dangerous form of state under anything less than absolute literal post-scarcity, and redundant under sufficiently advanced automation.
Kolzene wrote:Any while I do not know enough physics to understand what a "Gibbs State" is exactly (the Wikipedia article was a bit over my head), I do appreciate the reference, since Howard Scott, the inventor of Technocracy, credits J. Willard Gibbs as his technical inspiration for Technocracy. I'm going to have to look for a good explanation of a Gibb's State.
It was a pun. It's a "gibs" state because it doles out gibs, which is slang for welfare. The structure is philosophically right wing to the core, but disguises it behind a technocratic welfare state in order to ingratiate itself to socialism, which whatever its means, has as its ends, a left wing outcome.
Kolzene wrote:Although I expect that you mean this sarcastically, it is indeed true (if a bit harshly worded). They can't abuse their "control". Any time someone performs in a manner that does not "get the job done" and meet requirements, or otherwise goes against the requirements of the Technate (such as depriving people of their freedoms and/or purchasing power), then they lose their position and it is given to someone who can do the job right.
Who is in charge of the Technate?