New Left, Local Control, and Fascism

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(5) National Administrative Technology Develop- cause us to make mistakes that might not be made by a
ment. If "optical page-reading" technology were smaller group of "experts." The goal after all is to
widely applied, and if present computer design were develop a population which can democratically manage
improved to reduce maintenance and breakdown its own affairs; a few mistakes are a small price to pay
(because many present computers are built like junk for that result.
to begin with- for greater profit), the economy
could develop and apply rational systems through Unless we wish to have an economy managed by
which most of the paper-shuffiing occupations could "experts" with the resulting army of bureaucrats, the
be eliminated, freeing millions of persons from mind- procedure must be that the entire population (or, at
dulling office routine for creative, productive work. least all wage-earners and their allies) decides the
This development is a necessary correlative of our general economic policies, priority projects, generally
work in expanding the number of productive work- allocation of resources. The same population, through
places in the new industries to be created, local agencies, through factory organizations, and so
forth, then supervises and audits the performance of
(6) A General Program of Replacement of Obsolete those policies at the "local level."
Production Facilities, Concentrating Emphatically
On Those Which Represent Unsatisfactory Working Why Working People Can't Run The
Conditions. Why should a human being have to
monotonously sew garments on a jazzed-up version Economy Today
of a nineteenth century device (sewing machine),
when seam-impregnation (or cloth impregnation) and A capitalist society is essentially an anarchist society.
inductive "welding" methods can be applied? It is In fact, capitalist society is the only form of anarchist
criminal and idiotic to demand that human beings be society that could actually exist. If capitalist nations
subjected to the man-killing pace of repetitive assembly
operations when a combination of intelligent society could exist without a government. In fact, the
have governments, that is only because no anarchist
product and process design permits such assemblies only kind of radical-anarchist movements that ever took
to be made automatically? Why must men die and political power were the fascist movements organized
destroy their bodies otherwise in mines? We have, or out of the ranks of Italian and German anarchists and
are within reach of developing, productive technolo- populists by Mussolini and Hitler (and similar governgy
so that jobs may he designed to fit our conception ments in pre-World War II Eastern Europe).
of what it is suitable for a human being to do.
The problem of finding a replacement for anarchistic
(7) International "Infra-Structure" Development. society (capitalist or fascist) is that the economy is
The U.S. sector of the world economy has a grow- actually a delicately-balanced whole. If one traces the
ing dependence upon the world economy as a whole various successive steps required to produce each
which is grossly understated by the rigged prices at product used in personal consumption, including the
which our sector purchases. It is not only humane but production of required machinery, delivery facilities,
in our self-interest that we, along with the entire andso forth, one would discover that the simple articles
advanced sector, contribute at least 5-10% of the that make up personal consumption in the U.S. today
annual product of the advanced sector for the im- are the result of a series of very many steps making up
mediate upgrading of living standards and the economic
development of the undeveloped nations, in order to replace the capitalist system, it is necessary
a network covering almost the entire world. Therefore,
to approach the problem of economic management on a
1.6 How An Economy Is Managed large scale, or at least a national scale and preferably
something of a world scale.
Policies of the sort we have outlined above are merely
the essential starting-point for transition from a bank- In the U.S. today we have also the essential techrupt
capitalist economy to a socialist democracy. What niques, ranging through industrial engineering, comwe
must build is not an economy managed by an elite of puter technology, marketing analysis methods, and so
"experts," but an economy governed through the forth, to manage the economy on just that scale. That
increasing "expertise" of its entire population. To the doesn't mean that a handful of brains sit in some superextent
that militant rank and file leaders from the ranks computer center and manage every detail from there. It
of organized labor, oppressed minorities and radical means that overall production can he planned in the
youth discuss the present program, debate its subse- sense of budgeting resources and production allocaquent
elaborations, we are proving that such political tions, letting local people work out the details within
democracy is actually possible, we are proving and general policies.
helping to develop the capacity of the population to
competently formulate its own national economic poll- The problem -- the main problem -- is that working
cies. people are conditioned to think anarchistically. That is,
the guy in one particular skill-pay bracket considers
Admittedly, such a democratic process will initially himself in competition for "goodies" with those from