Technological progress and technologies of abundance were central to the imagined communist futures of socialists and anarchists in the 19th century. Take Marx’s higher stage of communism, in which it becomes possible to “do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” In Fields, Factories and Workshops, Kropotkin extrapolated from the invention of electrically powered machinery to an economy of small-scale craft shop manufacturing integrated into village economies, in which the distinctions between head and hand work withered away and people could meet their consumption needs with three or four hours of labor a day. Even the bucolic neo-medieval utopia in William Morris’s News From Nowhere had advanced technology in the background: There were “force barges” transporting goods on the Thames, and there were no more factories because any group of neighbors who wanted to work together could set up wherever they wanted to work and bring in electrical power to run their tools.

There’s a parallel shift from the utopian framing of nineteenth century socialism and anarchism, with their emphasis on personal autonomy and reduced work hours, to the 20th century “progressive” agenda centered on what Guy Standing calls “labourism.” The latter, reflected in the agendas of the New Deal, European Social Democracy and the establishment labor unions, takes both large-scale mass production and the wage system as given, and seeks a society with universal employment at forty hours a week guaranteed for everyone. Far from being revolutionary, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argue in Commonwealth, this model of “socialism” actually involves a kind of social and technological stasis. The Social Democratic agenda is basically “to reintegrate the working class within capital.”

It would mean, on the one hand, re-creating the mechanisms by which capital can engage, manage, and organize productive forces and, on the other, resurrecting the welfare structures and social mechanisms necessary for capital to guarantee the social reproduction of the working class.

In other words, basically resurrecting and perpetuating the mid-20th century model of mass-production managerial capitalism, but with an added layer of bureaucrats to redistribute some of the rents and make it more tolerable and sustainable.

Fortunately this technological defeatism and downward adjustment of expectations has not infected the entire Left.

The whole “tech as right-wing trojan horse” trope ignores the existence of a left-wing high-tech community centered on open-source ideas — including people like the autonomists Negri and Hardt, and the German Oekonux group, who see commons-based peer production as the kernel of the future post-scarcity communist society. In Commonwealth, Negri and Hardt argue that means of production are radically cheapening, human capital is replacing physical capital as the primary source of value, and the networked organization of production is causing productive relations to center on the social relationships of the producing classes themselves. …the trend toward the hegemony or prevalence of immaterial production in the processes of capitalist valorization…. Images, information, knowledge, affects, codes, and social relationships… are coming to outweigh material commodities or the material aspects of commodities in the capitalist valorization process. This means, of course, not that the production of material goods… is disappearing or even declining in quantity but rather that their value is increasingly dependent on and subordinated to immaterial factors and goods…. What is common to these different forms of labor… is best expressed by their biopolitical character…. Living beings as fixed capital are at the center of this transformation, and the production of forms of life is becoming the basis of added value. This is a process in which putting to work human faculties, competences, and knowledges — those acquired on the job but, more important, those accumulated outside work interacting with automated and computerized productive systems — is directly productive of value. One distinctive feature of the work of head and heart, then, is that paradoxically the object of production is really a subject, defined… by a social relationship or a form of life. This means that we ourselves, cooperating horizontally with one another and using tools within the means of working people to acquire, increasingly are the production process. Capital is becoming increasingly external to production, able to extract rents from it only by relying on legal monopolies like “intellectual property” to enclose the social relationships of workers. It follows, Negri and Hardt argue, that revolution no longer primarily entails the physical capture of expensive means of production financed and owned by the capitalists. It entails, rather, simply taking the human relationships and tools already in our possession and seceding from the capitalist economy, and setting up a counter-economy of commons-based peer production. Class struggle no longer takes the form of physically storming the factory, but rather of “exodus”: “a process of subtraction from the relationship with capital by means of actualizing the potential autonomy of labor-power.” The irony is that, at the same time as the horizontal relationships of working people among ourselves become the primary source of value, and capital increasingly depends on “intellectual property” to extract rents from those relationships, the same technological changes are making “intellectual property” itself unenforceable. It is “intellectual property” and proprietary knowledge that keep new technology expensive and and enables the rich to monopolize its fruits. But this proprietary control of knowledge (corporate-funded university R&D with its results protected by non-disclosure agreements, government-enforced trade secrets and patents, scientific discovery behind journal paywalls, etc.) is fundamentally opposed to the spirit of science. That spirit, as exemplified by the international scientific community of the seventeenth century, centered on shared experimentation and reproducible results. Proprietary “science,” on the other hand, impedes real discovery and progress by erecting toll gates to sharing and building on knowledge. And it is technology-friendly Leftists, more than anybody else, who oppose proprietary science in favor of do-it-yourself, peer-to-peer science and open source technology.

This is not to say we should be blithe utopians. Social and economic inequality pose real obstacles to achieving our future of universal abundance, and it would be a grave error to minimize them. As Occupy Oakland activist Emily Loftis put it in a Twitter exchange with me back in 2012, the problem with the high-tech approach to counterinstitution-building I advocated was that “people that need these resources and networks the most have no/little access to these forms of tech.”