Une société en miettes

La classe possédante tient les leviers du pouvoir, la force et la finance, mais elle est peu nombreuse et doit diviser pour régner. Pendant longtemps elle a pu s’appuyer sur une classe intermédiaire de petits possédants, les sous-officiers du système sélectionnés par une instruction rudimentaire et idéologique. Les plus malins pouvaient même aspirer à de hautes fonctions. Le fossé de classe se situait entre le petit bourgeois possédant un peu et l’ouvrier n’ayant que sa force de travail. Il s’agissait d’éviter que les deux se trouvent des intérêts communs, et ne pas reproduire les erreurs de 1789 ou de 1871 quand les Communes avaient pris le pouvoir. La classe ouvrière elle-même devait être divisée par des courants politiques opposés et des syndicats antagonistes. Néanmoins, cette organisation du social n’était pas sans failles et devait être constamment renforcé par de la propagande nationaliste, provoquant des irruptions guerrières ou ethnico-raciales.

Le monde après 1945 était différent. Les armes nucléaires rendaient la guerre totale impraticable, consignant les combats à la périphérie des empires. Et l’accès aux études supérieures ne cessait de s’élargir d’une classe d’âge à la suivante, de même que l’accès à la propriété d’un logement. Avec une forte imposition des revenus et des successions, suite aux exigences de la guerre, certains théorisaient une société composée uniquement d’une classe moyenne. Mais ce rêve américain n’était qu’une façade qui cachait un monde du travail très âpre et ethniquement mélangé. L’ascension sociale et l’embourgeoisement des ouvriers, leur passage du col bleu au col blanc avait dû être compensé en bas de l’échelle. Pour les tâches spécialisées le capitalisme français avait recruté au Nord de la Méditerranée, pour les tâches plus simples au Sud. Et les autres pays développés, confrontés à la même situation, avaient aussi encouragé une immigration de main-d’œuvre pour les travaux ingrats. Suite aux remous de 1968, quelques bonnes âmes se préoccupèrent du sort des immigrés dans leurs bidons-villes et leurs foyers insalubres. Il y eut de l’alphabétisation, l’autorisation de faire venir leurs familles, l’accès aux logements sociaux et des naturalisations. Sous l’apparence d’intégration, le capital installait des minorités visibles aux derniers rangs de la société.

La classe possédante a interrompu la cohésion d’après-guerre entre classe moyenne et classe ouvrière, en créant une citoyenneté visiblement différente. L’avantage du capitalisme américain, avec ses divisions raciales originelles, s’était reproduit en Europe. Le travail se trouvait divisé par des barrières nouvelles. Les droits des minorités primaient sur la solidarité de classe traditionnelle. En même temps une autre fragmentation du travail était en cours. La production éparpillait sa sous-traitance et isolait les unités de production, l’emploi intérimaire se répandait, et l’auto-entreprise était favorisée. L’esprit du chacun pour soi l’a emporté. Le capital a réussi l’émiettement complet de son opposition et l’a réduite à l’impuissance. Mais saura-t-il résoudre l’urgence de ses contradictions internes, ou va-t-il s’effondrer sous le poids de la dette sans la moindre barricade?

Technology defines the future

When early pre-humans saw their habitat change from tropical forest to savannah, they were ill-equipped to survive. Not much fur, thin hides, no claws or horns, and not very incisive teeth, so they learned to run and to use body extensions. Some animals occasionally use sticks and stones as tools, but primitive humans developed the concept. The hand’s capacity was increased by stones shaped into blades and points. Then the arm was lengthened by fixing these stones to handles and shafts. Animal skins were probably used for protection very early on, without leaving a trace. And the domestication of fire meant cooking and keeping off nocturnal predators. Later the hand was extended to a distance by javelins, boomerangs, tomahawks, bows and arrows, slings and darts. Humans also harnessed animal muscle power to carry, push and pull. With time came selective agriculture and breeding, stone buildings, hard metals and wheels.

Humans evolved by extending their body with artifacts. And their mind developed with the artifice of language. Most animals and some plants communicate with those of their own species, by smells, sounds and movements. But the human larynx and vocal cords evolved in such a way, possibly due to the upright position, that they can produce a huge variety of complex sounds, more than enough to give a different name to everything in countless different tongs. For many thousands of years, words and the stories they built were transmitted orally. Knowledge was memory. Oral communities live in a sound environment, and believe that words have magical powers, for good or bad. Writing transforms sounds into visual signs, and the alphabet does this in a completely abstract way. Language developed human memory and made possible the description of imaginary worlds. Writing allowed the present to confront the past, instead of repeating it from memory, and created an abstract personal point of view.

After about six centuries of seclusion, Western Europe burst onto the world stage with the first crusade in 1096. These rustic warriors discovered the advanced and sophisticated civilisations of the Middle East, and the Chinese inventions of fireworks and woodcut printing on paper. Europeans would soon be printing with movable lead type and making war with bronze cannons. Just as Europe was beginning to wake up from its medieval slumber, the Middle East and India were ravaged by the Mongols and subjected to Turkish overlords, and China, possibly in reaction to the same Mongol menace, was scrapping its navy and closing its borders. Europeans were able to conquer the planet, because the other major powers were in such a sorry state.

The European Renaissance revisited antiquity, and thereby questioned religious beliefs, political institutions and scientific knowledge. During the crusades, Europe had borrowed from afar, paper, ink and printing, gun-powder and hard steel (Damascus), but the Middle Ages had only invented wind-mills and sea-worthy sailing ships (as opposed to galleys). Then, having more or less resolved their religious oppositions by the end of the 17^th century, Europeans experienced a sudden surge in inventiveness, with celebrities such as Newton, Galvani and Lavoisier. All this fermented into institutional change and republican revolutions in America and France. Meanwhile James Watt was putting together the machine that would change the world, by the practical and rational transformation of heat into movement.

It is hard to imagine a world where the only motive forces were wind, running water and muscle power, assisted by pulleys, levers and wheels. Engines driven by steam, electricity or internal combustion have become so ubiquitous that the only activities managing without them are non-mechanical sports. Few people sweat at work any more. They have to pump iron or pedal, or run on a treadmill to let off steam. And many people never exert their muscles at all, and become obese. Human activity has been progressively replaced by machines that are more powerful, faster and more precise. An evolution that began by extending and increasing the body’s capacities has finally made them redundant.

Writing began as an aid to memory, and books became the store of memory. Then, during the 20^th century, new ways of storing were invented, photography and films, Bakelite and vinyl disks, magnetic tape, laser disks and micro-chips. And the diffusion of stored memories has also changed completely. Books, not to mention clay tablets, are cumbersome. They need work and energy to be made and transported. And an ever growing number of them could only be found in libraries or by chance in a second-hand store. Films and photos were just as hard to find and see. The internet changed all that. It made available just about all stored memories, in print, audio and video, to just about everyone, just about anywhere. This is producing the same disruptive effects worldwide as did the sudden appearance of movable-type printing in Europe five centuries ago. The mass diffusion of ideas old and new sets off a questioning of and an opposition to the status quo. Then as now governments tried to quell the movement and repress the diffusion, but the jinn was out of the bottle. There was and is no going back.

Printing broke the top-down control of information by the Roman Church, its universities and monasteries. The result was a religious and political upheaval. It also introduced the mass production of an identical object, a prelude to the industrial revolution. The new technologies for transmitting sound and images began as highly centralised Hertzian emissions, often under government supervision. They diversified somewhat in the 1960s, in the wake of other liberal movements, but, like the press and publishing, they were Big Business and were held in very few hands. And controlling the infrastructure gave control of the content in centre-out diffusions. The World Wide Web has broken that duality. Mega corporations still own the infrastructure (ITT, Orange, BT, FAMANG, etc.), but the content is coming from billions of different sources. Mass media are being pushed aside by social media. Pundits are losing their audiences, who no longer want to be told what to think, and can find or form like-minded groups on the Web. The precedent of printing breaking the Roman Church’s cultural and ideological monopoly, and the divisions and violence that ensued cannot be a model, though it does give an idea of how radical that rupture is. It turns society upside-down. Everyone can speak and be followed, not just the few who own a megaphone.

Human evolution has been shaped by technology. And as human societies depend on communicating for their cohesion, their structures depend on the forms of communication at their disposal. Oral societies communicate by word of mouth. The messages can be modified and are evanescent. Writing preserves the original discourses, and printing multiplies them identically. Audio recordings preserve the actual sound of words, instead of their symbolic representations. They no longer have the neutrality of a visual perspective. Audio reproduces the tone of voice and the emotions it transmits. In the 1930s and 40s, radio and sound systems played with these emotions in different ways, from fireside chats to vituperative excesses. Video brought the close-up, body language and subjective perceptions. Television has used these visual projections to promote or vilipend. Audio and video communications do not have the cool objective perspective of print. They are hot and emotive. The voice and the face compete with the content. Sensations and reason struggle to make sense of the message.

Words have come back to the sensuality of sound and image, and internet has opened their production to most of humanity. This is a combination of two disruptive processes. A hot medium is replacing a cool one, and information is transmitted laterally, instead of to the centre and out again in a standard format. A sort of global mind is taking shape, with a myriad sensors gathering and passing on information. Language is still a barrier to complete connection, though English is close to becoming the planet’s lingua franca. A wiki world of cooperation is opposing the pyramidal empires of wealth and power. Digital technology is provoking a new evolutionary leap into the unknown, a future neither better nor worse (rapacity will probably persist), but completely different. Having expended the body’s physical capacities to their limits, technology has begun to push the mind’s extensions as far as they can go. However, the body’s sensual experience is very individual in space and time, whereas the mind’s experience of words is built on a multitude of voices. Acts can be copied, thoughts are shared.

Technological extensions have increased the body’s strength, speed and dexterity, and the mind’s memory. All activities have become artificial and specialised, and they need a complex network of transport and communications to be able to function. From the first stone that was shaped and the first field that was sown, humans have evolved to a stage where natural spontaneous phenomena no longer count. To the point where there is talk of “terra forming” on Mars and “engineering” the climate on Earth. Planet Gaia has produced a species that is imagining it can change its birthplace. It is just hubris, and the only man-made changes are the consequence of burning all the fossil carbon that has been buried underground over hundreds of millions of years, and covering the continents and oceans with lead, mercury, radioactive elements and plastic particles. These changes are all destructive, and have the potential to combine and make future survival uncertain for most forms of life. It seems that the power to extend the body’s physical capacities has over reached itself. As for the mind’s extensions by print and digital storage, there is still a long way to go. But the sheer mass of information tends to obscure the essential elements. There are irreconcilable opinions everywhere, especially in domains such as economics, sociology or history that influence the way societies are governed. What is the social cost of capitalist accumulation? Should ethnic and cultural minorities subsist or disappear. Why spotlight some past events rather than others? These and numerous other questions have answers that are more ideological than reasoned. A multitude of voices can compete with the standard discourse and point out its contradictions. But the voices are seldom in accordance, which adds to the confusion of fake news and downright lies. When a new medium allows the diffusion of ideas and opinions that had previously been silenced, the immediate result is division, chaos and reaction. But it also gives the impulse to a different global perspective. Printing propagated religious turmoil just as the telescope was redefining humanity’s position in the universe. It opened an age of brutal war and conquest, of experimental science and of political emancipation. The World Wide Web is still in its primary stage of creative destruction, and its ultimate consequences remain shrouded in mystery.