Second Scientific Revolution as the Penetration of Science into All Forms of Production
Discussion
Maroš Krivý :
“Between 1963 and 1965, the Party initiated extensive research into how to reform and revolutionize socialism, a milestone in the post-Stalinist recuperation of scientific knowledge in the country. The initiative was triggered by a panoply of factors. The economic crisis of 1962–63 exposed the limits of the prevailing steel economic model and was the main topic of the Party’s quinquennial congress of 1963. In addition, an entire generation defined by the youthful experience not of inter-war capitalism but of post-war Stalinism had now politically and culturally matured and was increasingly receptive to tensions within the socialist project and similarities across the socialist-capitalist divide. Marxism was also being reconceived as humanism, and Hegelian-idealist and phenomenological aspects of socialist revolution were being resuscitated (Myant 1989: 90–131; Horn 1998; Bren 2004; Mervart 2017).
The research was conducted at the Academy of Science by teams of economists, sociologists and political scientists, bringing these formerly proscribed disciplines into the service of socialism to come. Under the leadership of Richta, an interdisciplinary group of some sixty philosophers, social scientists, architects and engineers worked together on what would become Civilization, perhaps the best-known intellectual record of the particularly Czechoslovak version of socialism — ‘socialism with a human face’, a catchphrase coined by the Czech philosopher himself. The conceptual backbone of this publication, part philosophical treatise, part policy report, published in three editions and translated into eleven languages, was the concept of a scientific and technological revolution (STR).4 Highlighting the critical role for communism of scientific and technological knowledge workers, Civilization encapsulates the spirit of a revolution that historian Gerd-Rainer Horn (1998: 359) characterized as ‘instigated and led by the intelligentsia’, a revolution that culminated in the so-called Prague Spring and the short-lived reformist government of Alexander Dubček.5 The scientification of communism emphasized the historical specificity of both class struggle and the future of socialism. ‘The issue of revolution once again became highly topical during the 1960s’, wrote historian Vítězslav Sommer (2017: 100); ‘however, this time it was contemplated more as a phenomenon of the future than as a legacy of the glorious revolutionary past’. Seeking to overhaul socialism marred by a personality cult and bureaucratic ossification, Civilization revisited revolutionary aspects of communism but placed them outside the then-mainstream arena of blue-collar labour: cybernetic science and computer technology rather than industrialization. Revolution, in other words, was the business of a technical intelligentsia at home in laboratories and operations centres — what Western Marxists then described as the ‘new working class’, rather than the ‘historical’ working class of mines and factories.
The report’s concept of STR was adopted from the work of the Irish physicist and Marxist historian of science John D. Bernal, himself conversant with Soviet scientific developments. This pioneer of the social history of science characterized STR, or the ‘second scientific revolution’, as he also called it, as ‘the penetration of science into all forms of production’ (Bernal 1965 [1954]: 903), blurring any distinction between pure and applied sciences. ‘Conscious calculation of the optimal distribution of productive resources, material and human’, he wrote, fond of analogies with nature dialectics, ‘represents a higher stage in social evolution much as the appearance of a central nervous system did in organic evolution’ (1965 [1954]: 874). The import of Bernal’s theories into Czechoslovak socialism was not without some contradictions: whereas the Irish historian developed the theory of STR with reference to the Stalinist planned economy, Richta struggled to rethink scientific planning in opposition to that model. Bernal’s conceptual framework nevertheless suffused Civilization, where it was integrated with a kaleidoscopic range of thematic inputs and intellectual sources. The report was an intellectual fusion of heterodox Western Marxism, systems theory and a host of culturally and environmentally inflected social sciences, including input by theorists of architecture. It dwelled on cybernetic automation in the context of human alienation, developed a Marxist understanding of post-industrialism and explored correlations between people’s disposable time, leisure patterns, self-actualization and economic productivity.
The STR, Civilization argued, was the contemporary crucible of socialism. Having abolished private ownership of the means of production, socialism had not resolved contradictions arising from the industrial character of productive forces. Socialist workers remained alienated, Richta professed, because the type of work they did in factories, mines and construction sites remained abstract. The challenge, then, was how to transform what the report called an ‘extensive’ mode of socialist production into an ‘intensive’ one. This was a technological issue of efficiency as much as an existential question of creativity and human self-realization (Figure 1). While industrialization was an indispensable driver of socialist revolution, it was incompatible with a truly democratic communism, which must consider how life is subjectively experienced. ‘The accomplishment of the scientific and technological revolution is integral to the working class’s historical role’, Civilization maintained: under socialism, unlike in a capitalist context, that revolution would foster rather than impede meaningful life (Richta 1969a: 274).
For Richta, the liberation from machinic enslavement would be the consequence of gradually replacing bureaucratically organized industrial manufacturing with cybernetically governed automated production. Civilization portrayed cybernetics as ‘the only plausible foundation for governance and planning in the future’ (1969a: 263). Rather than marshalling subordinates to fulfil inflexible plans, the report tasked future socialist managers with optimizing systems. For Richta, what he called the ‘algorithmic restructuring of governance’ was not only consistent with but essential to the kind of communism where people would experience life as meaningful (266). Thinking of self-realizing individuals as analogous to self-regulating systems, Richta believed that ‘unlike primitive technology dominating people, the evolved and versatile one facilitates all-round human personality development’ (198).
Is social change driven by historical struggles or technological progress? To square the inexorable techno-optimism of cybernetics with the Marxist-Leninist social revolutionary outlook required some conceptual acrobatics. The STR, Civilization maintained, both inaugurated a new era in accordance with ‘the laws of historical change’ (‘zákonité změny’) and was equivalent to a ‘change in the laws of history’ (‘změna zákonitostí’) (234). Similarly, history could be studied as a ‘cybernetic model of constrained choice’, argued the research project’s deputy leader, sociologist Ota Klein (1969: 146). This was a more than academic point of view, and the one that would, according to Klein, ‘augment our forecasting capacity, and contain the role of resentment and cronyism in politics’ (1969: 146).8 Consistent with an unorthodox view that scientists and technology experts were a revolutionary class of their own, there was tension between dialectical-materialist and systems-theoretical conceptions of society as, respectively, a focus of political change and a system to be stabilized.
The unlikely marriage of dialectics and cybernetics, which in the contemporary Soviet Union and GDR was pragmatically deployed as a convenient toolbox for outperforming capitalism, was in Czechoslovakia further entangled with idiosyncratic existentialist programmes.9 In his suggestively titled 1963 dissertation Communism and the Transformation of Human Life: On the Character of Contemporary Humanism, Richta identified putative post-industrial socialism with ‘the real development of human beings’ (Sommer 2016: 103). His humanism infused Civilization, sitting ambiguously between materialist perspectives on human self-determination (as in the ‘young’ Marx of Grundrisse and alienation critique) and liberally minded cybernetics (which could be used, according to Norbert Wiener (1989 [1950]: 162), ‘for the benefit of man … rather than merely for profits’). Richta’s humanism also hinged on a rather crude argument, advanced by the French economist and sociologist Jean Fourastié, that technological automation would, as a matter of course, lead to an increase in the amount of free time at people’s disposal.
Other patent influences on the report included the Marxist phenomenology of Karel Kosík, author of the influential Dialectics of the Concrete, published in 1963, and even the existential phenomenology of Jan Patočka, erstwhile student of Edmund Husserl and later protégé of dissident-cum-Czech president Václav Havel. Although the report mentions neither Kosík nor Patočka, both colleagues of Richta at the Academy, it discussed meaning as not only an avatar of cybernetic information but also, and equally, an intersubjective sense of human worldly existence.11 There is a sense of a phenomenological ‘appropriation of the world’ in Richta’s description of the STR as ‘inherently a worldly process’ (1969a: 175, 70), a sense that is intimately linked but irreducible to planetary-wide cybernetic infrastructures.”
(https://journal.eahn.org/article/id/7567/#!)
Source
* Article: Krivý, M., 2019. Automation or Meaning? Socialism, Humanism and Cybernetics in Etarea. Architectural Histories, 7(1), p.3. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/ah.314
URL = https://journal.eahn.org/article/id/7567/#!
More information
- Book: Civilization at the Crossroads : Social and Human Implications of the Scientific and Technological Revolution. By Radovan Richta. Routledge, 1969
See: Civilization at the Crossroads of the Scientific and Technological Revolution