Liberatory Technology

Liberatory Technology was described by political philosopher and social theorist Murray Bookchin in his 1965 essay Towards a Liberatory Technology ¹. Bookchin described the possibility of an environmentally-friendly technology, which would "make man’s dependence upon the natural world a visible and living part of his culture". Bookchin envisaged small communities integrated into the natural environment, using small-scale technologies permitting a decentralisation of population as well as the production of goods; a reintegration of settlements, agriculture and small scale industry. These settlements would have local autonomy as well as confederation for exchange and organisation across larger areas. Bookchin didn't see himself as techno-pessimist nor techno-utopian. In his view, technology has no agency of its own. Instead he situated it in, and envisioned it as result of, social organisation. He aimed for a balanced use of technology, exploring its potential as basic structural support of society when it's no longer at the service of value extraction and control over labour. Bookchin's vision of technology is one that humanises society by liberating people from toil and need.

His vision of a utopian ecological lifestyle inspired many in the UK's 'alternative technology' movement, with its related magazine Undercurrents ². The main characteristic of Liberatory Technology, in line with Bookchin’s anarchist politics, is decentralisation in order to avoid centralised economic and administrative control. Mass communication and miniaturisation of technology and computing would support this decentralised industry and population. It is powered by renewable energy, non-coercive, adapted to specific local needs, small scale and shared among communities. He imagined tools to perform simple and basic tasks, making them multipurpose, so that they could be used in many different situations, in order to avoid wasting machines once the products they produce are no longer needed. In Ecology and Revolutionary Thought, Bookchin points to the value of organic differentiation, not mechanical standardization, for balance in society and nature alike ³. His view of technology reflects this, and resonates with current philosophies on sustainable design, such as that of Arturo Escobar as expressed in Designs for the Pluriverse, and resonates with the characteristics of Benign Computing and Permacomputing ⁴.

What sets Liberatory Technology apart from soft technology and Appropriate Technology is the way it envisions technology as inseparable from a way of social organisation. Technology serves the anarchist, communalist social structure and is shaped by it. Bookchin's ideas are techno-utopian, imagining technology supporting a post-scarcity society, 'solving' the problem of distribution of scarce resources and labor in society ⁵. His writing echoes anarchist and geographer Peter Kropotkin's 1899 Fields, Factories and Workshops, which deals with the potentials of a combination of decentralised small industries with agriculture, which is "carried on for satisfying real needs rather than for satisfying shareholders by high profits or for pouring gold into the pockets of promoters and bogus directors." ⁶ Kropotkin wrote this in a time when small and decentralised industries were quickly disappearing, after the first industrial revolution, in favour of centralised and large scale factories with increasingly minute division of labour. He emphasised how progress in science and technology allows people to sustain themselves with much smaller amounts of work than as wage labourers and under much better conditions, as long as capitalists, landlords and middle men seeking to extract profits stay out of the process.

Bookchin copied this emphasis on the labour saving qualities of technology. To him, self-regulating control mechanisms in industrial operations and the digital computer are capable of taking over all the physically hard and boring mental tasks of man "in industry, science, engineering, information retrieval and transportation."⁷. His flavour of techno-utopianism goes in the opposite direction of ecomodernism. Instead of using technology to separate man from nature, he believed technology can be used ecologically to reawaken man's sense of dependence upon the environment. To remove the contradiction between town and country, he wondered how land and community can be reintegrated without imposing the painful toil of manual agriculture on communities. He envisioned mechanised, yet small scale agriculture which supports regional ecology.

He pointed to village industries from the past, making use of local energy sources, materials and resources. Renewable energy such as solar, hydro and wind could reduce reliance on fossil fuels. He realised none of these renewable sources can provide for centralised industries and concentrated populations, but saw this as an opportunity to rescale and rethink tempo and size based on these limitations ⁸. It would lead to durable goods, conservation of raw materials and technology could reduce toil so that people can dedicate themselves to organisation, crafts and more. He wholeheartedly agreed with the Dada-ist call for unemployment for all.

"The most critical function of modern technology must be to keep the doors of the revolution open forever!"⁹

Bookchin confronted the lifestyle activism promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog in no uncertain terms:

" We must earnestly deal with the fact that economic growth, gender oppressions, and ethnic domination — not to speak of corporate, state, and bureaucratic interests — are much more capable of shaping the future of the natural world than are privatistic forms of spiritual self-regeneration. These forms of domination must be confronted by collective action and major social movements that challenge the social sources of the ecological crisis, not simply by personalistic forms of consumption and investment that often go under the rubric of 'green capitalism'."¹⁰

He critiqued practices without a link to counter-systemic social movements, as well as theory and critique without a coherent and practical way forward. Both are needed. He argued for a convergence of strategic and prefigurative activism as a first step toward a political movement that is able to contest and reclaim political power.

The biggest weakness of his vision is that it remains unclear how to exactly work towards this utopia. His writing is too general and the bridge from globalised neoliberal capitalist industrialism to decentralised ecological communalism is suggested, yet not constructed. But this is perhaps also exactly the point: imagining a path out requires utopic dreams, the road is made by walking ¹¹. Bookchin strongly argues against futurism, which simply extends the present into the future. What is needed is to change the present so the future looks radically different. He explained his commitment to utopic vision in a 1978 lecture: "if you don’t do the impossible, we’re going to wind up with the unthinkable—and that will be the destruction of the planet itself."¹²