The High Tech Sector: Conditions & Opportunities (page 2 of 2)
By the High Tech Committee of the National Organizing Committee

At the same time, the various police forces are moving to control the new areas of human interaction made possible by new technology. New technologies provide powerful tools for protecting privacy and sharing information. To maintain control over the new technology, information and the people who use it, the U.S. government is clamping down on several fronts.

Here are a few recent developments:

Opportunities: High Tech Workers

As the old system of lifelong stable employment breaks down, opportunities arise to influence how high tech workers comprehend what is happening to them. Without ideas being introduced into the debate that point the way towards a reorganization of society along the basis of distribution of social wealth according to need -- a communist resolution -- those workers will succumb to fascist agitation (the problem is Indian programmers, or undocumented workers, or people on welfare; the solution is more police and prisons, less welfare, gated communities and walls around the border).

High tech workers being displaced through the technological changes discussed above need a program that points the way forward. What would such a practical program be? Developing self- defense organizations (e.g., a union) for high tech workers? Pushing for a guaranteed income, to remove the economic terror faced by contingent workers? A redistribution of work, based on a shortened work week? A government jobs program? Effective training programs?

Such a program overlaps with the demands rising out of other sections of the trade union and unemployed workers movement. Events like the MIT Technology and Employment Conference last January, and the planned Chicago Technology and Employment Conference next March provide opportunities to raise these issues, and advance the development of a practical program. As workers in high tech, we need to raise these issues in the various forums that we have available.

Opportunities: Youth

The burden of dead end, low wage jobs, or no jobs at all, especially hits youth. For full time workers age 16 to 24, the increase in poverty earnings went form 23 percent in 1979 to 47 percent in 1992.[12] Growing numbers of college educated youth are finding their opportunities defined by dead end, low wage jobs. When the bleak prospects of fully employed youth is combined with the fact that, in many areas of the country, youth unemployment approaches 50 percent, the revolutionary position of youth becomes clear. For a vast section of America's youth, the capitalist system offers no future.

The phenomenon of "hackers" should be examined in this context. Expressing an explicit disdain of capitalist property laws, these youth represent in many cases the hint of a new society in formation, expressing the values of sharing, exploration, and creativity. They have succeeded in drawing a great deal of fire from the Secret Service, the FBI, and local law enforcement agencies who recognize the vulnerability of the digital infrastructure. As with other sections of society, this loose youth movement will likely polarize. Generally missing from their discussions is an overall understanding of the historical significance of their activity. Although implicitly communist in their outlook, unless this impulse is nurtured and cultivated through discussion and education, it will wither, be bought out, or pervert into a fascist impulse. Important opportunities exist for linking up the hackers movement with other currents of the youth movement -- the truce movement, the new student move "Break the Blackout" movement, the anti-censorship movement.

Opportunities: Popular Convergence and the NII

At the same time that once-distinct capitalist markets are merged, the various popular organizations that addressed individual arenas around media access, education, artists' rights, and labor issues in the various computer, communications and artistic spheres are also thrown into working together. Organizations that fought for a vital public library system or that fought for public access to local cable television systems or that represented culture workers in film, music, writing etc. have a new, practical basis for working together with each other and with new groupings like the community networking movement. This has taken a concrete expression in coalitions like the Telecommunications Policy Roundtable, probably the largest of these efforts on a national level. Organizations as diverse as the American Library Association, the Consumer Federation of America, the Communications Workers of America and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, along with an other 100 or so organizations they are on the some battlefield in the struggle for equitable access to work, information and audience. Coalitions like this are replicated on the local level, for example, in Chicago in the recent formation of the Chicago Coalition for Information Access.

The breadth of organizations that have stepped forward to advance a progressive position on the NII affirms the broad nature of the struggle for democracy in culture -- culture in its grandest sense -- that the battle around the NII represents. Missing from most of the debate around the NII, though, is a broader context for understanding the relationship of the technology revolution to the global economic and social crisis.

The general tendency in the current discussion is to begin from the point of view of those already able to afford access to information, the upper strata of the working class that is afraid of being shut out of the developing process. Largely ignored in the debate is the growing section of the population that has no financial means, often no educational means, and no social means (housing, food, health care, etc.) to use the NII as it is envisioned. It is important that this survival movement (the movement for shelter, welfare rights, health care, etc.) take up the call for access to culture and knowledge, and that those with the skills and access encourage and defend their participation. The general struggle around the NII will be to define "universal access" in the broadest, most democratic way possible -- access to knowledge, access to culture, access to technology, access to skills, access to audience, access to democracy, access to a future worth living in. What this means in terms needs to be worked out.

Opportunities: "Intellectual Property"

Companies attempting to claim "intellectual property" rights are in a position analogous to the landlords attempting to enclose common pasturage in the 17th and 18th centuries. The property less class generally sees no problem with copying videos, computer software, music, magazine articles, etc. for friends. As in the period of the land enclosures, capitalists must force a new understanding of "property" and "property rights" onto people, through propaganda campaigns like the SPA's "Don't Copy That Floppy"; the force of the police; and international trading sanctions.

Within the science and high tech sectors, the private, capitalist appropriation of technology for the purpose of amassing profit stands in stark contradiction with its possible benefits. Battles have emerged, and will intensify over patents and copyrights. In the international arena, the fight over patenting of plant life has important consequences for developing countries, by forcing a new kind of dependency on the U.S. This struggle will be especially sharp over the patenting and private ownership of human genes, which is particularly significant because of its impact on the larger question of private ownership of life forms.

In this battle, we have a class culture of sharing on our side, which the information capitalists must attempt to dismantle. In this battle, the capitalists present a weak flank -- the conflict between property relations and productive forces stand in stark contrast. On the other hand, the battle is certainly not won, and the information capitalists have organization, money and the state on their side. Organizations like the League for Programming Freedom and organizations of geneticists and other scientists are raising the issues, but the fight needs to be broadened and deepened.

Articulating a Vision

The Industrial Revolution represented a process in which commodity production was uncoupled from the limitations of individual human muscle power and manipulative skill. Machinery was developed which harnessed and integrated the manipulative and muscle power of individuals to much greater power sources: water power and steam engines, and later, internal combustion engines and the electric dynamo.

The current electronic revolution represents a process in which the intelligence and knowledge of the individual is appropriated and incorporated directly into the production machinery. Under capitalism it displaces the worker and the worker's skill. However, the electronics revolution also represents the collection, summation and integration of the intelligence of individuals and groups into a higher form of knowledge. This knowledge potentially then becomes available to all members of society.

To our colleagues and fellow workers, we must articulate the simple truth that capitalism stands in the way of social progress. We must be clear in communicating that whatever moral or humanitarian impulse led a scientist or engineer or technician into this particular field is being blocked and stifled by the private appropriation of social wealth.

We also need to articulate a vision of what this society could be, to provide a rallying point for the forces of change. In a reorganized society, for example, the enormous potential of biotechnology to identify the causes of disease -- rather than to provide therapeutics to alleviate symptoms, or to condemn individuals before they are even born -- could be unleashed. The sharply increased production capacity is sufficient to provide sophisticated goods to all members of society. The new information networks have the potential to make the total of human knowledge accessible to all of society. High tech workers -- scientists, engineers, researchers, technicians, etc. -- those of us who design, use and understand the potential of the new technologies must help give shape to the vision.

We welcome your comments, and invite you to join with us in carrying out the work before us.

The High Tech Committee of the National Organizing Committee may be reached by writing PO Box 477113, Chicago, IL 60647, or sending email to jdav@igc.apc.org. We welcome questions, suggestions, and critiques.

FOOTNOTES

1. CPU: Working in the Computer Industry #005. CPSR Working in the Computer Industry Working Group. Figures are from the American Electronics Association, in the 1993 Computer Industry Almanac

2. "Standard greeting and charter." Coalition for Visa Reform.

3. CPU: Working in the Computer Industry #004.

4. CPU: Working in the Computer Industry #011.

5. "Jobs at Risk" IEEE Spectrum. August 1993.

6. The biotechnology industry represents another face of the technological revolution. Its direct impact on employment and the economy is much smaller than electronics, with less than 200,000 (mostly scientific) workers nationwide. More work needs to be done on employment trends in this sector of high-tech.

7. This "digital advantage" may be the material basis for the radically different features of the so-called "information economy", rather than some essential character of "information" or "knowledge" as has been advanced elsewhere. For a deeper critique of "information exceptionalism", see Dan Schiller's "From Culture to Information and Back Again: Commoditization as a Route to Knowledge." Critical Studies in Mass Communication. March, 1994.

8. "The revolution in the modes of production of industry and agriculture made necessary a revolution in the general conditions of the social process of production, i.e., in the means of communication and transport." (Marx, Capital)

9. Davis and Stack, "Knowledge in Production", Proletariat. 1992.

10. Census Bureau, Current Population Report, 1994.

11. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, quoted in Beyond the Casino Economy. Verso, 1989.

12. Census Bureau.

9/26/94