> What are you, some kind of peace nazi?
Chris Clarke <cclarke at faultline.org>...Opposing breaking windows means I'm a Nazi. Not bad. Burson Marsteller...
http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/0003/0572.html Burson Marsteller report on anti-corporate activists Unabomber suspect goes to court via video ... published in The New York Times on April 26, 1995, the Unabomber wrote that "we blew up Thomas Mosser" because he was an executive with Burson-Marsteller. ... http://www.usatoday.com/news/index/una76.htm Tim Luke, "Re-Reading the Unabomber Manifesto." Telos, 107 (Spring 1996), 85-108. RE-READING THE UNABOMBER MANIFESTO
To the extent that the now infamous manifesto, "Industrial Society and Its Future," covers cultural,
economic and political issues Telos has addressed for over a quarter century, the odd story of Ted Kaczynski and the particularities of his strategic bombing campaign against "the system" warrants reexamination.[1] Unabombs killed three and wounded twenty-three others in a string of sixteen bombings from 1978 to 1995. Many of the victims, however, were individuals not usually associated with targets of terrorist activities: comparatively poor, obscure, or powerless academics whom the Unabomber saw as the key personnel supporting the operators of "the system."
Immediately following Kaczynski's arrest, Newsweek pointed out his "essentially "left-wing orientation"[2] and placed him in a line of famous American odd-balls who, beginning with Thoreau, often take up "a grubby, lonely existence in one of the most rugged regions of the North American outback." In the case of the Unabomber, this pattern of life suggests such a profound alienation that "it makes Thoreau, with his two-year sabbatical at Walden Pond, look like a social butterfly."[3] Kirkpatrick Sale, by contrast, saw the Unabomber's activities as those of "a rational and serious man, deeply committed to his cause, who has given a great deal of thought to his work and a great deal of time to his expression of it."[4] And, of course, analyses indulging in psycho-babble were not lacking. Thus, Maggie Scharf claimed that "the diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder seems to be the most illuminating explanation of the Unabomber's seemingly incomprehensible behavior." Allegedly, Kaczynsky is "deeply injured at the core and suffering from sorely depleted supplies to self-esteem ... with a sense of inner emptiness and painful feelings of unworthiness, despair and desolation."[5] Whether or not Kaczynski is mad or reasonable, narcissistic or selfless, evil or virtuous is not particularly interesting. More relevant are the relations between Kaczynski's life, his reputed manifesto, and the whole cultural context from which they emerged.
While the Unabomber manifesto is a flawed document, crudely reducing a complex society to "the system," it contains interesting insights. There are no signs that the Unabomber followed any of the Telos debates over the years, or pitched his arguments to today's burgeoning populist movements. A quick survey of the footnotes suggests that its author did not have access to materials much more sophisticated than what one might find in second-hand book shops or a public library in small western towns. Not unlike Paul and Percival Goodman's Communitas and their analysis of how "the means of livelihood" structure "ways of life," the Unabomber's violent destruction of those "man- made things" of "engineering and architecture" that are "the heaviest and biggest part of what we experience"[6] indicates that he recognizes how freedom is constrained by the categorical imperatives embedded in ordinary things.
Written in a disorganized series of short numbered paragraphs and running some 35,000 words in length, the Unabomber's manifesto begins with radical sentiments that many have shared for nearly 200 years: "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race," inasmuch as what is identified as the workings of "the industrial system" have "destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world" (paragraph1).[7] The essay outlines a vision of "what must be done," allegedly from the perspective of a burnt-out ex-academic living in Montana's backwoods. Because of this predicament, the bombings became a ploy to capture public attention.[8] But how lasting was this impression? The Unabomber killed 3 people in the course of 17 years, and the message in his manifesto was mostly tossed away with the rest of the September 19, 1995 newspaper.
The Unabomber concedes that the manifesto is not comprehensive: it examines "only some of the negative developments that have grown out of the industrial system" -- particularly those that "have received insufficient public attention or in which we have something new to say" (paragraph5). What he believes has received inadequate attention, or to be "new," are attempts to register how and why technology as "a means of livelihood" deprives people of their dignity and autonomy, while imposing a sense of inferiority and powerlessness. While this may be dismissed as another exercise in red- green confusion along the lines of Sale's "New Luddites,"[9] there is more here than this superficial critique lets on.[10] The Unabomber's belief that technology increases life-expectancy and everyday ease as it decreases life-enjoyment and freedom parallels Marcuse's reading of technology.[11]
What has garnered too little attention is the deadening impact of capital, research, and technology in market-mediated choices -- how an allegedly emancipatory technology can, even within capitalist liberal-democratic regimes, result in a rational totalitarian order. The Unabomber approaches this question in several ways, but the concept of "oversocialization" captures much of his distaste. He sees human dignity and freedom bleeding away into pre-processed modes of subjectivity: "We are socialized to conform to many norms of behavior that do not fall under the headings of morality. Thus the oversocialized person is kept on a psychological leash and spends his life running on rails that society has laid down for him. In many over socialized people this results in a sense of constraint and powerlessness that can be a severe hardship" (paragraph26). Ironically, he sees this condition afflicting leftists even more acutely than most people, because the prevailing blocs of power and wealth limit modem leftism mostly to acting out its resistance as artificial negativity with no relation to actual revolution (paragraph26-30).[12]
To compensate for lost power, the system not only provides for but also endorses "surrogate activities" that industrial peoples "set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward ... for the sake of the 'fulfillment' that they get from pursuing the goal" (paragraph39). Because "only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one's physical needs," (paragraph39) most of what preoccupies anyone is a surrogate: art, science, athletics, literature as well as acquiring money, participation in corporatism, engaging in social activism, and pursuing celebrity. These surrogates are are "less satisfying than the pursuit of real goals ... one indication of this is the fact that, in many or most cases, people who are deeply involved in surrogate activities are never satisfied, never at rest" (paragraph41). The Unabomber states that "the effort needed to satisfy biological needs does not occur AUTONOMOUSLY, but by functioning as parts of an immense social machine" (paragraph41). When meeting real needs takes only trivial effort, and satisfying surrogate desires is given such latitude, the stage is set for individual marginalization on many interrelated levels. Thus a very fine line divides "Sensible Sam the Smart Consumer" from "Crazy Kaczynski the Alleged Founder of the Freedom Club."
The Unabomber's interpretation again parallels Marcuse's account of technology as "instruments of social and political control," because all individuals' sense of their current needs takes place through the scientific organization of labor and leisure, "which operate beyond and outside the work process and condition the individuals in accord with the dominant social interests."[13] Autonomy under these conditions is difficult to attain because the individual's power is preempted by the highly rationalized social regime, which also, in turn, redefines rationality to suit the profit targets of its "merchants of desire."[14] As Marcuse notes, "the apparatus to which the individual is to adjust and adapt himself is so rational that individual protests and liberation appear not only hopeless but as utterly irrational. The system of life created by modem industry is defined in terms of expediency, convenience and efficiency. ... Rational behavior becomes identical with a matter-of- factness which teaches reasonable submissiveness and thus guarantees getting along with the prevailing order."[15]
Even though his resistance was futile, and perhaps irrational, Kaczynski acted against expediency, convenience, and efficiency in a life that would seem sociopathic even before he was indicted as the Unabomber. To live normally for him would have further interdicted his already tenuous freedom. As he emphasizes, this question of autonomy is decisive: "For most people it is through the power process -- having a goal, making an AUTONOMOUS effort and attaining the goal -- that self- esteem, self- confidence and a sense of power are acquired" (paragraph44). Industrial society destroys these conditions for autonomous action by embedding people in weak, unfree roles in every amorphous aspect of market-mediated social reproduction. This is why this system is in crisis and has to be destroyed by a popular revolution: "when one does not have adequate opportunity to go through the power process the consequences are (depending on the individual and on the way the power process is disrupted) boredom, demoralization, low self-esteem, inferiority feelings, defeatism, depression, anxiety, guilt, frustration, hostility, spouse or child abuse, insatiable hedonism, abnormal sexual behavior, sleep disorders, eating disorders, etc." (paragraph44).
To crush the regime of oversocialization and revitalize the power process, the Unabomber touts the merits of violent revolt, which are seemingly assumed to work as billed. His obviously poor sense of unintended consequences, however, pops up in this celebration of revolution, which must be "immediate" (paragraph166), "total" (paragraph179), "ecocentric" (paragraph183), "technoscientific" (paragraph193), "global" (paragraph195), and "communitarian" (paragraph199). The preservation of wild nature and individual autonomy depend on dismantling "the system." Yet, with complete naivete, he somehow believes that his revolutionary program is antithetical to the visions of the future espoused by those technocrats, leftists or politicians who keep the present system running so smoothly. In positing that "the single overriding goal must be the elimination of modem technology, and that no other goal [social justice, material equality, popular participation] can be allowed to compete with this one" (paragraph205), he argues everything else should be examined through an open-ended "empirical approach" (paragraph206). Not seeing how his revolutionary analysis mimics the industrial system's elitist managerialism, the Unabomber merely reasserts the enlightened self- empowerment co- opted by the captains of industry, inventors of tomorrow, or scions of commerce. In accord with the Enlightenment schema, he asserts "history is made by active, determined minorities, not by the majority, which seldom has a clear and consistent idea of what it really wants" (paragraph189). Therefore, the coming revolution will follow an ideology written in two versions: one "more sophisticated should address itself to people who are intelligent, thoughtful and rational" (paragraph187), the other "should be propagated in a simplified form that will enable the unthinking majority to see the conflict of technology vs. nature in unambiguous terms" (paragraph188).
The revolutionaries of the Unabomber's Freedom Club must follow the classic Bolshevik strategy of energizing committed radicals and sensitizing the uninformed masses to ready themselves to coproduce their inevitable future under a visionary vanguard's lead: "until the time comes for the final push toward revolution, the task of revolutionaries will be less to win the shallow support of the majority than to build a small core of deeply committed people. As for the majority, it will be enough to make them aware of the existence of the new ideology and remind them of it frequently; though of course it will be desirable to get majority support to the extent that this can be done without weakening the core of seriously committed people" (paragraph189). This peculiar vision of the transition is decisively negative: "we have no illusions about the feasibility of creating a new, ideal form of society. Our goal is only to destroy the existing form of society" (paragraph182). The possibility that there are such big majorities of people to mobilize only because of how technological society works seems to elude the Unabomber's allegedly intelligent, thoughtful, rational elite.
Of course, Kaczynski does not buy into the redistributive millenarianism of 19th century socialism. He warns against "leftists of the most power-hungry type" (paragraph217), because ultimately "leftism is a totalitarian force" (paragraph219) "characterized by arrogance or a dogmatic approach to ideology" (paragraph230). Therefore, social justice as a revolutionary goal is forbidden because it tends to attract leftist do-gooders with power-hungry arrogance. It would compel revolutionaries to preserve large-scale, organization-dependent technology, and would dilute the ecocentric focus of the revolution. In short, "it must not be allowed to interfere with the effort to get rid of the technological system" (paragraph201). Despite efforts to anticipate the possible consequences of mounting a revolution whose "focus will be on technology and economics, not politics" (paragraph193), there are no guarantees that this blow against technological progress would not self-destruct. In many ways, the Unabomber only seems committed to replacing technocratic new class managers with small groups of green leaders, who would rule by wise ecological fiat. What guarantees are there in his designs that anti-systemic ecological technophobes, like the industrial system's technocrats, would not lead "all on an utterly reckless ride into the unknown" (paragraph180)?
The Unabomber embeds his critique in a fateful choice between two kinds of technology: "Small- scale technology and organization-dependent technology" (paragraph208). Pursuing a line of attack that basically concludes by celebrating the collapse of Rome and the rise of medieval feudalism, he observes that the Roman empire's organization-dependent technology (roads, aqueducts, urban sanitation, large buildings) did regress as the empire collapsed, while its small- scale technology survived in many households and villages. Since "small-scale technology is technology that can be used by small-scale communities without outside assistance" (paragraph208), it must play a major role in any post-revolutionary scenario. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, "primitive INDIVIDUALS and SMALL GROUPS actually had considerable power over nature; or maybe it would be better to say power WITHIN nature" (paragraph198). Therefore, "one should argue that the power of the INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM should be broken, and that this will INCREASE the power and freedom of INDIVIDUALS and SMALL GROUPS" (paragraph199).
Following the Goodmans, Marcuse, or Mumford, the nub of the Unabomber's protest is found in these questions: how does complex technology, defined as large-scale or organization-dependent, determine life by eliminating freedom and substituting empty surrogate activities for personal power? What must be done to escape the destructive consequences -- on an individual, social or global level -- of this industrial system? The destruction of the system depends on the disruption of the system's propagation of empty surrogates or false needs. If the mechanisms of such organizational dependence could be broken down by violent revolution, terrorism, or popular disinterest, then the networks needed for operating them "would quickly be lost" (paragraph210). As the Unabomber articulates this possibility, he anticipates the necessary advent of a new "dark age," arguing that: "once this technology had been lost for a generation or so it would take centuries to rebuild it, just as it took centuries to build it the first time around. Surviving technical books would be few and scattered. As industrial society, if built from scratch, without outside help, can only be built in a series of stages. You need tools to make tools. ... A long process of economic development and progress in social organization is required. And, even in the absence of an ideology opposed to technology, there is no reason to believe that anyone would be interested in rebuilding industrial society" (paragraph210).
Organization is where power actually ebbs and flows rather than in technology or the state or any individual alone. According to the Unabomber, all people need power; it is what defines autonomous human beings. However, the industrial revolution was about the concentration of power in abstract social machines. As a result, these industrial megamachines are where power for a few persists as powerlessness for everyone else. "Modern man as a collective entity, that is -- the industrial system -- has immense power over nature" (paragraph197). But, even more evil is the fact that "modem INDIVIDUALS AND SMALL GROUPS OF INDIVIDUALS have far less power than primitive man ever did," because "the vast power of 'modern man' over nature is exercised not by individuals or small groups but by large organizations" (paragraph197). For an individual to wield the power of technology, it occurs only "under the supervision and control of the system" as "you need a license for everything and with the license come rules and regulations," so the individual has only "the technological powers with which the system chooses to provide him" (paragraph198).
Here too is the source of an intriguing level of operational survivability in organization-dependent technology; its codes of authority, legitimacy or use are embedded in the artifacts needed for its application. Consequently, the Unabomber is unequivocal about his immediate revolutionary program: "Until the industrial system has been thoroughly wrecked, the destruction of that system must be the revolutionaries' ONLY goal ... if the revolutionaries permit themselves to have any other goal than the destruction of technology, they will be tempted to use technology as a tool for reaching that other goal. If they give in to that temptation, they will fall right back into the technological trap, because modern technology is a unified, tightly organized system, so that in order to retain SOME technology, one finds oneself obliged to retain MOST technology, here one ends up sacrificing only token amounts of technology ... never forget that the human race with technology is like an alcoholic with a barrel of wine" (paragraph200, 203). Fortunately for the Freedom Club, this tendency toward breakdown is already occurring on a global scale due to the excesses and inherent flaws in the large- scale disorder of organization-dependent industrial systems. When all is said and done, "the industrial system will not break down purely as a result of revolutionary action," because its vulnerabilities are a product of the regime evolving such that "it is already in enough trouble so that there would be a good chance of its eventually breaking down by itself anyway" (paragraph167).
Beyond the more obvious difficulties of constructing an anti-technological revolution, the Unabomber employs a simplistic construction of "nature" as the fount of indisputable objective reason that revolutionists should contrapose to the sullied irrationalities of technology. While his references suggest he has not perused the works of Arne Naess, Bill Derail or George Sessions, this reading of "nature" is straight out of deep ecology. With no sense of irony, the Unabomber asserts that "the positive ideal that we propose is Nature" (paragraph183), and "it is not necessary for the sake of nature to set up some chimerical utopia or any new kind of social order" (paragraph184). This might be true, but could not nature itself, particularly when constructed along such deep ecological lines, become a new kind of social order for some chimerical utopia?
The Unabomber's categories of nature basically play ineffectually with Lukacs' two senses of nature. [16] "First nature," or "WILD nature; those aspects of the functioning of the Earth and its living things that are independent of human management and free of human interference and control" (paragraph183), is set up against technology as "second nature," or "an immense social machine" (paragraph41) composed of "technology that depends on large-scale social organization" (paragraph208). Human nature is the battleground between first and second nature, because "with wild nature we include human nature, by which we mean those aspects of the functioning of the human individual that are not subject to regulation by organized society but are products of chance, or free will, or God" (paragraph183). Destroy second nature, and first nature will be redeemed and reclaimed, allowing human nature to flourish amidst its tests of authentic power processes in the wild, not with artificial surrogate activities. In addition to healing the scars left on nature by the industrial revolution, "getting rid of industrial society will accomplish a great deal ... it will remove the capacity of organized society to keep increasing its control over nature (including human nature) ... it is certain most people will live close to nature, because in the absence of advanced technology there is no other way that people can live. To feed themselves they must be peasants or herdsmen or fishermen or hunters, etc. ... local autonomy should tend to increase, because lack of advanced technology and rapid communications will limit the capacity of governments or other large organizations to control local communities" (paragraph184).
These radical interpretations of nature, however, are no less artificial or no more certain than the positive ideologies of technology the Unabomber opposes.[17] Instead, he simply conventionalizes a series of fashionable ecocentric assumptions about nature, and transforms them into constant timeless troths, like so many others who naively sign on to the good ship "deep ecology" without thinking about where its admirals might sail them. On this account, Klein's dismissal of the Unabomber for his "essential left-wing orientation" is laughable.[18] The Unabomber's contempt for modern leftism seconds deep ecology's criticisms of modem socialism's trust in big science, complex technology, and vast organizations to create limitless material abundance. Nonetheless, his commitment to "wild nature" does not lead all the way into a biocentric Gaia worship; indeed, he razzes such ecospiritualist devotions as frivolous play-acting, even though he admits that nature often inspires quasi-religious reverence. <snip> Michael Pugliese