WI: The Technocracy Movement Succeeds

WI: The Technocracy Movement Takes Power

Has anyone ever done anything with the Technocracy Movement in the US?

(Short version: advocated a planned economy a la the Soviet Union, but saw engineers and professionals as the leaders and precipitating agents of the new society rather than the proletariat. They were quite elitist, and the role of the laboring class was to do what it was told; they saw the military as a model for how to organize society. The new society would come about when the "Price System" collapsed of its own accord, which they thought was imminent; the technocrats would pick up the pieces after the collapse. Had a brief burst of public interest in 1932-33 before slowly fading away - their actual membership probably peaked around 1938, but they never again recovered the public spotlight.)

I was thinking something like, Howard Scott doesn't bungle his big speech in 1933, and secures a wealthy patron for the nascent movement. FDR is assassinated and the economy keeps getting worse, with no hope in sight; maybe there's even a failed insurrection by communists. Technocracy, Inc., keeps growing, and eventually political and business elites turn to the technocrats as preferable to the Reds, in a successful version of the Business Plot. Thoughts?

If you believed liberal ideologues like Berle or Galbraith in the 30s and 40s and into the 60s, we in effect had Technocracy via the New Deal and the dynamics of corporations as these liberal champions understood them.

That is, they argued that effective control of policy-making in corporations had shifted from the Board of Directors and stockholders generally (ie, the people either old-fashioned champions of capitalism or its Marxist enemies assumed would have the last word, as owners) to the management, which said these New Deal liberals, actually had interests divergent from maximizing profits as such. It isn't clear to me if they had such faith in the convergence of the managerial interests with the legitimate, "technocratic" interests of the masses that one could simply rely on big corporate management to do the right things in its own enlightened self-interest, or whether they believed these entities needed some check in the form of democratically controlled regulatory bodies and labor unions. But in the latter case they certainly believed that, faced with a demonstration of will on the part of the non-managers to assert their basic interests, that the managerial class would quickly and easily come up with mutually agreeable accommodations the bureaucrats and labor movement leaders would recognize as good and fair, and so they'd get along amicably.

Under, essentially speaking, the leadership and guidance of a managerial corporate elite that corresponded rather closely in role to the best conceivable version of Leninist type command-economy planning elites.

In short, the legal owners of capital would remain quiescent and content; the working masses would recognize that their affairs were being taken care of fairly and considerately by people much more educated and sophisticated then them.

Now against this, you had of course right-wing criticism that suggested that the grindstone of profit-maximization was absolutely essential to any good result and such a liberal utopia was both impossible and would be "The Road to Serfdom" if it somehow came to pass. And on the left, Marxists and various kinds of neo-Marxists reiterated their claims that actually, wealth and profit-maximization as such had managed to keep the whip hand just fine and from another angle, the New Deal ideologues were living in a fool's paradise, while conflicts of interest between the owning classes (with the managers as their loyal agents) and the working ones would continue to remain severe and resolved against the interest of the majority, as long as the latter failed to organize to overthrow the capitalist order completely.

The notion that American liberal society had stumbled upon the happy medium that would be well characterized as "Technocracy with a human face" seemed appealing enough though, until the economic meltdowns of the late '60s and early '70s made a mockery of the prevailing "Keynesian" consensus.

Technocracy- Ordoliberalism w/o liberalism

Technocracy- rule by people with some idea what they're doing.

The folks that operate best in current status quo do their best to minimize political, fiscal, and legal liabilities and have done extremely well.
That doesn't mean they've done the most overall good.
Overall good's a woolly concept I admit. IMO, that means doing what consistently benefits the most people.

As a socialist, that means people shouldn't have to sweat the basics- a decent place to live, clean water, reasonably safe food, preventive health care, and education that empowers folks to be citizens, not just passive consumers.

Your libertarian capitalists would argue maximizing freedom of choice with as few government thumbs on the scales as possible gives everyone the best chance to make the best of things.

At the base of it, best for what kind of people?

If the great majority of people are a bunch of apathetic or disenfranchised lumps- technocrats get the freedom to do whatever they without fear of accountability.

If people are educated, involved citizens who get nasty about the slightest hint of chicanery on the technocrats' part, that keeps a balance, but it's difficult to maintain vigilance.

Your average person sweats staying employed and having a decent lifestyle that's ever-tougher to maintain with lousy wage and bennies' growth. That goes for white-collar cube serfs as well as blue-collar types.
Job security's an oxymoron for anyone in public or private sector jobs.

If you're always having to hustle to stay economically competitive- you don't have the time or energy to hold the commercial or political technocrats' feet to the fire. Family life's suffered. Communities fall apart when everyone's worried about just paddling their own canoe.

You could point to Singapore, Germany, Korea, and Japan or other technocratic economic success stories based on a social consensus about how things are going to run, trusting the engineers, managers, and economists to have picked the right priorities and means to achieve them, and make adjustments when the assumptions of making more, better, cheaper don't automatically mean prosperity.

America's gotten too in love with our military-industrial complex that's become a white elephant sucking too much resources to justify the expenses.
Is that a technocratic failure? Technocrats sadly tend to make whatever has been decided by the political/corporate elite "work".

I'd argue the technocratic movement has been a roaring economic success.
Its social costs are both tangible (pollution, family disruption, income inequality) and intangible. There's good and bad to every decision- you gotta ask is it worth it?

Shevek23 said:

If you believed liberal ideologues like Berle or Galbraith in the 30s and 40s and into the 60s, we in effect had Technocracy via the New Deal and the dynamics of corporations as these liberal champions understood them.

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That's a lot of why Technocracy, Inc., never caught on IOTL - the New Deal stole their thunder, and the sane half of the movement split off to become the Continental Committee and then the Technodemocrats, and then got absorbed into mainstream politics.

TxCoatl1970 said:

I'd argue the technocratic movement has been a roaring economic success.
Its social costs are both tangible (pollution, family disruption, income inequality) and intangible. There's good and bad to every decision- you gotta ask is it worth it?

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Howard Scott's Technocracy, Inc. didn't look much like the "technocrats" of today. They were a lot weirder.

The Technocrats were a revolutionary movement, and more than a little fascist, including matching uniforms (red and gray double-breasted suits). They could perhaps be described as communists without the class warfare rhetoric, or fascists with a thing for engineers instead of soldiers.

They were outspokenly, openly elitist, and a lot of their literature hinted at an ultimate coup d'etat to bring them to power - the "Price System" would fall apart, and they needed to have cadres of trained personnel in key positions to keep things operating when the time came. A government of Technocracy, Inc., would look more like a dieselpunk Soviet Union than any version of modern capitalism, although with a lot more of the pre-revolutionary elite brought into the power structure, and hopefully none of the mass murder (impossible to say since they never gained power). They spent the last of their influence IOTL advocating "Total Conscription" in WW2 - essentially, drafting EVERYONE, and running the entire country like the military.

Their big advantage, tactically speaking, is that they were a genuine home-grown political movement offering "solutions" to the economic crisis, a movement that didn't necessarily want to smash all the existing power structure. If you squint hard enough, a businessman or politician could be classified as a "social engineer," and brought into the organization in that capacity. If it had grown into a larger movement, it could have offered elites fearing the Left (or the Right) a revolution they think they can control.

Their big disadvantage, tactically speaking, is that they didn't have much to offer the common man over the communists. His role, in their view, was to do what he was told and like it, and in exchange they'd give him a job and, eventually, an automated technotopia. The communists offered that AND a starring role as the Proletariat, Makers of the Revolution, etc.

A Technocratic revolution would probably take the form of the president appointing Howard Scott Director of Everything under quiet duress, rather than mobs or soldiers marching through the streets. Where it ends, I don't know, but I doubt anywhere good.

***bump***

Isn't the criterium—rule by professionals—exactly what happened in the Soviet Union? The fact that this society had a masque of pro-proletarian ideology doesn't change the actual nature of social being. </leftistsectarianism>

The US Technocracy movement has some real problems. The fundamentally democratising and commodifying nature of Enlightenment capitalism means that there is little place for non-owners to assert that they best manage production. More, Technocracy didn't offer a coherent ideology that could
a) Drive a mass movement of mobilised workers acting in their own interest
b) Appeal to the existing demobilised mass of working class voters (Compare to the platforms put by Democrats and Republicans in the same period that did appeal, strongly, to demobilised workers)
c) Hijack a mass movement of self-interested workers

Technocracy, lacking parliamentary or revolutionary skills, withered.

The Galbraith suggestion is interesting, but is better put as a counterfactual to the Soviet Union. If the Soviet Union was a society where the nomenklatura as specialists and bureaucrats replaced the bourgeoisie, abrogating to itself the rights to extract surplus; then, in the West during Fordism, the specialists and bureaucrats came to an accommodation with the bourgeoisie where specialists would have more management power and better remuneration but would not directly challenge the ownership of capital.

yours,
Sam R.

Does technocracy really have much in common with ordoliberalism? Plenty of other economic types involve planning besides it.

The Technocracy Movement and Technocracy Inc. never really failed, sure they didn't install the Technate...yet, or gained ginormous popularity and understanding they where hoping for. I myself am a classic Technocrat, I don't dress in a grey suit all the time but I still stand by the ideas that Howard Scott and M.King Hubbert founded. For anyone who might be ignorate of Technocracy or would like to know the "real" ideas and structure read the Technocracy Study Course for yourself...don't gather information from conventional sources like Wikipedia, for one it's not accurate or complete on the topic. With that said, keep a open mind about Technocracy it is NOT related to any other ideology or group besides it's predecessor "Technical Alliance". It's possibly the first real American ideology.

Here is a link to a online version of the Study Course, http://www.archive.org/details/TechnocracyStudyCourseUnabridged
I hope reading this will clarify a few misconceptions with Technocracy.

Anyways, if the Technocracy Movement did succeed and North America was organized into The North American Technate. Life would probably be a little more peachier then now.

Krkrbs420 said:

The Technocracy Movement and Technocracy Inc. never really failed, sure they didn't install the Technate...yet, or gained ginormous popularity and understanding they where hoping for. I myself am a classic Technocrat, I don't dress in a grey suit all the time but I still stand by the ideas that Howard Scott and M.King Hubbert founded. For anyone who might be ignorate of Technocracy or would like to know the "real" ideas and structure read the Technocracy Study Course for yourself...don't gather information from conventional sources like Wikipedia, for one it's not accurate or complete on the topic. With that said, keep a open mind about Technocracy it is NOT related to any other ideology or group besides it's predecessor "Technical Alliance". It's possibly the first real American ideology.

Here is a link to a online version of the Study Course, http://www.archive.org/details/TechnocracyStudyCourseUnabridged
I hope reading this will clarify a few misconceptions with Technocracy.

Anyways, if the Technocracy Movement did succeed and North America was organized into The North American Technate. Life would probably be a little more peachier then now.

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Well, this is interesting. I knew the movement still existed, but never expected to actually encounter a real-life Technocrat.

FWIW, I have skimmed (very lightly) the EOS wiki and the technocracy website, and was mostly positively impressed with what I saw. But I also came away thinking that this is a very, very different movement from the Technocracy of the 30s. Let me give a few quotes - these are taken from The Technocrats, 1919 - 1967: A Case Study of Conflict and Change in a Social Movement, which was the only third-party academic citation from wikipedia I found online:

Technocracy Digest said:

"Genius is a rare biological occurrence. The behaviour of the majority of the 165,000,000 people on this continent indicates a capacity but little about the moron level. Three percent or roughly about five million of them have a sufficiently well developed cerebral cortex, the activity and past training to become Technocrats, The balance are never expected to understand it, participate in it, or supply the requisite leadership to effect the greatest social transition in all history."

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The total conscription program is described as:

1. Conscription of all citizens between the ages of 18 and 65.
2. The nationalization of all business and industry and correspondingly the "suspension of profits".
3. The centralization of both economic and political (including military) power. That is, all state, county, and local governments to be eliminated.
4. All foreign language communication media and organizations to be suppressed.
5. All liquor outlets to be closed.

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(That's from the author, not a technocracy document.) And, after the war:

Total Conscription! Your Questions Answered said:

The men who do the fighting are in the national service now and Technocracy contends that such national service must become the permanent national duty of all North America.

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That's just a sampling. I have sympathy for the idea of applying the scientific and technological methods to improving the operation of society. And certainly what I saw of the website today laid stress on technocracy as, at least, democratically enabled. And perhaps I have been wildly misled about the actual program of Technocracy, Inc. But I hope you can see why I might compare the movement of the 30s and 40s to fascism and communism. In any event, I'll at least take a look at the study course.

Thanks, if you are interested in any further information take a look at "A Program" by William Knight...http://www.archive.org/details/AProgram-WilliamKnight?mid=53

If you might want any more information or just wanting to meet more actual Technocrats, and have a Facebook account feel free to look at this group! https://www.facebook.com/groups/2205039391/?ref=notif¬if_t=group_activity

Oh yes, for future reference EOS is different from the original version of Technocracy Inc. That may be what you where seeing there.
Okay, enough Web-links for me today haha.

Asnys said:

Well, this is interesting. I knew the movement still existed, but never expected to actually encounter a real-life Technocrat.

But I hope you can see why I might compare the movement of the 30s and 40s to fascism and communism. In any event, I'll at least take a look at the study course.

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Its not a good idea to get your information from Wikipedia. Many do not know that it is a contrived project and is not reputable or reliable as an information source Who Controls Wikipedia? Price System analysis. : TechnocracyTechnate.org : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

Technocracy and the technate design is not even remotely connected to communism and was never connected to fascism. If anything it could be a science based secular human ... organization that came up with the ideas of a non market system using energy accounting as a right of citizenship.

Here is something that may explain more of what this subject actually is Who_Is_A_Technocrat_Wilton_Ivie.

Here also is a site with accurate information YouTube - Part 1. The North American Technate TNAT Technocracy

We are no longer a social movement. Social movements have bad connotations these days. Technocrats have never rioted... we just plant some flowers along the road and hope that someone comes by to pick them.
Ciao