A-Infos (en) Bulgaria, F.A.B.: SINGULARITY part 1 - Ideas that are close to us -- The scariest technologies of today and how humanity reaches them. (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Alexander Shubin: The path of informality (instead of the proletariat) ---- The 
whole history of mankind is a struggle for the germination of human creativity in 
society, it is the path to overcome successive systems of oppression, reification 
(the process during which an abstract idea about a computer application can be 
converted to an object or explicit data model), human instrumentation. The result 
of this process of overcoming can be a truly humane society centered on 
cooperation and creativity rather than domination and oppression.
By creating a human culture capable, in principle, of giving man true freedom 
based on humanity and solidarity, civilization simultaneously enslaved people. 
The confrontation between man and his environment, the lagging behind the 
capabilities of society from the needs of man, the slow development of the 
creative abilities of most people, the lagging behind the advanced achievements 
of the human spirit - all this led to the hierarchy of society, the 
transformation of the majority of people into an instrument of the will of the 
minority, in an element of the "human machine". The dominance of this minority 
was reinforced by organized state violence. The oppressed responded with 
rebellion and self-organization, with a desire for social creativity.

The Road Traveled: Traditional and Industrial Societies
Man's liberation from the shackles of oppression and despotic traits of his own 
culture cannot happen overnight. Humanity is an inertial system that passes 
through certain stages in its development, each of which provides its own 
opportunities for humanity, solidarity and freedom on the one hand and violence, 
oppression and domination on the other.

In order to build a thorough forecast for the development of humanity in the long 
term, it is necessary to begin with a description of the main characteristics of 
the path already traveled by humanity.

For thousands of years, mankind lived in a pre-industrial traditional agrarian 
society (Toffler's First Wave). This social system is based on the predominance 
of agricultural production and the regulation of social relations based on 
tradition and... the whip. At this stage of development, man is still very little 
removed from the biological environment, in fact, the human creative principle is 
only now beginning to manifest itself in him. This society can be characterized 
by a number of interrelated parameters: biological type of population regulation 
(high birth and death rate), cyclical rhythm of life associated with the 
agricultural cycle, patriarchal-tribal and/or religious-corporate organization of 
power, patriarchal family, communal organization of population, orientation 
towards reproduction rather than creation of something new in the field of 
technology, ideas, world view and moral doctrines. The defining feature of 
traditional society is the lack of narrow specialization of the producer and his 
alienation from the means of production and even more subordination to the rule 
of the elite in all spheres of life. The majority of the population is engaged in 
agriculture and is not cut off from the natural environment. The artificial 
environment that surrounds a person in our time, in traditional society, 
accompanies the life of an insignificant urban minority, and in part. A person is 
guided in his life above all by tradition, social norms that have been formed 
over the centuries. Therefore, it is appropriate to call the pre-industrial 
society traditional.

Why are we skipping over 5,500 years of slavery and feudalism?
In the XIX-XX centuries, the global decomposition of the traditional agrarian 
society took place, industrial relations began to dominate. In the 20th century, 
migration to cities affected billions of people. The industrial order (Toffler's 
Second Wave) developed rapidly in most countries of the world, destroying, 
displacing and absorbing traditional society.

The industrial path (industrialism) is a system of social relations based on 
innovation provided by standardization and narrow specialization.

In an industrial society, lifestyle, culture, economy and power are guided not by 
tradition but by change, not by the individual and the family but by collective 
activity, where each person is given a narrow standard function. The spread of 
the industrial structure leads to the movement of masses from the villages to the 
cities (urbanization), so such a society can be called urbanized.

An industrial urbanized society, the core of which is high-productivity industry, 
opens up spectacular prospects for eliminating hunger and devastating epidemics 
for humanity. But the same industrialism leads to unprecedented destruction of 
nature and culture, alienation and control of man by man in all spheres of his 
activity.  Industrial society is controlled by the ruling classes in almost all 
its spheres.

The slow development of civilization is replaced by an accelerated pace of life. 
In the social sphere, industrialism formed new social strata. The intellectual 
elite is now needed for the constant production of new knowledge and criticism of 
the old. The management layers organize the joint activity of specialized 
producers on standard "rational" and not on traditional (as before) principles. 
They are divided into owners ("bourgeoisie") and managers ("management", 
"technocracy"). Workers are narrowly specialized, deprived of productive property 
and even of participation in its management, "alienated" from the means of 
production and the urbanized way of life. Such a working class is called the 
proletariat.

The results of the modernization:
In the manufacturing sector, the result of modernization, the transition to 
industrialism, is a technological revolution (industrial revolution, 
industrialization).
In macroeconomic terms, it comes to the widespread use of fossil resources and 
the struggle for them, from this point of view "capitalism" - this is the 
competition of capital;
In the intellectual sector - the transition from traditionalism and 
providentialism to rationalism and criticism;
In the field of information - mass circulation of information produced by the 
elite, development of mass communication systems;
In a political aspect - the emergence of national bureaucratic states, the 
beginning of the era of socio-political revolutions and mass party politics.
All these characteristics stem from the most important social and production 
principle of the new era - innovative development based on standardization and 
narrow specialization. The most important characteristics of industrial society 
are closely related. The mass production of material goods led to the gradual 
elimination of the biological method of limiting the population (famine and 
epidemics), which led to a demographic explosion. At the cost of turning man into 
a specialized tool for production, industrialism managed to create a new 
artificial environment for people to live in, to temporarily weaken humanity's 
dependence on natural elements. Population growth and technological concentration 
of industrial production led to a process of urbanization. Specialization 
required the alienation of the worker from the means of production, which led to 
the spread of the principle of manageability in the sphere of production and 
unprecedented social mobility and the painful breakdown of traditional 
institutions. The system of universal division of labor required the creation of 
a standardized national culture and, therefore, of nation-states. Industrialism 
gave rise to technocracy and worldview rationalism and the widespread 
dissemination of simplified knowledge necessary to participate in industrial 
production (universal literacy, "mass culture").

The humanistic, creative, liberating aspects of modernization are inseparable 
from its destructive and enslaving aspects. Already in the 19th century, the 
greatest thinkers began to look for ways to consolidate the gains of 
modernization while overcoming its negative sides. This task, which still faces 
humanity today, was connected with the transition to a new system - socialism - a 
society without the division of ruling and working classes. From the beginning, 
the proponents of socialism saw this post-capitalist society in different ways. 
Socialists - anarchists, followers of P. J. Proudhon and the Russian populists, 
believe that self-governing communities (communes) will become its basis. 
Marxists advocated a single centralized association of workers. With the 
development of socialist ideology, these two currents borrowed a lot from each 
other and created synthetic models of socialism (anarchism).

But the task of the socialist thinkers, those futurists of the nineteenth 
century, was hampered by the fact that industrial society in its formative period 
was seriously different from its mature forms. It painfully "hatched" from the 
shell of traditional society. The transition from a traditional to an industrial 
society was accompanied by numerous revolutionary uprisings and social disasters. 
Early industrialism developed in the form of spontaneous capitalism. The 
industrial sector was organized in the form of spontaneously competitive capitals 
- structures that united producers under the leadership of a private owner or his 
representatives. The destructiveness of capital clashes only increases in 
proportion to their monopolization. Spontaneous capitalism is unstable and does 
not control the growth of its own social costs (unemployment, overproduction, 
financial speculation, worker poverty, etc.).   The apparent property differences 
between private owners (capitalists, landlords, and rentiers) and workers caused 
widespread public protest and a desire to eliminate private property as the 
source of all social evils.

The principles of "democracy" proclaimed by the liberals - supporters of 
capitalism - parliamentarism, the competition of parties for the votes of the 
electors - in fact turned out not to be democracy, but equality for the 
commercial and political elite.

The destructive crises inherent in capitalism exacerbate social disasters. The 
plight of the broad masses of the working people led to revolutionary upheavals. 
The authority of the anti-capitalist agitation of anarchists and Marxists among 
the "lower" layers of the population is growing. As a result, the capitalist 
oligarchy made concessions. The mission to "order" the industrial (as a rule - 
still agrarian-industrial) society was undertaken by the technocratic 
bureaucracy, which established more or less strict control over the economy. The 
bureaucracy used the opportunities to concentrate resources in the hands of the 
state to complete industrialization in a number of countries and to create a 
"welfare state" - a system of redistribution for the benefit of vulnerable (and 
therefore "explosive") social groups, as well as for its own benefit , to 
increase the power of the state. The bureaucracy became one of the ruling classes 
alongside the private owners (the state-capitalist countries of the West) and 
could completely replace them (examples are the state-socialist countries of the 
USSR, Eastern Europe and Asia). So in the 30s-50s. In the 20th century, a welfare 
state and a state-regulated industrial (and industrial-statistical, in which the 
state directly intervenes in the economy) society was created - the highest phase 
of industrialism. Wider strata of workers, peasants, and officials gained access 
to such goods of civilization as free education, paid vacation, health insurance, 
a separate apartment, and even a comfortable house. This makes it possible to 
talk about a "consumer society", where, thanks to the growth of the income of the 
population, the difference between the income of the elite and the rest of 
society is decreasing. The view that the welfare state contained elements of 
socialism became widespread. But modern societies are still divided into ruling 
and working classes, social hierarchy has not disappeared anywhere. So socialism 
did not arise either in the USSR or in Sweden. The welfare state is a mature 
stage in the development of industrial society. However, by the end of the 20th 
century, it began to fall apart.

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