Progress without People: New Technology, Unemployment, and the Message of Resistance

David Bennett is the national director of the Department of Workplace Health, Safety and Environment at the Canadian Labour Congress in Ottawa.

These essays provide a critique of technological capitalism, from its
primitive stage of mechanization to its current, mature phase of
automation. Most of the material appeared more than a decade ago, before
computer networks became commonplace in industrial workplaces, and
before the era of computerized, unregulated, rampant capitalism that we
know, too delicately, as globalization. These contemporary phenomena
would serve only to buttress Noble’s thesis that capitalists, through
loose technology, destroy jobs, societies, and, ultimately, humanity.

On the issue of organized resistance, Noble’s argument becomes opaque
and puzzling. Resistance to pernicious change, he contends, is apt only
when it is “concrete and in the present.” Noble sees all attempts to
turn spontaneous acts of resistance—sabotage, strikes, and industrial
disobedience—into a political program as indicative of co-option,
sell-out, or outright betrayal. He seems to suggest that this result is
inevitable, simply because a coherent political program necessarily
entails a departure from the concrete and the present—mythology,
propaganda, and some future goal being the modes of departure.

His treatment of resistance aside, Noble provides some first-class
economic analysis and a dazzling description of the psyches of
engineers, technologists, executives, and accountants. Homo economicus
is more complex but no less a social liability than we ever imagined,
with an ideology and belief system more religious than acquisitive.