Socialism and Technology

(Quote of the Week)

In the wake of the Japanese nuclear disaster, much of the left calls for shutting down nuclear power plants, echoing the antitechnology nostrums of petty-bourgeois and bourgeois environmentalists. Addressing the needs of the planned economy of the former Soviet Union, Leon Trotsky stressed that the all-round, qualitative development of industry and technology, which is arrested and distorted under the capitalist profit system, is essential for socialist construction.

We must not destroy technology. The proletariat has taken over the factories equipped by the bourgeoisie in that state in which the revolution found them. The old equipment is still serving us to this day. This fact most graphically and directly shows us that we do not renounce the “heritage.” How could it be otherwise? After all, the revolution was undertaken, first and foremost, in order to get possession of that heritage.

However, the old technology, in the form in which we took it over, is quite unsuitable for socialism. It constitutes a crystallization of the anarchy of capitalist economy. Competition between different enterprises, chasing after profits, unevenness of development between different branches of the economy, backwardness of certain areas, parcelization of agriculture, plundering of human forces: all this finds in technology its expression in iron and brass. But while the machinery of class oppression can be smashed by a revolutionary blow, the productive machinery that existed under capitalist anarchy can be reconstructed only gradually. The completion of the restoration period, on the basis of the old equipment, has only brought us to the threshold of this tremendous task. We must carry it through at all costs.

—Leon Trotsky, “Culture and Socialism” (3 February 1926), reprinted in Problems of Everyday Life (1973)