In engineering, there is a paradigm called DFM: “design for manufacture”. The idea is that engineers must not only design objects to be functional, but to also be amenable to their intended manufacturing process. The physical properties of any industrially created object are contingent upon the capitalist context that brings them into being. These objects do not exist in a vacuum, but instead are obligate artifacts of our present social reality.
Those of us that want communism, i.e. an emancipatory society where productive activity is rationally deployed towards generalized human welfare, have a responsibility to take a prybar to the fissures of our capitalist present and coax out the latent communist logic within. The history of industrial capital is one of obscene amounts of human suffering and is long overripe for dismantling. Perversely, it is the massive buildup of productive capacity and broad socialization of the productive process that makes communism not only possible but necessary. In 2022, at the time of this writing, there is more than enough productive and distributive capacity on the planet to ensure a life of comfort and dignity for every single human being. It is the task of communists to leverage the vast amount of technical skill embedded in the modern global proletariat towards the realization of such a society.
The productive industrial workforce contains a significant concentration of technical knowledge that is of utmost importance for a modern communist project. The (literal and metaphorical) machines of capitalism cannot be broken up and restructured into a truly human society without the participation of the operators, technicians, scientists, and engineers who currently possess the skills to make them run. The failure to include workers with this sort of knowledge is a severe shortcoming among the modern anglophone far left, which is largely dominated by individuals working in the decidedly unproductive1 culture sphere. The reasons for this are structural of course, just as all macro-social phenomena is. This does not change the fact that corrective action is needed.
There is no shortage of “communist theory” blogs, and unfortunately there is now one more. My goal here is to develop theory the proper way: directly as a synthesis of existing theory with knowledge gained first hand. I earn my living by working as an engineer. Every day I go to work I am confronted with the vast gulf between what currently exists and what could be. I do my best to cultivate radical perspectives among fellow technical workers where I can. My hope is that by documenting my observations and efforts in written form, I can do my part to bridge this gap between emancipatory politics and the technical strata of the proletariat.
The paradigm of engineering DFM contains its own immanent critique, albeit an opaque one: the concrete character of the fruits of your labor are structured directly by the social context in which your labor is produced. Parts are designed for maximum profitability above all else. The implication in DFM that there are other ways of doing engineering design, but we do not do it because it is not profitable. There are different contexts in which it would be rational to design that part totally differently. There are contexts in which what we design and how we design it is actually socially beneficial. Let us think about the fault lines between our present capitalist hellscape and the truly human society that could be made from its fractured pieces. Let us enact that fracture, and simultaneously get building.
Let us begin to design for manufracture.
Footnotes
- Unproductive in the Marxist sense: labor that facilitates the circulation of capital or the reproduction of the society conditions that are amenable to capital. This is in distinction to productive labor, which has a direct role in the commodity production process.
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