Translations: Français, Português
The October 2021 edition of Field Notes, the political editorial of NYC-based art magazine Brooklyn Rail, features an essay I wrote on engineering and its relation to both capitalism and a potential communist future. The essay, titled “The Present and Future of Engineers” can be read here at this link.
This essay is a significantly shorter version of a much longer essay I wrote earlier. The original goes into far greater detail and contains more technical examples. The shorter Rail piece has some extra stuff about software engineering and engineering ideology only somewhat hinted at in the original. I am still deciding what to do with the original piece, as it is too lengthy for normal essay publishing but far too short to serve as a book.
Edit: as of November 10th, 2022 you can read the original longer version here.
While I decide, please feel free to read the Rail piece at the link above. Below is an excerpt.
Subjecting engineering to Marxist analysis yields complex results. Most engineers are proletarians: we perform labor in exchange for a wage, which we need in order to afford a comfortable life in the global capitalist system. Despite this, the origins of modern engineering lie just as much in Taylorist factory management as in the sweaty wage labor of the factory floor. In the social totality that is capitalism, we are simultaneously dominated by the imperatives of capital’s abstract logic while also concretizing this abstract domination against masses of other workers. This poses a difficult question for communist engineers: whose side are we on? To further complicate matters, communists must also consider not only the role that engineers play in capitalism but what roles they might play in the revolutionary dissolution of capitalism, and in the establishment of a communist society.
These questions are worth considering now, even as the real movement for a new society is only just now resuming the historical course from which it was derailed in the course of the previous century. There are limits to what useful conclusions can be gained by stroking one’s chin; the actual answers will only be determined by this movement in the course of its action to abolish the present state of things. Within these limits, my aim here is to identify, in broad strokes, the dynamics that shape modern engineering and to use these concepts to speculate as to what the future may hold as it emerges from the chrysalis of the present.
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[T]here is no single engineering subjectivity, hence no direct link between engineering and a possible revolutionary consciousness. What can be said with near certainty is that a revolution that does not have substantial participation from engineers is doomed to fail at implementing communism. The material basis for communism is not proletarian rage or mass-scale dispossession, it is centuries of labor now embodied in the form of fixed capital: machinery, buildings, global productive infrastructure, and countless commodities. There is a cruel irony to the fact that communism has been made possible by the brutal subjugation of the majority of the planet’s population into wage labor, but it is indeed mass manufacturing and global distributive capacity that makes a planned social system, controllable by the collective human desire for wellbeing, possible. Capitalism has created the technical means for a society based on the rational safeguarding and expansion of human welfare, but not necessarily the social forms that are conducive to such a society. Engineering, as it currently exists, represents the overwhelming bulk of the technical knowledge existing within capitalism, but is socially composed in a way that would necessarily be dissolved by the establishment of communism.

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