This essay was originally written in early 2021 as an initial attempt to synthesize thoughts derived from my daily working life as an engineer with some influential concepts picked up from various theorists and writers. It is a little sprawling and uses ideas already well-established elsewhere as a staging ground to discuss the particularities of engineering labor. This was never directly published before now, however a significantly condensed version was published as The Present and Future of Engineers under the "Thinking About Communism" rubric for Field Notes, the political portion of The Brooklyn Rail edited by Paul Mattick Jr. The condensed version is largely the same in focus as this full-sized piece, however it also includes some new concepts on the role of ideology among engineers, the nature of engineering in communism, and an aside on software engineering. If you are interested in deeper elaboration and extensive usage of examples, read on! If you want most of the same concepts but without the high word count, just go check out the Rail piece. Special thanks to Phil and Tina for detailed comments on early drafts that improved readability.
Two-Fold
At any given moment we are each surrounded by dozens, if not hundreds, of manufactured commodities. When acting as consumers, we interact with them in the final stage of their lives where the labyrinthian world-making production process that spawns them is rendered opaque, and they appear as a humble item ready for consumption. Usage of laptops, automobiles, plastic lawn chairs, non-stick skillets, refillable aluminum water bottles, blue jeans, knee braces, over-the-counter painkillers, mail envelopes, hair brushes, or any other particular commodity in the endless sea of the world’s manufactured goods requires little inquiry in to how these commodities physically come into existence. They make their public debut on a store shelf or online catalog, each containing a potential future for the individual who may decide to buy it. The world is full of stuff to buy. It often seems that the world is mostly stuff, that all these things and items constitute the bulk of what human society really boils down to. There is truth to this, however commodities do not make the world necessarily out of what they are and what they can be to the consumer, but rather it is the invisible iceberg under the surface of the consumerist ocean of public consciousness that truly makes the world: it is the very process of the world’s stuff coming into existence that makes society what it is. The commodities themselves are almost a byproduct. The commodity is made in factories and zipped around the world in a dizzying number of supply chains, but factories and supply chains are staffed by people and actuated by their very human labor.
This is not a particularly new development for those whose politics is centered around understanding capitalism in order to bring about its dissolution. The industrial worker often plays the protagonist in any number of left-wing political outlooks, and for good reason: a social order built upon the production of commodities is vulnerable to those who are capable of putting a stop to the production of commodities through the stoppage of their labor. The question of how this is to be done requires an understanding of the people to whom this system is vulnerable, and the various components of this population. The industrial proletariat is not a monolithic bloc. Plenty of ink has, quite usefully and informatively, been spilled by writers dissecting how this critical group differs across time or space. One area that remains intellectually underexplored by communists is the stratification of expertise among the commodity-producing workforce, specifically the role of engineers among the broader modern industrial proletariat.
The role of engineers in capitalism is two-fold: our labor simultaneously enables the domination of other laborers through the deployment of technology in service of capital accumulation while also itself being subject to domination by capitalism. A modern anti-capitalist approach to politics must account for the complex role of engineers, as engineers play not only a pivotal role in capitalism, but would play a similarly critical role in the installation of any society that structures productive activity around the direct fulfillment of human need. The seizure of the means of production cannot be leveraged towards communal ends if those who understand how these means function and how to repurpose them are not involved. Over the course of this essay I intend to chart the way modern engineering fits into capitalism’s social totality and speculate what this implies for those who call themselves communists, anarchists, or socialists.
The key to understanding not only modern engineering but modern capitalism in general is through understanding the process of automation. While there is no shortage of mainstream attention devoted to the topic today, any serious attempt to understand it should start with the most incisive critic of capitalism: Karl Marx. For Marx, whose immanent critique of capitalism remains incredibly prescient, automation was itself an emergent phenomenon for which the imperative to constantly technologically revolutionize the forces of production is inherent to the very structure of capital itself1. Automation, the replacement of human labor and judgment by machines, is undertaken by industrial capitalists as a way to increase the quantity of goods that can be produced by a certain amount of laborers in a certain amount of time. Those firms at the bleeding edge of technological innovation hold the biggest advantage over their competition as their goods can be sold at the same price as less-automated competitors for a greater profit margin since each individual good was cheaper for the more automated firm to produce because more can be produced in less time. An arms race of sorts takes place where those capitalists who can maintain the most innovative labor-saving processes hold a clear advantage over their competitors, and those who cannot keep pace are run out of business2.
The ripple effects that this process has on society cannot be understated. It would be far beyond the scope of this essay to examine these effects in their entirety, or even simply within the entirety of labor itself, and as such I will confine my analysis to the broad strokes of automation’s effects on engineering work within the context of commodity production. There are two main effects the perpetual churn of automation has had on engineering both historically and presently. The first is a continuous trend towards polarization of technical expertise in the labor force as a result of technological advancement. The second effect is a secular trend among all labor, even that requiring the expertise of engineers, to become increasingly “rationalized” in service of the need for capital to turn a profit. In charting the way that these two somewhat opposed but concurrent, if not orthogonal, tendencies play out in the working lives of engineers it is my hope that a useful understanding of how engineers are similar to and differ from other workers can be developed in service of a broader 21st century approach to anti-capitalist politics.
A Taxonomy of Modern Engineers
Engineering, as a critical facet of the commodity production process, differs little around the world. There are, however, differences to be found in superficialities such as naming conventions, individual job titles, working culture, and other aspects relevant to an individual engineer’s subjective working experience. While this essay attempts to account for these, they are often of little importance to the actual focus of this essay: the underlying logic of engineering and what it means to global capitalism.
The vast majority of engineers have at least a 4-year degree from a university engineering program. There exist engineers without a degree who attained their position through accumulating knowledge and being promoted from a technician position, but these are rare. There are numerous types of engineering degrees one can obtain. Some of the most common ones are mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, civil engineering, chemical engineering and industrial engineering. There are many other types of engineering degrees though, such as aerospace engineering, computer engineering, construction engineering, structural engineering, biomedical engineering, environmental engineering, agricultural engineering, nuclear engineering, petroleum engineering, and others. Often universities will subordinate these more-specific degrees with smaller student-counts into the departments of a related more general degree (e.g. aerospace engineering being a subset of mechanical engineering, environmental engineering subordinated to civil engineering, petroleum engineering subordinated to chemical engineering, etc). Many engineers have masters degrees or doctoral degrees. Some individuals attain graduate and post-graduate degrees in the same field of study as their undergraduate degree, however it is not uncommon for individual engineers to attain advanced degrees in a different field of engineering, or even a non-engineering degree such as an MBA or other degrees that may be of managerial use. Conversely, it is not uncommon to see individuals with non-engineering undergraduate degrees, such as in a formal science like physics, chemistry, or biology, attain an engineering master’s degree. Some engineers obtain further formal licensures that the state requires in order to call oneself a “Professional Engineer”. Depending on location and industry these licenses can range from nearly-useless to absolutely essential in terms of attaining work.
The type of degree one has is not always a strong indicator of what sort of actual engineering work they will do once employed full time, as the bulk of applied engineering knowledge is learned on the job with university education most covering scientific principles and introductory applied knowledge. A mechanical engineer, for instance, could conceivably find work designing automotive components, performing thermal modeling for turbines, developing manufacturing processes in a fabrication facility, or performing technical sales. The world of different engineering job types, duties, and titles varies even more than the engineering university system.
As engineering roles relate to commodity production they can be roughly divided into three categories: those who work in the process of designing and developing the product, those who work in the manufacturing process wherein these products are physically made, and those who interface with external entities either in support of the production process or in the sale of the produced commodities. Depending on the company there can be overlap between these three, sometimes with individual engineers performing duties in different categories.
The first category, where products are designed and developed, perform the work necessary to conceive of an abstract solution to a given problem, model a concrete solution to the problem, design a product that adheres to this model, develop a prototype, and refine the prototype until the design is ready for volume manufacturing. Engineers in this category, depending on their job duties, are typically called design engineers, systems engineers, test engineers, R&D engineers, product development engineers, validation engineers, or may even be non-engineering scientists.
The second category, where the commodity is manufactured, includes engineers who develop the processes and oversee the events necessary for the manufacturing of the designed product in quantities that yield a profit. The specific job duties can vary wildly, but include engineers called manufacturing engineers, process engineers, industrial engineers, quality control engineers, facility engineers, continuous improvement engineers, or production engineers.
The third category is the least coherent, as it basically includes any engineer not part of the design or manufacturing process. Within this category one can view engineers who interact with customers as largely related to each other whereas those who do not are in more diffuse positions. Customer facing engineers typically have titles such as applications engineer, sales engineer, solutions engineer, field service engineer, and engineers who work as part of a broader marketing team. Non customer-facing engineers in this category can include supply-chain engineers, procurement engineers, cost engineers, or engineers who work in non-engineering departments to impart their technical expertise, such as finance or purchasing.
The first two categories, those in the design and manufacturing processes, are the engineers whose work has the biggest impact on the commodity production process. For these engineers it is where the axes of being the intellectual vanguard of industrial capital and being dominated by industrial capital intersect most visibly and decisively.
Tendency for Productive Expertise to Polarize
To speak of the “advancement” of productive technology requires some sort of metric by which this advancement occurs. Far from being transhistorical, capitalist automation is unique in its obsession with a generalized reduction in labor time per unit produced3 as compared to productive activity that historically precedes it. This metric of advancement, labor time per unit, is reliably reduced through an inseparable reduction in the complexity of the tasks a worker performs during the manufacturing process. This reduction in task complexity accompanies a division of labor where each worker performs a smaller set of tasks which are now so simple that subsequent tasks can be handled by different workers with little or no risk of production errors. By removing the necessity of complex actions from the worker and placing that responsibility on the significantly more accurate, precise, reliable, and docile machine the expertise required by the worker is drastically reduced. Where the machining of metal used to be done with great expert care by a machinist on a manual mill or lathe, robotic CNC machines operating on 5 simultaneous axes can more reliably create the same part in significantly less time with very little work needed from the operator besides loading the material and initiating the run program (which was written by a technician with special software). Where textiles used to take incredible amounts of hands-on labor requiring practical knowledge to prepare the cotton, convert it into fiber, spin it into yarn, then weave it into fabric, now mechanized processes can do the difficult portions while the workers perform the repetitive motions required to keep the machines moving.
While wide masses of laborers are stripped of the need to hold advanced technical knowledge (and the bargaining power that accompanies it), it is not as if this expertise disappears. It is simply concentrated in a much smaller proportion of workers who design and configure the machines and processes such that they properly create the required product. Not only is the expertise on the specific product concentrated in fewer hands, but new expertise in the design, creation, and maintenance of these machines and processes is required. Further expertise in advancing the scientific principles from which further advancements in productive forces are conjured also becomes more and more imperative. The domain of engineering is in this concentration of technical expertise among those who do not use the machines to directly produce goods but rather those who do the intellectual labor of developing these machines and processes.
Manufacturing, Industrial, and Process Engineering
Concentration of technical expertise does not happen simply for its own sake however, or even purely for the sake of the intellectually curious engineer. The point of enterprise is the generation of profit4, which is nothing more than capital continually valorizing itself in a quest for interminable growth and accumulation. The work of “rationalizing” the productive process implies that said processes become more rational, but more rational for who, or by what measure? Rationality is defined chiefly thus in terms of money obtained for company shareholders. While it is typically not the responsibility of engineers to manage company finances, the work of engineers involved in commodity production is ultimately in service of the company’s bottom line either through generating revenue or eliminating costs. Engineers involved in commodity production accumulate technical expertise while stripping it from ordinary laborers because such a concentration is critical for the perpetual sophistication of the means of production, which itself is crucial for the continued generation of profit. It is precisely at this juncture of the technical with the financial that the wide-reaching social effects of engineers are most apparent, even if the subservience of intellectually-driven technical work to the abstract logic of capital is occluded to many engineers who may otherwise think of themselves as more independent than they really are.
Insofar as engineering is ultimately deployed in service of capital accumulation, the concrete character of engineering thus concerns itself with the concrete character of capital accumulation. If the commodity production process can be chiefly described in the abstract as the continual interplay between constant capital (capital invested in machinery, equipment, buildings, etc) and variable capital (capital paid to workers as wages), then the commodity production process can be concretely described as the interplay between laborers and the means of production that allow for the churning out of commodities. The concrete character of engineering is thus not solely confined to the necromancy of actuating dead labor (expended labor that has already been spent and solidified) in the form of machinery, but must also contend with the living labor that comes from the flesh and blood workers who use the machines. It is important to note here that for many engineers the notion that their work is just as much the scientific domination of people as it is the scientific domination of physical phenomena and machines would sound totally absurd. This is because engineering, as mentioned earlier, is divided into a myriad of subdisciplines and job types that are wildly divergent from each other in their specifics while all ultimately serving the same purpose. While engineers, in aggregate, must contend with the technical aspects of both living and dead labor, some engineers perform work with seemingly little to do with people and much to do with machinery, whereas for other engineers the human element is extremely prominent, especially for those who are most proximate to the physical production of the commodities.
The way in which engineers act as the intellectual catalyst for facilitating the domination of the lower-skilled worker by capital through the avenue of machinery is made most apparent in engineering sub-disciplines like manufacturing engineering, industrial engineering, or process engineering. These all perform work intimately proximate to the physical creation of the commodities. The chief concern of such engineers is the very act of bringing the commodity to fruition through the application of living labor. These engineers must ensure that this transmuting of labor into commodities not only occurs, but occurs in a way that is efficient from a monetary standpoint, i.e. is satisfactorily profitable to the shareholders. In order for a commodity to be sold, it must first be assembled, manufactured, built, or otherwise physically created. Given that selling more commodities is more profitable than selling fewer, and reducing the costs of production expands the profit margin per unit sold, the employment of these engineers is an investment designed to bring scientific approaches and technical expertise to bear in direct service of capital through the streamlining of commodity production.
Imagine the following scenario: a capitalist hands a large number of workers each a whittling knife, a saw, some big chunks of wood, and some instructions for each worker to make some tables. In such a scenario it is possible that enough tables will be made to an acceptable standard for the capitalist to make a return on their profit after the initial outlay of capital. It is likely, however, to take them a long time, and the tables are likely to come out inconsistent and with high scrap rates. Dividing the workers into teams, such as one for crafting the legs, another for the flat top, and a third for assembly will reduce the time necessary for each table to be produced, as each process can be done more efficiently by workers who repeat the same handful of tasks in series with other workers rather than perform the entire process individually in parallel with other workers. This efficiency, not to mention product consistency, can be improved if their primitive hand-tools are replaced with miter saws, simple lathes, and some measuring tools. Further efficiency can be attained by replacing these tools with even more sophisticated CNC lathes, automated saws, and automated planers. Introducing automated handler systems to automatically load material into the computer-controlled tools and extra machinery with fixtures to piece together and fasten the different components to each other would further amplify this efficiency. A handful of engineers and a significantly reduced number of workers, armed with money for fixed capital expenditures, would easily outcompete the original larger number of workers armed with simple hand tools, even if the original group were absolute masters of the craft of table making. The manufacturing engineer, in looking to improve production to support the bottom line, has a vested interest in deskilling the workers and thinning their numbers while increasing both the quality and quantity of output. It should be noted that this example is an exaggeration. No modern table manufacturer has its workers using whittling knives and handsaws, however the mentality of the engineer in this example holds true. To the extent that the technology exists and investing in it is financially viable for the manufacturer, engineers of the manufacturing, industrial, and process variety perform work chiefly concerned with the simplification of labor and deployment of machinery to boost productive capacity at the expense of the worker’s need to attain practical skills.
The specifics of what these engineers do varies based on the type of commodity being produced, the specific operations and culture of the company in question, and their particular job title. This includes but is not limited to: creating work instructions, developing written standards, performing statistical analysis on time expenditure or material scrappage, selecting and qualifying machinery for usage by laborers, defining processes for the laborer to follow, designing jigs and fixtures to speed up production or improve repeatability, managing quality control, troubleshooting production problems/stoppages, coordinating with external suppliers, tracking materials, advocating for ease of manufacturability to design engineers, and training laborers. At smaller companies it may be up to a small team or even an individual to perform all of these duties, while at larger companies engineering labor is often divided such that one engineer may perform a few or even just one of these.
These engineers have a close proximity to the productive process itself, and thus are proximal to the juncture wherein the abstract needs of capital are materially realized in the concrete subjugation of the laborer, technician, or operator. Proliferation of mechanization and automation strips expertise and know-how from the laborers as a necessary byproduct of the simplification of their work in the quest for profit. This expertise, now concentrated in the hands of engineers, is deployed by engineers to ensure that the maximum amount of labor value is extracted from each unit of labor time spent by the laborer, which materializes in a maximization of extracted money per unit of labor time. This usually does not take such a straightforward appearance to the engineers and laborers involved, however. This is generally understood in terms of “reducing waste” (waste either being wasted material or wasted time), “simplifying things”, or otherwise “continuous improvement”/”kaizen” as it is known in Lean5 manufacturing jargon. This is not to say that manufacturing engineers are the mortal enemies of laborers, technicians, or operators any more than any working individual has the potential to get along well with their boss or a cow can learn to love the farmer that milks her. This process does not necessarily manifest in overt conflict between laborers and engineers. Plenty of laborers enjoy taking part in these processes, as their hands-on expertise must be consulted such that it can be automated or simplified. Just as the engineer accumulates expertise stripped from the laborers, laborers who are not laid off may be tasked with new novel tasks, as their now-automated work takes significantly less time out of their working day. Sometimes nobody is actually laid off, as the introduction of improved machinery and processes improves revenue to the point where all workers with now-obsolete duties are retrained or tasked elsewhere as the company grows. In some firms, smaller ones in particular, the manufacturing engineer is much more likely to have close contact with the laborers and, depending on the nature of the operation, perform small amounts of manual labor alongside them as part of developing their own expertise and as part of their own job duties. This is of course in contrast with larger firms where a more separated relationship is most likely, as the company can not only afford to but also financially benefits from a stricter division of labor and expertise. As with every other systemic tendency in capitalism, the on-the-ground subjective experience can vary significantly, especially when one factors in all the ideological baggage that automation, work, engineering, and company culture bring with them.
Design Engineering
The whole point of manufacturing, industrial, and process engineering is to rationalize the productive process, however examining this dynamic can easily miss a very crucial element of this process: the commodity being manufactured and its concrete relationship to capital accumulation. Manufacturing engineering, industrial engineering, and process engineering are only one part of the diverse world of engineering but are notable for their intimate relationship with the nuts and bolts of the production process. Much further removed is the design engineer, who applies scientific principles, technical know-how, and creativity towards the design of commodities that are to be manufactured. These engineers may not have their hands directly in the productive process, and thus are not directly responsible for carrying out capital’s domination of laborers, technicians, and operators, but rather perpetuate that dynamic from a distance and in a more abstract fashion.
The specific character of an item produced for sale in a capitalist economy contains both a concrete component (its practical utility/application) and an abstract component (its utility to the capitalist; that it can be sold for money). It is easy to view the concrete use of a commodity and its abstract property of being sellable for money as being orthogonal axes that differ qualitatively in their entirety except for the fact that they intersect at the item in question, but this abstraction misses the larger picture. In reality the concrete and abstract characters of a commodity are more akin to two strands woven together to form a rope, where these two fundamental aspects of the commodity strengthen each other and function as an intertwined whole rather than two independent traits. A commodity only has abstract value, which is to say it is sellable, specifically because it has a concrete, non-abstract, use. A pair of shoes sells because people can and want to wear them. An item would not be manufactured if the capitalist did not expect it would sell, and commodities only sell if somebody wants to buy them, which only happens if the commodity serves some purpose or fills a need for the buyer6. The fact that an item’s utility is crucial to its value at market is obvious, but the determining relationship abstract value has to the concrete utility of a commodity is less-so. After all, produced goods were certainly useful and had utility prior to the generalization of commodity production and the advent of universalized economy-mediating abstract value that accompanied it, so how can abstract value play a determining role in the concrete character of a commodity?
To the capitalist, the most important aspect of a commodity is that it can be sold for money. Unlike the engineer who is primarily concerned with spending money to turn materials into a commodity, the shareholder of a firm is concerned with using commodities to turn money into a larger sum of money7. Profit is not just the consequence of producing a commodity but the reason for producing it in the first place. The owner of capital must deploy said capital in service of generating profit, and thus accumulate more capital unless they want to be outcompeted by other capitalists. As far as capital is invested in the production of commodities, the creation of the commodity must be undertaken in ways amenable to the needs of capital, which is to say it must be undertaken in ways that maximize revenue and minimize costs in order to attain the largest profit margin. The needs of capital are inscribed all over commodities, whether they are consumer goods or products sold from one layer of industry to another.
Some obvious examples are planned obsolescence in consumer electronics, usage of inferior (cheaper) materials for certain goods, or incompatibilities between functionally-similar commodities due to proprietary differences. Many ideas for how to improve revenue from and reduce costs for commodities originate from non-engineers, such as marketing or finance personnel, however implementation of these use-affecting characteristics falls to the design engineer. This is not to say that design engineers are the trained monkeys of other company departments, for in reality the design engineer bears a lot of responsibility for carrying out the whims of capital through the design phase of commodity production.
All commodities that are manufactured must first be designed, and thus commodities must be designed with the manufacturing process in mind. A good design engineer is one who is familiar with the processes required for their design to be manufactured, and can thus minimize the amount of money spent on manufacturing costs without compromising the intended use of the product. A machined part requiring fewer setups on a milling machine, a plastic component shaped such that a maximal quantity can be made from a single injection mold, and an electrical assembly designed to take advantage of automated component placement all require the design engineer to understand the manufacturing process to a sufficient level to take maximum advantage of the rationalized production processes developed by manufacturing, industrial, and process engineers. Take for instance the considerations involved in designing a mechanical assembly that is utilized in heavy machinery. Each component must be designed so that a CNC machine (such as a CNC mill or CNC lathe) can be used for as much of the work as possible with as little human intervention as can be managed. By reducing the amount of involvement from the machine operator, faster throughput can be achieved, which results in fewer costs for the owner of the fabrication facility, which translates to lower costs for the company purchasing the parts from the fabricator. Once the components are manufactured, they must be assembled together by an assembler. The manual labor for piecing together mechanical assemblies is not as automated as, say, the machining portion, so the easier the design is to assemble, the faster the throughput of the assembly team. Pieces that easily slot together and are joined with common fasteners are significantly faster (thus cheaper) to assemble than employing the services of a welder with a fixture, which itself requires additional design work either from a design engineer or from a dedicated fixture designer. Once assembled, it may be validated for functionality depending on the character of the commodity. A good design will interface easily with whatever automated testing machinery the company owns and can be run by a technician, rather than needing to be inconveniently tested at the intended site of usage and validated or analyzed first-hand by a systems engineer or test engineer. Following that, it must be packaged and sent off somewhere else, whether it be a distributor, a storage warehouse, or the customer directly. High-volume production benefits more from automated packaging, and thus the item must be designed with geometry that is compatible with automated packaging and not likely to require intervention (expended labor time) from a worker for just that single unit. Low-volume production, where packaging and shipping is less or even barely automated, still benefits from a design that makes use of rationalized labor processes. Insofar as a laborer must package each part manually, it is not uncommon for facilities with quantitatively low output of individual units to have such laborers fill multiple roles beyond their shipping duties. As such a design that requires the minimum amount of special preparation (extra labor time) by the shipping worker is superior from a monetary perspective. For small items this extra labor can be as mundane as requiring extra passes with wrapping paper for odd geometry, and for large items it can be as important as ensuring that the item can be properly transported by a forklift or pallet jack. Even where packaging and shipping comprises the full workload of a laborer, an easily packaged and shipped design increases throughput of that laborer, which reduces costs on a per-unit basis. Even after the product has left the facility and is being shipped by a third party, a design that prioritizes compactness and lower weight is advantageous, as shipping companies are some of the most rationalized companies on the planet wherein the more parcels can be delivered per worker and per delivery vehicle, the more profitable the shipping company is.
What all of these design considerations have in common is that their “efficiency” is directly tied to how much they make use of existing labor rationalization in the form of division of labor and division of expertise. The costs to produce a commodity rise proportionally to the money spent on labor required to produce that commodity, and as such it is the duty of the design engineer (to their employer) to make maximum use of the division of labor created from the abstract demands of capitalist totality. As such, it is clear how the design engineer is just as much a participant in the subjugation of the laborer to the production process as the manufacturing engineer who directly oversees this subjugation. Insofar as the logic of capital provides an abstract rationale for the deployment of technology in service of lowering wages and decreasing on-the-job quality of life for laborers, the concrete implementation of this dynamic is left to various engineering disciplines and subdisciplines.
Subjective Effects of Expertise Polarization
Prior to the emergence of capitalism, artisanal or craft production was the predominant form that non-agricultural productive activity took. This form of production was characterized by a strong overlap between labor and technical skill, with the acquisition of technical know-how often mediated by guilds or other systematized social structures. The erosion of crafts, not only in Europe but all over the planet, has happened directly as a byproduct of the increasing sophistication of capitalist production processes. It did not and does not happen all at once, but is a continuous historical process wherein most work is perpetually simplified so that profit at any given firm grows. The expertise required to produce commodities does not simply disappear however, nor is it simply divided evenly between every worker whose hands touch the workpiece. The expertise held by the entirety of the workforce tends to polarize with a small minority holding the technical expertise used to create the systems of production that the remaining majority will operate. Engineers obviously fall into the former category. To liken modern engineers to the skilled artisans of the pre-capitalist world would require a severe oversimplification of the societal context in which both exist, however a surface level comparison elucidates some useful concepts. As groups of people, each commands a relatively strong bargaining position (as compared to “unskilled” laborers) in their respective markets due to the criticality of their expertise to the production of complex products. As such, both have a level of control over the character of their work in a way that lesser-skilled individuals do not. In varying levels of intensity, there is some social prestige to be had for performing high-skilled work that commands higher compensation and is important for the continuation of the productive status-quo.
The technically demanding nature of engineering schooling and most engineering disciplines tends to attract those who have a personal interest in such challenges, and serves to repel those without the ability or interest to meet these technical demands. While not all engineers are passionate about their work, it is not so common to find an engineer who does not have a level of intellectual curiosity or personal passion about matters in their field or technology in general. This is in contrast to “low-skilled” laborers, who are less likely to have a personal interest in the particulars of their work, which is more likely to contain a lot of tedium and drudgery. Engineers are typically spoiled compared to the average laborer in the sense that we, on average, have significantly more control and decision-making power over the specifics of our work. There are significant caveats to this, as will be elaborated on in the next section, however the enhanced level of workplace autonomy is a significant factor in determining the behavior and attitudes of engineers in the workplace. Creativity and initiative that directly helps the company bottom line are typically encouraged. A sense of curiosity and autodidacticism is not only helpful to engineers, but is often necessary as the assimilation of unfamiliar and technically challenging concepts and skill sets is frequently necessary in the workplace. Engineering work often forges a can-do mentality where any problem can be solved with a methodical approach, the application of scientific principles, and the ability to learn the relevant information. Though these attitudes are typically considered desirable, they are the flip side of other common engineering behaviors that are typically met with disdain by others. Many engineers believe that their ability to methodically approach technical problems at work is easily transferred to other areas where they lack expertise. While it is true that a methodical approach and broad scope of technical knowledge is frequently useful outside the workplace, this attitude often veers into rank scientism. A tendency to collapse complex problems into quantifiable variables manipulable by mathematical or scientific approaches very easily destroys the important nuance that makes such problems so difficult to solve in the first place. This is most apparent with large-scale societal problems wherein it is not uncommon for engineers to, in their absolute lack of expertise on the relevant matters, propose solutions that treat social systems as isolatable and independently manipulable through assumptions that, in their approximations, reduce the relevant factors to a level of simplicity no longer adequate to solving the problem at hand. The ability and authority to solve technical problems at work often breeds an arrogance where those without engineering or scientific training are not considered to be as intelligent or capable as those with such training. In university engineering programs it is not uncommon for non-STEM majors to be the unfortunate objects of mocking jokes, and in the workplace this attitude can metastasize and take aim at non-engineering departments, including an elitist disdain for the very laborers whose practical expertise has historically been stripped away by engineers. These are all stereotypes of engineers, of course, and it would be absurd to think they apply to every engineer, however stereotypes generally do not arise from nowhere. As a common joke goes: “how do you know if someone is an engineer? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.”
Engineers are nothing more than people and as such are capable of the full range of human personality traits, be they marvelous, resplendent, and beautiful, or abhorrent, malicious, and loathsome. Being normal people, engineers are just as subject to the ambient ideological constructs of society and operate within them as such. As established earlier, engineers perform work within a capitalist context, work that is inextricable from capitalism so long as the social totality of capital exists. The worst aspects of engineers are simply the manifestations of some of the worst aspects of capitalism, but as with every subjectivity there lies buried deep the potential, if not the rational kernel, for capitalism to make its own gravediggers who can take the shattered pieces of this violent system and rebuild it into something where humans deploy machines for human ends rather than the inverse wherein the capitalism-haunted machinery of our own making shackles us to its insatiable process of misery and accumulation.
If I am to speculate, the incorporation of engineers into any anti-capitalist movement would require, on some level, an appeal to the technical passions of engineers. The destruction of the capitalist world and re-shaping of its remains into a socialist/communist world predicated on maximizing human wellbeing is not solely a technical problem, far from it, but the technical portion of this feat is huge. For engineers to be involved would mean that the technical task of radically transforming global production would be tackled by those for whom capital has accumulated technical expertise, but at the same time engineers will have to overcome the way the logic of capital accumulation buttresses our entire profession. Engineers, in this sense, resemble a compounded microcosm of a dynamic that would necessarily be posed to the proletariat as a whole: the need to utilize our role within the social totality of capitalism to destroy capitalism and thus our very role in capitalism. The capitalist division of labor is a conduit through which much domination, both the interpersonal kind and the abstract domination by capital, flows. It is through the shattering of this conduit by way of dismantling the entire pumping system it is attached to that a new system where pumps and conduits are not reliant upon wide scale destitution, abjection, and violence can be built by society as a whole, rather than a technocratic minority. The dissolution of capitalism would, much like the self-dissolution of the proletariat, involve the self-dissolution of engineering as a distinct social stratum.
Engineers, upon contemplating this, might first think of all the paperwork that would become obsolete, and rejoice. The impact would be larger than mere alleviation of tedious duties like tracking billable work hours or wrangling suppliers into quoting bulk material costs though. The entire rational core of the “rationalization” process of production that engineers are responsible for enacting would be upended. That which was previously not a “rational” factor in engineering decisions would now become the ultimate priority. Under capitalism, where profit is the singular most important consideration for industry, factors such as environmental impact, equitable access to produced wealth, quality of life of those who perform labor (in all parts of the supply chain), and actual societal need for the product being produced are either ignored or begrudgingly accounted for by capitalists only as far as they either directly impact the bottom line, or the state coerces them to8.
If profit is removed from the equation, there is now room for a planned system of production to properly account for any number of factors that are collectively decided to be worth considering. If companies no longer need to constantly churn out new models of products in order to attain repeat buyers, items can be designed and manufactured to last longer, which would reduce the volume of items needing to be made. Material selection would be based on a holistic understanding and accounting of environmental impact. A general scaling back of industrial production would mean that fewer machines are needed, and those that remain need not be designed for the sole production of one single high-volume component (as many industrial machines currently are), but rather could be designed to be multi-purpose machines that can be dynamically repurposed as needs shift. Those who operate machinery would not necessarily be relegated to endless drudgery, as fewer more-versatile machines would require more skill to be deployed effectively, and less time would be needed to achieve the needed output. In a system with no need for monetary efficiency, the organic development and deployment of skill would not be hindered. The health of the planetary biosphere would no longer be sacrificed to the profits of wanton polluters, and the specific goods produced would be decided upon (and distributed) through a rational plan that factors the needs of the entire human population equitably, rather than prioritizing consumers in more affluent regions of the globe as capitalism currently does. “Needs” themselves might come to be completely reinterpreted. Given that capitalist society already has more than enough productive capacity to provide food, water, and shelter to every person on Earth, a communist society would by definition utilize this reappropriated capacity towards this end. Once the basics for human life are no longer mediated by markets and mass dispossession, what other human desires might, once liberated from the logic of capital, come to be considered needs to be satisfied by the communist productive apparatus? Might access to education, art, communication, play, and community come to be recognized as fundamental needs that can be tackled by society’s conscious productive efforts rather than left to the vampire that is capital accumulation? Predicting the future is impossible, especially when it involves an entire upending of the current order, however it is clear that if we are to have a global society not defined by misery, it will have to be built consciously with the vast amounts of technical expertise capitalism has already imbued across the global workforce.
Although the very foundation of modern engineering would be dismantled, what is left over, like with the rest of society after the defeat of capitalism, is fertile ground from which to build a better world. Engineering as a methodology and practice, after the dismantling of capitalism, would still deploy science methodically for the fulfillment of goals, however the category of engineers as a specific group of people is likely to eventually disappear, or at least become significantly less rigidly demarcated than it currently is. The tendency for technical expertise to concentrate among engineers under capitalism is inherent to the profiteering logic of capital, and thus would disappear if capital disappears. That which currently separates engineers from non-engineers (education, institutional support, access to and control over sophisticated technology) would be available to those who want it, as much of what currently is locked behind monetary barriers can easily be made free to access under a socialist/communist system. The development of expertise by those who perform labor is a transhistorical dynamic that is unlikely to go away after capitalism. In such cases, with no profit-driven engineers to wrest expertise from those who develop it naturally, the type of labor that engineers currently hold a monopoly on would be most sensibly performed by those who can most effectively apply it to the productive process for the good of society as a whole. Good ideas borne from the first-hand process of doing labor would be the only prerequisite to “qualify as an engineer” in such a society, and the actual act of “engineering” would entail no more than simply bringing that good idea into fruition with the means and resources available to that individual. Those whose specific skills cause them to gravitate more towards one type of labor, be it physical hands-on labor or abstract scientific research, are likely to best serve both themselves and society as a whole by focusing on what they are best at and desire to do the most, but the structural barriers that separate engineering work from non-engineering work would have no reason to continue to exist after capitalism.
Part 2
Footnotes
- Marx, Karl. Capital Volume 1, Penguin Books 1976. p. 486
- For a further exploration of this dynamic refer to the “treadmill effect” in chapter 8 of Time, Labor, and Social Domination by Moishe Postone
- Marx, Karl. Capital Volume 1, Penguin Books 1976. p. 486
- Marx, Karl. Capital Volume 3, Penguin Books 1981. p. 132
- Lean is a manufacturing management paradigm concerned with the elimination of waste in production environments. The 5 principles of Lean manufacturing can be found here: https://www.lean.org/WhatsLean/Principles.cfm
- Need for a specific commodity does not always exist prior to the production of a commodity, but is often created as part of the marketing of said commodity. This is a vast oversimplification of the concept of need, however a further exploration is beyond the scope of this essay.
- In Capital schemas, the engineer is concerned primarily in C-M-C’ whereas the capitalist is primarily concerned with M-C-M’
- The modern state should not be confused for a neutral arbiter of society, but should rather be understood as the administrative apparatus of the national bourgeoisie as a whole. Conflict between the state and private enterprise over regulatory affairs has to do with different factions of the capitalist class and their particular interests, such as the needs of one industry instead of another, or long term macroeconomic stability versus the short term profit of a particular industry. State enforcement of labor rights has more to do with concessions won by workers during class struggle than any benevolence inherent to the state.
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