The Industrial Revolution and its consequences
have been a disaster for the human race.
They have greatly increased the life-expectancy
of those of us who live in “advanced”
countries, but they have destabilized society,
have made life unfulfilling, have subjected
human beings to indignities, have led to widespread
psychological suffering (in the Third World
to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted
severe damage on the natural world.
The continued development of technology will
worsen the situation.
It will certainly subject human beings to
greater indignities and inflict greater damage
on the natural world, it will probably lead
to greater social disruption and psychological
suffering, and it may lead to increased physical
suffering even in “advanced” countries.
The industrial-technological system may survive
or it may break down.
If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve
a low level of physical and psychological
suffering, but only after passing through
a long and very painful period of adjustment
and only at the cost of permanently reducing
human beings and many other living organisms
to engineered products and mere cogs in the
social machine.
Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences
will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming
or modifying the system so as to prevent it
from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.
If the system breaks down the consequences
will still be very painful.
But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous
the results of its breakdown will be, so if
it is to break down it had best break down
sooner rather than later.
We therefore advocate a revolution against
the industrial system.
This revolution may or may not make use of
violence; it may be sudden or it may be a
relatively gradual process spanning a few
decades.
We can’t predict any of that.
But we do outline in a very general way the
measures that those who hate the industrial
system should take in order to prepare the
way for a revolution against that form of
society.
This is not to be a POLITICAL revolution.
Its object will be to overthrow not governments
but the economic and technological basis of
the present society.
In this article we give attention to only
some of the negative developments that have
grown out of the industrial-technological
system.
Other such developments we mention only briefly
or ignore altogether.
This does not mean that we regard these other
developments as unimportant.
For practical reasons we have to confine our
discussion to areas that have received insufficient
public attention or in which we have something
new to say.
For example, since there are well-developed
environmental and wilderness movements, we
have written very little about environmental
degradation or the destruction of wild nature,
even though we consider these to be highly
important.
