R.R. as the Material Basis of the Anarcho-Communist Society
THE ROBOTRONIC REVOLUTION AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION
The dawn of the twenty-first century opened an era of global crisis and spiritual decay. At the same time, it is a time of unprecedented maturation of all the objective conditions for a social transformation. The daily and widespread scientific and technological discoveries, their application in all areas of life, and the uncontrollable changes they immediately provoke, lead to the following conclusion:
Just as the first industrial revolution eliminated the structures and relations of feudal society, changing classes, mentalities, ideas, and desires, so too does R.R. undermine the social, economic, and political relations and forms of today’s society.
The R.R. factor creates the material conditions and outlines a new world with new social and international relations. At the same time, R.R. is the most solid material foundation and necessary condition of the social revolution. The two condition each other, which will provoke a revolutionary dynamic in the development of today’s society that no dictatorship, class interest, social or national barrier, religious-ideological prejudice or “worldly wisdom” will be able to withstand.
Whoever does not notice the revolutionary essence and role of this process for the future of humankind in general, and for anarchism in particular, has missed an entire era. Whoever refuses or is unable (due to ideological sclerosis or intellectual constipation) to analyze the phenomena, tendencies, and transformations associated with it—and its reflection on the PROGRAM, ORGANIZATION, TACTICS, METHODS, AND MEANS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE—is doomed to repeat boring banalities, search for the future in the past, and resent the youth who do not greet utopian musings, “contributions,” ideological lessons, and recipes from self-appointed “teachers and benefactors” or semi-literate charlatans with naive enthusiasm.
By robothronic revolution, we mean the avalanche of scientific discoveries, the creation of new theories and branches of science such as nuclear physics, synthetic chemistry, electronics, informatics, cybernetics, bionics, genetics, and their practical and technical applications. This revolution began in the post-war decades of the Second World War with the discovery of new energies, synthesis of new materials, and the creation of new technologies. Among all these discoveries, two stand out: COMPUTERS AND ROBOTS. Their combination leads to the automation of production (industrial and agricultural), services, and even part of scientific and creative activities.
All this creates a new, previously unknown mode of production in which the workforce will be gradually, but inevitably, excluded. At the same time, all spheres of social life and relations will be revolutionized. A measure of the speed of this revolutionary process is the fact that the volume of scientific and technical information doubles within short time spans in various fields of science, economy, or military production.
New generations of computers and robots are entering industry, agriculture, commerce and supply, transport, banking and statistics, services (including medicine and education), laboratories, and the sciences. Thus, more and more labor processes—physical, engineering, intellectual—are being automated, and isolated automation in individual sectors becomes IMPOSSIBLE. Once started in one enterprise, it pulls all others in the sector along with it. Because anyone who does not automate in capitalist society is doomed to uncompetitiveness, to quicker or slower decline and inevitable bankruptcy. The same applies to competition among sectoral capitals within a national market and economy, as well as among “national” capitals in the global market.
Thus, competition draws all enterprises, all capital, and ultimately all states into the whirlpool of automation. Borders between countries and blocks with “different” systems open to R.R. Those who try to build walls and barbed wire in front of it will die first. And when all “open up” — they will die together.
The automation we witness is only the beginning of the process. In the laboratories of major firms and universities, work is actively being done to create self-learning automatons that can remember and analyze their own “experience.” This, along with machine recognition of images, colors, sounds, and other signals from the external environment, leads directly to the creation of a generation of machines with “artificial intelligence.” Altogether, this leads to the realization of Norbert Wiener’s “prophecy” about the closed circle of automation and the sequential removal of humans from all spheres of production, services, statistics, and monotonous, repetitive, mind-numbing physical and mental tasks.
These processes reveal unlimited possibilities for progress, abundance, and the expansion of human potential and confront the “First World” (and eventually all of humanity) with the necessity for new principles, criteria, and goals of social and economic organization, distribution and consumption, interpersonal and international relations. But the birth of this new society presupposes the death and burial of the current one, with its political, economic, and class rulers. Naturally, they will try to erect various types of barriers against R.R., to restrain automation within limits tolerable to them—beyond which today’s structures and relations lose any “raison d’être.” The ruling classes will strive to place this revolutionary process—and the social history of humanity—under their control. But this is unlikely to be possible, even with attempts to establish a global dictatorship or a modern planetary Roman Empire attempting to replace competition with worldwide monopoly and “game” regulation by decree; to preserve the hierarchy of social layers, personal and group privileges—from the world capital to the last province on every continent; to eternalize inequality and impose slavery, even when pyramids and palaces can be built without slaves and in quantities… sufficient for all who want them.
In the new context, alongside the undermining of all foundations of today’s world, with the degradation of the intellectual and political energy of its leaders, in contrast to the unlimited possibilities that R.R. opens for humankind, roams the mirage of planetary domination, of halting social development, and creating a super-Orwellian nightmare. Until now, this ruling “ideal” has always been shattered by competition and the uneven development of the world. These two processes have, throughout six millennia of political history, created new centers of power and appetites over all regions of the globe, new zones of economic and military vacuum, new victories and defeats—thus sweeping away the dreams and ambitions of successive rulers, exploiters, and substitutes for gods trying to conquer the world.
Competition between today’s political, financial, and “military-industrial complexes” of the U.S., Europe, Japan, and Russia to control “vacuums,” the emergence of new competitors (such as China, India, Brazil, and others), the entire unstable balance of power between these centers of influence, their greed, ambitions for dominance and profit—make control over R.R. impossible, whose level of development is, among other things, a measure of military strength for each of these industrial-militarist dinosaurs locked in a death struggle.
This competition accelerates the transformation of today’s workers into tomorrow’s unemployed. Thus, staying within the framework of the capitalist socio-economic, political, and international system, we are heading toward a world where the number of unemployed in overdeveloped countries will reach a critical mass of the active population. (It is difficult to determine the exact threshold that will lead to a social explosion, especially since this phenomenon is not isolated but unfolds in parallel with a series of counteracting and delaying—or assisting and accelerating—factors, forces, and processes, each of which deserves separate study.)
Such a majority of the active population—a high percentage even today among the youth of Europe—cast out from real economic, technical, scientific, and cultural processes, provokes poorly masked terror among the rulers, who continue to chase competitiveness and profitability, while their programs and plans, subordinated to these goals, annually generate millions of unemployed and “superfluous people,” forming the new “dangerous classes.”
What solution to this dilemma can the various owners of plots of power and wealth find, those who want at all costs to preserve the world of power and property?
If we exclude the “final solution,” once practiced in the furnaces of Nazi concentration camps and Stalin's GULAG, or the deranged ideas of some frightened “paper tigers” of nuclear war, it seems that not many options remain for the “masters of the day” to handle the millions of “superfluous” they themselves have created: either a growing number of unemployed “lumpens,” or lumpens fictionally employed in bureaucracy, the police, the army, and all kinds of parasitic institutions, professions, and callings.
Over time, these two categories of “lumpens” can only increase their relative weight among the active population. Under state capitalism, the declassed “superfluous” were harnessed into the yoke of an ever-growing petty bureaucracy. Along with other “achievements,” government offices became incubators of dead souls—in each office “cell” (often no larger than a prison cell), around some semblance of a desk sat several “employees,” occupied with filling the bottomless barrels of bureaucracy and pouring out their not entirely powerless malice on the heads of “neighbors” dragged into the “offices” by a flood of paperwork.
Parasites exist not only in the world of “real socialism.” Under private capitalism, the current equivalent of this pseudo-employment are the unemployed, parasitic professions, and the entire underworld of the big cities. And because the “superfluous” are becoming more and more numerous, the liberal adepts of “freedom” are frantically searching for a solution… and they find one. Judging by statistics from the American economy (where “jobs are created”), a massive percentage of newly created positions are for servants, valets, waiters, cooks, guards, personal drivers, doormen, and the like. Statisticians are amazed to find that the increase in such labor is accompanied by its devaluation. Thus, even the initial thrust of R.R. is accompanied by a rise in the number of servants. (In Japan, ads appear for dog walkers who help puppies urinate). These are the “prospects” today’s liberal masters of the “free world” offer to the “superfluous” and declassed youth in the robothronic era! And these are the forms in which they try to revive the civilizations of slavery and serfdom swept away by barbarians or the young bourgeoisie. These, finally, are the contours of Reagan’s “conservative revolution.”
With these and many other similar measures and “reforms” of their economic and social policy, the rulers seek to create a “new” social fabric and foundation for their rule and pseudo-release valves TO AVOID THE CHAIN AND UNCONTROLLABLE REACTION OF SOCIAL EXPLOSIONS. Thus, it BECOMES OBVIOUS TO ALL the MEANINGLESSNESS OF A SOCIAL SYSTEM in which, as a result of robothronic development, the social, economic, and political relations of inequality, exploitation, and subjugation are emptied of content and become anachronisms, while the rulers of the world wish to preserve them at any cost.
The erosion and collapse of the patched-up (and “reformed” to be preserved) “social order” is A MATTER OF TIME. No one, not even God, has succeeded in stopping the flow of time! AGAINST THE ROBOTRONIC BOMBS with which the foundations of today’s social, state, and economic structures and relations are being charged, there is—and seemingly can be—no “strategic defense.”
Capitalism may only be the antechamber of the robothronic revolution, but it cannot complete it. This completion presupposes the removal of all barriers—social, political, monetary, cultural, and moral—that today's society erects in order to preserve itself, blocking the freedom of creativity and initiative of millions of people in every country.
Tomorrow’s society needs free creators, people of initiative, of bold ideas and projects. It needs human freedom, not limited by power, selfish interests, or dogma. And there can be no freedom—neither individual nor collective—no free human personalities can emerge from an amorphous and nameless mass without eliminating the rule of the few over the many (or the many over the even more), without crushing the will to dominate others and to parasitize at their expense, without destroying ownership, profiteering, and monopoly—private or state—over any sector, branch, or people!
The free and harmonious development of everyone and all requires the uprooting of every manifestation of greed, power-lust, and egocentrism, of the striving for luxury, privilege, fame, vanity, etc. It requires the revocation of the “right” to use one’s “neighbor” as a servant, informant, prostitute, secretary, etc. This development requires overcoming the fragmentation of humanity and the uneven development of its parts, outgrowing caste, national, and racial narrow-mindedness, which, like atavism, may continue to manifest long after all military-police, economic, social, cultural, and moral foundations of power have become DEAD AND INCINERATED!
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>>2447997 is a leaflet version of the publication above. The complete publication as of 27.08.25 does not appear to have a complete translation readily available.