Marxists aren't opposed to technocracy

 

Marxists aren't opposed to technocracy.  Nietzcheans are opposed to technocracy.  And understandably so.  They have a point!

But Marxists aren't opposed to technocracy.  When Engels claims, in Anti-Dühring (1877), that "the government of persons" will be "replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production," this is a perfect description of technocracy.  Technocracy is the administration of things.  It is not the government of persons - indeed, the human element has been completely removed.  This is what Nietzsche would call the Last Man, or what Kojeve would call the end of history and the "disappearance of Man," in which humanity, having lost all meaningful ambition, "remains alive as an animal in harmony with Nature or given Being."  Foucault recognizes this world as the world of "biopower": "Starting from the 18th century, societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that humans are a species" and can be governed this way: carefully, tenderly, like a gardener, shaping the specimen, allowing it to grow stably and decisively into the desired shape, permanently.  (This is Foucault's subtle way of critiquing Marxism - "critique" in the full sense, here - he is not simply opposed to Marxism.)

Romantics are opposed to technocracy.  Nietzscheans are opposed to technocracy.  They resist its inevitability, because of their ressentiment.  They are resentful towards it, and envious towards it, because it seems to stifle their "free will."  Foucault has a complex and perhaps exemplary Nietzschean attitude: he recognizes that Man will wash away "like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea," but he has learned to love this fate: amor fati.  Still he will continue to struggle against this fate, even while loving it: pessimistic activism. 

But Marxists is not the same as romanticism.  Marxists don't struggle against technocracy - on the contrary, they struggle for technocracy. 

Remember, technocracy is not the government of persons.  So technocracy is not the "rule of experts" - not exactly.  It would be more accurate to say that true technocracy is not the rule of experts, but the rule of expertise.  Not the rule of scientists, per se, but the rule of science.  Scientific socialism, if you like.  So long as you still have the rule of experts, as a separate class, yes, Marxists would still have something to fight against at that point.  But the ultimate goal is the rule of expertise itself - not the individual expert, but the industrial organization of expertise, "by the conduct of the processes of production": a world in which no one individual person is in charge, there is no one central authority, but everyone has their own little area of expertise, their own little tiny limited authority.  Their own department.  A world in which expertise has become completely depersonalized.  

And Engels is right: at that point, one would probably witness the withering away of the state, the state being defined as "special bodies of armed men" - this would no longer be necessary, humanity being sufficiently cowed and docile.

Marxists struggle for the administration of things, instead of persons.  And it is a delicious irony that ultimately, the goal of Marxism is the thingification (the reification) of social relations.  This is a dialectical relationship: Marxists struggle here and now against the reification of social relations, in order, ultimately, to achieve the reification of social relations. 

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