Book Review - Forces of Production by David F Noble

This book was written by David F Noble about the 'Automation Era' of the middle 20th century. David F Noble presents a series of interlinked case studies of how the Scientist- Entrepreneurial class collaborated with the US Military to give birth to what is now known as the proverbial 'Military Industrial' Complex. Though one of the avowed aims of the Military Industrial complex that influenced the US federal government was 'containing' Communism and 'anti-American' activities' internationally, Noble goes on to argue that there were other, even more significant goals to achieve.

The chief aim was to counter the working class unity which was getting a filip in all the industrial countries especially in the US during the booming Soviet era. The case studies chiefly centre on the famed MIT which kept pressurising the federal government to pump in millions of dollars towards funding 'Research'. And the research was focussed on developing technology that soon will enable mankind to enter the era of the 'Automatic Factory'. The automatic factory was projected as the ultimate stage in the evolution of science and technology, which if attained could totally eliminate the 'error-prone' human component out of the process of production. The MIT and related corporations were successful in manoeuvring the govt to pump a significant percentage of the annual federal budget into the research towards the final 'automatic factory'.

In other words, these institutions were bent on extracting a major share of taxpayer money in order to develop technology that will in turn render the taxpayer totally 'jobless'. Noble highlights the extreme absurdity of the entire process which after a point assumes evil and irreversible implications. The expensive research work carried on in these institutions which initially were centred on reducing 'manual errors' and producing perfect output so as to suit other important industrial needs, rapidly drifted into areas of cost cutting and economising production. And cost cutting, so obvious in the way it means, implied elimination of human wage labour even if the new sophisticated machinery developed by these institutions were extremely expensive and unaffordable to many small and medium scale industries.

The book also reflects the working class reaction to these new developments, the challenges it faced under ineffective trade union leadership and how significant these seemingly minor events had a huge bearing on the course of later, more remarkable developments.

Noble not only records the events but also daringly puts forward the impressions they left on him and does not shy away from making future predictions. The book goes on to make a huge statement that might be summed up as follows - 'No aspect of a capitalist society is independent or meaninglessly preordained. And the aspect might even be as seemingly innocent as Technology. Technology as long as it is in the hands of capital, shall serve only the purposes of its master and any assumptions about its service to mankind in the journey towards overall human prosperity, is nothing more than a dangerous illusion'.

I would recommend the book only to those who are wholly interested in the subject and not certainly for others. There will be a vast amount of dreary statistics and numbers which might be off-putting. But I am sure it is an extremely enlightening work when you really want to know your place in the long chain of human historical phenomenon.