Page:Michael Velli - Manual For Revolutionary Leaders - 2nd Ed.djvu/23

 This is not the case with the powers of an office. For example, a "good electrician" is one who does no more and no less than precisely what is assigned to the office, or craft, of "electricians." The accomplishment of a "good electrician" is under no circumstances the unique result of a particular encounter of a specific individual with given instruments. The "job" is the standard result expected from that office. Any other "good electrician" would accomplish exactly the same result. In other words, the powers reside in the office; the individual is merely a more or less efficient instrument of the office. Furthermore, to the extent that a human being becomes one with an office, identifies the powers of the self with the powers of the office, to that extent the human being becomes a personification of certain social powers and negates herself or himself as a human being. An individual who becomes what "we electricians," "we doctors" or "we teachers" are, becomes a thing which responds in a specific standard manner, which performs its special expected routine, whenever it is activated by money. This internalization of personified powers is the cement that holds together the social relations.

During the course of Capital accumulation, there has been a recurring interest in the production of robots, and remarkably successful prototypes have been designed and produced. A robot is a machine whose behavior is similar to that of a human being who internalizes the division of labor. Like the human being who has been elevated to an expert or a professional, the robot possesses a specific virtue or potency, a special field in which its powers are developed to the level required by the task to which it is assigned. Like the expert, the robot is able to execute perfectly the powers of its specific office. The robot is able to evaluate whether it finds itself in one or another of a given set of situations, to choose the approach suitable to the given situation, and to correct itself if it errs. If the robot has the ability to evaluate, choose, and correct itself, these abilities are part of the instructions programmed into it when it was produced. In other words, these powers are not the robot's own, but the programmer's. The robot has no self-powers; it has no "self." In any given situation the robot's behavior takes the form of one of several pre-determined and therefore expected behaviors. Therefore the robot is an ideal component for an efficient division of labor. It is the model of an ideal citizen in a representative democracy. If it did not possess certain striking limitations, the robot would undoubtedly have replaced the human being as the New Man of industrial society.

Unfortunately for the society of personified powers, the robot's limitations are not mere technological shortcomings; they are part of the robot's very nature, so to speak. It has already been shown that industrial, strictly modern productive activity is characterized by the fact that human beings are simultaneously engaged in it and not engaged in it. With robots, this ambiguity would disappear: human beings would not be engaged in productive activity. However, the disappearance of the ambiguity could lead to the disappearance of industrial society itself, since the system of represented powers rests