Page:Michael Velli - Manual For Revolutionary Leaders - 2nd Ed.djvu/35

 productive power from the productive process where it originates. An ancient foot soldier was perfectly aware of the human consequence of running a spear through another human being; a technician who pushes a button that releases a bomb could grasp the significance of his act only if his own home town were annihilated by a bomb; the mild mannered University of Michigan Professor who calmly defines the enemies to international security, who devotes his life to the development of model concentration camps, who passionlessly and objectively explores the possibilities of jellies that burn on living flesh—the Professor, unlike the footsoldier or the technician, is merely theorizing, experimenting with vials, calculating the slopes of lines on graphs.

The mental disorders that take root among the wielders of personified social power are further aggravated by the lack of species solidarity that accompanies the internalization of the behavior, thoughts and feelings of an office. The officers of the ideological establishment increasingly become the self less thinking machines, the robots who were once thought of as possible productive workers. But the ideological officials are not as efficient as robots were thought to be by those who believed that machines, not human beings, created the productive forces. Like the monks who calmly inscribed spheres within spheres while the Church collapsed around them, the ideological superstructure loses contact with its social base. The scientific method and cold objectivity of the thinking machine are developed symptoms of a lack of empathy with human beings which leads to a profound inability to understand them. This inability in turn leads to coldly and scientifically designed policies and measures which are completely out of touch with the social situation for which they are designed. The measures lose their social, namely human, frame of reference; they are the calm and carefully pre meditated designs of a maniac, a deranged robot, a mechanical monster that has slipped out of human control and begins destroying human beings helter-skelter with a mechanical indifference which, among animate beings, would characterize only a deity or an ape.

In general, responses to a social order are conditioned by the level of development of the productive forces and by the form of the social relations. However, in specific instances the weight of the productive forces or the social relations in conditioning an individual's response depends on the individual's daily activity within the social division of labor. The further an individual's daily social activity is removed from society's productive forces, the less the individual's response is conditioned by the level of development of the productive forces, the more It is conditioned by the social relations. This is why the modern First and Second Estates, the officials of the governmental and ideological establishments, cannot view the productive forces as potential means to the development of their human powers, but only as threats to their personified powers. Among the wielders of society's