Techniques – technologies and communalist society — Social Ecology and Communalism Workshop

Elements for a lucid dialogue between social ecology and anti-industrial criticism

(Based on a cross-reading of “Renewable Lies & Decarbonized Capitalism” by Nicolas Casaux and “Authoritarian Technique and Democratic Technique” by Lewis Mumford)

How can we think about technical and technological choices in a truly ecological, democratic, and non-hierarchical society? This question has been raised in many recent debates, including within our workshop. It is complex because it touches on both the material conditions of autonomy and the horizon of a post-capitalist society. It requires us to move beyond binary oppositions without abandoning critical thinking.

The books Mensonges renouvelables & capitalisme décarboné (Renewable Lies & Decarbonized Capitalism) by Nicolas Casaux and Technique autoritaire et technique démocratique (Authoritarian Technology and Democratic Technology) by Lewis Mumford each contribute to this debate in their own way. But reading them also calls for further discussion, particularly from the perspective of social ecology inspired by Bookchin.

1. What are we really talking about when we talk about “technology”?

There seems to be some confusion between these two terms in certain debates. Some anti-industrial critics tend to reject “technology” as a whole as an alienating force, while others—including us—prefer to ask the question more “holistically”: are all technologies alienating by nature? Or should we distinguish between them according to their scale, social structure, and relationship to human autonomy?

In the workshop, Floréal invites us to move away from an overly simplistic opposition between “technique” (associated with the communal, artisanal, human world) and “technology” (assimilated to large-scale industrial production and, ultimately, capitalism). He is certainly right to point out that certain forms of technology—including automated or partially industrialized ones—may be necessary in a post-scarcity society in Bookchin’s sense: to produce basic tools (nails, simple machines), instruments for healthcare (surgery, prosthetics), or to meet the needs of a large population.

This distinction between technique and technology should not therefore become a fundamental opposition. But this does not prevent us from asking the following question: in a society freed from the logic of profit, wage labor, and market value, which technical forms would we prioritize? And how would we decide, collectively, what is sustainable, desirable, and controllable?

As Steka rightly pointed out in a recent exchange on L’Agora:

“The real question is not what we would like to have in abstract terms in terms of technology, but what a communalist society faithful to social ecology would allow: without alienated labor, without capital, without hierarchy, in harmony with nature and with itself.” 

2. Useful but sometimes insufficient criticism

The strength of Casaux’s book lies in its denunciation of the ”renewable lie“: what capitalism calls ”green transition” is often nothing more than an operation to greenwash its extractive, centralized, and dominant logic. What he denounces is a structural lie, a hegemonic narrative constructed by the ruling classes to paint the most destructive industrial logic green: “Industrial civilization is preparing to finish destroying what remains of the natural world, but now in the name of ecology.”

He also highlights the mechanisms by which the institutions of the system co-opt ecological struggles. Casaux speaks of a veritable ”co-management of disaster“:

”The NGO-ization of resistance produces professional activists, paid to organize happenings, who will move from one NGO to another without ever questioning the heart of the system. ” – Renewable Lies, p. 107

Below is a diagram of the mechanism by which NGOs, foundations, and dominant institutions co-opt and neutralize ecological and social struggles:

Ecological & social struggles

↓

Emergence of popular struggles

↓

Surveillance & identification of demands

↓

Targeted funding & co-optation (NGOs, foundations, think tanks)

↓

Institutionalization & supervision (COP, UN, IPCC, AAP, patronage)

↓

Redefinition of objectives (commodification, greenwashing, social innovation)

↓

Delegitimization of radical criticism (depoliticization, accusations of irrationality)

↓

→ Reproduction of the system, invisibilization of alternatives

But this criticism, however salutary it may be, does not always go so far as to set out the concrete conditions for alternative production. Casaux, like other anti-industrialists, tends to reverse ends and means: he makes technology the heart of the problem, without always distinguishing between the capitalist uses of certain technologies and possible forms of collective appropriation.

However, as Floréal points out, the heart of capitalism is not technology, but the valorization of commodities and the unlimited production of artificial desires. The problem is not so much the machine as what it produces, why, and for whom.

Bookchin himself gradually moved closer to Mumford’s critique on this point:

“The notion that science and technology are autonomous from society is one of the most insidious illusions of our time.” – Toward a Democratic Conception of Science and Technology, 1987

3. A political project above all

Lewis Mumford’s framework – between ‘authoritarian’ and ”democratic” technologies—can help us think about these issues without falling into paralyzing technophobia. It is not the presence of a technology that matters, but what it requires in terms of power, resources, and dependencies. A nuclear power plant is not a cooperative sawmill. A proprietary digital platform is not a tool for local self-management. These choices are not neutral: they shape the societies that use them – and vice versa.

From this perspective, the question becomes: what technologies would be compatible with a communalist society based on the principles of social ecology? Not based on an ideal catalog, but starting from very real constraints: limited resources, large populations, basic needs to be met, and the repair of inherited ecological and social damage.

4. Acting here and now: concrete experiments and political strategy

Given the scale of the problem, it would be tempting to believe that all we can do is survive on the margins or wait for “everything to collapse.” However, what we can do today—even with modest means—is to reopen the debate on technology based on concrete practices rooted in territories and communities in struggle.

This first requires clarifying the space for debate: we must move away from the sterile alternative between an “anti-technology” vision (hostile to all forms of technology per se) and a “pseudo-techno-critical” vision that would be content to tinker with elements of the dominant technological system to “get the job done.” The challenge is not to pick and choose a few “acceptable” objects from the existing technological arsenal, but to rethink our needs, our lifestyles, our social relations—and in doing so, to reopen the question of technical choice based on explicit political, ethical, and ecological criteria.

Two complementary and inseparable paths are emerging:

The first consists of multiplying, supporting, and connecting the concrete experiments already underway here and there—in agriculture, housing, education, energy, the commons, etc.—which, without waiting, are sketching out what a communalist society could look like. These collective experiences are not simply practical alternatives: they are spaces for popular reappropriation, for the development of a different social imagination, for testing our critiques, and for redefining standards of comfort, needs, and desires based on what we collectively discuss. It is in these cracks that a redefinition of technology can begin to take shape—provided that they are part of a logic of moving beyond capitalism, rather than simply mitigating its effects.

The second avenue, closely linked to the first, is that of reintroducing the political—in the strong sense—into these alternative practices. Far removed from political maneuvering or institutional management, this involves strategically linking them to a project of radical transformation: that of communalism. This also implies a questioning of work and the economy as shaped by capitalism—in other words, a departure from the economy as a naturalized ideology of life to be produced, consumed, and managed. This work is all the more difficult given that the logics of power, competition, and performance remain deeply entrenched—even in circles that claim to offer an alternative.

But this work is also what we can begin to do, here and now, collectively, by building bridges between local struggles, practical experiments, critical reflections, and spaces for politicization (without compromise). It is there, and only there, that we can reinvent a way of living with technology without submitting to it, in line with an ethically and politically desirable society.

Floréal puts it aptly: “It is not ideology that will impose sobriety, but the physical limits of our living environments.” At the same time, for us, these limits are not necessarily a disaster, but an opportunity to rethink the meaning of our lives, our priorities, our relationship to work, care, nature, technology, and tech.

This will require effort, including for those who currently live in modest conditions in industrialized countries. We will have to give up certain forms of standardized comfort, relearn skills, and rebuild collective autonomy. But there is also immense scope for creativity, emancipation, and reappropriation. Far from a return to candlelight, this could be a re-grounding in reality, where technologies—chosen, understood, and mastered—would once again become tools for the common good.

5. What if we started again from the meaning of human life?

To the question “What technologies for a communalist society?”, Steka proposes a salutary reversal: what if we started not from objects or means, but from what a truly human life entails? A life that is neither sacrificed to production, nor burdened by nuisances, nor conditioned by infrastructure that no one would want to pay for.

Who wants to live next to a factory, work there, and adopt its rhythms?
Who wants to live near a nuclear power plant or bury toxic waste in their basement?
Who really wants to live at the foot of a field of giant wind turbines or industrial solar panels?
Who wants to go and dig for rare earths or extract lithium in degrading conditions?

Not us, that’s for sure. But then who?

These questions take on their full force if we agree to broaden the debate to include historical forms of social organization. Steka, drawing in particular on Clastres and Marx, highlights an essential point: it is not scarcity that underpins work, but inequality. What capitalism cannot tolerate is not poverty, but the existence of abundance outside of work.

Clastres wrote:

“There was great disapproval of the fact that healthy young men preferred to dress up like women in paint and feathers instead of sweating in their gardens. These were people who deliberately ignored the fact that you have to earn your bread by the sweat of your brow. It was too much, and it did not last: the Indians were quickly put to work, and they perished.“

And further on:

”The refusal of primitive societies to let work and production engulf them (…) the intrinsic impossibility of competition; in a word, the unspoken but nevertheless understood prohibition of inequality.”

What this reflection reminds us is that technology is not neutral: it carries with it a history, social relations, and a desire for domination—particularly of a military, colonial, and capitalist origin. As Engels shows in The Condition of the Working Class in England, the introduction of machines did not abolish exploitation: it redeployed it elsewhere, often in the colonies or on the periphery of the system.

Conclusion – An ethics of means

A critical dialogue with anti-industrial thinkers such as Nicolas Casaux and Miguel Amorós can usefully inform our thinking. Not to espouse all their positions, but to avoid the trap of unintentional or inherited technophilia, which would naturalize devices shaped by the dominant order. We must put technology back in its proper place: behind political, ethical, and ecological choices.

We are still in the middle of the debate. But certain lines are beginning to emerge. For us as communalists, an emancipated society is not one that has the most powerful tools at its disposal, but one that chooses means consistent with its ends. A society where technical decisions are not delegated to experts, but where we collectively debate what is just, livable, and desirable. A society where technology extends the conditions of life rather than obscuring them. A society, finally, where the means are not secondary, but carry within them a political imagination, a relationship to the world – because they are already proof of what we want to build.

But at this stage, as Steka so rightly points out in a contribution to L’Agora, it seems worthwhile to ask the question again: what is technology for us? What could it become in a society freed from capitalism, patriarchy, and state logic? What would a technology be that is no longer this obvious externality, this opaque outside to humans, but a fully accepted, understood, debated, and mastered way of being in the world? Let’s face it: the answer is far from simple. But it is one of the many tasks that await us if we want social ecology to remain true to its promise.

We are reposting this article on L’Agora, our discussion forum, to continue the conversation together. Your contributions are welcome.