The 20th century was full of ideological movements. Were we to look at American-made political movements alone, we can see the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the several Civil Rights Movements coupled with 60s Radicalism, Reagan-era American Conservatism, and closing the century off with a weird mixture of Bush-Clinton-Bush-era Conservatism and Liberalism. One American-made political movement that is not talked about enough, however, is technocracy.
First, as a quite unique ideology, it inspired a mass movement during its height in the 30s and 40s. During that time, the movement built itself an organizational body with hundreds of thousands of adherents, it had its own mass rallies, its own caravans of cars, its own charismatic leader in its founder Howard Scott. But it did not come from nowhere, as a foundation to Howard Scott there were three major figures to set the stage, namely: Edward Bellamy, Thorstein Veblen, and Frederick Taylor.
The Three Forefathers
Edward Bellamy (1850-1898), a novelist and activist, laid out in his fictional novels the hope for a society without inequality and money. As an activist, he inspired the formation of “Nationalist Clubs” that believed that nationalization of industry and displacing competition with cooperation would lead to a fairer society and to economic democracy. The Nationalist Clubs were closely related to the People’s Party which had some influence in the 1890s and 1900s.
Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) was a prominent economist during the Progressive Era and father of the Institutional School of Economics. He believed production ought to be based on general benefit to society, to improve its welfare. To him, this was much better than “production for profit” or any personal incentives.
Frederick Taylor (1856-1915), the namesake of “Taylorism,” or “scientific management,” was the standardization of production based on scientific principles. Vladimir Lenin took a liking to Taylorism and the Soviet Union and later East Germany would go on to adopt and implement it.
Out of these three men, only Thorstein Veblen was a personal associate of the Technocracy Movement’s founder—Howard Scott—with Veblen as the mentor and Scott as the student. But it is undeniable that all three men helped to create a foundation for Scott and his movement.
The Movement
Howard Scott’s (1890-1970) Technocracy Movement, also known as Technocracy Incorporated, sprung from the “Technical Alliance,” a study group at Columbia University. This was a small group in numbers, but with members of great importance. Founded by Howard Scott in 1919 with the backing of Thorstein Veblen, the Alliance was defunct by 1921. Following that, Scott moved to found a new populist movement. The movement reached its peak in the 1930s when it had hundreds of thousands of followers in its book clubs, composed of university students, professionals, and engineers across the US, Canada, and the UK. Howard Scott was its founder, its chief ideologue, and chief spokesman. Howard Scott was the movement’s “Lenin.” In Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation, we read, “It may not have been Scott’s idea to position himself as a messiah, but neither did he do anything to discourage it.”
If Scott is the movement’s Lenin, then Thorstein Veblen was its Marx, and, to a lesser degree, so was Frederick Taylor. Scott being a “Lenin” also innovated beyond Veblen and Taylor. Scott did not want to “reform” capitalism, he wanted it replaced entirely. The new system was to be an “energy-based value system,” liberated from profit incentives.
The economy (and general society) was to be under the supervision of a “Soviet of Experts.” This Soviet would manage society in a calculated, planned manner, in order to guide society into an efficient and egalitarian model. With this Soviet of Experts in charge—politicians and capitalists gone—Scott believed that waste and corruption would be gone, and everyone would have employment with a 20-hour work week. Consumption of goods and services would no longer be based around ownership of means of production or the labor market. Instead, distribution is conducted according to the amount of energy spent during the period of production. So, from “work,” one would have to spend energy, and the more energy spent, the more would be distributed to consume. This was Howard Scott’s program to create a world devoid of money, and hence, devoid of profit-incentives and the labor market.
The framework for this technocratic world was laid out in 1934 in Scott’s manifest Technocracy Study Course—a manual for followers to discuss in book clubs. Soon there was an organizational structure of the “Technocracy Movement” with a headquarters, controls, divisions, and sections.
The second-in-command after Howard Scott was the geophysicist and co-author of the Technocracy Study Course, Marion King Hubbert (1903-1989). This is the same Hubbert of the “Peak oil theory.” He would later be a founding father for the environmental sustainability movement.
Scott and Hubbert had a common obsession, an obsession with monitoring everything. For instance, one requirement in their technocratic society would be to, “Provide specific registration of the consumption of each individual, plus a record description of the individual.” This obviously sounds like an Orwellian nightmare, but also somewhat familiar to a credit/debit card economy.
Scott and Hubbert were anti-market but they were also anti-private property. First, money was to be replaced with “energy certificates.” These were distributed at the start of an energy accounting period and the certificates issued in one period expire at the next. This way, everyone is forced to spend; the very choice to save is eliminated. But, even if you were allowed to save, it would still be of no use since, in the technocratic world, all property, natural resources, and means of production would be collectively owned and managed by the Soviet Experts.
Howard Scott’s Technocracy Movement clearly has plenty of similarities with the Communist movement. They were certainly competitors for the same utopian-type personalities. How did Scott view the Communist movement? Howard Scott believed that his movement was the most far movement to the Left, even more Left than Communism. To him, Communism was still stuck in the past, too conservative, and not visionary enough. During the War Communism years (1918-1921)—the most revolutionary years—Lenin had abolished money altogether, but this policy of a moneyless society was soon overturned and Russia turned to the New Economic Plan (NEP), which was a softer form of socialism in which small businesses were allowed to exist and so too were money and profit incentives.
Scott’s technocracy was to be an even more radical social revolution as money was to be abolished absolutely and permanently. His society was to be one based solely on the power of technology and science, whose “will” was to be exercised by “experts.” The general populace would live their lives in fulfillment, in honest energy-spending labor, and in material abundance. His was a world calculated, planned, free of capitalistic spontaneity; a society, run by a soviet of professionals and engineers, who would engineer a perfect world, infinitely superior to the world created “organically” by selfish, profit-motivated, free individuals.
Conclusion
The Technocracy Movement was founded by two men obsessed with monitoring, with recording statistics, calculation, and planning. Scott and Hubbert are utopians that wanted to make the world better. The goal was a “perfect” world, but in their “perfect” world there was no space for freedom, individuality, or the opportunity to develop a unique self. For utopia, freedom must be eliminated and all choices are made by “experts.” What kind of utopia is that?
