WORLD WORLDWIDE BULGARIA News Journal Update - (en) Bulgaria, F.A.B.: SINGULARITY part 1 - Ideas that are close to us -- The scariest technologies of today and how humanity reaches them. (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Alexander Shubin: The path of informality (instead of the proletariat) ---- The

whole history of mankind is a struggle for the germination of human creativity in
society, it is the path to overcome successive systems of oppression, reification
(the process during which an abstract idea about a computer application can be
converted to an object or explicit data model), human instrumentation. The result
of this process of overcoming can be a truly humane society centered on
cooperation and creativity rather than domination and oppression.
By creating a human culture capable, in principle, of giving man true freedom
based on humanity and solidarity, civilization simultaneously enslaved people.
The confrontation between man and his environment, the lagging behind the
capabilities of society from the needs of man, the slow development of the
creative abilities of most people, the lagging behind the advanced achievements
of the human spirit - all this led to the hierarchy of society, the
transformation of the majority of people into an instrument of the will of the
minority, in an element of the "human machine". The dominance of this minority
was reinforced by organized state violence. The oppressed responded with
rebellion and self-organization, with a desire for social creativity.

The Road Traveled: Traditional and Industrial Societies
Man's liberation from the shackles of oppression and despotic traits of his own
culture cannot happen overnight. Humanity is an inertial system that passes
through certain stages in its development, each of which provides its own
opportunities for humanity, solidarity and freedom on the one hand and violence,
oppression and domination on the other.

In order to build a thorough forecast for the development of humanity in the long
term, it is necessary to begin with a description of the main characteristics of
the path already traveled by humanity.

For thousands of years, mankind lived in a pre-industrial traditional agrarian
society (Toffler's First Wave). This social system is based on the predominance
of agricultural production and the regulation of social relations based on
tradition and... the whip. At this stage of development, man is still very little
removed from the biological environment, in fact, the human creative principle is
only now beginning to manifest itself in him. This society can be characterized
by a number of interrelated parameters: biological type of population regulation
(high birth and death rate), cyclical rhythm of life associated with the
agricultural cycle, patriarchal-tribal and/or religious-corporate organization of
power, patriarchal family, communal organization of population, orientation
towards reproduction rather than creation of something new in the field of
technology, ideas, world view and moral doctrines. The defining feature of
traditional society is the lack of narrow specialization of the producer and his
alienation from the means of production and even more subordination to the rule
of the elite in all spheres of life. The majority of the population is engaged in
agriculture and is not cut off from the natural environment. The artificial
environment that surrounds a person in our time, in traditional society,
accompanies the life of an insignificant urban minority, and in part. A person is
guided in his life above all by tradition, social norms that have been formed
over the centuries. Therefore, it is appropriate to call the pre-industrial
society traditional.

Why are we skipping over 5,500 years of slavery and feudalism?
In the XIX-XX centuries, the global decomposition of the traditional agrarian
society took place, industrial relations began to dominate. In the 20th century,
migration to cities affected billions of people. The industrial order (Toffler's
Second Wave) developed rapidly in most countries of the world, destroying,
displacing and absorbing traditional society.

The industrial path (industrialism) is a system of social relations based on
innovation provided by standardization and narrow specialization.

In an industrial society, lifestyle, culture, economy and power are guided not by
tradition but by change, not by the individual and the family but by collective
activity, where each person is given a narrow standard function. The spread of
the industrial structure leads to the movement of masses from the villages to the
cities (urbanization), so such a society can be called urbanized.

An industrial urbanized society, the core of which is high-productivity industry,
opens up spectacular prospects for eliminating hunger and devastating epidemics
for humanity. But the same industrialism leads to unprecedented destruction of
nature and culture, alienation and control of man by man in all spheres of his
activity.  Industrial society is controlled by the ruling classes in almost all
its spheres.

The slow development of civilization is replaced by an accelerated pace of life.
In the social sphere, industrialism formed new social strata. The intellectual
elite is now needed for the constant production of new knowledge and criticism of
the old. The management layers organize the joint activity of specialized
producers on standard "rational" and not on traditional (as before) principles.
They are divided into owners ("bourgeoisie") and managers ("management",
"technocracy"). Workers are narrowly specialized, deprived of productive property
and even of participation in its management, "alienated" from the means of
production and the urbanized way of life. Such a working class is called the
proletariat.

The results of the modernization:
In the manufacturing sector, the result of modernization, the transition to
industrialism, is a technological revolution (industrial revolution,
industrialization).
In macroeconomic terms, it comes to the widespread use of fossil resources and
the struggle for them, from this point of view "capitalism" - this is the
competition of capital;
In the intellectual sector - the transition from traditionalism and
providentialism to rationalism and criticism;
In the field of information - mass circulation of information produced by the
elite, development of mass communication systems;
In a political aspect - the emergence of national bureaucratic states, the
beginning of the era of socio-political revolutions and mass party politics.
All these characteristics stem from the most important social and production
principle of the new era - innovative development based on standardization and
narrow specialization. The most important characteristics of industrial society
are closely related. The mass production of material goods led to the gradual
elimination of the biological method of limiting the population (famine and
epidemics), which led to a demographic explosion. At the cost of turning man into
a specialized tool for production, industrialism managed to create a new
artificial environment for people to live in, to temporarily weaken humanity's
dependence on natural elements. Population growth and technological concentration
of industrial production led to a process of urbanization. Specialization
required the alienation of the worker from the means of production, which led to
the spread of the principle of manageability in the sphere of production and
unprecedented social mobility and the painful breakdown of traditional
institutions. The system of universal division of labor required the creation of
a standardized national culture and, therefore, of nation-states. Industrialism
gave rise to technocracy and worldview rationalism and the widespread
dissemination of simplified knowledge necessary to participate in industrial
production (universal literacy, "mass culture").

The humanistic, creative, liberating aspects of modernization are inseparable
from its destructive and enslaving aspects. Already in the 19th century, the
greatest thinkers began to look for ways to consolidate the gains of
modernization while overcoming its negative sides. This task, which still faces
humanity today, was connected with the transition to a new system - socialism - a
society without the division of ruling and working classes. From the beginning,
the proponents of socialism saw this post-capitalist society in different ways.
Socialists - anarchists, followers of P. J. Proudhon and the Russian populists,
believe that self-governing communities (communes) will become its basis.
Marxists advocated a single centralized association of workers. With the
development of socialist ideology, these two currents borrowed a lot from each
other and created synthetic models of socialism (anarchism).

But the task of the socialist thinkers, those futurists of the nineteenth
century, was hampered by the fact that industrial society in its formative period
was seriously different from its mature forms. It painfully "hatched" from the
shell of traditional society. The transition from a traditional to an industrial
society was accompanied by numerous revolutionary uprisings and social disasters.
Early industrialism developed in the form of spontaneous capitalism. The
industrial sector was organized in the form of spontaneously competitive capitals
- structures that united producers under the leadership of a private owner or his
representatives. The destructiveness of capital clashes only increases in
proportion to their monopolization. Spontaneous capitalism is unstable and does
not control the growth of its own social costs (unemployment, overproduction,
financial speculation, worker poverty, etc.).   The apparent property differences
between private owners (capitalists, landlords, and rentiers) and workers caused
widespread public protest and a desire to eliminate private property as the
source of all social evils.

The principles of "democracy" proclaimed by the liberals - supporters of
capitalism - parliamentarism, the competition of parties for the votes of the
electors - in fact turned out not to be democracy, but equality for the
commercial and political elite.

The destructive crises inherent in capitalism exacerbate social disasters. The
plight of the broad masses of the working people led to revolutionary upheavals.
The authority of the anti-capitalist agitation of anarchists and Marxists among
the "lower" layers of the population is growing. As a result, the capitalist
oligarchy made concessions. The mission to "order" the industrial (as a rule -
still agrarian-industrial) society was undertaken by the technocratic
bureaucracy, which established more or less strict control over the economy. The
bureaucracy used the opportunities to concentrate resources in the hands of the
state to complete industrialization in a number of countries and to create a
"welfare state" - a system of redistribution for the benefit of vulnerable (and
therefore "explosive") social groups, as well as for its own benefit , to
increase the power of the state. The bureaucracy became one of the ruling classes
alongside the private owners (the state-capitalist countries of the West) and
could completely replace them (examples are the state-socialist countries of the
USSR, Eastern Europe and Asia). So in the 30s-50s. In the 20th century, a welfare
state and a state-regulated industrial (and industrial-statistical, in which the
state directly intervenes in the economy) society was created - the highest phase
of industrialism. Wider strata of workers, peasants, and officials gained access
to such goods of civilization as free education, paid vacation, health insurance,
a separate apartment, and even a comfortable house. This makes it possible to
talk about a "consumer society", where, thanks to the growth of the income of the
population, the difference between the income of the elite and the rest of
society is decreasing. The view that the welfare state contained elements of
socialism became widespread. But modern societies are still divided into ruling
and working classes, social hierarchy has not disappeared anywhere. So socialism
did not arise either in the USSR or in Sweden. The welfare state is a mature
stage in the development of industrial society. However, by the end of the 20th
century, it began to fall apart.

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