TOOLS FORCONVIVIALITY
Ivan Illich

Fontana/Collins

First published in the U.S.A. by Harper & Row in their World
Perspective Series, edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen, 1973
Published in Great Britain by Calder & Boyars 1973
First issued in Fontana 1975
Copyright© Ivan lllich 1973
Portions of this book appeared in the MarchjApril1973 issueof Social Policy Magazine
Made and printed in Great Britain by
William Collins Sons & Co Ltd Glasgow

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Contents

I

Acknowledgements

7

Introduction

9
I4

Two Watersheds

II Convivial Reconstruction

23

III

6o
62
65
7I
82
88
9I

The Multiple Balance
I. Biological Degradation
2. Radical Monopoly
3· Overprogramming
4· Polarization
5· Obsolescence
6. Frustration

IV Recovery
I. The Demythologization Q{ Science
2. The Rediscovery of Lauguage
3· The Recovery of Legal Procedurev Political Inversion

I. Myths and Majorities
2. From Breakdo-wn to Chaos
3· b1s~ght into Crisis

4· Sudden Change

99

IOO
I03
I01
II5
n6
II7
I20
I22

Acknowledgements
The multidimensional analysis of ceilings for industrial
growth was first formulated in a Spanish docwnent coauthored by Valentina Borremans and myself and submitted
as a guideline for a meeting of two dozen Chilean socialists
and other Latin Americans at CIDOC (the Center for Intercultural Documentation) in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The next
version was presented a·t the Zeno Symposium organized byProfessor Richard Wollheim in Cyprus. It was published in
Esprit, Paris, March 1972, with criticisms by Th. Adam,
Pierre Caussat, J. P. Chevenement, Paul Fraisse, Yves
Goussault, Pierre Kende, J. W. Lapierre, Michel Panoff,
Henri Pequignot, Jean Marie Domenach, and Paul Thibaud.
A third version served me and my deceased friend Greer
Taylor as the basis for our participation in the Canadian
Conference on the Law in January 1972 in Ottawa. Comments by David Weisstub, Nils Christie, Allen M. Linden,
J. G. Castel, H. W. Arthurs, Jose Antonio Viera-Gallo, J. C.
Smith, and Bonaventura de Sousa Santos, and other critical
papers by jurists, will be published in mid-1973 in Toronto.
During the swnmer of 1972, participants in my CIDOC
seminar contributed very helpful papers. I'm especially grateful for the assistance of John Bradley, John Brewer, JoseMaria and Veronica Bulnes, Martin Cohen, Irene Curbelo deDiaz, Dennis Detzel, Joseph Fitzpatrick, Amnon Goldworth,
Conrad Johnson, Hartmut von Hentig, John MacKnight,
Michael Maccoby, Leslie Marcus, Francisco Miro Quesada,Marie-Noelle Monteil, William Ophuls, Marta H. Reed,
Everett Reimer, Francisco Varela, Etienne Verne, Jacques Vidal and German Zabala. Dennis Sullivan has- patiently andcritically assisted me in editing the final version. After I had
delivered this manuscript to the publisher, I received valu-

8

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

able suggestions from J. P. Naik and his friends in India.
These have seeped into the text to the extent this can happen
in the correction of proofs. Second only to Valentina Barremans and Greer Taylor, Heinz von Foerster, Erich Fromm,
Hermann Schwember and Abraban Diaz Gonzales haveexerted the most decisive influence on the formulation of myideas.

Introduction
During the next several years I intend to work on an
epilogue to the industrial age. I want to trace the changes inlanguage, myth, ritual and law, which took place in thecurrent epoch of packaging and of schooling. I want todescribe the fading monopoly of the industrial mode of production and the vanishing of the industrially generated professions this mode of production serves.
Above all I want to show that two-thirds of mankind still
can avoid passing through the industrial age, by choosing
right now a postindustrial balance in their mode of production which the hyperindustrial nations will be forced to adopt
as an alternative to chaos. To prepare for this task I submit
this essay for critical comment.
In its present form this book is the result of conversationsat CIDOC in Cuernavaca during the summer of 1972.
Participants in my seminar will recognize their ideas, andoften their words. I ask my collaborators to accept my sincere
thanks, especially for their written contributions.
This essay has become too long to appear as an article andtoo intricate to be read in several instalments. It is a progress
report. I respectfully thank Ruth Nanda Anshen for issuingthis tract as a volume, in World Perspectives, published by
Harper & Row.
For several years at CIDOC in Cuernavaca we have conducted critical research on the monopoly of the industrial
mode of production and have tried to define conceptually
alternative modes that would fit a postindustrial age. During
the late sixties this research centred on educational devices.
By 1970 we had found that:
1. Universal education through compulsory schooling is
not possible.

10

INTRODUCTION

2. Alternative devices for the production and marketing ofmass education are technically more feasible and ethically less tolerable than compulsory graded schools.
Such new educational arrangements are now on theverge of replacing traditional school systems in rich andin poor countries. They are potentially more effectivein the conditioning of job-holders and consumers in anindustrial economy. They are therefore more attractive
for the management of present societies, more seductive
for the people, and insidiously destructive of fundamental values.
3. A society committed to high levels of shared learningand critical personal intercourse must set pedagogicallimits on industrial growth.
I have published the results of this research in a previous
volume of World Perspectives, entitled Deschooling Society.
I clarified some of the points left ill defined in that book by
writing an article published in the Saiurday Review of April
19, 1971.
Our analysis of schooling has led us to recognize the mass
production of education as a paradigm for other industrial enterprises, each producing a service commodity, each organized
as a public utility, and each defining its output as a basic
necessity. At first our attention was drawn to the compulsory
insurance of professional health care, and to systems of
public transport, which tend to become compulsory once
traffic rolls above a certain speed. We found that the industrialization of any service agency leads to destructive side
effects analogous to the unwanted secondary results wellknown from the overproduction of goods. We had to face a
set of limits to growth in the service sector of any society as
inescapable as the limits inherent in the industrial production of artifacts. We concluded that a set of limits to industrial growth is well formulated only if these limits apply bothto goods and to services which are produced in an industrial
mode. So we set out to clarify these limits.
I here submit the concept of a multidimensional balance ofhuman life which can serve as a framework for evaluating
man's relation to his tools. In each of several dimensions of

INTRODUCTION

11

this balance it is possible to identify a natural scale. Whenan enterprise grows beyond a certain point on this scale, it
first frustrates the end for which it was originally designed,
and then rapidly becomes a threat to society itself. These
scales must be identified and the parameters of humanendeavours within which human life remains viable must be
explored.
Society can be destroyed when further growth of mass production renders the milieu hostile, when it extinguishes thefree use of the natural abilities of society's members, when
it isolates people from each other and locks them into a manmade shell, when it undermines the texture of community bypromoting extreme social polarization and splintering specialization, or when cancerous acceleration enforces social change
at a rate that rules out legal, cultural, and political precedents as formal guidelines to present behaviour. Corporate
endeavours which thus threaten society cannot be tolerated.
At this point it becomes irrelevant whether an enterprise isnominally owned by individuals, corporations, or the state,because no form of management can make such fundamental
destruction serve a social purpose.
Our present ideologies are useful to clarify the contradictions which appear in a society which relies on the capitalist
control of industrial production; they do not, however, provide the necessary framework for analysing the crisis in theindustrial mode of production itself. I hope that one day a
general theory of industrialization will be stated with precision, that it will be formulated in terms compelling enoughto withstand the test cf criticism. Its concepts ought to provide a common language for people in opposing parties whoneed to engage in the assessment of social programmes ortechnologies, and who want to restrain the power of man's
tools when they tend to overwhelm man and his goals. Such atheory shouid help people invert the present structure ofmajor institutions. I hope that this essay will enhance theformulation of such a theory.
It is now difficult to imagine a modern society in which industrial growth is balanced and kept in check by several complementary, distinct, and equally scientific modes of produc-

12

INTRODUCTION

tion. Our vtston of the possible and the feasible is so restricted by industrial expectations that any alternative to moremass production sounds like a return to past oppression or
like a Utopian design for noble savages. In fact, however, thevision of new possibilities requires only the recognition thatscientific discoveries can be used in at least two opposite
ways. The first leads to specialization of functions, institutionalization of values and centralization of power and turns_
people into the accessories of bureaucracies or machines. The
second enlarges the range of each person's competence, control, and initiative, limited only by other individuals' claims
to an equal range of power and freedom.
To formulate a theory about a future society both very
modern and not dominated by industry, it will be necessary
to recognize natural scales and limits. We must come to admitthat only within limits can machines take the place of slaves;beyond these limits they lead to a new kind of serfdom. Only
within limits can education fit people into a man-made envirol?Jlle'nt: beyond these limits lies the universal schoolhouse,
hospital ward, or prison. Only within limits ought politics tobe concerned with the distribution of maximum industrial
outputs, rather than with equal inputs of either energy or
information. Once these limits are recognized, it becomes
possible to articulate the triadic relationship between persons,tools, and a new collectivity. Such a society, in zohich modern
technologies serve politically interrelated individuals rather
than managers, I will call 'com-·h•ial'.
After many doubts, and against the advice of friends
whom I respect, I have chosen 'com•ivial' as a technicalterm to designate a modern society of responsibly limited
tools. In part this choice was conditioned by the desire tocontinue a discourse which had started with its Spanish cognate. The French cognate has been given technical meaning(for the kitchen) by Brillat-Savarin in his Physiology of
Taste: Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy. This
specialized use of the term in French might explain why it
has already proven effective in the unmistakably different andequally specialized context in which it will appear in thisessay. I am aware that in English 'convivial' now seeks theINTRODUCTION

13

company of tipsy jolliness, which is distinct from that indicated by the OED and opposite to the austere meaning ofmodern 'eutrapelia,' which I intend. By applying the term
'convivial' to tools rather than to people, I hope to forestall
confusion.
'Austerity,' which says something about people, has also
been degraded and has acquired a bitter taste, while for
Aristotle or Aquinas it marked the foundation of friendship.
In the Summa Theologica II, II, in the 186th question,
article 5, Thomas deals with disciplined and creative playfulness. In his third response he defines 'austerity' as a virtue
which does not exclude all enjoyments, but only those which
are distracting from or destructive of personal relatedness.
For Thomas 'austerity' is a complementary part of a moreembracing virtue, which he calls friendship or joyfulness. It
is the fruit of an apprehension that things or tools could
destroy rather than enhance eutrapelia (or graceful playfulness) in personal relations.**Hugo v. Rahner, Man at Play, New York, 1972,

I
Two Watersheds
The year 1913 marks a watershed in the history of modern
medicine. Around that year a patient began to have morethan a fifty-fifty chance that a gr .. duate of a medical school
would provide him with a specifically effective treatment (if,of course, he was suffering from one of the standard diseases
recognized by the medical science of the time). Many
shamans and herb doctors familiar with local diseases andremedies and trusted by their clients had always had equal or
better results.
Since then medicine has gone on to define what constitutes
disease and its treatment. The Westernized public learned todemand effective medical practice as defined by the progressof medical science. For the first time in history doctors could
measure their efficiency against scales which they themselves
had devised. This progress was due to a new perspective of
the origins of some ancient scourges; water could be purified
and infant mortality lowered; rat control could disarm theplague; treponemas could be made visible under the microscope and Salvarsan could eliminate them with statisticallydefined risks of poisoning the patient; syphilis could be
avoided, or recognized and cured by rather simple procedures; diabetes could be diagnosed and self-treatment withinsulin could prolong the life of the patient. Paradoxically,
the simpler the tools became, the more the medical profession
insisted on a monopoly of their application, the longer became the training demanded before a medicine man was
initiated into t:Q.e legitimate use of the simplest tool, and themore the entire population felt dependent on the doctor.
Hygiene turned from being a virtue into a professionallyorganized ritual at the altar of a science.
Infant mortality was lowered, common forms of infection

TWO WATERSHEDS

15

were prevented or treated, some forms of crisis intervention
became quite effective. The spectacular decline in mortality
and morbidity was due to changes in sanitation, agriculture,marketing, and general attitudes toward life. But thoughthese changes were sometimes influenced by the attention
that engineers paid to new facts discovered by medical
science, they could only occasionally be ascribed to the intervention of doctors.
Indirectly, industrialization profited from the new effectiveness attributed to medicine; work attendance was raised, andwith it the claim to efficiency on the job. The destructivenessof new tools was hidden from public view by new techniquesof providing spectacular treatments for those who fell victims
to industrial violence such as the speed of cars, tension on thejob, and poisons in the environment.
The sickening side effects of modern medicine became
obvious after World War II, but doctors needed time to diagnose drug-resistant microbes or genetic damage caused byprenatal X-rays as new epidemics. The claim made by
George Bernard Shaw a generation earlier, that doctors hadceased to be healers and were assuming control over thepatient's entire life, could still be regarded as a caricature.
Only in the mid-fifties did it become evident that medicine
had passed a second watershed and had itself created new
kinds of disease.
Foremost among iatrogenic (doctor-induced) diseases was
the pretence of doctors that they provided their clients withsuperior health. First, social planners and doctors became its
victims. Soon this epidemic aberration spread to society atlarge. Then, during the last fifteen years, professional medicine became a major threat to health. Huge amounts ofmoney were spent to stem immeasurable damage caused by
medical treatments. The cost of healing was dwarfed by thecost of extending sick life; more people survived longer
months with their lives hanging on a plastic tube, imprisoned
in iron lungs, or hooked on to kidney machines. New sickness
was defined and institutionalized; the cost of enabling people
to survive in unhealthy cities and in sickening jobs skyrocketed. The monopoly of the medical profession was ex-

16

TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

tended over an increasing range of everyday occurrences inevery man's life.
The exclusion of mothers, aunts, and other nonprofessionals from the care of their pregnant, abnormal, hurt, sick, ordying relatives and friends resulted in new demands for
medical services at a much faster rate than the medical
establishment could deliver. As the value of services rose, it
became almost impossible for people to care. Simultaneously,
more conditions were defined as needing treatment by creating new specializations or paraprofessions to keep the tools
under the control of the guild.
At the time of the second watershed, preservation of thesick life of medically dependent people in an unhealthy environment became the principal business of the medical profession. Costly prevention and costly treatment became increasingly the privilege of those individuals who throughprevious consumption of medical services had established aclaim to more of it. Access to specialists, prestige hospitals,
and life-machines goes preferentially to those people who livein large cities, where the cost of basic disease prevention, as
of water treatment and pollution control, is already exceptionally high. The higher the per capita cost of prevention,
the higher, paradoxically, became the per capita cost of treatment. The prior consumption of costly prevention and treatment establishes a claim for even more extraordinary care.
Like the modern school system, hospital-based health carefits the principle that those who have will receive even more
and those who have not will be taken for the little that they
have. In schooling this means that high consumers of education will get postdoctoral grants, while dropouts learn thatthey have failed. In medicine the same principle assures that
suffering will increase with increased medical care; the rich
will be given more treatment for iatrogenic diseases and thepoor will just suffer from them.
After this second turning point, the unwanted hygiene byproducts of medicine began to affect entire populations rather
than jus{ inc!i\ridu!ll men. In rich countries medicine began
to sustain the middle-aged until they became decrepit andneeded more doctors and increasingly complex medical tools.

TWO WATERSHEDS17

In poor countries, thanks to modern medicine, a larger percentage of children began to survive into adolesence andmore women survived more pregnancies. Populations increased beyond the capacities of their environments and therestraints and efficiencies of their cultures to nurture them.
Western doctors abused drugs for the treatment of diseases
with which native populations had learned to live. As a result
they bred new strains of disease with which modern treatment, natural immunity, and traditional culture could notcope. On a world-wide scale, but particularly in the USA,
medical care concentrated on breeding a human stock thatwas fit only for domesticated life within an increasingly
more costly, man-made, scientifically controlled environment.
One of the main speakers at the 1970 AMA convention exhorted her pediatric colleagues to consider each newborn
baby as a patient until the child could be certified as healthy.
Hospital-born, formula-fed, antibiotic-stuffed children thus
grew into adults who can breathe the air, eat the food, andsurvive the lifelessness of a modern city, who will breed andraise at almost any cost a generation even more dependent on
medicine.
Bureaucratic medicine spread over the entire world. 'In
1968, after twenty years of Mao's regime, the Medical
College of Shanghai had to conclude that it was engaged in
the training of 'so-called first-rate doctors ... who ignore fivemillion peasants and serve only minorities in cities .... They
create large expenses for routine laboratory examinations ...
prescribe huge amounts of antibiotics unnecessarily . . . andin the absence of hospital or laboratory facilities have to limit
themselves to explaining the mechanisms of the disease topeople for whom they cannot do anything, and to whom this
explanation is irrelevant.' In China this recognition led to amajor institutional inversion. Today, the same college reportsthat one million health workers have reached acceptable levelsof competence. These health workers are laymen who inperiods of low agricultural manpower needs have attended
short courses, starting with the dissection of pigs, gone on to
the performance of routine lab tests, the study of the elementsof bacteriology, pathology, clinical medicine, hygiene, and18

TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

acupuncture, and continued in apprenticeship with doctors or
previously trained colleagues. These 'barefoot doctors' remain at their work places but are excused occasionally when
fellow workers require their assistance. They have responsibility for environmental sanitation, for health education, immunization, first aid, primary medical care, postillness
follow-up, as well as for gynaecological assistance, birthcontrol, and abortion education. Ten years after the second
watershed of Western medicine had been acknowledged,
China intends to have one fully competent health worker for
every hundred people. China has proved that a sudden inversion of a major institution is possible. It remains to be seen
if this deprofessionalization can be sustained against theoverweening ideology of unlimited progress and pressuresfrom classical doctors to incorporate their barefoot homonymas part-time professionals on the bottom rung of a medical
hierarchy.
In the West during the sixties dissatisfaction with medicine
grew in proportion to its cost, reaching the greatest intensity
in the USA. Rich foreigners flocked to the medical centresof Boston, Houston and Denver to seek exotic repair jobs,
while the infant mortality of the US poor remained comparable to that in some tropical countries of Africa and Asia.
Only the very rich in the United States can now afford what
all people in poor countries have: personal attention aroundthe deathbed. An American can now spend in two days ofprivate nursing the mediail yearly cash income of the world's
population.
Instead of exposing the systemic disorder, however, only
the symptoms of 'sick' medicine are now publicly indicted in
the United States. Spokesmen for the poor object to thecapitalist prejudices of the AMA and the income of doctors.
Community leaders object to the lack of community control
over the delivery systems of professional health maintenanceor of sick care, believing that laymen on hospital boards canharness professional medics. Black spokesmen object to theconcentration of research grants on the types of disease which
tend to strike the white, elderly, overfed foundation official
who approves them. They ask for research on sickle-cell

TWO WATERSHED_S

19

anaemia, which strikes only the black. The general voter hopesthat the end of the war in Vietnam will make more funds
available for an increase of medical production. This general
concern with symptoms, however, distracts attention from themalignant expansion of institutional health care which is at
the root of the rising costs and demands and the decline inwell-being.
The crisis of medicine lies on a much deeper level thanits symptoms reveal and is consistent with the present crisisof all industrial institutions. It results from the developmentof a professional complex supported and exhorted by society
to provide increasingly 'better' health, and from the willingness of clients to serve as guinea pigs in this vain experiment.
People have lost the right to declare themselves sick; ~oc;ety
now accepts their claims to sickness only after certification
by medical bureaucrats.
It is not strictly necessary to this argument to accept 1913
and 1955 as the two watershed years in order to understandthat early .in the century medical practice emcr'1ed into an
era of scientific verification of its results. And later medical
science itself became an alibi for the obvious damage cau-:edby the medical professional. At the first watershed the desirable effects of new scientific discoveries were easily measured
and verified. Germ-free water reduced infant mortality related
to diarrhoea, aspirin reduced the pain of rheum1tism, andmalaria could be controlled by quinine. Some traditionalcures were recognized as quackery, but, more importantly,
the use of some simple habits and tools spread widely. People
began to understand the relationship between health and abalanced diet, fresh air, calisthenics, pure water and soap.
New devices ranging from toothbrushes to Band-Aids andcondoms became widely available. The positive contributionsof modern medicine to individual health during the early partof the twentieth century can hardly be que~tioned.
But then medicine began to approach the second watershed. Every year medical science reported a new breakthrough. Practitioners of new specialties rehabilitated someindividuals suffering from rare diseases. The practice of
medicine became centred on the performance of hospital-

20

TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

based staffs. Trust in miracle cures obliterated good sense
and traditional wisdom on healing and health care. The irresponsible use of drugs spread from doctors to the generalpublic. The second watershed was approached when themarginal utility of further professionalization declined, atleast insofar as it can be expressed in terms of the physicalwell-being of the largest number of people. The second watershed was superseded when the marginal disutility increased as
further monopoly by the medical establishment became an
indicator of more suffering for larger numbers of people.
After the passage of this second watershed, medicine stillclaimed continued progress, as measured by the new landmarks doctors set for themselves and then reached; both predictable discoveries and costs. For instance, a few patientssurvived longer with transplants of various organs. On theother hand, the total social cost exacted by medicine ceased
to be measurable in conventional terms. Society can have noquantitative standards by which to add up the negative valueof illusion, social control, prolonged suffering, loneliness,
genetic deteriorations, and frustration produced by medical
treatment.
Other industrial institutions have passed through the sametwo watersheds. This is certainly true for the major social
agencies that have been reorganized according to scientificcriteria during the last 150 years. Education, the mails, social
work, transportation, and even civil engineering have followed
this evolution. At first, new knowledge is applied to the solution of a clearly stated problem and scientific measuring
sticks are applied to account for the new efficiency. But at asecond point, the progress demonstrated in a previous achievement is used as a rationale for the exploitation of society as awhole in the service of a value which is determined and constantly revised by an element of society, by one of its selfcertifying professional elites.
In the case of transportation it has taken almost a century
to pass from an era served by motorized vehicles to the erain which society has been reduced to virtual enslavement tothe car. During the American Civil War steam power onwheels became effective. The new economy in transportation

TWO WATERSHEDS

21

enabled many people to travel by rail at the speed of a royalcoach, and to do so with a comfort kings had not dared to
dream of. Gradually, desirable locomotion was associated andfinally identified with higher vehicular speeds. But whentransportation had passed through its second watershed,vehicles had created more distances than they helped tobridge; more time was used by the entire society for the sakeof traffic than was 'saved'.
It is sufficient to recognize the existence of these two watersheds in order to gain a fresh perspective on our present
social crisis. In one decade several major institutions have
moved jointly over their second watershed. Schools are losing
their claim to be effective tools to provide education; cars
have ceased to be eifectin.! toob for mass transportation; theassembly line has ceased to be an acceptable mode of production.
The characteristic reaction of the sixties to the growing
frustration was further technological and bureaucratic escalation. Self-defeating escalation of power became the coreritual practised in highly industrialized nations. In thiscontext the Vietnam war is both reve:1ling and concealing. It
makes this ritual visible for the entire world in a narrow
theatre of war, yet it alsl) distracts attention from the same
ritual being played out in many so-called peaceful arenas.
The condu.::t of the w:1r pro\·es that a convivial army limited
to bicycle speeds is served by the opponent's escalation ofanonymous power. And yc't many Americans argue that theresources squ:mdered on the \Yar in the Far East could be
used effe.:tively ro overwhelm pLwerry at home. Others areanxious to use the $20 billion the war now costs for increasing international developm.:nt a~sistance from its present lowof $2 billion. They fail to grasp the underlying institutional
structure commcm to a peaceful W<lr on po\·erty and a bloody
war on dissidence. Both es.:alate what they are meant toeliminate.
While evidence show~ that more of the same leads to utter
defeat, nothing less than more and more seems worthwhile ina society infected by the growth mania. The desperate plea is
not only for more bombs and more police, more medical ex-

22

TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

aminations and more teachers, but also for more information
and research. The editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of Atomic
Scientists claims that most of our present problems are theresult of recently acquired knowledge badly applied, and concludes that the only remedy for the mess created by this information is more of it. It has become fashionable to saythat where science and technology have created problems, it
is only more scientific understanding and better technologythat can carry us past them. The cure for bad management
is more management. The cure for specialized research ismore costly interdisciplinary research, just as the cure forpolluted rivers is more costly nonpolluting detergents. The
pooling of stores of information, the building up of a knowledge stock, the attempt to overwhelm present problems by
the production of more science is the ultimate attempt tosolve a crisis by escalation.

II
Convivial Reconstruction
The symptoms of accelerated crisis are widely recognized.
Multiple attempts have been made to explain them. I believethat this crisis is rooted in a major twofold experiment which
has failed, and I claim that the solution of the crisis begins
with a recognition of the failure. For a hundred years wehave tried to make machines work for men and to school
men for life in their service. Now it turns out that machines
do not 'work' and that people cannot be schooled for a life at
the service of machines. The hypothesis on which the experiment was built must now be discarded. The hypothesis wasthat machines can replace slaves. The evidence shows that,used for this purpose, machines enslave men. Neither a dictatorial proletariat nor a leisured mass can escape the dominionof constantly expanding industrial tools.
The crisis can be solved only if we learn to invert thepresent deep structure of tools; if we give people tools thatguarantee their right to work with high, independent
efficiency, thus simultaneously eliminating the need for either
slaves or masters and enhancing each person's range of
freedom. People need new tools to work with rather thantools that 'work' for them. They need technology to make themost of the energy and imagination each has, rather thanmore well-programmed energy slaves.
I believe that society must be reconstructed to enlarge thecontribution of autonomous individuals and primary groups
to t~e total effectiveness of a new system of production designM to satisfy the human needs which it also determines.
In fact, the institu~ions '.of industrial society do just th~
opposite. As the power of machines increases, the role ofpersons more and more decreases to that of mere consumers.
Individuals need tools to move and to dwell. They need

24

TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

remedies for their diseases and means to communicate with
one another. People cannot make all these things for themselves. They depend on being supplied with objects and services which vary from culture to culture. Some people
depend on the supply of food and others on the supply ofball bearings.
People need not only to obtain things, they need above all
the freedom to make things among which they can live, or
give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put
them to use in caring for and about others. Prisoners in richcountries often have access to more things and services thanmembers of their families, but they have no say in how
things are to be made and cannot decide what to do withthem. Their punishment consists in being deprived of what
I shall call 'conviviality'. They are degraded to the status ofmere consumers.
I choose the term 'conviviality' to designate the opposite
of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomousand creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourseof persons with their environment; and this in contrast withthe conditioned response of persons to the demands madeupon them by others, and by a man-made environment. I
consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized inpersonal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethicalvalue. I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity cPn effectively satisfy the needs it creates among
society's members.
Present institutional purposes, which hallow industrial productivity at the expense of convivial effectiveness, are a major
factor in the amorphousness and meaninglessness that plague
contemporary society. The increasing demand for products
has come to define society's process. I will suggest how thispresent trend can be reversed and how modern science andtechnology can be used to endow human actvity with unprecedented effectiveness. This reversal would permit the evolution of a life style and of a political system which givepriority to the protection, the maximum use, and the enjoyment of one resource that is almost equally distributed amongC 0 N V I V I AL

RE C0 NS T RUCT I 0 N

25

all people : personal energy under personal control. I willargue that we can no longer live and work effectively without public controls over tools and institutions that curtail ornegate any person's right to the creative use of his or her
energy. For this purpose we need procedures to ensure that
controls over the tools of society are established and governedby political process rather than by decisions by experts.
The transition to socialism cannot be affected without aninversion of our present institutions and the substitution ofconvivial for industrial tools. At the same time, the retooling.of society will remain a pious dream unless the ideals ofsocialist justice prevail. I believe that the present crisis of
our major institutions ought to be welcomed as a crisis ofrevolutionary liberation because our present institutions
abridge basic human freedom for the sake of providing
people with more institutional outputs. This world-widecrisis of world-wide institutions can lead to a new consciousness about the nature of tools and to majority action for theircontrol. If tools are not controlled politically, they will be
managed in a belated technocratic response to disaster.
Freedom and dignity will continue to dissolve into an unprecedented enslavement of man to his tools.
As an alternative to technocratic disaster, I propose thevision of a convivial society. A convivial society would be theresult of social arrangements that guarantee for each member
the most ample and free access to the tools of the communityand limit this freedom only in favour of another member's
equal freedom.
At present people tend to relinquish the task of envisaging
the future to a professional elite. They transfer power topoliticians who promise to build up the machinery to deliver
this future. They accept a growing range of power levels insociety when inequality is needed to maintain high outputs.
Political institutions themselves become draft mechanisms topress people into complicity with output goals. What is rightcomes to be subordinated to what is good for institutions.
Justice is debased to mean the equal distribution of institutional wares.
The individual's autonomy is tolerably reduced by a

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society that defines the maximum satisfaction of the maximum number as the largest consumption of industrial goods.
Alternate political arrangements would have the purpose of
permitting all people to define the images of their own
future. New politics would aim principally to exclude thedesign of artifacts and rules that are obstacles to the exerciseof this personal freedom. Such politics would limit the scopeof tools as demanded by the protection of three values:
survival, justice, and self-defined work. I take these values tobe fundamental to any convivial society, however different
one such society might be from another in practice, institutions, or rationale.
Each of these three values imposes its own limit on tools.
The conditions for survhJGl are necessary but not sufficient toensure justice; people can survive in prison. The conditions
for the just distribution of industrial outputs are necessary,
but not sufficient to promote convivial production. People canbe equally enslaved by their tools. The conditions for convivial work are structural arrangements that make possible
the just distribution of unprecedented power. A postindustrial
society must and can be so constructed that no one person's
ability to express him- or herself in work will require as acondition the enforced labour or the enforced learning or theenforced consumption of another.
In an age of scientific technology, the convivial structure oftools is a necessity for survival in full justice which is both
distributive and participatory. This is so because science has
opened new energy sources. Competition for inputs must
lead to destruction, while their central control in the handsof a Leviathan would sacrifice equal control over inputs tothe semblance of an equal distribution of outputs. Rationallydesigned convivial tools have become the basis for participatory justice.
But this does not mean that the transition from our present- to a convivial mode of production can be accomplished with. out serious •.threats to the surv-ival of many people. At._presenf
the relationship between people and their tools is suicidally
distorted. The survival of Pakistanis depends on Canadiangrain, and the survival of New Yorkers on world-wide ex-

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27

ploitation of natural resources. The birth pangs of a convivial
world society will inevitably be violendy painful for hungry
Indians and for helpless New Yorkers. I will later argue thatthe transition from the present mode of production, which isoverwhelmingly industrial, towards conviviality may startsuddenly. But for the sake of the survival of many people it
will be desirable that the transition does not happen all at
once. I argue that survival in justice is possible only at thecost of those sacrifices implicit in the adoption of a convivial
mode of production and the universal renunciation of unlimited progeny, affluence, and power on the part of bothindividuals and groups. This price cannot be extorted bysome despotic Leviathan, nor elicited by social engineering.
People will rediscover the value of joyful sobriety and liberating austerity only if they relearn to depend on each otherrather than on energy slaves. The price for a convivial society
will be paid only as the result of a political process whichreflects and promotes the society-wide inversion of present
industrial consciousness. This political process will find its
concrete expression not in some taboo, but in a series of
temporary agreements on one or the other concrete limitations of means, constandy adjusted under the pressure of conflicting insights and interests.
In this volume I want to offer a methodology by which
to recognize means which have turned into ends. My subject
is tools and not intentions. The choice of this subject makes
it impossible to undertake several related, relevant, andtempting tasks because:
1. It would not serve my purpose to describe in detail any
fictional community of the future. I want to provide guidelines for action, not for fantasy. A modern society, bounded
for convivial living, could generate a new flowering of surprises far beyond anyone's imagination and hope. I am notproposing a Utopia, but a procedure that provides each community with the choice of its unique social arrangements.
2. I do not want to contribute to an engineering manual
for the design of convivial institutions or tools, nor do I wantto engage in a sales campaign for what would be obviously abetter technology. My purpose is to lay down criteria by

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TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

which the manipulation of people for the sake of their tools
can be immediately recognized, and thus to exclude thoseartifacts and institutions which inevitably extinguish a convivial life style. Paradoxically, a society of simple tools thatallows men to achieve purposes with energy fully under theirown control is now difficult to imagine. Our imaginations
have been industrially deformed to conceive only what can bemoulded into an engineered system or social habits that fit thelogic of large-scale production. We have almost lost theability to frame in fancy a world in which sound and sharedreasoning sets limits to everybody's power to interfere withanybody's equal power to shape the world.
The present world is divided into those who do not haveenough and those who ha\·e more than enough, those who arepushed off the road by cars and those who drive them. The
have-nots are miserable and the rich anxious to get more. A
society whose members know what is enough might be poor,
but its members would be equally free. Men with industriallydistorted minds cannot grasp the rich texture of personal
accomplishments within the range of modern though limited
tools. There is no room in their imaginations for the qualitative change that the acceptance of a stable-state industry
would mean; a society in which members are free from mostof the multiple restraints of schedules and therapies.now imposed for the sake of growing tools. M.uch less do most of ourcontemporaries experience the sober joy of life in this voluntary though relative poverty which lies within our grasp.
3. I will focus on the structure of tools, not on the character structure of their ust"rs. The use of industrial tools stamps
in an identical way the landscape of cities each having its
own history and culture. Highways, hospital wards, classrooms, office buildings, apartments, and stores look everywhere the same..Identical tools also promote the development of the same character types. Policemen in patrol carsor accountants at computers look and act alike all over theworld, while their poor cousins using nightstick or pen are
different from region to rt"gion. The progressive homogenization of personalities and personal relationships cannot bestemmed without a retooling of society. Research on the

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29

social character traits that make retooling difficult or doubtful is complementary to what I propose. But I am not postulating the creation of a new man as a condition for a newsociety, nor am I pretending to know how either social
character or cultures will change. A pluralism of limited tools
and of convivial commonweals would of necessity encourage
a diversity of life styles.
4. It would distract from the core of my argument if I
were to deal with political strategies or tactics. With thepossible exception of China under Mao, no present government could restructure society along convivial lines. The
managers of our major tools - nations, corporations, parties,
structured movements, professions - hold power. This poweris vested in the maintenance of the growth-oriented structures
which they manipulate. These managers have the power tomake major decisions; they can generate new demands forthe output of their tools and enforce the creation of newsocial labels to fit them. They can even go so far as to limit
the output of tools in the interest of maximizing benefits. But
they have no power to reverse the basic structure of theinstitutional arrangements which they manage.
The major institutions now optimize the output of large
tools for lifeless people. Their inversion implies institutions
that would foster the use of individually accessible tools to
support the meaningful and responsible deeds of fully awake
people. Turning basic institutions upside down and inside out
is what the adoption of a convivial mode of production would
require. Such an inversion of society is beyond the managers
of present institutions.
Today's managers form a new class of men, selected fortheir character, competence, and interest - which enable themto both expand the productive society and promote thefurther operant conditioning of their clients. They hold andmanage power no matter who lives in the illusion that heowns the tools. This class of power-holders must be eliminated, but this cannot be done by mass slaughter or replacements. The new elite would only claim more legitimacy inthe manipulation of the inherited structured power. Management can be done away with only by eliminating the

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TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

machinery that makes it necessary and, therefore, thedemands for output that give it sway. In a convivial society
there is little need for replacing the chairman of the board.
In a society in which power - both political and physical- is bounded and spread by political decision there is place
not only for a new flowering of products and characters, butalso for a variety in forms of governance. Certainly, new tools
would provide new options. Convivial tools rule out certain
levels of power, compulsion, and programming, which are
precisely those features that now tend to make all governments look more or less alike. But the adoption of a convivial mode of production does not of itself mean that one
specific form of government would be more fitting thananother, nor does it rule out a world federation, or agreements between nation-states, or communes, or many of themost traditional forms of governance. I restrict myself to thedescription of basic structural criteria within which the retooling of society can be achieved.
5. A methodology by which to recognize when corporate
tools become destructive of society itself requires the recognition of the value of distributory and participatory justice. I
believe that my succinct statement will be sufficient to identify necessary restraints on tools, but it will also preclude thatin this essay I reach any conclusion about a desirable degreeof subordination of means to ends. ·6. The economics applicable to a postindustrial and convivial society can neither be ignored nor taken for granted.
In a society that accepts politically defined limits on all typesof industrial growth, many accepted terms will have to be redefined, but it is certain that in such a society inequality will
not be exluded. In fact, each individual's power to makeeffective changes would be greater than in preindustrial orin industrial times. Though they would be bounded, common
tools would be incomparably more efficient than primitive,
and more widely distributed than industrial, devices. Theirproducts would accrue more to- some than to others. The taskof keeping net transfer of power within bounds requires theuse of traditional as well as new economic devices. It will beargued that the limitation of tools cannot be effected before

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31

a corresponding new economic theory has been elaborated
and has become operational. This is correct. I do propose that
we use a dimensional analysis to obtain information about the
major variables which can upset the balance of life, and that
we rely on political process to identify the significant dimensions which man can control. I therefore propose an approachto the relationship between man's ends and his means inwhich the key units of economics come to signify a dimensionless set of factors. Economics useful for the inversion of
our present institutional structure starts out from politicallydefined limiting criteria. It is on these negative design criteria
for technological devices that I want to focus attention.
A methodology, by which to recognize the public perversion of tools into purposes, encounters resistance on the partof people who are used to measuring what is good in termsof dollars. Plato knew that the bad statesman is he who
believes that the art of measurement is universal, and who
jumbles together what is greater or smaller and what is more
fit to the purpose. Our present attitudes towards production
have been formed over the centuries. Increasingly, institutions
have not only shaped our demands but also in the most literal
sense our logic, or sense of proportion. Having come todemand what institutions can produce, we soon believe that
we cannot do without them.
The invention of education is an example of what I mean.
We often forget that education acquired its present sense only
recently. It was unknown before the Reformation, except asthat part of early upbringing which is common to piglets,
ducks, and men. It was clearly distinguished from the instruction needed by the young, and from the study in whichsome engaged later on in life and for which a teacher wasneeded. Voltaire still called it a presumptuous neologism,used only by pretentious schoolmasters.
The endeavour to put all men through successive stages ofenlightenment is rooted deeply in alchemy, the Great Art of
the waning Middle Ages. John Amos Comenius, a Moravian
bishop of the seventeenth century, a self-styled pansophistand pedagogue, is rightly considered one of the founders ofthe modern school. He was among the first to propose seven

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TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

or twelve grades of compulsory learning. In his Magna
Didactica he described schools as devices to 'teach everybody
everything' and outlined a blueprint for the assembly-line production of knowledge, which according to his method would
make education cheaper and better and make growth into full
humanity possible for all. But Comenius was not only anearly theoretician of mass production, he was an alchemist
who adapted the technical language of his craft to describe
the art of rearing children. The alchemist sought to refinebase elements by graduating their spirits through twelve
stages of successive enlightenment, so that for their own andall the world's benefit they might be transformed into gold.
Of course, alchemists failed no matter how often they tried,
but each time their 'science' yielded new reasons for theirfailure, and they tried again.
The industrial mode of production was first fully rationalized in the manufacture of a new indsible commodity,
called 'education'. Pedagogy opened a new chapter in thehistory of the Ars Magna. Education became the search foran alchemy process that would bring forth a new type of man
who would fit into an environment created by scientificmagic. But no matter how much each generation spent onschools, it always turned out that the majority of people werecertified as unfit for higher grades of enlightenment and had
to be discarded as unprepared for the good life in a manmade world.
Not only has the redefinition of learning as schooling madeschools seem necessary, it has also compounded the povertyof the unschooled with discrimination against the uneducated. People who have climbed up the ladder of schooling know where they dropped out and how uneducated theyare. Once they accept the authority of an agency to define
and measure their level of knowledge, they easily go on toaccept the authority of other agencies to define for them theirlevel of appropriate health or mobility. It is difficult for themto identify the structural corruption of our major institutions.
Just as they come to believe in the value of the 'knowledge
stock' they acquired in school, so they come to believe thathigher speeds save time and that income levels define well-C 0 N V I V I AL

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being or, as an alternative, that the production of more
services rather than more goods increases the quality of life.
The commodity called 'education' and the institution called'school' make each other necessary. The circle can be broken
only by a widely shared insight that the institution has cometo define the purpose. Values abstractly stated are reduced tomechanical processes that enslave men. This serfdom can be
broken only by the joyfui self-recognition of the fool who
assumes personal responsibility for his folly.
The institutional definition of values has made· it difficult
to focus our attention on the deep structure of social means.
It is hard to imagine that the division of sciences, of labour,and of professions has gone too far. It is difficult to conceiveof higher social effectiveness with lower industrial efficiency.
To recognize the nature of desirable limits to specializationand output, we must focus our attention on the industriallydetermined shape of our expectations. Only then can we
recognize that the emergence of a convivial and pluralist
mode of production will follow the limitation of industrial
institutions.
In the past, convivial life for some inevitably demanded
the servitude of others. Labour efficiency was low before thesteel axe, the pump, the bicycle, and the nylon fishing line.
Between the High Middle Ages and the Enlightenment, thealchemic dream misled many otherwise authentic Western
hwnanists. The illusion prevailed that the machine was alaboratory-made homunculus, and that it could do our labour
instead of slaves. It is now tir.1e to correct this mistake andshake off the illusion that men are born ro be slaveholders
and that the only thing wrong in the pasr was that not allmen could be equally so. By reducing our expectations ofmachines, however, we must guard against falling into theequally damaging rejection of all machines as if they were
works of the devil.
.
A convivial society should be designed to allow all its
members the most autonomous action by means of tools least
controlled by others. People feel joy, as opposed to mere
pleasure, to the extent that their activities are creative; while
the growth of tools beyond a certain point increases regimenT.F.C.

B

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TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

tation, dependence, exploitation, and impotence. I use theterm 'tool' broadly enough to include not only simple hardware such as drills, pots, syringes, brooms, building elements,
or motors, and not just large machines like cars or power
stations; I also include among tools productive institutions
such as factories that produce tangible commodities like corn
flakes or electric current, and productive systems for intangible commodities such as those which produce 'education,''health,' 'knowledge,' or 'decisions'. I use this term because
it allows me to subsume into one category all rationally designed devices, be they artifacts or rules, codes or operators,
and to distinguish all these planned and engineered instrumentalities from other things such as basic food or implements, which in a given c.ulture are not deemed to be subject
to rationalization. School curricula or marriage laws are noless purposely shaped social devices than road networks.
Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of toolsthat he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted
upon. To the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest
the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is masteredby his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own selfimage. Convivial tools are those which give each person who
uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment
with the fruits of his or her vision. Industrial tools deny thispossibility to those who use them and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others.
Most tools today cannot be used in a convivial fashion.
Hand tools are those which adapt man's metabolic energy
to a specific task. They can be multipurpose, like some primitive hammers or good modern pocket knives, or again they
can be highly specific in design such as spindles, looms, or
pedal-driven sewing machines, and dentists' drills. They canalso be complex such as a transportation system built to get
the most in mobility out of human energy - for instance, abicycle system composed of a series of man-powered vehicles,
such as pushcarts and three-wheel rickshaws, with a corresponding road system equipped with repair stations and perhaps even covered roadways. Hand tools are mere transducers

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35of the energy generated by man's extremities and fed by theintake of air and of nourishment.
Pozver tools are moved, at least partially, by energy converted outside the human body. Some of them act as
amplifiers of human energy: the oxen pull the plough, but
man works with the oxen - the result is obtained by poolingthe powers of beast and man. Power saws and motor pulleys
are used in the same fashion. On the other hand, the energy
used to steer a jet plane has ceased to be a significant fraction of its power output. The pilot is reduced to a mere
operator guided by data which a computer digests for him.
The machine needs him for lack of a better computer; or heis in the cockpit because the social control of unions overaeroplanes imposes his presence.
Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can beeasily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, forthe accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. The useof such tools by one person does not restrain another fromusing them equally. They do not require previous certificationof the user. Their existence does not impose any obligation
to use them. They allow the user to express his meaning inaction.
Some institutions are structurally convivial tools. The telephone is an example. Anybody can dial the person of his
choice if he can afford a coin. If untiring computers keep thelines occupied and thereby restrict the number of personal
conversations, this is a misuse by the company of a licencegiven so that persons can speak. The telephone lets anybody
say what he wants to the person of his choice; he can conductbusiness, express love, or pick a quarrel. It is impossible forbureaucrats to define what people say to each other on thephone, even though they can interfere with - or protect the privacy of their exchange.
Most hand tools lend themselves to convivial use unlessthey are artificially restricted through some institutionalarrangements. They can be restricted by becoming the monopoly of one profession, as happens with dentists' drills throughthe requirements of a licence and with libraries or laboratories by placing them within schools. Also, tools can be pur-

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TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

posely limited when simple pliers and screwdrivers are insufficient to repair modern cars. This institutional monopoly
or manipulation usually constitutes an abuse and changes thenature of the tool as little as the nature of the knife ischanged by its abuse for murder.
In principle the distinction between convivial and manipulatory tools is independent of the level of technology of thetool. What has been said of the telephone could be repeatedpoint by point for the mails or for a typical Mexican market.
Each is an institutional arrangement that maximizes liberty,
even though in a broader context it can be abused for purposes of manipulation and control. The telephone is theresult of advanced engineering; the mails require in principle
little technology and considerable organization and scheduling; the Mexican market runs with minimum planning alongcustomary patterns.
Any institution that moves toward its second watershed
tends to become highly manipulative. For instance, it costs
more to make teaching possible than to teach. The cost ofroles exceeds the cost of production. Increasingly, components intended for the accomplishment of institutional purposes are redesigned so that they cannot be used independently. People without cars have no access to planes, andpeople without plane tickets have no access to convention
hotels. Alternate tools which are fit to accomplish the same
purposes with fewer claims are pushed off the market. For
instance, civilized correspondence becomes a lost an. During
the last several years this barring of alternatives has usuallycoincided with the increased power of the tool and thedevelopment of more complex tool systems.
It is possible that not every means of desirable production in a postindustrial society would fit the criteria of conviviality. It is probable that even in an overwhelmingly convivial world some communities would choose greater affluenceat the cost of some restrictions on creativity. It is almost certain that in a period of transition from the present to the
future mode of production in certain countries electricity
would not commonly be produced in the backyard. It isalso true that trains must run on tracks and stop on scheduleC 0 NV IV I A L

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at a limit.ed number of points. Oceangoing vessels are built
for one purpose; if they were sailing clippers, they might beeven more specialized for one route than are present
tankers. Telephone systems are highly determined for thetransmission of messages of a certain band width and must be
centrally administered even if they are limited to the serviceof only one area. It is a mistake to believe that all large tools
and all centralized production would have to be excluded
from a convivial society. It would equally be a mistake todemand that for the sake of conviviality the distribution ofindustrial goods and services be reduced to the minimum consistent with survival in order to protect the maximum equal
right to self-determined participation. Different balances between distributive justice and participatory justice can prevail
in societies equally striving for postindustrial conviviality, depending on the history, political ideals, and physical resourcesof a community .
.What is fundamental to a convivial society is not the total
absence of manipulative institutions and addictive goods andservices, but the balance betw·een those tools which create the
spec!fic demands they are specialized to satisfy and thosecomplementary, ·enabling tools which foster self-realization.
The first set of tools produces according to abstract plans formen in general; the other set enhances the ability of people
to pursue their own goals in their w1ique way.
The criteria by which anticonvivial or manipulative tools
are recognized cannot be used to exclude every tool thatmeets them. These criteria, however, can be applied as guidelines for structuring the totality of tools by which a society. desires to define the style and level of its conviviality. A convivial society· does not exclude all schools. It does exclude aschool system which has been perverted into a compulsory
tool, denying privileges to the dropom. A convivial society.d<ies ·not exclude some high-speed intercity transport, as longas its layout does not in fact impose equally high speeds onaU other routes. Not even television must be ruled out although it permits very few programmers and speakers todefine what their viewers may see - as long as the over-all
structure of society does not favour the degradation of every-

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TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

one into a compulsory voyeur. The criteria of conviviality are
to be considered as guidelines to the continuous process bywhich a society's members defend their liberty, and not as aset of prescriptions which can be mechanically applied.
At present the reverse guideline prevails, even in societies
where the producer is told that he is in the saddle. The
socialist planner competes with the free-market advocate inclaiming that a society run on his principles is more productive. In 1931 Stalin translated 'control over the means of production' to mean the increase of productivity by new methods
used to control the producer. In the midst of the US Depression he launched Russia on an industrial race. Since thena socialist policy has been considered one which serves the industrially organized productivity of a socialist country.
Stalin's reinterpretation of Marxism has since then served asa form of blackmail against socialists and the left. It remains
to be seen if after Mao's death China will also trade productive conviviality for institutional productivity. The Stalinist
interpretation of socialism has made it possible for socialists
and capitalists alike to agree on how to measure the level ofdevelopment a society has achieved. Societies in which mostpeople depend for most of their goods and services on the
personal whim, kindness, or skill of another are called 'underdeveloped,' while those in which living has been transformed
into a process of ordering from an all-encompassing store
catalogue are called 'advanced'. Stalinism makes it possible
to interpret as revolutionary whatever increases the amount ofschooling, expands the road systems, or increases the productivity of extraction and manufacture. To be revolutionary hascome to mean either to champion the nation that lags in production and to make its members keenly aware of the lag, orto inflame the frantic and frustrated attempts of underconsuming minorities in rich countries to catch up.
Every aspect of industrial societies has become part of alarval system for escalating production and increasing thedemand necessary to justify the total social cost. For thisreason, criticism of bad management, official dishonesty, insufficient research, or technological lag distracts public attention from the one issue that counts: careful analysis of theC 0 N V I V I AL

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basic structure of tools as means. It is equally distracting tosuggest that the present frustration is primarily due to theprivate ownership of the means of production, and that the
public ownership of these same factories under the tutelage ofa planning board could protect the interest of the majority
and lead society to an equally shared abundance. As long as
Ford Motor Company can be condemned simply because it
makes Ford rich, the illusion is bolstered that the same factory could make the public rich. As long as people believethat the public can profit from cars, they will not condemn
Ford for making cars. The issue at hand is not the juridicial
ownership of tools, but rather the discovery of the characteristic of some tools which make it impossible for anybody to'own' them. The concept of ownership cannot be applied to atool that cannot be controlled. The issue at hand, therefore, iswhat tools can be controlled in the public interest. Only
secondarily does the question arise whether private control ofa potentially useful tool is in the public interest.
Certain tools are destructive no matter who owns them,whether it be the Mafia, stockholders, a foreign company, thestate or even a workers' commune. Networks of multilane
highways, long-range, wide-band-width transmitters, strip
mines, or compulsory schooi systems are such tools. Destructive tools must inevitably increase regimentation, dependence,
exploitation, or impotence, and rob not only the rich but also
the poor of conviviality, which is the primary treasure inmany so-called 'underdeveloped' areas.
It has become difficult for contemporary man to imagine development and modernization in terms of lower rather thanhigher energy use. High technology has been mistakenly
identified with powerful intervention in physical, psychological, and social processes. The illusion that a high culture
is one that uses the highest possible quantities of energy
must be overcome if we are to get tools into focus. In classical societies power sources were very equally distributed.
Each man was born with the potential to use most of thepower he would need in a lifetime if his organism was properly maintained. Control over larger amounts of physical

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FOR CONVIVIALITY

energy was the result of psychic manipulation or of politicaldomination.
Men did not need power tools to build the Mexican pyramids of Teotihuad.n or the Philippine rice terraces of Ibague.
Their muscles provided the force to raise St Peter's and to
dig the channels of Angkor Vat. Runners carried the messages
between Caesar's generals and between village chiefs and Inca
planners. Hands and feet moved the spindle and the loom,
the pottery wheel and the saw. Human metabolism provided
the energy that powered classical agriculture, manufacture,
and war. Individual skills were the controls that shaped
animal energy into socially defined work. The energy thatrulers could control was the sum of the performance theirsubjects voluntarily or involuntarily conceded.
I do not claim that human metabolism provided all useful
power, but I do claim that in most cultures it was the main
source of power. Men knew how to harness some of the forcesof the environment. They steered barges down the Nile; theygentled beasts to draw the plough; they caught the wind intheir sails; they became experts in the construction of simple
machines which combined the power of men and of rain andof gravity. They also tamed fire in the forge and the kitchen,
but the total output of these sources remained secondary.
Even Mongols who lived on their mounts provided moreenergy with their muscles than with their horsepower. All theenergy tapped from the environment to build Athens andFlorence did not contribute as much controlled power to theseclassical societies as did their men. Only when man lit fires
to turn cities into ruins or jungles into swiddens did he release- but certainly not control - energies that overwhelmed thepower of the people who used them.
The amount of physical power available to old societies canbe estimated. It can be expressed in multiples of the average
man's working time and metabolic energy. He can burn 2500
calories a day, four-fifths of them just to stay alive. They go
into making his heart beat and his brain pulse. The remainder
can be externalized, but this does not mean that all of it canbe transformed into work. A large portion of the lifetime
capacity of a man to act on his physical and social environ-C 0 N V IV I A L

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ment is burnt running around while he grows up. More isspent for chores that lie beyond his personal choice - but
also beyond other men's reach. He consumes energy in getting
up, in preparing food, in seeking protection from the cold, orin avoiding the slavedriver's whip. If man is deprived of theuse of this power, he becomes useless for work. Society cangive shape to these personal activities, but it cannot appropriate the energy used on them for other tasks. Custom, language,and law can determine the form of the slave's pottery, but themaster cannot take the last pots or the roof away from his
slaves, not if he wants them to go on slaving for him. A
small energy parcel from each man was the major source ofphysical power with which the temples were built, mountains
were moved, cloth was woven, wars were waged, and kings
were carried around or amused.
Power was limited. It was proportional to the population.
Its major source was the muscles of individual men. Its
efficient use depended on the stage of development whichhand tools had reached and the distribution of necessary tools
throughout the population. Tools all matched the impedanceof manpower to the task. Except by redirecting the forces ofgravity and wind they did not and could not act as amplifiersof this power. To control more power than others in his
society, a man had to lord it over his fellows. If a ruler could
draw power from sources other than men, his control overthis power still depended on his control over men. Each pairof oxen required a man to lead them. Even the forge neededa boy to blow into the fire. Political control coincided withthe control over physical power, and the control of power
depended entirely on authority.
Equal power and equal direct control of power were bothfeatures of preindustrial societies, but this did not guarantee
an equal autonomy in the exercise of this control. On a very
primitive level the physical predominance of one person madehim into the lord of others. A slight advantage in organization or weaponry made one people the master of another.
The appropriation of resources and tools created the basis ofclass societies and fostered the rituals and myths that shaped
men to fit into the class to which they were assigned.

42

TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

In a preindustrial society political control could extend
only over the excess power that people could produce. As
soon as a population became efficient enough to produce more
power than was required to maintain it, people could be deprived of control over this energy. They could be compelled
to cede their power to the decisions of others. They could beeither taxed or enslaved. Part of what they produced on theirown could be taken from them or they could be put to workfor the king or the village. Ideology, economic structure, andlife style tended to favour this concentration of excess energy
under the control of a few.
The degree to which this concentration of control polarizedsocial benefits varied from one culture to another. At best it
improved the range within which most members of society
could employ their remaining energies. High peasant culturesoffer good examples. While all shared in the tasks of defending their land from enemies or floods, each was also better
dressed, housed and fed. At worst, the concentration of decisions over power led to the establishment of empires whichwere expanded by mercenaries and fed from plantations
worked by slaves.
The total energy available to society increased rapidly toward the end of the Iron Age, that is, between the time of
Agrippa and the time of Watt. Most of the radical technicalmutations that came into existence before the scientific discoveries in the field of electricity in fact came about early in
the Middle Ages. Because they used windpower far more
effectively than any previous invention, three-masted sailingships made world-wide transportation possible. Speedy transportation with regular deliveries was made possible by thebuilding of canals in Europe, a millennium after the same
discovery was implemented in Southeast Asia. A vasdy increased application of nonhuman energy to industries likebrewing, dyeing, pottery-making, brick-making, sugarrefining, salt manufacture, and transportation went parallelwith the construction of vasdy improved water wheels andwindmills.
From the High Middle Ages to the late Renaissance, newsocial tools developed that ensured the protection of theC 0 N V I VI A L

REC0 N STRUCT I 0 N

43

worker's self-image and dignity, although he was now sometimes dwarfed by the size of machines. The guild system did
indeed give the worker a new claim to the monopoly overtools specific to his trade. But the mill had not yet grown outof proportion to the miller. His monopoly over grain-processing protected the guildsman, provided him with extra holidays, and still maximized the services that he could renderto his town. Guilds were neither unions nor professional
associations.
Lewis Mumford in his The Myth of the Machine: The
Pentagon of Power points out that one particular enterprise,
namely mining,
set the pattern for later modes of mechanization by its callous disregard for human factors, by its indifference to thepollution and destruction of the neighbouring environment,by its concentration upon the physicochemical process for
obtaining the desired metal or fuel, and above all by its topographic and mental isolation from the organic world of the
farmer and the craftsman, and the spiritual world of the
Church, the University and the City. In its destruction of
the environment and its indifference to the risks to human
life, mining closely resembles warfare - though likewise it
often, through its confrontation of danger and death, brings
into existence a tough, self-respecting personality , .. thesoldier at his best. But the destructive animus of mining
and its punishing routine of work, along with its environmental poverty and disorder were passed on to the new industries that used its products. These negative social results
offset the mechanical gains.

This new attitude toward gainful activity is well reflectedin the introduction of a new term to designate it. Tripaliare
meant to torture on the trepalium, which was first mentioned
in the sixth century as an instrument of impalement made outof three wooden sticks. By the tw'dfth century the word inboth French and Spanish expressed a painful experience towhich man is subjected; only in the sixteenth century did it
become possible to use the verb trabajar interchangeably withlabourer and sudar on the job. Equally significant is what happened in the English language. Things began to work - first

44

TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALIT'y

medicines (1600) and then physical tools (1650), even thoughthese were not yet tools driven by any outside power. The
alchemist's dream of making a homunculus in the test tube
slowly took the shape of creating robots to work for man, andto educate men to work alongside them. The ideology of an. industrial organization of tools and a capitalist organizationof the economy preceded by many centuries what is usuallycalled the Industrial Revolution. On Baconian premises Europeans began, according to Mumford, to save time, shrink
space, augment power, multiply goods, overthrow organic
norms and displace real organisms with mechanisms thatsimulated them or vastly magnified some single function they
performed. All these imperatives, which have become thegroundwork of science as technology in our present society,seem axiomatic and absolute only because they remain unexamined. The same change of mind appears also in a transferfrom ritual regularity to mechanical regularity with anphasis on time-keeping, space-measuring, account-keeping,thus translating concrete objects and complex events into
abstract quantities. According to Mumford, it was this capitalistic devotion to repetitive order that helped undermine·the unmeasurable personal balance between the workman andhis tools.
New power meant a new relation to time. The lending ofmoney against interest was considered 'against nature' by the
Church: money naturally was a means of exchange to buy
necessities, not a capital that could work or bear fruits.
During the seventeenth century even the Church abandoned
this view - though reluctantly - to accept the fact that
Christians had become capitalist merchants. Time became
like money: I now can ha'l'e a few hours before lunch; howshall I spend time? ... I am short of time so I can't afford
to spend that much time on a committee; it's not worth thetime! ... It would be a waste of time; I'd rather save an
hour.
Scientists began to consider man as a power source. Theysought to measure the maximum daily exertion that might be
expected from a man and compare both his maintenance andhis power to those of a. horse. Man was reinvented as a sourceem-

C0 N V I V I AL

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45of mechanical power. Prisoners condemned to the galleys
were not much use most of the time, since galleys were mostof the time in port. Prisoners condemned to the treadmills
produced rotary power to which any of the new machines
could be hooked. Up to the early nineteenth century men in
English prisons actually laboured on the treadmills to makemachines work.
The new attitude of man to his tools during the Industrial
Revolution, which began as capitalism did in the fifteenth
century, finally called for the invention of new sources ofpower. The steam engine was a product of the Industrial
Revolution rather than the cause of it. Power plants soon became mobile, and with the railroad the Iron Age and theIndustrial Revolution came to an end. Industrial ways became
the status quo.
Immense new sources of power were tapped during thetwentieth century, and much of this power became selfgoverning. Man has now been almost replaced by machines
and reduced to being their operator. Fewer men are needed
as gang workers in the fields: slavery has become Wleconomical. But also fewer men are needed on the assembly line, as
engineers have designed machines to perform the tasks thatmass production and industrialization had created in the centuries before the steam engine. More power has become available, so more power is used. The human slaveowner is replaced by the operant conditioning of men in the megamachine.
We have all grown up as children of our time, and therefore it is extremely difficult to envisage a postindustrial yet
human type of 'work'. To reduce industrial tools seems
equivalent to a return to the tortured labour of the mine andthe factory, or to the labour of the US farm hand who has
to compete with his mechanical neighbour. The worker who
had to dip a heavy tyre into a solution of hot sulphur eachtime the machine asked for it, was literally hooked on to his
apparatus. Agricultural labour also ceased to be what it wasfor a slave or a farmer. For the slave it was labour at theservice and behest of a master; for the peasant it was his own
work which he could organize and shape in accordance with

46

TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

the demands of growing plants, hungry animals, and unpredictable weather. The modern farmhand in the United States
today who is deprived of power tools is under a doublepressure quite different from that of the classical slave : hemust measure up to performance standards set by farmhands elsewhere who use machines, and he is constantly
aware that he is underprivileged, exploited, and abused because in an age of the mega-machine he feels that he is used
like a component. The prospect that moving towards a convivial society might imply a society with low power tools
would seem to him like a return to the exploitation of manpower by inefficient industrial machines in the early periodsof steam.
I have described three types of institutional arrangements
within which tools can be used. Certain tools can be usedeffectively within only one of these arrangements. There aretools which can be used normally for fully satisfying,imaginative, and independent work; others tend to be usedprimarily in activities best labelled as labour; and, finally,certain machines can only be operated. The same can be said
about physical artifacts and about the set of rules that defineformal instirutional arrangements. Cars are machines that callfor highways, and highways pretend to be public utilities
while in fact they are discriminatory devices. Compulsory
schools constitute a huge bureaucratic system; no matter how
convivially a teacher tries to conduct his class, his pupils
learn through him to which class they belong. Cars operate
on highways as teachers operate in schools. Only in a very
limited sense can what the truck driver and the teacher do becalled labour. Only exceptionally will a teacher feel that his
operations within the school system do not directly interferewith his work.
-- The ·'market characteristics of these three types of humanactivity help to clarify the distinction among u'lem. Labour
can be purchased or sold in the marketplace. Not work as anactivity; but only the result of convivial work can be marketed. Finally, the right to operate machines and to obtainthe scarce privileges that go with employment must be
earned through the previous consumption of certified treat-·•

CONVIVIAL

RECONSTRUCTION

47

ments, which take the form of a curriculum of schoolingand testing along with successive jobs.
Tools for a convivial and yet efficient society could nothave been designed at an earlier stage of history. We now
can design the machinery for eliminating slavery without enslaving man to the machine. Science and technology are notbound to the peculiar notion, seemingly characteristic of thelast 150 years of their application to production, that new
knowledge of nature's laws has to be locked into increasingly
more specialized and highly capitalized preparation of men to
use them. The sciences, which specialized out of philosophy,
have become the rationale for an increasing division of operations. The division of labour has finally led to the laboursaving division of tools. New technology is now used toamplify supply funnels for commodities. Public utilities areturned from facilities for persons into arenas for the ownersof expensive tools. The use of science and technology constantly supports the industrial mode of production, andthereby crowds off the scene all tools for independent enterprise. But this is not the necessary result of new scientificdiscoveries or of their useful application. It is rather the
result of a total prejudice in favour of the future expansionof an industrial mode of production. Research teams are organized to remedy minor inefficiencies that hold up the further
growth of a specific production process. These planned discoveries are then heralded as costly breakthroughs in theinterest of further public service. Research is now mostly
orientated towards industrial development.
This unqualified identification of scientific advance withthe replacement of human initiative by programmed tools
springs from an ideological prejudice and is not the resultof scientific analysis. Science could be applied for precisely
the opposite purpose. Advanced or 'high' technology could
become identified with labour-sparing, work-intensive decentralized productivity. Natural and social science can be used
for the creation of tools, utilities, and rules available toeveryone, permitting individuals and transient associations toconstantly recreate their mutual relationships and their environment with unenvisaged freedom and self-expression.

48

TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

New understanding of nature can now be applied to ourtools either for the purpose of propelling us into a hyperindustrial age of electronic cybernetics or to help us develop
a wide range of truly modern and yet convivial tools. Limited
resources can be used to provide millions of viewers with thecolour image of one performer or to provide many people
with free access to the records of their choice. In the firstcase, technology will be used for the further promotion of the·specialized worker, be he a plumber, surgeon, or TV performer. More and more bureaucrats will study the market, consult their balance sheets, and decide for more people on more
occasions about the range of products among which they may
choose. There will be a further increase of useful things foruseless people. But science can also be used to simplify tools
and to enable the layman to shape his immediate environment to his taste. The time has come to take the syringe outof the hand of the doctor, as the pen was taken out of thehand of the scribe during the Reformation in Europe.
Most curable sickness can now be diagnosed and treated bylaymen. People find it so difficult to accept this statement
because the complexity of medical ritual has hidden fromthem the simplicity of its basic procedures. It took theexample of the barefoot doctor in China to show how modem
practice by simple workers in their spare time could, in three
years, catapult health care in China to levels unparalleledelsewhere. In most other countries health care by laymen isconsidered a crime. A seventeen-year-old friend of mine wasrecently tried for having treated some 130 of her high-school
colleagues for VD. She was acquitted on a technicality by thejudge when expert counsel compared her performance withthat of the US Health Service. Nowhere in the USA canher achievement be considered 'standard,' because she
succeeded in making retests on all her patients six weeks
after their first treatment. Progress should mean growing
competence in self-care rather than growing dependence.
The possibilities of lay therapy also run up- against ourcommitment to 'better' health, and have blinded us to the
distinction between curable and incurable sickness. This is a
crucial distinction because as soon as a doctor treats in-C 0 N V I V I AL

R E C 0 N S T R UC T I 0 N49cura},le skkness, he. perverts his craft from a means to an
end. He becomes a charlatan set on providing scientific consolation in a ceremony in which the doctor takes on thepatient's struggle against death. The patient becomes theobject of his ministrations instead of a sick subject who canbe helped in the process of healing or dying. Medicine ceases
to be a legitimate profession when it cannot provide eachman or his next of kin with the tools to make this one
crucial differential diagnosis for himself.
New opportunities for the progressive expansion of lay
therapy and the parallel progressive reduction of professional
medicine are rejected because life in an industrial society has
made us place such exaggerated value on standard products,
uniformity, and certified quality. Industrialized expectations
have blurred the distinction between personal vocation andstandard profession. Of course, any laym::m can grow up to
become a general healer, but this does not mean that every
layman must be taught how to heal. It simply means that ina society in which people can and must take care of theirneighbours and do so on their own, some people will excel
at using the best available tools. In a society in which people
can once again be born in their homes and die in their homes
and in· which there is a place for cripples and idiots in thestreet and where a distinction is made between plumbing
and healing, quite a few people would grow up capable ofassisting others to h'~al, to suffer, or to die.
Just as with proper social arrangements most people wouldgrow up as readers without having to be schooled and without having to recreate the pre-Gutenberg profession of thescribe, so a sufficient numh:!r would grow up competent withmedical tools. This would make healing so plentiful that it
would be difficult to turn this competence into a monopoly
or to sell it as a commoditv. DeDrofessionalization means arenewed distinction between. the freedom of vocation and theoccasional boost sick people derive from the quasi-religious
authority of the certified doctor.
Of course the deprofessionalization of most ordinary medicine could sometimes substitute a quack for today's impostor,
but the threat of quackery becomes less convincing as pro-

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TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

fessionally caused damage grows. There just is no substitutefor the self-correcting judgement of the layman in socializinr
the tools invented or used by the professional. Lifelong
familiarity with the specific dangers of a specific remedy isthe best preparation for accepting or rejecting it in time ofcrisis.
Take another tool- transportation- as an example. Under
President Cardenas in the early thirties, Mexico developed amodern system of transportation. Within a few years about 80
per cent of the population had gained access to the advantages of the automobile. Most important, villages had beenconnected by dirt roads or tracks. Heavy, simple, and toughtrucks travelled over them every now and then, moving at
speeds far below twenty miles per hour. People were crowded
together on rows of wooden benches nailed to the floor to
make place for merchandise loaded in the back and on theroof. Over short distances the vehicle could not compete withpeople, who had been used to walking and to carrying theirmerchandise, but long-distance travel had become possible forall. Instead of a man driving his pig to market, man and pig
could go together in a truck. Any Mexican could now reachany point in his country in a few days.
Since 1945 the money spent on roads has increased every
year. It has been used to build highways between a few major
centres. fragile cars now move at high speeds over smoothroads. Lar:;e, specialized trucks connect factories. The old,all-purpose tramp truck has been pushed back into the mountains or swamps. In most areas either the peasant must takea bus to go to the market to buy industrially packaged commodities, or he sells his pig to the trucker in the employ ofthe meat merchant. He can no longer go to town with his
pig. He pays taxes for the roads which serve the owners ofvarious specialized monopolies and does so under the illusionthat the benefits will ultimately spread to him.
In exchange for an occasional ride on an upholstered seatin an air-conditioned bus, the common man has lost much of
the mobility the old system gave him, without gaining any
new freedom. Research done in two typical large states of
Mexico - one dominated by deserts, the other by mountains

CONVIVIAL

RECONSTRUCTION

51

and lush growth - confirms this conclusion. Less than one
per cent of the population in either state travelled a distanceof over fifteen miles in any one hour during 1970. Moreappropriate pushcarts and bicycles, both motorized whenneeded, would have presented a technologically much more
efficient solution for 99 per cent of the population than thevaunted highway development. Such pushcarts could havebeen built and maintained by people trained on the job, andoperated on roadbeds built to Inca standards, yet covered todiminish drag. The usual rationale given for the investment
in standard roads and cars is that it is a condition for development and that without it a region cannot be integrated into
the world market. Both claims are u·ue, but can be considered
as desirable only if monetary integration IS the goal ofdevelopment.
During the last few years the promoters of development
have come to admit that cars, as operated now, are inefficient.
This inefficiency is blamed on the fact that modern vehicles
are designed for private ownership, not for the public good.
In fact, modern personnel transport is inefficient not because
an individual capsule rather than a cabin is the model for thelargest number of vehicles, or because these vehicles are now
owned by their drivers. It is inefficient because of the obsessive identification of higher speed with better transport. Just
as the demand for better health at all costs is a form ofmental sickness, so is the pretence of higher speed.
The railroads reflected the class societies they served
simply by putting differem fares on the same speed. But
when a society commits itself to higher speeds, the speedometer becomes an indicator of social class. Any peasant could
accompany Lazaro Cardenas on horseback. Today only his
personal staff can accompany a modern governor in his
private helicopter. In capitalist countries how often you cancover great distances is determined by what you can pay .. Insocialist countries your velocity depends on the social importance the bureaucracy attaches to you. In both cases the particular speed at which you travel puts you into your class andcompany. Speed is one of the means by which an efficiencyorientated society is stratified.

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TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

Fostered addiction to speed is also a means of social
control. Transportation in its various forms now swallows
23 per cent of the US gross expenditure. The United States
may be rich enough to allocate one-fourth of its energy
resources and human time to the enterprise of getting
somewhere. Under Khufu, Egyptians might have spentthat much during a few years to build the Great Pyramid
and to get their ruler to the underworld. Unfortunately, however, transportation exacts an ever higher percentage of the
cash spent in a given year within many a Latin-Americanmunicipality. The road degrades the subsistence farmer andartisan, integrates the village into the money economy, andswallows much of the available cash. It is true that moderntransportation does incorporate a region into the world
market. It also trains the inhabitants for the consumption offoreign goods and the acceptance of foreign values. For example, throughout history Thailand was known for its klongs.
These canals crisscrossed the country; people, rice and tax
collectors all moved easily along them. Some villages were
cut off during the dry season, but the seasonal rhythm oflife turned this periodic isolation into an occasion for meditation and festivities. A society that can afford long holidays
and fill them with activities is certainly not poor. During thelast half-decade major klongs were filled in to build roads.
Since bus drivers are paid by the number of miles they cancover in a day, and since cars are still few, the Thais for ashort while will be able to circulate in their country at worldrecord bus speeds. They will pay with the destruction ofwaterways that took millennia to build. The economists
argue that buses and trucks pump more money per year
through the economy. They do, but at the cost of depriving
most Thais of the independence which their sleek rice boats
once granted each family. Of course, car owners could never
have competed with rice boats unless the World Bank had
financed roads for them and the Thai government had madenew laws that permitted them to profane the klongs.
The building trades are another example of an industry
that modern nation-states impose on their societies, thereby
modernizing the poverty of their citizens. The legal protec-

:c 0 N V I V I A L

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53tion and financial support granted the ·industry reduces andcancels opportunities for the otherwise much more efficient
self-builder. Quite recently Mexico launched a major programme with the aim of providing all workers with proper
housing. As a first step, new standards were set for the construction of dwelling units. These standards were intended
to protect the little man who purchases a house from exploitation by the industry producing it. Paradoxically, these same
standards deprived many more people of the traditional
opportunity to house themselves. The code specifies minimum requirements that a man who builds his own house in
his spare time cannot meet. Besides that, the real rent for industrially built quarters is more than the total income of 80
per cent of the people. 'Better housing,' then, can be occupied only by those who are well off or by those on whom thelaw bestows direct rent subsidies.
Once dwellings that fall below industrial standards aredefined as improper, public funds are denied to the overwhelming majority of people who cannot buy housing but
could 'house' themselves. The tax funds meant to improve
the living quarters of the poor are monopolized for the building of new towns next to the provincial and regional capitals
where government employees, unionized workers, and people
with good connections can live. These are all people who areemployed in the modern sector of the economy, that is,people who hold jobs. They can be easily distinguished fromother Mexicans because they have learned to speak about
their trabajo as a noun, while the unemployed or the occasionally employed or those who live near the subsistence level do
not use the noun when they go to work.
These people, who have work, not only get subsidies forthe building of their homes; the entire public-service sector
is rearranged and developed to serve them. In Mexico City
it has been estimated that 10 per cent of the people use 50
per cent of the household water, and on the high plain wateris very scarce indeed. The building code has standards far
below those of rich countries, but by prescribing certain ways
in which houses must be built, it creates a rising scarcity of
housing. The pretence of a society to provide ever better

54

TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

housing is the same kind of abberation we have met in thepretence of doctors to provide better health and of engineers
to provide higher speeds. The setting of abstract impossible
goals turns the means by which these are to be achieved into
ends.
What happened in Mexico happened all over Latin
America during the decade of the Alliance for Progress, including Cuba under Castro. It also happened in Massachusetts. In 1945, 32 per cent of all one-family housing unitsin Massachusetts were still self-built by their owners fromfoundation to roof or constructed under the full responsibility of the owner. By 1970 the proportion had gone down
to 11 per cent. Meanwhile, housing had been discovered asa major problem. The technological capability to produce
tools and materials that favour self-building had increasedin the intervening decades, but social arrangements - likeunions, codes, mortgage rules, and markets - had turned
against this choice.
Most people do not feel at home unless a significant proportion of the value of their houses is the result of the inputof their own labour. Convivial policies would define what
people who want to house themselves cannot get, and thereby
make sure that all can get access to some minimum ofphysical space, to water, some basic building elements, someconvivial tools ranging from power drills to mechanized pushcarts, and, probably, to some limited credit. Such an inversion of the present policy could give a postindustrial society
modern homes almost as desirable for its members as thosewhich were standard for the old Mayas and are still the rulein Yucatan.
Our present tools are engineered to deliver professional energies. Such energies come in quanta. Less than a quantum
cannot be delivered. Less than four years of schooling isworse than none. It only defines the former pupil as a dropout. This is equally true in medicine, transportation, andhousing, as in agriculture and in the administration ofjustice. Mechanical transportation is worthwhile only at
certain speeds. Conflict resolution is effective only when theissue is of sufficient weight to justify the costs of court action.

C 0 NV IV I A L

REC0 N S TRUCTI 0 N

55

The planting of new grain is productive only if the acreage
and capital of the farmer are beyond a certain size. Powerful tools created to achieve abstractly conceived social goals
inevitably deliver their output in quanta that are beyond thereach of a majority. What is more, these tools are integrated.
Access to key positions in government or industry is reservedto those who are certified consumers of high quanta of schooling. They are the individuals chosen to run the plantation ofmutant rubber trees, and they need a car to rush frommeeting to meeting. Productivity demands the output of
packaged quanta of institutionally defined values, and productive management demands the access of an indvidual to
all these packages at once.
Professional goal-setting produces goods for an environment produced by other professions. Life that depends onhigh speed and apartment houses makes hospitals inevitable.
By definition all these are scarce, and get even scarcer as
they approach the standards set more recently by an everevolving profession; thereby each unit or quantum appearing
on the market frustrates more people than it satisfies.
A just society would be one in which liberty for one person
is constrained only by the demand~ created by equal liberty
for another. Such a society requires as a precondition anagreement excluding tools th:n by their very nature prevent
such liberty. This is true for tools that are fundamentally
purely social arrangements, sU<:h as the school system, as
well as for tools that are phv~ical m:J.chines. In a convivial
society compulsory and open-ended schooling would haveto be excluded for the sake of justice. Age-specific, compulsory competition on an unending ladder for life-longprivileges cannot increase equality but must favour those whostart earlier or who are healthier, or who are better equipped
outside t.lte classroom. Ine;·itably it organizes society into
many layers of failure, with each layer inhabited by dropouts schooled to believe that those who have consumed
more education deserve more privilege because they are
more valuable assets to society as a whole. A society constructed so that education by means of schools is a necessity

56

TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

for its functioning cannot be a just society. Power tool~
having certain structural characteristics are inevitably
manipulative and must also be eliminated for the sake ofjustice. In a modern society, energy inputs represent one of
the new liberties. Each man's ability to produce change
depends on his ability to control low-entropy energy. On thiscontrol of energy depends his right to give his meaning to
the physical environment. His ability to act toward the future
he chooses depends on his control of the energy that gives
shape to that future. Equal freedom in a society that uses
large amounts of environmental energy means equal control
over the transformation of that energy and not just an equalclaim to what has been done with it.
Most of the power tools now in use favour centralization ofcontrol. Industrial plants with their highly specialized tools
give neither the worker nor most engineers a choice overwhat use will be made of the energy they manage. This isequally true, though less evident, of the high-powered consumer tools that dominate our society. Most of them, such ascars and air conditioners, are too costly to be available on an
equal basis outside a few super-rich societies. Others, such asmechanical household devices, are so specialized in naturethat they in no way offer more freedom than much simpler
hand tools. The monopoly of industrial production deprives
even privileged clients of control over what they may get.
Few people get the cars that most people want, and GM
designers can only build vehicles to fit the existing roads.
Nations and multinational corporations have become means
for the spreading empire of international professions. Professional imperialism triumphs even where political and economic domination has been broken. Schools everywhere aregoverned by pedagogues who read the same books on learning theory and curriculum-planning. In a given year, schools
produce more or less the same model of pupils in every
nation. Nineteen-fifty graduates are as obsolete in Dakar a~they are in Paris. The same iatrogenic sicknesses are produced all over the world by doctors who administe
chloromycin or steroid pills. Every country tends to selec .
those productive processes which are more capital-intensiv

C 0 N V I V I AL

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57

nd promise greater cost-benefit ratios, so that the same kindf technological nnemployment is produced everywhere.
dasic needs are defined as those that international professions;an meet. Since the local production of these wares is to..he advantage of highly schooled national elites, a conntry's
ioctors, teachers, and engineers will defend it as an antidote
to foreign domination. The knowledge-capitalism of professional imperialism subjugates people more imperceptibly
than and as effectively as international finance or weaponry.
The principal source of injustice in our epoch is political
approval for the existence of tools that by their very nature
resrict to a very few the liberty to use them in an autonomous way. The pompous rituals by which each man isgiven a vote to choose between factions only cover up thefact that the imperialism of industrial tools is both arbitrary
and growing. Statistics which prove increased outputs andhigh per capita consumption of professionally defined quanta
only veil the enormously high invisible costs. People getbetter education, better health, better transportation, better
entertainment, and often better nourishment only if the experts' goals are taken as the measurement of what 'better'means. The possibility of a convivial society depends therefore on a new consensus about the destructiveness of imperialism on three levels : the pernicious spread of one nation
beyond its bonndaries; the omnipresent influence of multinational corporations; and the mushrooming of professionalmonopolies over production. Politics for convivial reconstruction of society must especially face imperialism on thisthird level, where it takes the form of professionalism. The
public ownership of resources and of the means of production, and public control over the market and over net transfers of power, must be complemented by a public determination of the tolerable basic structure of modern tools. Thismeans that politics in a postindustrial society must be mainly
oncerned with the development of design criteria for tools
ather than as now with the choice of production goals. Theseolitics would mean a structural inversion of the institutions
ow providing and defining new man-made essentials.
To invert politics, it will not be enough to show that a con-

58

TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

vivial life style is possible, or even to demonstrate that it i~more attractive than life in a society ruled by industrial productivity. We cannot rest with the claim that this inversiOI.
would bring society closer to meeting the goals now stated a8
those of our major institutions. It is not even enough to showthat a just or socially equal order can become a reality only
through a convivial reconstruction of tools and the consequent redefinition of ownership and power. We need a way
to recognize that the inversion of present political purpose
is necessary for the survival of all people.
Most people have staked their self-images in the present
structure and are unwilling to lose their ground. They havefound security in one of the several ideologies that support
further industrialization. They feel compelled to push theillusion of progress on which they are hooked. They long forand expect increased satisfaction, with less input of humanenergy and with more division of competence. They value
handicraft and personal care as luxuries, but the ideal of amore labour-intensive, yet modern production process seems
to them quixotic and anachronistic.
It seems absurd to prepare politicians who have pledged
themselves to increased outputs and better distribution of
goods and services among their constiments for the day whena majority of voters will choose limit.« for all rather thanpromises of equal consumption. It appears equally hopelessto expect inverse insight from humanitarian liberals who
have come to feel that feeding the starving millions is their
vocation. They forget that people eat, and that people die
when they are fed. These self-appointed keepers of theirbrothers make other people's survival depend on their own
growing efficiency. By shifting from the production of guns
to the production of grains they reduce their sense of guilt
and increase their sense of power. They are blind to the convergence of population growth and the failure of the green
revolution, which guarantees that feeding people now will
escalate starvation by 1985. Their hubris distracts them fromunderstanding that only the reintroduction of industrial expansion can bring food and population into balance in theso-called backward countries. The attempt to feed people

C 0 N V I V I AL

RE C0 N S T RUCT I 0 N

59

and to control their increase are two mutually reinforcing,and very dangerous, illusions. Nor can economists foresee
institutional inversion when for them all institutions mustbe evaluated according to the increase in their planned output and their ability to externalize internal diseconomies inan unobtrusive way. The terms and frameworks of economics have been shaped by the ideology of an irresistible
institutionalization of values that overarches otherwise
opposed economic creeds.
To translate the theoretical possibility of a postindustrial
convivial life style into a political programme for new tools,
it must soon be shown that the prevailing fundamental structure of our present tools menaces the survival of mankind. It
must be shown that this menace is imminent and that theeffects of compulsive efficiency do more damage than goodto most people in our generation. For this purpose we must
identify the range within which our present institutions havebecome frustrating, and we must recognize another range
within which our tools become destructive of society as awhole.

III

The Multiple BalanceThe·human equilibrium is shifting. It is capable of shifting
within flexible but finite parameters. People can change, but
only within bounds. In contrast, the present industrial system
is dynamically unstable. It is organized for indefinite expansion and the concurrent unlimited creation of new needs,
which in an industrial environment soon become basic
necessities.
Once the industrial mode of production has become dominant in a society, it may still admit shifts from one type of
output to another, but it does not admit limits to the further
institutionalization of values. Such growth makes the incQn
gruous demand that man seek his satisfaction by submitting
to the logic of his tools.
The demands made by tools on people become increasingly
costly. This rising cost of fitting man to the service of his
tools is reflected in the ongoing shift from goods to services
in over-all production. Increasing manipulation of man becomes necessary to overcome the resistance of his vital
equilibrium to the dynamic of growing industries; it takes
the form of educational, medical, and administrative
therapies. Education turns out competitive consumers; medicine keeps them alive in the engineered environment they
have come to require; bureaucracy reflects the. necessity of
exercising social control over people to do meaningless work.
The parallel increase in the cost of the defence of new levelsof privilege through military, police, and insurance measuresreflects the fact that in a consumer society there are inevitably
two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and theprisoners of envy.
Political debate must now be focused on the various ways
in which unlimited production threatens human life. This

THE MULTIPLE BALANCE

61

political debate will be misled by those who insist on prescribing palliatives which only disguise the deep reasons why
the systems of health, transport, education, housing, and evenpolitics and law are not working. The environmental crisis,
for example, is rendered superficial if it is not pointed outthat antipollution devices can only be effective if the total
output of production decreases. Otherwise they tend to shift
garbage out of sight, push it into the future, or dump it on to
the poor. The total removal of the pollution created locallyby large-scale industry requires equipment, material, andenergy that can create several times the damage dsewhere.
Making antipollution devices compulsory only increases theunit cost of the product. This may conserve some fresh air for
all, because fewer people can afford to drive cars or sleep in
air-conditioned homes or fly to a fishing ground at the weekend, but it replaces damage to the physical environment withfurther social disintegration. To shift from coal to atomic
power replaces smog now with higher radiation levels tomorrow. To relocate refineries overseas, where pollution controls are less stringent, preserves Americans - not Venezudans- from unpleasant odours at the cost of higher levels ofworld-wide poisoning.
The overgrowth of tools threatens persons in ways which
are profoundly new, though they are also analogous to traditional forms of nuisance and tort. These threats are of a newkind, because their perpetrators and victims are the same
people: both operators and clients of inexorably destructive
tools. Though some people may cash in on the game at first,
ultimately all lose everything they have.
I will identify six ways in which all people of the world
are threatened by industrial development after passage
through the second watershed : ( 1) Overgrowth threatens theright to the fundamental physical structure of the environment with which man has evolved. (2) Industrialization
threatens the right to convivial work. (3) The overprogramming of man for the new environment deadens his creative
imagination. (4) New levels of productivity threaten the rightto participatory politics. (5) Enforced obsolescence threatens
the right to tradition: the recourse to precedent in language,62

TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

myth, morals, and judgement. I will describe these fivethreats as distinct though inter-related categories all havingin common a destructive inversion of means into ends. (6)Pervasive frustration by means of compulsory though engineered satisfaction constitutes a sixth and more subtle
threat.
I am typifying the hazards created by the overgrowth oftools in six categories chosen so the damages can be recognized in traditional terms. That impersonal tools placed at
the service of the injured party should inevitably inflict the
injury is new, but the damage which threatens each person isnot. These six categories can serve in the recovery of procedural principles by which people can expose and redress thepresent imbalance in the functioning of tools. These underlying principles of moral, political, and juridical procedure I
assume to be three: recognition of the legitimacy of personal
conflict, the dialectic authority of history over present procedures, and the recourse to laymen or peers for binding policy
decisions. The radical functional inversion of our major institutions constitutes a revolution much more profound than
the shifts in ownership or power usually proposed. It can beneither envisaged nor enacted unless a basic structure of procedure is recovered and clearly agreed upon. This structure
can even now be discussed in concrete terms. I will therefore
refer to formal juristic concepts in illustrating my argument.

1. B I 0 L 0 G I C A L DE G R A D A T I 0 N
The precarious b:1lance between man and the biosphere has
been recognized and has suddenly begun to worry many
people. The degradati!)n of the environment is dramatic andhighly visible. For years car traffic in Mexico City increased
steadily under a sparkling sky. Then, within a couple ofyears, smog descended and soon became worse than in Los
Angeles. This phenomenon can be easily discussed and appreciated by people who have never studied science. Poisonsof unknown potency are discharged into the biotic system of
the earth. There is no way to retrieve some of them, nor anymeans to predict how some of them may suddenly combine
their action so that the whole earth, like Lake Erie or Baikal,

THE MULTIPLE BALANCE

63

will die. Man has evolved to fit into one niche in the universe.
The earth is his home. This home is now threatened by the
impact of man.
Overpopulation, excessive affluence, and faulty technology
are usually identified as the three trends which combine andthreaten to break the environmental balance. Paul Ehrlich
points out that to face honestly the need for population control and stabilized consumption may 'expose one to the painful criticism of being both anti-people and anti-poor,' but healso emphasizes that 'these unpopular measures offer mankind's only hope for averting unprecedented misery'. Ehrlich
wants to implement birth control with industrial efficiency. Barry Commoner insists that faulty technology, thethird element in the equation, accounts for most of the recent
deterioration in the quality of the environment. He exposes
himself to the criticism of being an antitechnological demagogue. Commoner wants to retool industry rather than invert
the basic structure of our tools.
Fascination with the environmental crisis forced the debate
about survival to focus on only one balance threatened bytools. A one-dimensional dispute is futile. Three trends haveindeed been identified, each of them tending to upset thebalance between man and the physical environment. Overpopulation makes more people dependent on limited resources. Affluence compels each person to use more energy.
Faulty technology degrades energy in an inefficient way.
If these three trends are considered to be the only significant threats, and the physical environment is considered as
the only fundamental milieu that is thro.tened, only two central issues must be discussed: (1) To decide which factor ortrend has degraded the environment most, and which factor
will impose the greatest burden on the environment during
the next few years. (2) To decide which factor merits mostattention because we can in some way reduce or invert it.
One party claims it is easier to do away with people, the otherthat it is more feasible to reduce entropy-producing production.
Honesty requires that we each recognize the need to limit
procreation, consumption, and waste, but equally we must

64

TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

radically reduce our expectations that machines will do ourwork for us or that therapists can make us learned or healthy.
The only solution to the environmental crisis is the shared insight of people that they would be happier if they could work
together and care for each other. Such an inversion of thecurrent world view requires intellectual courage for it exposes
us t() the unenlightened yet painful criticism of being not
only anti-people and against economic progress, but equally
against liberal education and scientific and technological advance. We must face the fact that the imbalance between man
and the environment is just one of several mutually reinforcing stresses, each distorting the balance of life in a different
dimension. In this view, overpopulation is the result of a distortion in the balance of learning, dependence on affluence isthe result of a radical monopoly of institutional over personalvalues, and faulty technology is inexorably consequent upona transformation of means imo ends.
·The one-dimensional debate among proponents of various
panaceas for the ecological imbalance will only inspire thefalse expectations that somehow human action can be engineered to fit into the requirements of the world conceived
as a technological totality. Bureaucratically guaranteed survival under such circumstances means the expansion of industrial economics to the point where a centrally plannedsystem of production and reproduction is identified with theguided evolution of the Earth. If such an industrially mindedsolution becomes generally accepted as the only way of preserving a viable environment, the preservation of the physicalmilieu can become the rationale for a bureaucratic Leviathan
at the levers which regulate levels of human reproduction,
expectation, produ..:tion, and consumption. Such a technological response to growing population, pollution, and affluence can be founded only on a further development of thepresently prevailing institUTionalization of values. The belief
in the possibility of this development is founded on an erroneous supposition, namely that 'The historical achievement ofscience and technology has rendered possible the translationof values into technical tasks - the materialization of values.
Consequently, what is at stake is the redefinition of values in65

T H E M U L T I P L E .B A L A N C E

technical terms, as elements in technological process. The newends, as technical ends, would then operate in the project andin the construction of the machinery, and not only in its
utilization.'*The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on
the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. Otherwise man will find himself totally enclosed within his artificial creation, with no exit. Envelopedin a physical, social, and psychological milieu of his own making, he will be a prisoner in the shell of technology, unable to ··find again the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for
hundreds of thousands of years. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and that oniy persons can work toward them.
Machines only operate ruthlessly to reduce people to the roleof impotent allies in their destructive progress.
2. R A D I C A L M 0 N 0 P 0 L Y
When overefficient tools are applied to facilitate man's relations with the physical environment, they can destroy thebalance between man and nature. Overefficient tools corrupt
the environment. But tools can also be made overefficient inquite a different way. They can upset the relationship between what people need to do by themselves and what theyneed to obtain ready-made. In this second dimension overefficient production results in radical monopoly.
By radical monopoly I mean a kind of dominance by one
product that goes far beyond what the concept of monopoly
usually implies. Generally we mean by 'monopoly' the exclusive control by one corporation over the means of producing(or selling) a commodity or service. Coca-Cola can create amonopoly over the soft-drink market in Nicaragua by being
the only maker of soft drinks which advertises with modem
means. Nestle might impose its brand of cocoa by controllingth(f. raw material, some car maker by restricting imports ofother makes, a television channel by licensing. Monopolies ofthis kind have been recognized for a century as dangerous byproducts of industrial expansion, and legal devices have been
*Herbert 1\.iarcuse, Otze-Dimensional Man, Boston, 1970.
~~c

c

66

TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

developed in a largely futile attempt to control them. Monopolies of this kind restrict the choices open to the consumer.
They might even compel him to buy one product on themarket, but they seldom simultaneously abridge his liberties
in other domains. A thirsty man might desire a cold, gaseous,and sweet drink and find himself restricted to the choice ofjust one brand. He still remains free to quench his thirst withbeer or water. Only if and when his thirst is translated without meaningful alternatives into the need for a Coke would
the monopoly become radical. By 'radical monopoly' I mean
the dominance of one type of product rather than the dominance of one brand. I speak about radical monopoly when
one industrial production process exercises an exclusive control over the satisfaction of a pressing need, and excludes
nonindustrial activities from competition.
Cars can thus monopolize traffic. They can shape a city
into their image - practically ruling out locomotion on footor by bicycle in Los Angeles. They can eliminate river trafficin Thailand. That motor traffic curtails the right to walk, notthat more people drive Chevies than Fords, constitutes radicalmonopoly. What cars do to people by virtue of this radicalmonopoly is quite distinct from and independent of what
they do by burning gasoline that could be transformed into
food in a crowded world. It is also distinct from automotive
manslaughter. Of course cars burn gasoline that could be used
to make food. Of cour~e they are dangerous and costly. But
the radical monopoly cars establish is destructive in a special
way. Cars create distance. Speedy vehicles of all kinds renderspace scarce. They drive wedges of highways into populatedareas, and then extort tolls on the bridge over the remotenessbetween people that was manufactured for their sake. This
monopoly over land turns space into car fodder. It destroys.:he environment for feet and bicycles. Even if planes andbuses could run as nonpolluting, nondepleting public services,
their inhuman velocities would degrade man's innate mobility
and force him to spend more time for the sake of travel.
Schools tried to extend a radical monopoly on learning byredefining it as education. As long as people accepted theteacher's definition of reality, those who learned outside school

THE MULTIPLE BALANCE

67

were officially stamped 'uneducated'. Modern medicine deprives the ailing of care not prescribed by doctors. Radicalmonopoly exists where a major tool rules out natural competence. Radical monopoly imposes compulsory consumption
and thereby restricts personal autonomy. It constitutes a
special kind of social control because it is enforced by meansof the imposed consumption of a standard product that only
large institutions can provide.
The control of undertakers over burial shows how radicalmonoply functions and how it differs from other forms of culturally defined behaviour. A generation ago, in Mexico, only
the opening of the grave and the blessing of the dead body
were performed by professionals : the gravedigger and thepriest. A death in the family created various demands, all ofwhich could be taken care of within the family. The wal,;:e, thefuneral, and the dinner served to compose quarrels, to ventgrief, and to remind each participant of the fatality of deathand the value of life. Most of these were of a ritual natureand carefully prescribed - different from region to region.
Recently, funeral homes were established in the major cities.
At first undertakers had difficulty finding clients because evenin large cities people still knew how to bury their dead. During the sixties the funeral homes obtained control over new
cemeteries and began offering package deals, including thecasket, church service, and embalming. Now legislation is
being passed to make the mortician'~ ministrations compulsory. Once he gets hold of the body, ·,ne funeral director will
have established a radical monoply ..;ver burial, as medicine
is at the point of establishing one over dying.
The current debate over health-care deliverv in the UnitedStates clearly illustrate~ the emrenchment of ~ radical monopoly. Each political party in the debate makes sick-care aburning public issue and thereby relegates health care to anarea about which politics has nothing important to say. Eachparty promises more funds to doctors, hospitals, and drugstores. Such promises are not in the interest of the majority.
They only serve to increase the power of a minority of professionals to prescribe the tools men are to use in maintaining
health, healing sickness, and repressing death. More funds

68

TOOLS FOR

CONV~VIALITY

will strengthen the hold of the health industry over public resources and heighten its prestige and arbitrary power. Suchpower in the hands of a minority will produce only an increase in suffering and a decrease in personal self-reliance.
More money will be invested in tools that only postpone unavoidable death and in services that abridge even further thecivil rights of those who want to heal each other. More money
spent under the control of the health profession means that
more people are operationally conditioned into playing therole of the sick, a role they are not allowed to interpret forthemselves. Once they accept this role, their most trivial
needs can be satisfied only through commodities that are
scarce by professional definition.
People have a native capacity for healing, consoling, moving, learning, building their houses, and burying their dead.
Each of these capacities meets a need. The means for thesatisfaction of these needs are abundant so long as they depend primarily on what people can do for themselves, with
only marginal dependence on commodities. These activities
have use-value without having been given exchange-value.
Their exercise at the service of man is not considered labour.
These basic satisfactions become scarce when the social
environment is transformed in such a manner that basic needs
can no longer be met by abundant competence. The establishment of radical monopoly happens when people give up theirnative ability to do what they can for themselves and for eachother, in exchange for something 'better' that can be done forthem only by a major tool. Radicai monopoly reflects the industrial institutionalization of values. It substitutes the standard package for the personal response. It introduces newclasses of scarcity and a new device to classify people according to the level of their conswnption. This redefinition raises
the unit cost of valuable service, differentially rations privilege, restricts access to resources, and makes people dependent.
Above all, by depriving people of the ability to satisfy personal needs in a personal manner, radical monopoly createsradical scarcity of personal - as opposed to institutional service.
Against this radical monopoly people need protection. TheyTHE

M U L T·I P L ;B B,A LANCE

69

need this protection whether consu.oiption is imposed by theprivate interests of undertakers, by me government for thesake of hygiene, or by the self-destructive collusion between
the mortician and the survivors~ who want to do the bestthing for their dear departed. They need this protection even
if the majority is now sold on the professional's services.
Unless the need for protection from radical monopoly is recognized, its multiple implementation can break the tolerance.
of man for enforced inactivity and passivity.
It is not alwavs easv to determine what constitutes compulsory consutnp,tion. The monopoly held by schools is notestablished primarily by a law that threatens punishment toa parent or child for truancy. Such laws exist, but school isestablished by other tactics: by discrimination against theunschooled, by centralizing learning tools under the control
of teachers, by restricting public funds earmarked for babysitting to salaries for graduates from normal schools. Prott;ction against laws Ihat impose education, vaccination, or life
prolongation is important, but it is not sufiicient. Proceduresmust be used that permit any party who feels threatened bycompulsory con~wnption to daim protection, whatever form
the imposition takes. Like intolerable pollution, intolerable
monopoly cannot be defined in advance. The threat can be
anticipated, but the definition of its iJrecise nature can result
only from peopie's participation in deciding what may not
be produced.
Protection against this general monopoly is as difficult asprotection against pollution. Peopie will face a danger thatthreatens their own self-ir;terest but not one that threatens
societv as a whole. J\bny more people are against cars thandriving them: Thev• are against cars because they
are a;ainst0
pollute and because they monopolize traffic. They drive cars
because they consider the pollution created by one car insignificant, ;md because they do not feel personally deprivedof freedom when they drive. It is also difficult to be protected against monopoly when a society is already litteredwith roads, schools, or hospitals, when independent action has
been paraiysed for so long that the ability for it seems to haveatrophied, and when simple alternatives seem beyond the

70

TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

reach of the imagination. Monopoly is hard to get rid ofwhen it has frozen not only the shape of the physical world
but also the range of behaviour and of imagination. Radicalmonopoly is generally discovered only when it is too late.
Commercial monopoly is broken at the cost of the few who
profit from it. Usuaily, these few manage to evade controls.
The cost of radical monopoly is already borne by the public
and will be broken only if the public realizes that it would bebetter off paying the costs of ending the monopoly than bycontinuing to pay for its maintenance. But the price will not
be paid unless the public learns to value the potential of aconvivial society over the illusion of progress. It will not be
paid voluntarily by those who confuse conviviality with intolerable poverty.
Some of the symptoms of radical monopoly are reaching
public awareness, above all the degree to which frustration
grows faster than output in even the most highly developed
countries and under whatever political regime. Policies aimed
to ease this frustration may easily distract attention from thegeneral nature of the monopoly at its roots, however. The
more these reforms succeed in correcting superficial abuses,
the better they serve to bolster the monopoly I am trying todescribe.
The first palliative is consumer protection. Consumers cannot do without cars. They buy different makes. They discover that most cars are unsafe at any speed. So they organize to get safer, better, and more durable cars and to get
more as well as wider and safer roads. Yet when consumers
gain more confidence in cars, the victory only increases
society's dependence on high-powered vehicles - public or
private - and frustrates even more those who have to, or
would prefer to, walk.
While the organized self-protection of the addict-consumer
immediately raises the quality of the dope and the power ofthe peddler, it also may lead ultimately to limits on growth.
Cars may finally become too expensive to purchase and medicines too expensive to test. By exacerbating the contradictions inherent in this institutionalization of values, majorities
can more easily become aware of them. Discerning con-

TI-i"ErJULJ'-IP,L_E

BALANCE71

sumers who are discriminatory in their purchasing habits may
finally discover that they can do better by doing things forthemselves.
The second palliative proposed to cure growing frustration
with growing output is planning. The illusion is common thatplanners with socialist ideals might somehow create a socialist
society in which industrial workers constitute a majority. The
proponents of this idea overlook the fact that anticonvivial
and manipulative tools can fit into a socialist society in only avery limited measure. Once transportation, education, or medicine is offered by a government free of cost, its use can be
enforced by moral guardians. The underconsumer can beblamed for sabotage of the national e.ffort. In a market economy, someone who wants to cure his flu by staying in bed
will be penalized only through loss of income. In a societythat appeals to the 'people' to meet centrally determined pro- ..
duction goals, resistance to the consumption of medicine be-_comes an act of public immorality. Protection against radicalmonopoly depends on a political consensus opposed to
growth. Such a consensus is diametrically opposed to theissues now raised by political oppositions, since these converge in the demand to increase growth and to provide more
and better things for more completely disabled people.
Both the balance that defines man's needs for a hospitableenvironment and the balance that def,nes everyone's need forauthentic activity are now do~e to the breaking point. And
still this danger docs not concern most people. It must now
be explained why most people arc eicher blind to this threator feel helpless to coJTecr it. I bclie\·e that the blindness isdue to the decline in a third balance - the balance of learning - and that the impotence people experience is the resultof yet a fourth upset in what I call the balance of power.

3. 0 V E R P R 0 GRAMM IN G
The balance of learning is determined by the ratio of two
kinds of knowledge in a society. The first is a result of thecreative action of people on their environment, and thesecond represents the result of man's 'trivialization' by his
manufactured milieu. Their first kind of knowledge is de-

72

TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

rived from the primary involvement of people with eachother and from their use of convivial tools; the second accrues
to them as a result of purposeful and programmed training
to which they are subjected. Speaking the mother tongue islearned in the first way, while some pupils learn mathematics
in the second. No sane person would say that speaking or
walking or nursing a child is primarily the result of education, while competence in mathematics, ballet dancing, or
painting usually is.
The relation between what can be learned from ordinary
living and what must be learned as a result of intentional
teaching differs widely with place and time. It depends verymuch on rituals. All Muslims learn some Arabic as the resultof prayer. This learning evolves from interaction in a context
bounded by tradition. In much the same manner, peasantspick up the folklore of th.eir region. Class and caste also generate opportunities to learn. The rich acquire 'proper' tablemanners or accents and insist these cannot be taught. The
poor learn to fend in dignity where no education could teachthe rich to survive.
Crucial to how much anyone can learn on his own is the
structure of his tools: the less they are convivial, the morethey foster teaching. In limited and well-integrated tribes,
knowledge is shared quite equally among most members. All
people know most of what everybody knows. On a higher
level of civilization, new tools are introduced; more people
know more things, but not all know how to execute themequally well. Mastery of skill does not yet imply a monopolyof understanding. One can understand fully what a goldsmith
does without being one oneself. Men do not have to be cooks
to know how to prepare food. This combination of widely
shared information and competence for using it is characteristic of a society in which convivial tools prevail. The techniques used are easily understood by observing the artisan atwork, but the skills employed are complex and usually can beacquired only through lengthy and programmed apprenticeship. Total learning expands when the range of spontaneous
learning widens along with access to an increasing number oftaught skills and both liberty and discipline flower. This

THE MULTIPLE

BALANCE73

expansion of the balance of learning cannot go on forever; itis self-limiting. It can be optimized, but it cannot be forcibly
extended. One reason is that man's life span is limited.
Another - just as inexorable - is that the specialization oftools and the division of labour reinforce each other. Whencentralization and specialization grow beyond a certain point,
they require highly programmed operators and clients. Moreof what each man must know is due to what another man
has designed and has the power to force on him.
The city child is born into an environment made up of
systems that have a different meaning for their designers thanfor their clients. The inhabitant of the city is in touch withthousands of systems, but only peripherally with each. He
knows how to operate the TV or the telephone, but theirworkings are hidden from him. Learning by primary experience is restricted to self-adjustment in the midst of packaged
commodities. He feels less and less secure in doing his own
thing. Cooking, courtesy and sex become subject matters inwhich instruction is required. The balance of learning
deteriorates: it is skewed in favour of 'education'. People
know what they have been taught, but learn little from theirown doing. People come to feel that they need 'education'.
Learning thus becomes a commodity, and, like any commodity that is marketed, it becomes scarce. The nature ofthis scarcity is hidden - at a high cost - by the many forms
education takes. Education can be programmed preparation
for life in the future in the form of packaged, serial instructions produced by schools, or it can be constant communication about ongoing life through the output of the media andthrough the instructions built into consumer goods. Sometimes these instructions are attached to the item and must be
read. In more thoroughly designed goods, the shape, colour,and provoked associations speak to the user about the way theitem must be handled. Education can also become a periodic
remedy for workers whose original training gets left behindby industrial innovation. When people become obsolete andneed constantly to renew their educational security, when theaccountant must be reprogrammed for each new generation ofcomputers, then learning has indeed become scarce. Education

74

TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

becomes the most vulnerable and confusing issue in thesociety.
Everywhere the direct cost of training rises faster than the
total output. This has been interpreted in either of two ways.
One. interpretation assumes that education is a means to asocial end. From this perspective the capitalization of man
through knowledge inputs is a necessary requirement· for
higher productivity. The disproportionare growth rate of theeducational sector means total production is nearing an asymptote. To avoid rhis, ways must be found to increase the costbenefit ratio in education. Schools will be the first victims of adrive for rationalization in the production of knawledge capital. In my opinion, this is unfortunate. Although the school isdestructive and quite inefficient, its tr::.ditional character protects at least some rights of the pupil. Educators freed fromthe restraint of schools could be much more effective anddeadly conditioners.
The second interpretation starts from the opposite assumption. According to this view, education is the most valuable
output of institutional growth. The transition to a stationary
state in the production of goods and perhaps even of energy
will usher in an explosive growth in the production of invisible commodities such as informarion, education, and fun.
In .this argument the marginal utility of education also decreases, but· this is no reason to limit its production. Someeconomists go even further. In the mme of a misnamed
quality of life they want to put the breaks on the manufacturing sector when it interferes with the growth of the sen·ice
sector, seemingly unawJre of the stultifying effects of escalating treatments. In neither of these two views is a disrinction
made between learning by the use of convivial tools and learning through manipulation. Both views skew the balance oflearning by increasing manipulative teaching and crushingautonomous questions. Those who treat education as a meansfor production and those who treat education as the supreme
luxury product agree on the need for more education. They
upset the balance of learning in favour of more reaching.
They assume that a modern world is inevitably so alien thatit has passed beyond the reach of peopl~ and can be known

THE

MULTIPLE BALANCE

75

only by mystagogues and disciples.
The transformation of learning into education paralyses
man's poetic ability, his power to endow the world with his
personal meaning. Man will wither away just as much if heis deprived of nature, of his own work, or of his deep need tolearn what he wants and not what others have planned thathe should learn. The overdetermination of the physical environment renders it hostile. Radical monopoly makes people
prisoners of welfare. Men overwhelmed by commodities are
rendered impotent and in their rage either kill or die. The
corruption of the balance of learning makes people into
puppets of their tools.
Poets and clowns have always risen up against the oppression of creative thought by dogma. They expose literalmindedness with metaphor. They demonstrate the follies ofseriousness in a framework of humour. Their intimate wonder
dissolves certainties, banishes fear, and undoes paralysis. The
prophet can denounce creeds and expose superstitions andmobilize persons to use their lights and wits. Poetry, intuition,and theory can offer intimations of the advance of dogma
against wit that may lead to a revolution in awareness. Only
the separation of Church and State of compulsory knowledge
from political action, can redress the balance of learning. The
law has been used, and can be used again, to this purpose.
The law has protected societies against the exaggerated
claims of its priests, and can protect it against the claims ofeducators. Compulsory school attendance or other compulsory treatment is analog0m to c0mpulsory attendance at areligious ritual. The Jaw can disestablish it. The law can beused against the rising cost of educatio!1, and against the useof education in the reproduction of a class society.
To understand the rising cost of education, we must recognize two facts: first, that nonconvivial tools create educational side effects which at some point become intolerable
and, second, that education which employs nonconvivial tools
is economically unfeasible. The first recognition opens our eyesto the possibility of a society where work and leisure andpolitics would favour learning and that could function withless formal education; the second recognition permits us to set

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TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

up educational arrangements that favour self-initiated, selfchosen learning, and that relegate programmed teaching tolimited, clearly specified occasions.
Throughout the world, highly capitalized tools require
highly capitalized men. Following the Second World War,economic development penetrated eve:-~ 'backward' areas. Spotindustrialization created an intense demand for schools toprogramme people nor only to opera~c but also to live with
their. new tools. The establishment of more schools in Malay~
sia or Brazil teaches people the ''cccumant's view of the valueof time, the bureaucrat's view of the value of promotion, thesalesman's view of the value of increased consumption, andthe union leader's view of the p11rpose of work. People aretaught all this not by the teacher but by the curriculum hiddenin the structure of school. It does not matter what the teacher
teaches so long as the pt.:pil has to attend hundreds of hours ofage-specific assemblies to engage in a routine decreed by the
curriculum and is graded according to hi:; ability to submit
to it. People learn that they acquire more value in the market
if they spend more hours in class. They learn to value progressive consumption of curricula. They le:Jm that whatevera major institution produces has value, even invisible things
such as education or health. They learn to value grade advancement, passive submission, and even the standard misbehaviour that teachers like to interpret as H sign of creativity.
They learn disciplined competition for the favour of thebureaucrat who presides over their duily se~sions, who iscalled their teacher as long as Ihey arc in class and their boss
when they go to work. They Jearn to define themselv~s asholders of kr,owledge stock in the speciality in which they
have made invesm1ems of their time. They learn to accept
their place in society precisely in the clas5 and career corresponding to the level at which they Ieaye school and to thefield of their academic specic.liza.tion.
Industrial jobs are arranged so that the better-schooled" fitinto the scarcer slots. Scarce jobs are defined as more productive, so people with less schooling are barred from access tothe more desirable goods produced in the new industries. Industrially produced shoes, bags, clothes, frozen foods, and softTHE MULTIPLE BALANCE

77

drinks drive off the market equivalent goods that had been
convivially produced. As production becomes more centralized
and more capital-intensive, the screening process performedby tax-supported schools not only costs more for those who
get through it, but double-charges those who do not.
Education becomes necessary not only to grade people forjobs but to upgrade them for consumption. As industrial output rises, it pushes the education system to exercise the social
control necessary for its efficient use. The housing industry in
Latin-American countries is a good example of the educational diseconomies produced by architects. All the major
cities in such countries are surrounded by vast tracts of selfbuilt favelas, barriadas, or poblaciones. Components for new
houses and utilities could be made very cheaply and designed
for self-assembly. People could build more durable, more
comfortable, and more sanitary dwellings, as well as learn
about new materials and systems. But instead of supporting
the ability of people to shape their own environment, thegovernment deposits in these shantytowns public utilities designed for people who live in standard modern houses. The
presence of a new school, a paved road, and a glass-and-steel
police station defines the professionally built house as thefunctional unit, and stamps the self-built home a shanty. The
law establishes this definition by refusing a building permit
to people who cannot submit a plan signed by an architect.
People are deprived of their ability to invest their own timewith the power to produce use-value, and are compelled towork for wages and to exchange their earnings for industriallydefined rented space. They are deprived also of the opportunity to learn while building.
Industrial society demands that some people be taught before they can drive a truck and that other people be taught
before they can build a house. Others must be taught how tolive in apartment buildings. Teachers, social workers andpolicemen co-operate to keep people who have low-paying oroccasional jobs in houses t.hey may not build or change. To
accommodate more people on less land, Venezuela and Brazil
experimented with high-rise tenements. First, the police had
to dislodge people from their 'slums' and resettle them in

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TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

apartments. Then the social workers had to socialize tenants
who lacked sufficient schooling to understand that pigs may
not be raised on eleventh-floor balconies nor beans cultivated in their bathtubs.
In New York people with less than twelve years of schooling are treated like cripples: they tend to be unemployable,
and are controlled by social workers who decide for them how
to live. The radical monopoly of overefficient tools exacts fromsociety the increasing and costly conditioning of clients. Ford
produces cars that can be repaired only by trained mechanics.
Agriculture deparunents turn out high-yield crops that canbe used only with the assistance of farm managers who havesurvived an expensive school race. The production of better
health, higher speeds, or greater yields depends on more disciplined recipients. The real cost of these doubtful benefits
is hidden by unloading much of them on the schools that
produce social control.
Pressure for more and better conditioning of people in thename of education has led schools over their second watershed. Planners make programmes more varied and complex,
but their marginal utility thereby declines. Compulsory attendance has been extended to the point that it now can be defined by teachers as independent study on the city streets, or
as a field project supervised by the weavers of Teotithin delValle.
Parallel with the growing pretensions of school, otheragencies discovered their educational mission. Newspapers,
television, and radio were no longer just media of communication. They were pressed into the service of socialization.
Periodicals expanded to acconunodate all fit news, whichmeant that a few professional journalists got vast readerships,
while the majority was reduced to token representation in the'Letters to the Editor' section.
The industrial manufacture and marketing of knowledge
reduce the access of people to convivial tools for selfinitiated learning. Witness the fate of u.i.e book. The book is
the result of two major inventions that enormously extended
the balance of learning: the alphabet and the printing press.
'Both techniques are almost ideally convivial. Almost anybody

THE MULTIPLE BALANCE

79

can learn to use them, and for his own purpose. They use
cheap materials. People can take them or leave them as theywish. They are not easily controlled by third parties. Even theSoviet government cannot stop the samizdat circulation ofsubversive typescripts.
The alphabet and the printing press have in principle deprofessionalized the recorded word. With the alphabet themerchant broke the monopoly of the priest over hieroglyphs.
With cheap paper and pencil, and later with the typewriterand modem copying devices, a set of new techniques had inprinciple opened the era of nonprofessional, truly convivial,
communication by record. The tape recorder and camera
added new media to fully interactive communication. Yet the
manipulative nature of institutions and schooling for theacceptance of manipulation have put these ideally convivial
tools at the service of more one-way teaching. Schools train
people in the use of constantly revised textbooks. They produce readers of instructions and of news. The per capita purchase of nontechnical books by high-school graduates declines
with the increased percentage of people who finish highschool. More books are written for the school-trained specialist, and the self-initiated reading of books declines. Morepeople spend more time hooked on the curriculum definedby new principals: the publisher, the producer, and the programme director. Every week they wait for Time.
Even the library has become a component of a schooled
world. As the library got 'better,' the book was further withdrawn from the handy bookshelf. The reference librarianplaced himself between people and shelves; now he is being
replaced by the computer. Putting the book into huge deposits
and into the hands of computers, the New York Public
Library has become so expensive to operate that it now opens
only from ten to six weekdays and is open only partially on
Saturdays. This means that its books have become the specialized tool of readers who live on a grant to stay away fromwork and school.
At its best the library is the prototype of a convivial tool.
Repositories for other learning tools can be organized on its
model, expanding access to tapes, pictures, records, and very

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TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

simple labs filled with the same scientific instruments withwhich most of the major breakthroughs of the last century
were made.
Manipulative teaching tools raise the cost of learning. Now
we only ask what people have to learn and then invest in ameans to teach them. We should learn to ask first what people
need if they want to learn and provide these schools for them.
Professional teachers laugh at the idea that people would
learn more from random access to learning resources thanthey can be taught. In fact, they frequently cite as proof for
their. scepticism the declining use of libraries. They overlook
the fact that libraries are little used because they have beenorganized as formidable teaching devices. Libraries are notused because people have been trained to demand that they
be taught. Neither are contraceptives, and for analogous reasons we have to explore.
People must learn to live within boUllds. This cannot betaught. Survival depends on people learning fast what theycannot do. They must learn to abstain from Ulllimited progeny, consumption, and use. It is impossible to educate people
for volUlltary poverty or to manipulate them into self-control.
It is impossible to teach joyful renunciation in a world totally
structured for higher output and the illusion of declining
costs.
People must learn why and how to practise contraception.
The reason is clear. Man has evolved in a small comer of theuniverse. His world is bounded by the resources of the ecosphere, and can accommodate only a limited munber ofpeople. Technology has transformed the characteristics ofthis niche. The ecosphere now accommodates a larger numberof people, each less vitally adapted to the environment -eachon the average having less space, less freedom to survive withsimple means, fewer roots in tradition. The attempt to makea better environment has turned out to be as presUlllptuous as
the attempt to create better health, education, or communica.
tion. As a result there are now more people, most of them l~s
at home in the world. This large population can survive because of new tools. 'In turn, it spurs the search for even more
powerful tools, and thereby demands' more radical mono-THE MULTIPLE BALANCE

81

poly; this monopoly, in its turn, calls for more and moreeducation. But, paradoxically, what people most need tolearn, they cannot be taught or educated to do. If they arevoluntarily to keep their numbers and consumption withinbounds, they must learn to do so by living active and responsible lives, or they will perish - passive though well informed,
frustrated yet resigned. Voluntary and therefore effective
population control is impossible under conditions of radicalmonopoly and overprogramming. An efficient, specializedbirth control programme must fail in the same way that
schools and hospitals fail. It can start with a futile attempt at
effective seduction. It will logically escalate to enforced
sterilization and abortion. Finally, it will provide a rationale
for mega-deaths.
Voluntary and effective contraception is now absolutely
necessary. If such contraception is not practised in the very
near future, humanity is in danger of being crushed by its
own size rather than by the power of its tools. But this universal practice cannot possibly be the result of some miracle
tool. A new practice, inverse to the present, can only be theresult of a new rdationship between people and their tools.
The universal practice of effective contraception is a necessary
premise for the limitation of tools which I advocate. But
equally, the psychological inversion that will accompany alimitation of tools is a premise for the convivial psychologicalpressure necessary for effective contraception.
The devices needed for birth control are a paradigm formodem convivial wols. They incorporate science in instruments that can be handkd by any reasonably prudent andwell-apprenticed person. They provide new ways to engage
in the millenary practice of contraception, sterilization, andabortion. They are cheap enough to be made universallyavailable. Thev are made to fit alternate tasks, beliefs, andsituations. Th~y are obviously tools that structure the bodily
o~~elationship of each individual to himself and to others. To beeffective, some must be used by every adult, ,and many ·ofthem must be used every day. Birth control is an immensetask. It must be accomplished within one decade. It can beaccomplished only in a convivial manner. It is ridiculous

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TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

to try to control populations with tools which by their natureare convivial while conditioning the population by formal
education to fit more effectively into an industrial and professional world. It is absurd to expect that Brazilian peasantscan be taught to depend on doctors for injections and prescriptions, on lawyers for conflict resolution, and on teachers
for learning to read, while asking them to use the condom on
their own. But it is equally fanciful to expect that Indian
doctors will allow illiterate but well-trained hospital assistants
to compete with them in the performance of sterilizations. If
the public realized that this delicate intervention could beequally or even more carefully performed by a layman whose
attentions, dexterity, and programming skills were refined in
the weaving of saris, doctors would lose their monopoly on all
interventions which are economically feasible for any majorityof people. Professional taboos and industrial tools stand andfall together once truly rational, postindustrial tools are available. Only the convergent use of convivial tools in all significant areas of need-satisfaction can render their use in eachsector truly effective. Only among convivially structured tools
can people learn to use the new levels of power that modern
technology can incorporate in them.
4. P 0 L A R I Z A T I 0 N
The present organization of tools impels societies to growboth in population and in levels of affluence. This growth
takes place at the opposite ends of the privilege spectrum.
The underprivileged grow in number, while the already privileged grow in affluence. The underprivileged thus strengthen
their frustrating claims, while the rich defend their presumed
rights and needs. Hunger and impotence lead the poor to demand rapid industrialization, and the defence of growing
luxuries pushes the rich into more frantic production. Poweris polarized, frustration is generalized, and the alternative ofgreater happiness at lower affluence is pushed into the blindspot of social vision.
This blindness is a result of the broken balance of learning.
People who are hooked on teaching are conditioned to be customers for everything else. They see their own personal

THE MULTIPLE BALANCE

83

growth as an accumulation of institutional outputs, and preferwhat institutions make over what they themselves can do.
They repress the ability to discover reality by their own lights.
The skewed balance of learning explains why the radicalmonopoly of commodities has become imperceptible. It does
not explain why people feel impotent to correct those profound disorders which they do perceive.
This helplessness is the result of a fourth disruption: thegrowing polarization of power. Under the pressure of an expanding mega-machine, power is concentrated in a few
hands, and the majority becomes dependent on handouts.
New levels of luxuriant overproduction grow faster than the
output of commodities which this wanton production imposes.
A 3 per cent increase in the standard of living of the US··population costs twenty-five times as much as a similar increase. in the living standard of India, despite the greater
size and more rapid growth of the Indian population. Significant benefits for the poor demand a reduction of the resources
used by the rich, while significant benefits for the rich makemurderous demands on the resources of the poor. Yet the richpretend that by exploiting the poor nations they will becomerich enough to create a hyperindustrial abundance for all.
The elites of poor countries share this fantasy.
The rich will get richer and many more of the poor will
become destitute during the next ten years. But anguish about
the hungry should not prevent us from understanding thestructural problem of power distribution that constitutes the
fourth dimension of destructive overgrowth. Unchecked industrialization modernizes poverty. Poverty levels rise and thegap between rich and poor widens. These two aspects must be
seen together or the nature of destructive polarization will bemissed.
Poverty levels rise because industrial staples are turned
into basic necessities and have a unit cost beyond what amajority could ever pay. The radical monopoly of industries
has created new types of demeaning poverty in societies ofsometimes profligate affluence. The former subsistence farmer
is put out of business by the green revolution. He earns moreas a labourer, but he cannot give his children their former

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TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

diet. More importantly, the US citizen with ten times his
income is also desperately poor. Both get increasingly less atgreater cost.
The other side of modernized poverty is related but distinct. The power gap widens because control over production
is centralized to make the most goods for the greatest number.
Whereas rising poverty levels are due to the structure of industrial outputs, the gaping power lag is due to the structureof inputs. To seek remedies for the former without simultaneously dealing with the latter would only postpone andaggravate the world-wide modernization of poverty.
The surface effects of industrially concentrated power canbe obviated by income equalization. Progressive taxes without loopholes can be supplemented by social security, income
supports, and equal welfare benefits for all. Confiscation ofprivate capital beyond a certain limit can be attempted.
Keeping maximum close to minimum income is an eventougher way to stem personal enrichment through the management of corporate power. But such curbs on personal income will be effective only in regulating private consumption.
It has no effect on equalizing the privileges that really countin a society where the job has become more important thanthe home. As long as workers are graded by the amount of
manpower capital they represent, those who hold high denominations of knowledge stock will be certified for the useof all kinds of timesaving privileges. The concentration ofprivileges on a few is in the nature of industrial dominance.
With the introduction of agriculture and animal husbandry,
patriarchal government and some centralization of power became feasible. At this stage political means could be used to
get the power of many slaves under one man's control. One
man could transform a multitude into a tool for the realizationof his design. Religion, ideology, and the whip were the principal means of control. But the amount of power controlled wassmall. The centralization of power which now seems normal
could not have been imagined even a century ago.
In modern society, energy conversion enormously exceeds
the body power of all men. Manpower stands to mechanicalpower in a ratio of 1: 15 in China and 1:300 in the USA.

THE

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BALANCE85.

Switches concentrate the control over this power more effectively than whips ever could. The social distribution of control over power inputs has been radically changed. If capitalmeans the power to make effective change, power inflation
has reduced most people to paupers.
As tools get bigger, the number of potential operators declines. There are always fewer operators of cranes than ofwheelbarrows. As tools become more efficient, more scarce
resources are put at the service of the operator. On a Guatemalan construction site, only the engineer gets air conditioningin his trailer. He is also the only one whose time is deemedso precious that he must be flown to the capital, and whose
decisions seem so important that they are transmitted byshortwave radio. He has of course earned his privileges bycornering the largest amoum of tax money and using it toacquire a university degree. The Indio who works on the gangdoes not notice Ihe relative increase in privilege between him
and his Ladino gang boss, but the geometricians and draughtsmen who also went to school, but did not graduate, feel theheat and the distance from their families in a new and acuteway. Their relative poverty has been aggravated by theirbosses' claim to greater efficiency.
Never before have tools approached present power. Neverbefore have they been so integrated at me service of a small
elite. Kings could not claim divine right with as little challenge as executives claim services for the sake of greater production. The Russians justify supersonic transport by saying
it will economize the time of their scientists. High-spee~transportation, broad-band-width communication, special
health maintenance, and unlimited bureaucratic assistance areall explained as requirements to get the most out of the mosthighly capitalized people.
A sociery with very large tools must rely on multiple devices to keep rhe majority from claiming the most expensive
packages of privilege. These must be reserved for the mostproductive individuals. The most prestigious way to measurea person's productivity is by the price tag on his education
consumption. The higher a person's knowledge capital, thegreater the social value placed on the decisions he 'makes'

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and the more legitimate is his claim to high-level packages ofindustrial outputs.
When the legitimacy of educational certification breaks
down, other more primitive forms of discrimination are boundto assume renewed importance. People are judged to be lessvaluable manpower because they are born in the Third
World, because they are black, because they are women, because they belong to the wrong group or party, or because
they cannot pass the right battery of tests. The scene is set
for the multiplication of minority movements, each one claiming its share, and each one destined to be foiled by its own
intent.
Hierarchies must rise and conglomerate as they extend overfewer and larger corporations. A seat in a high-rise job is themost coveted and contested product of expanding industry.
The lack of schooling, compounded with sex, colour, andpeculiar persuasions, now keeps most people down. Minorities
organized by women, or blacks, or the unorthodox succeed atbest in getting some of their members through school and into
an expensive job. They claim victory when they get equalpay for equal rank. Paradoxically, these movements strengthen the idea that unequal graded work is necessary and thathigh-rise hierarchies are necessary to produce what an egalitarian society needs. If properly schooled, the black porter
will blame himself for not being a black lawyer. At the sametime, schooling generates a new intensity of frustration which
ultimately can act as social dynamite.
It does not matter for what specific purpose minorities now
organize, if they seek an equal share in consumption, an equal
place on the pyramid of production, or equal nominal powerin the government of ungovernable tools. As long as a minority acts to increase its share within a growth-orientatedsociety, the final result will be a keener sense of inferiority
for most of its members.
Movements that seek control over existing institutions givethem a new legitimacy, and also render their contradictions
more acute. Changes in management are not revolutions. The
shared control of workers and women, or blacks and the
young, does not constitute a social reconstruction if what they

THE MULTIPLE BALANCE

87

claim to control are industrial corporations. Such changes areat best new ways to administer an industrial mode of production which, tha·nks to these shifts, continues unchallenged.
More commonly, these changes are professional insurgencies
against the statui quo. They expand management, and, at aneven faster rate, they degrade labour. A new desk usuallymeans more capital-intensive production in one firm and a
new guarantee of so-called underemployment somewhere else
in society. A majority loses further productive ability, and aminority is forced to seek new reasons and weapons to pro.teet its privilege.
New classes of under consumers and of underemployed are
one of the inevitable by-products of industrial progress.
Organization makes them aware of their common plight. At
present· articulate minorities - often claiming the leadershipof majorities - seek equal treatment. If one day they were toseek equal work rather than equal pay - equal inputs rather
tlian equal outputs - they could be the pivot of social reconstruction. Industrial society could not possibly resist a strong
women's movement, for example, which would lead to thedemand that all people, without distinction, do equal work.
Women are integrated into all classes and races. Most of
their daily activities are performed in nonindustrial ways. Industrial societies remain viable precisely because women are
there to perform those daily tasks which resist industrialization. It is easier to imagine that the North American continent would cease to exploit the underindustrialization ofSouth America than that it would cease to use its women forindustry-resistant chores. In a society ruled by the standardsof industrial efficiency, housework is rendered inhuman anddevalued. It would be rendered even less tolerable if it were
given pro-forma industrial status. The further expansion ofindustry would be brought to a halt if women forced upon us
recognition that society is no longer viable if a single modeof product:ion prevails. The effective recognition that not two
but several equally valuable, dignified, and important modesof production must coexist whhin any viable society would
bring industrial expansion under control. Growth would stop
if women obtained equally creative work for all, instead of

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TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

demanding equal rights over the gigantic and expanding tools
now appropriated by men.

5.

0 B S 0 L ESC EN C E

Convivial reconstruction demands the disruption of the present monopoly of industry, but not the abolition of all industrial production. It does imply the adoption of labourintensive tools, but not the regression to inefficient tools. It
requires a considerable reduction of all kinds of now compulsory therapy, but not the elimination of teaching, guidance, or
healing for which individuals take personal responsibility.
Neither must a convivial society be stagnant. Its dynamics
depend on wide distribution of the power to make effective
change. In the present scheme of large-scale obsolescence a
few corporate centres of decision-making impose compulsory
innovation on the entire society. Continued convivial reconstruction depends on the degree to which society protects thepower of individuals and of communities to choose their own
styles of life through effective, small-scale renewal.
I have shown that social polarization is the result of twocomplementary factors: the excessive cost of industrially produced and advertised products, and the excessive rarity ofjobs that are considered highly productive. Obsolescence, on
the other hand, produces devaluation- which is the result notof a certain general rate of change but of change in those products which exercise a radical monopoly. Social polarization
depends on the fact that industrial inputs and outputs comein units so large that most people are excluded from them.
Obsolescence, on the other hand, can become intolerable evenwhen people are not directly priced out of the market. Product elaboration and obsolescence are two distinct dimensionsof overefficiency, both of which underpin a society of hierarchically layered privilege.
It does not really matter if forced obsolescence becomes destructive of old models or of old functions, if Ford discontinues the distribution of spare parts for its 1955 model, or if
the police rule old cars off the road because they lack featuresthat safety lobbyists have made standard. Renewal is intrinsic
to the industrial mode of production coupled to the ideology

THE MULTIPLE

BALANCE89

of progress. Products cannot be improved unless hugemachines are retooled - and in the technical sense engineers
have given this word. To make this pay, huge markets must
be created for the new model. The most effective way toopen a market is to identify the use of what is new as an important privilege. If this identification succeeds, the old model
is devalued and all the self-interest of the consumer is wedded
to the ideology of never-ending and progressive consumption.
Individuals are socially graded according to the number ofyears their bill of goods is out of date. Some people can afford
to keep up with the Joneses who buy the latest model, whileothers still use cars, stoves, and radios that are five to ten
years old - and probably spend their vacations in places thatare just as many years out of style. They know where they fit
on the social ladder.
The social grading of individuals by the age of the things
they use is not just a capitalist practice. Wherever the economy is built around the large-scale production of elaborate
and obsolescent packages of staples, it is only the privileged
who have access to the newest model of services and goods.
Only a few nurses get the most recent course in anaesthesialogical nursing, and only a few functionaries get the newmodel of a 'people's car'. The members of this minority within a minority recognize each other by the recent date at which
the products they use come on to the market, and it makes
little difference whether they use them at home or at work.
Industrial innovations are costly, and managers must justify
their high cost by producing measurable proof of their superiority. Under the rule of industrial socialism, pseudo science
will have to provide the alibi, while in market economies,
appeal can be made to a survey of consumer opinion. In any
case, periodic innovations in goods or tools foster the belief
that anything new will be proven better. This belief has become an integral part of the modern world view. It is forgotten that whenever a society lives by this delusion, each marketed unit generates more wants than it satisfies. If new things
are made because they are better, then the things most people
use are not quite good. New models constantly renovate
poverty. The consumer feels the lag between what he has

W

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FOR

CONVIVIALITY

and what he ought to get. He believes that products can bemade measurably more valuable and allows himself to be constantly re-educated for their consumption. The 'better' replaces the 'good' as the fundamental normative concept.
In a society caught up in the race for the better, limits onchange are experienced as a threat. The commitments to thebetter at any cost makes the good impossible at all costs.
Failure to renew the bill of goods frustrates the expectation ofwhat is possible, while renewal of the bill of goods intensifies
the expectations of unattainable progress. What people have
and what they are about to get are equally exasperating tothem. Accelerating change has become both addictive and intolerable. At this point the balance among stability, change,
and tradition has been upset; sociery has lost both its roots inshared memories and its bearings for imiovation. Judgement
op precedents has lost its value.
· One of the major objections against a st2tionary-state economy is the fear that the production of a limited and durable
number of goods would set intolerable limits on the freedomof innovation and of scientific exploration. This would bejustified if I were discussing the transition from the present
industrial society to its next model: clean and limited production of goods and unlimited growth in the service sector.
I am not, however, discussing the evolution of industrial society, but the transition to a new mixed mode of production.
Industrial innovations are pianned, trivial, and conservative. The renewal of convivial tools would be as unpredictable, creative, and lively as the people who use them. Scientific progress is also dulled by the present identifications ofresearch with industrial development . .Most of the cost of research derives from its competitive nature and pressure; mostof its tools are restricted to people who have been carefully
programmed to look at the world through the prisms of profit
and power; most of its goals are set by the need for more
power and efficiency. Leisurely scientific research does not exclude a bevatron or some ultracentrifuges; removal of access
restrictions now created by schools would again admit the
curious, rather than the orthodox, to the alchemist's vault;
and study for its own sake would produce more surprises thanTHE

MULTIPLE

BALANCE91

team research on how to eliminate production snags.
A changeless society would be as intolerable for people as
the present society of constant change. Convivial reconstruction requires limits on the rate of compulsory change. An unlimited rate of change makes lawful community meaningless.
Law is based on the retrospective judgement of peers aboutcircumstances that occur ordinarily and are likely to occur
again. If the rate of change which affects all circumstances
accelerates beyond some point, such judgements cease to bevalid. Lawful society breaks down. Social control does notaccommodate community participation and becomes the function of experts. Educators define how people are to be trained
and retrained throughout their lives - shaped and reshaped
until they fit the demands of industry and are attracted byits profits. Ideologues define what is right or wrong. The
tooling of man for the milieu becomes the major industry
when this milieu changes beyond a certain rate; then man's
need for language and law, for memories and myths, imposes limits to the change of tools.
6. F R U S T R A T I 0 N
I have identified five reasons in each of which the efficiencyof tools can upset the balance of life. Faulty technology canrender the environment uninhabitable. Radical monopoly canforce the demand for affluence to the point of paralysing theability to work. Overprogramming can transform the world
into a treatment ward in which people are constantly taught,
socialized, normalized, tested, and reformed. Centralizationand packaging of institutionally produced values can polarize
society into irreversible structural despotism. And, finally, engineered obsolescence can break all bridges to a normative
past. In each or several of these dimensions a tool can threaten
survival by making it unfeasible for most people to relatethemselves in action to one of the great dimensions of theirenvironment.
In the assessment of society it is not sufficient to select justone of these realms. Each one of these balances must be preserved. Even clean and equally distributed electricity could
lead to intolerable radical monopoly of power tools over

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TOOLS FOR CON\"1VIALITY

man's personal energy. Not only compulsory schools but pervasive teaching media can be used- to upset the balance oflearning or to polarize society into an oppressive meritocracy.
Any form of engineering can lead to unendurable obsolescence.
It is true that a man's physical niche is threatened; but just as
he evolved within one particular physiological environment, so
he also evolved within a social, political and psychological environment 'Yhich can also be irreversibly destroyed. Mankind
may wither and disappear because he is deprived of basic
struCtures of language, law, and myth, just as much as he canbe smothered by smog. Future shock can destroy what ishuman just as much as radical monopoly or social polarization.
I have argued that in each of five realms conceptual criteria
can be used to recognize escalating imbalance. These criteria
serve as guidelines for political processes by which themembers of a technological society can develop constitutive
boundaries within which tools must be kept. Such boundaries
circumscribe the kind of power structures that can be kept
under the control of people. By growing beyond this range,
tools escape political comrol. Man's ability to claim his rights
is extinguished by his bondage to processes over which he has
no say. Biological functions, work, meaning, freedom, androots - insofar as he can still enjoy them - are reduced toconcessions, which optimize the logic of tools. Man is reduced
to an indefinitely malleable resource of a corporate state.
Without constitutive limits translated into constitutional provisions survival in dignity and freedom is squelched.
Present research is overwhelmingly concentrated in two
directions: research and development for breakthroughs tothe better production of better wares and general systems
analysis concerned with protecting man for further consumption. Future research ought to lead in the opposite direction;
let us call it counterfoil research. Counterfoil research also has
two miijor tasks: to provide guidelines for detecting the incipient stages of tnurderous logic in a tool; and to 4evise· tools
and tool -systems that optimize the balance 1Jf life, thereby
maximizing liberty for all.
Counterfoil research is not a new branch of science, nor isTHE MULTIPLE BALANCE

93

it some interdisciplinary project. It is the dimensional analysis of the relationship of man to his tools. It seems obviousthat each person lives in several concentric social environments. To each social environment there corresponds a set of
natural scales. This is true for the primary group, for the
production unit, for the city, the state, and the organizationof men on the globe. To each of these social environments
there correspond certain characteristic distances, periods,
populations, energy sources, and energy sinks. In each of these
dimensions tools that require time periods or spaces or energies much beyond the order of corresponding natural scales
are dysfunctional. They upset the homeostasis which renders
the particular environment viable. At present we tend to define human needs in terms of abstract goals and treat these as
problems to which technocrats can apply escalating solutions. What we need is rational research on the dimensions
within which technology can be used by concrete communities
to implement their aspirations without frustrating equivalent
aspirations by others.
The barriers beyond which destruction looms are of adifferent nature from the boundaries within which a society
freely constrains its tools. The former establish the realm of
possible survival; the latter determine the shape of a culturally
preferred environment. The former define the conditions foruniform regimentation; the latter set the conditions of convivial justice. The boundaries of doom are constitutive
requirements common to all postindustrial societies.
Statutory characteristics setting more narrow bounds thanthose absolutely necessary are the result of joint options madein a commonweal, as a result of its members' defining theirlife style and their level of liberty.
Supersonic transports could easily be ruled out to protect
the environment, air transport to avoid social polarization,
cars to protect against radical monopoly. The balance of purpose I want to highlight at this point provides a further criterion by which to select desirable tools. In view of thisbalance it might even be possible to exclude public transportation moving at high velocity.
There is a form of malfunction in which growth does not

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T 0 0 L S F 0 R C 0 N V I V I A LJ T Y

yet tend toward the destruction of life, yet renders a tool
antagonistic to its specific aims. Tools, in other words, havean optimal, a tolerable, and a negative range. Tolerable overefficiency also disturbs a balance, but. a balance of a subtler
and more subjective kind than those discussed before. Thebalance here threatened is that between personal cost and return. It can be expressed more generally as the perception of
the balance between means and ends. When ends become
subservient to the tools chosen for their sake, the user firstfeels frustration and finally eitl1er abstains from their use orgoes mad. Compulsory maddening behaviour in Hades wasconsidered the ultimate punishment reserved for blasphemy.
Sisyphus was forced to keep rolling a stone uphill, only to see
it roll back down. When maddening behaviour becomes thestandard of a society, people learn to compete for 1.:he rightto engage in it. Envy blinds people and makes them compete for addiction.
Wherever the maximum velocity of any one type of commuter vehicle grows beyond a certain mph, the travel time
and the cost of transportation for the median commuter isincreased. If the maximum velocity at any one point of aconunuter system goes beyond a certain mph, most people are
obliged to spend more time in traffic jams, or waiting for connections, or recovering from accidents. They will also haveto spend more time paying for the transportation system they
are compelled to use.
The critical velocity depends to a certain extent on avariety of factors: geography, culture, market controls, levelof technology, and money flow. With so many variables affecting a quantity, it would seem that its value could fluctuate
over a very wide range. Just the contrary is true. Once it isunderstood that we refer to any vehicular velocity in the transportation of people within a community, we find that therange within which the critical velocity can vary is very
narrow. It is, in fact, so narrow and so low that it seems
improbable and not worth the time of most traffic engineers
to worry about.
Commuter transportation leads to negative returns when it
admits, anywhere in the system, speeds much above thoseTHE

MULTIPLE

BALANCE95

reached on a bicycle. Once the barrier of bicycle velocity isbroken at any point in the system, the total per capita
monthly time spent at the service of the travel industry increases.
High output leads to time lack. Time becomes scarce,
partly because it takes time to consume goods and to undergo
therapies, and partly because dependence on production
makes abstention from it more costly. The richer we get in a
consumer society, the more acutely we become aware of how
many grades of value - of both leisure and labour - we haveclimbed. The higher we are on the pyramid, the less likely weare to give up time to simple idleness and to apparently nonproductive pursuits. The joy of listening to the neighbourhood finch is easily overshadowed by stereophonic recordingsof 'Bird Songs of the World,' the walk through the park
downgraded by preparations for a packaged bird-watching
tour into the jungle. It becomes difficult to economize time
when all commitments are for the long run. Staffan Linder
points out that there is a strong tendency for us to overcommit the future, so that when the future becomes present,
we seem to be conscious all the time of having an acutescarcity, simply because we have committed ourselves toabout thirty hours a day instead of twenty-four. In addition
to the mere fact that time has competitive uses and high marginal utility in an affluent society, this overcommitment
creates a sense of pressure and harriedness.
Life in a society where speedy transportation is taken for
granted renders time scarce in both of these ways. Activities
related to the use of speedy vehicles by many people in asociety occupy an increasing percentage of the time budgetof most members of that society, as the speed of the vehicles
increases beyond a certain point. Beyond this point the competition of transportation activities with stationary activities
becomes fierce, especially competition for the allocation oflimited real estate and available energy. This competition
seems to grow exponentially with the rise of speed. The timereserved for commuting displaces both work and leisure time.
Hence, the speedier vehicles are, the more it becomes important to keep them filled at all times. If they are individual

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T 0 0 L S F O.R C 0 NV IV I ALIT Y

capsules, they tend to become disproportionately costly andscarce. If they are public vehicles, they tend to be large, andrun at infrequent intervals or along only a few routes.
As speed increases, the adaptation of life patterns to vehicles
becomes more tyrannical. It becomes necessary to make constant corrections and amendments to the allocation of shorter
periods. It becomes necessary to make appointments andcommitments months or even years ahead. Since some ofthese commitments, which have been made at great cos~, cannot be kept, there is a sense of constant failure which produces a sense of constant tension. Man has only a limited
ability to submit to programming. When speed increases beyond a certain point, the transportation system vies with othersystems in exhausting human tolerance for social controls.
Machines turn against men at a much lower level of power
than would be ruled out by the first five criteria. But whilethese criteria identify necessary safeguards for life and liberty,
the balance of purpose depends on a different kind of value.
Conceptual rather than empirical criteria can be set for the
relatively
constitutional limitation of power. It ought toeasy for a majority to rule what abuse it will take from any
minority, or what damage it will not expose its offspring to.
The recognition of the most socially desirable power of a tool
is of a different nature; it can only be the outcome of politicalprocedure. The value obtained for time wasted on speedtransportation is conditioned by the consensus in a community about the level of its freedom as a concrete option of
its civilization.
Transportation beyond bicycle speeds demands power inputs from the environment. Velocity translates directly into
power, and soon power needs increase exponentially. In the
United States, 22 per cent of the energy converted drives
vehicles, and another 10 per r~ent keeps roads open for them.
The amount of energy is comparable to the total energy except for domestic heating - required .for the combined
ecOn.omies of India and ChiiUJ. The energy- used up in th~
United States for the sole purpose of driving vehicles built
to accelerate beyond bicycle speeds would suffice to add
auxiliary motors to about twenty times that many vehicles

beTHE MULTIPLE BALANCE

97

for people all over the world who want to move at bicycle
speeds and do not or cannot push the pedals because they aresick or old, or because they want to transport a heavy load or
move over a great distance, or because they just want to relax. Simply on the basis of equal distribution on a worldwide scale, speeds above those attained by bicycles could beruled out. It is of course mere fantasy to assume an egalitarian consensus sufficiently strong to accept such a proposal.
At closer inspection though, many communities will find thatthe very ~arne speed limit necessary for equal distribution ofmobility. ]s also . very close to the optimum velocity giving
maximum value to conununity life. At 20 mph constant speed
Phileas Fogg could have made his trip around the world inhalf of eighty days. Simulation studies would be useful for
exploring imaginative policies that seek optimal liberty withconvivial power tools. To whose advantage would Calcutta's
traffic flow stabilize if speeds were limited to 10 mph? Whatprice would Peru's military pay for limiting the nation's speed
to 20 mph? What gains in equality, activity, health, andfreedom would result from limiting all other vehicles to the
speed of bicycles and sailing ships?
Negative returns are not unique to transportation. Ninety
per cent of all medical care for patients with terminal diseases
is unrelated to their health; such treatment tends to increase
suffering and disability without demonstrably lengthening
life. The maximum feasibility of service for the optimum
care of an individual patient lies within a certain range. Beyond. thi!! range medical bills measure the health of a patie_n_t
in the same way that GNP measures the wealth of a nation.
Both add on the same scale the market value of benefits andthe defensive expenditures which become necessary to offset
the unwanted side effects of their production. The technological escalation of medicine first ceases to serve healing andthen ceases to prolong life. It turns into a death-denying
ritual of terminal care : a final race in which the personality
best fitted to machines turns in the most spectacular per·formance.
Counterfoil research is concerned first with an anal}rsis ofincreasing marginal disutility and the menace of growth. It is
~R~

D

98

TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

then concerned with the discovery of general systems of institutional structure which optimize convivial production.
This kind of research meets psychological resistance. Growthhas become addictive. Like heroin addiction, the habit distorts basic value judgements. Addicts of any kind are willingto pay increasing amounts for declining satisfactions. They
have become tolerant to escalating marginal disutility. They
are blind to deeper frustration because they are absorbed inplaying for always mounting stakes. Minds accustomed tothinking that transportation ought to provide speedy motion
rather than reduction of the time and effort spent moving are
boggled by this contrary hypothesis. Man is inherently mobile,and speeds higher than those he can achieve by the use of
his limbs must be proven to be of great social value towarrant support by public sacrifice.
Counterfoil research must clarify and dramatize the relationship of people to their tools. It ought to hold constantly
before the public the resources that are available and the consequences of t.~eir use in various ways. It should impress on
people the existence of any trend that threatens one of the
major balances on which life depends. Counterfoil researchleads to the identification of those classes of people most immediately hurt by such trends and helps people to identify
themselves as members of such classes. It points out how aparticular freedom can be jeopardized for the members ofvarious groups which have otherwise conflicting interests.
Counterfoil research involves the public by showing that thedemands for freedom of any group or alliance can be identified with the implicit interest of all.
Withdrawal from growth mania will be painful, but mostly
for members of the generation which has to experience thetransition and above all for those most disabled by consumption. If their plight could be vividly remembered, it might
help the next generation avoid what they know would enslave
them.

IV
RecoveryI have discussed five dimensions on which the balance of life
depends. In each I have indicated tendencies that must be
kept in equilibrium to maintain the homeostasis which constitutes human life. I have argued that the control of naturalforces is functional only if the use of nature does not makenature useless for man. I have argued that institutions arefunctional when they promote a delicate balance between;YVhat people can do for themselves and what toels at theJiervice of anonymous institutions can do for them. Formal it:t~struction also depends on a balance. Special arrangements
must never outweigh opportunities for independent learning.
An increase in social mobility can render society morehuman, but only if at the same time there is a narrowing of
the difference in power which separates the few from themany. Finally, an increase in the rate of innovation is ofvalue only when with its rootedness in tradition, fullness of
meaning, and security are also strengthened.
A tool can grow out of man's control, first to become his
master and finally to become his executioner. Tools cari rulemen sooner than they expect : the plough makes man thelord of a garden but also the refugee from a dust bowl.
Nature's revenge can produce children less fit for life thantheir fathers, and born into a world less fit for them. Homofaber can be turned into a sorcerer's apprentice. Specialization can make his every day so complicated that it becomes
estranged from his activity. Addiction to progress can enslave all men to a race in which none e\·er reaches the goal.
There are two ranges in the growth of tools : the range
within which machines are used to extend human capability
and the range in which they are used to contract, eliminate,or replace human functions. In the first, man as an individual

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T 0 0 L S F 0 R C 0 NV IV I ALIT Y·

can exercise authority on his own behalf and therefore asswne
responsibility. In the second, the machine takes over- first reducing the range of choice and motivation in both the operator and the client, and second imposing its own logic anddemand on both. Survival depends on establishing procedures
which permit ordinary people to recognize these ranges andto opt for survival in freedom, to evaluate the structure built
into tools and institutions so they can exclude those which bytheir structure are destructive, and control those which areuseful. Exclusion of the malignant tool and control of the
expedient tool are the two major priorities for politics today.
Multiple limits to overefficiency must be expressed in language that is simple and politically effective. This urgent task
is faced, however, with three formidable obstacles: the idolatry of science, the corruption of ordinary language, and los!'of respect for the formal process by which social decisions are
made.

1. THE DEMYTHOLOGIZATION OF SCIENCE
Above all, political discussion is stunned by a delusion about
science. This term has come to mean an institutional enterprise rather than a personal activity, the solving of puzzles
rather than the unpredictably creative activity of individual
people. Science is now used to label a spectral production
agency which turns out better knowledge just as medicine
produces better health. The damage done by this misunderstanding about the nature of knowledge is even more fundamental than the damage done to the conceptions of health,education, or mobility by their identification with institutional outputs. False expectations of better health corrupt
society, but they do so in only one particular sense. They
foster a declining concern with healthful environments,
healthy life styles, and competence in the personal care of
one's neighbour. Deceptions about health are circwnstantial.
The institutionalization of knowledge leads to a more generaland degrading delusion. It makes people dependent on having
their knowledge produced for them. It leads to a paralysis of
the moral and political imagination.
This cognitive disorder rests on the illusion that the know-

RECOVERY

101

1edge of the individual citizen is of · less value than the'knowledge' of science. The former is the opinion of individuals. It is merely subjective and is excluded from policies. The latter is 'objective' - defined by science and promulgated by expert spokesmen. This objective knowledge isviewed as a commodity which can be refined, constantly improved, accumulated and fed into a process, now called 'decision-making'. This new mythology of governance by the
manipulation of knowledge-stock inevitably erodes reliance on
government by people.
The world does not contain any information. It is as it is~Information about it is created in the organism through its interaction with the world. To speak about storage of information outside the human body is to fall into a semantic trap.
Books or computers are part of the world. They can yield
information when they are looked upon. We move the problemof learning and of cognition nicely into the blind spot of ourintellectual vision if we confuse vehicles for potential information with information itself. We do the same when we confuse data for potential decision with decision itself.
· Overconfidence in 'better knowledge' becomes a selffulfilling prophecy. People first cease to trust their own
judgement and then want to be told the truth about what
they know. Overconfidence in 'better decision-making' first
hampers people's ability to decide for themselves and thenundermines their belief that they can decide.
The growing impotence of people to decide for themselvesaffects the structure of their expectations. People are transfprmed frqm contenders for scarce resources into competitots,
for abundant promises. Adjudication by ordeal is replaced byrecourse to secular rituals. These rituals are organized as
frenzied consumption of the offerings of some menu: a curriculum, a therapy, or a court case. The promise that science
will provide affluence for all and for each according to his
objectively verified merits deprives personal conflict of _its
creative legitimacy. People who hflve unlearned how to dec1de· about their own rights on tb.eir own evidence. become pawns
in a world game operated by mega1...machines. No longer caneach person make his or her own contribution to the constant102

T 0 0 L S F 0 R C 0 N V I V I AL I T Y

renewal of society. Recourse to better knowledge producedby science not only voids personal decisions of the power tocontribute to an ongoing historical and social process, it also
destroys the rules of evidence by which experience is traditionally shared. The knowledge-consumer depends on getting
packaged programmes funnelled into him. He finds security
in the expectation that his neighbour and his boss have seen
the same programmes and read the same columns. The procedure by which personal certainties are honestly exchanged
is eroded by the increasing recourse to exceptionally qualified
knowledge produced by a science, profession, or politicalparty. Mothers poison their children on the adman's or the
M.D.'s advice. Even in the courtroom and in parliament,scientific hearsay - well hidden under the veil of expert testimony - biases juridical and political decisions. Judges,
governments, and voters abdicate their own evidence about
the necessity of resolving conflicts in a situation of defined andpermanent scarcity and opt for further growth on the basis ofdata which they admittedly cannot fully understand.
When communities have grown overconfident in science,
they leave it to expens to set the upper limits on growth.
This mandate rests on a fallacy. Experts can define standards
at levels slightly below those at which people complain withtoo much force. They can keep the public sullen and forestallmutiny. But closed peer groups cannot be entrusted with selfrestraint in furthering their expert knowledge. Nor can we
expect them to be representative of the common man. Scientific expertise cannot define what people will tolerate. No
person can abdicate the right to decide on this for himself. Itis, of course, possible to experiment on humans. Nazi doctors
explored what the organism can endure. They found out how
long the average person can survive torture, but this did nottell them anything about what someone can tolerate. These
doctors were condemned under a statute signed in Nuremberg
two days after Hiroshima and the day before the bomb was
dropped on Nagasaki.
What a population will endure remains beyond experiment.
We can tell what happens to particular groups of people
under extreme circumstances - in prison, on an expedition,

RECOVERY103

or in an experiment. Such precedents cannot serve as
measures for the privations which a society will tolerate as aresult of tools or rules made for its service. Scientificmeasurements may suggest that a certain endeavour threatensa major balance of life. Only the informed judgement of amajority of prudent men who act on the much more complex
basis of everyday evidence can determine how to limit individual and social goals. Science can clarify the dimensionsof man's realm in the universe. Only a political community
can dialectically choose the dimensions of the roof underwhich its members will live.

2. T H E

RE D I S C0 V E RY 0 F L AN GUAGE

Between 1830 and 1850 a dozen inventors formulated the lawof the conservation of energy. Most of them were engineers,lind independently from each other they redefined the floating life force of the universe in terms of work machines could
perform. Measurements that could be taken in the laboratory
became the scale by which the mysterious cosmic nexus called vis viva for centuries - could henceforth be defined.
During the same period industry successfully competedwith other modes of production for the first time. Industrial
performance became the scale according to which humaneffectiveness in the entire economy was now measured. Housework, farming, handicraft, and ;ubsistence activities ranging
from the making of preserves to the self-building of a homeoegan to be viewed as subsidiary or second-rate forms of produGtion. The industrial mode first degraded and later paralysed the nexus of productive relationship which coexisted insociety.
This monopoly of one mode of production over all social
relations is much more profound than the competition offirms which overshadows it. In the surface competition thewinner is easily recognized as the more capital-intensive factory, the better-organized business, the more exploitativeand better-protected branch of industry, the corporation thatsheds diseconomies the most unobtrusively or produces forwar. On a broad scale this race takes the form of a competition among multinational corporations and industrializing

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T 0 0 L S F 0 R C 0 N V I V I AL I T Y

nation-states. But this deadly game among giants diverts
attention from the ritual service which the game itself renders to the contestants. As the arena of the contest expands,
an industrial structure is imposed on world society. The
mode of corporate production establishes a radical monopoly
not only over resources and tools but also over the imagination and motivational structure of people. Political systems
compete to baptize the same expanding industrial structure
into opposing creeds, without recognizing that it {s beyond
their control. The convergence of corporate monopolies on
the deep structural level of society can be called the industrialization of man. This trend must be inverted if people
are to be free. But the industrial corruption of language itself
makes this issue terribly difficult to formulate.
Language reflects the monopoly of the industrial mode of
production over perception and motivation. The tongues ofindustrial nations identify the fruits of creative work and of
human labour with the outputs of industry. The materialization of consciousness is reflected in Western languages.
Schools operate by the slogan 'education!' while ordinary
language asks what children 'learn'. The functional shift fromverb to noun highlights the corresponding impoverishment of
the social imagination. People who speak a nominalist
language habitually express proprietary relationships to work
which they have. All over Latin America only the salaried employees, whether workers or bureaucrats, say that they havework; peasants say that they do it: 'Van a trabajar, pero no
tienen trabajo.' Those who have been modernized andunionized expect industries to produce not only more goods
but also more work for more people. Not only what men do
but also what men want is designated by a noun. 'Housing'designates a commodity rather than an activity. Peopleacquire knowledge, mobility, even sensitivity or health. They
have not only work or fun but even sex.
This shift from verb to noun reflects a transformation in
the idea of ownership. 'Possessing,' 'holding,' and 'seizing' nolonger describe the relationships people can have to corporations, such as systems of schools or highways. Possessive
statements made about tools come to mean the ability toRECOVERY105

command their outputs, interest from capital, or merchandise,or some kind of prestige connected with their operation.
Fully industralized man calls his own principally what has
been made for him. He says 'my education,' 'my transportation,' 'my entertainment,' 'my health' about the commodities
he gets from school, car, show business, or doctor. Western
languages, and above all English, become almost inseparablefrom industrial production. Western men might have to learn
from other languages that ownership relations can be restructured in a convivial way. For instance, in Micronesian
tongues there exist entirely distinct devices to express therelationship I have to my acts (which can no longer be separated from me), to my nose (which can be cut off), to myrelatives (who were inflicted on me), to my canoe (without
which I could not be a full man), to a drink (which I serveyou), or to the same drink (which I intend to swallow).
In a society whose language has undergone this shift, predicates come to be stated in terms of a commodity andclaims in terms of competition for a scarce resource. 'I wantto learn' is translated into 'I want to get an education.' The
decision to do something is turned into the demand for a
stake in the gamble of schooling. 'I want to walk' is restatedas 'I need transportation.' The subject in the first case designates himself as an actor, and in the second as a consumer.
Linguistic change supports the expansion of the industrial
arena : competition for institutionalized values is reflected in
the use of nominal language. This competition for shares inevitably takes the form of a game. People gamble for what
they perceive as nouns. Of course, that competition can beorganized either as a zero-sum game, in which one wins whenanother loses, or as a non-zero-sum game, in which bothcompetitors get more than if either had lost. Compulsory
school could be construed as an extreme example of a zerosum game: there are only winners and losers; by definition
school bestows privilege on fewer people than it degrades.
An example of the second would be the transition fromprivate to public transport: at least for the time being, morecommuters could get faster wherever they want to go.
Conflict does not have to be a competition for scarce com-

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TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

modities. It could also manifest disagreement about which
conditions would best remove restraints on autonomous
action. Conflict can lead to the creation of a new freedom;but this possibility has been obscured by nominalist language.
It can create for both parties the right to do, and to do things
which bv definition are neither commodities nor scarce. Conflict which leads to the right to walk, to participate in shaping society, to speak and communicate equally, to live in clean
air or to use convivial tools deprives both adversaries of some
affluence for the sake of an incommensurable gain - newliberty.
In some societies the corruption of language has crippled
the political fantasy to the point where the difference between a claim to commodities and a right to convivial tools
cannot be understood. Limits on tools cannot be publicly discussed. Public blindness to urgent issues is not a new phenomenon. People. for decades refused to open their eyes to theurgency of population control, for example. Limiting tools
for the sake of freedom and conviviality is now Such an issue
that cannot be raised. A limit on vehicular velocity as amajor election issue seems an implausible idea to the richand an irrelevant idea to the poor. People who are born next
to highways cannot imagine a world without speed, and thepeasant in the Andes cannot grasp why anyone should travelthat fast. A slowdown as the condition for good transportation sounds shocking. To recommend limits on tools sourids
as deeply obscene today as the recommendation for greater
sexual frankness and freedom as a condition for a good marriage law would have sounded a generation ago.
The operating code of industrial tools encroaches on everyday language and reduces the poetic self-affirmation of men
to a barely tolerated and marginal protest. The consequentindustrialization of man can be inverted only if the convivial
function of language is recuperated, but with a new level ofconsciousness. Language which is used by people jointly
claiming and asserting each person's right to share in theshaping of the community becomes, so to speak, a secondorder tool to clarify the relationships of a people to engineered instrumentalities.

RECOVERY3.

THE

RE C0 V E RY 0 F

L E GAL107
P R 0 C BD UR B

Support of an ever-expanding productive society has become
the overwhelmingly dominant purpose of the existing structure of politics and law. The procedure by which people decide what ought to be done has become subservient to theideology that corporations ought to produce more: more
knowledge and decisions, more goods and services. This perversion constitutes the third obstacle to the translation of theneed for a bounded society into actual social process.
Political parties, legislatures, and the juridical system havebeen consistently used to foster and protect the growth ofschools, unions, hospitals, and road systems, not to speak ofindustries. Gradually, not only the police but even the courts
and the legal system itself have come to be thought of as
tools made for the service of an industrial state. That theysometimes protect individuals against industrial claims has
become an alibi for their habitual service of legitimizing thefurther concentration of power. Along with the idolatory ofscientific method and the corruption of language, this progressive loss of confidence in political and legal processes isa major obstacle to retooling society.
People come to understand that an alternative society ispossible by using clear language. They can bring it about by
recovering consciousness of the deep structure by which, intheir society, decisions are made. Such a structure exists
wherever people form a community. Contradictory decisions
can be the outcome of the same process because the structure
can be used to define personal values and also to shore up
institutional behaviour. But the existence of such conflicting
results does not contradict the existence of a consistent structure which generates them. People can decide to get an
education in school even though they have decided that it
would be better to learn something on their own. They can
let themselves be taken to a hospital, though they have decided to die at home. Just as cognitive dissonance is a foundation for dialectics, so the simultaneous acceptance of contradictory norms proves the existence of normative procedures.
Public confidence in the existence of shared procedures has

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been shaken because these procedures are constantly misused. They have become tools to support unlimited production through converging arguments that alternately take amoral, a political, or a legal character. Christian churches
preach meekness, charity, and austerity but finance industrial
programmes; socialists enforce a Stalinist mode of production, and the common law has come to favour the firm overthe individual. Soon the computer will be used to define atevery juncture what should be done for the growth of tools,.unless. people rediscover that they share a deep cormnitment
to· fof.mal procedures by which they can decide how :theifpresent major institutions ought to be turned around.
Unless people agree on a process that can be continuously,
convivially, and effectively used to control society's tools, theinversion of the present institutional structure cannot be either
enacted or, what is more important, precariously maintained.
Managers will always re-emerge to increase institutional produqivity and capture public support for the better service
they 'promise.
Three objections are usually made whenever law is proposed as a tool for the inversion of society. One of them israther superficial: not everybody can be a lawyer, and so noteverybody can operate the law on his own. This, of course,
is true only to some degree. Parajudical systems could be set
up in particular communities and incorporated into the overall structure. Much wider scope could be given to alternative mechanisms to allow for greater participation by the nonprofessional, such as mediation, conciliation, and arbitration.
~ul "insofar as this objection is valid, it is also irrelevant to
my point. The law, as it deals with the regulation of largescale production agencies, can surely be decentralized, demystified and debureaucratized. But even then some social
concerns are, and could for a long time remain, complex andof vast range, demanding corresponding legal tools. Precisely
if it is to be used for the negotiating of world-wide proscriptions among large communities, each with its own ccnturiesold.traditions, the.law·.will remain a tool requiring some exper~ to operate 'it. But this does not 111ean that such experts
have to be graduates of a law school, or that they must be

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109

members of a closed profession.
The second objection is completely relevant and much
more profound: persons who now operate the law as a social
tool are deeply infected with the myths that pervade agrowth society. Their imagination of the possible and of thefeasible is determined by the lore of industry. It would befolly to expect the present corporations of social engineers ofa utilitarian society to turn into the guardians of a convivial
one. The critical importance of this observation is complemented and underlined by a third objection. The juristic
system is not simply a set of written laws; it is a continuing
process by which those laws are made and then applied toactual situations. The law is used to impose a given mind-set
on all participants. The resulting content of the law embodies
the ideologies of lawmakers and judges. How they experience
the ideology inherent in a culture becomes established mythology in the laws they make and apply. The body of laws that
regulates an industrial society inevitably reflects and reinforces its ideology, social character, and class structure.
'More' is always in the common good - more power to firms,
professions, and panies.
While this objection does indicate a fundamental difficulty
against the use of law in an inversion of society, it also misses
the point. I carefully distinguish between a body of laws andthe purely formal structure by which it is made, just as I
have distinguished the use of slogans by which our institutions operate from the use of ordinary language, and as I
will later distinguish between policies and formal politicalprocess. It is the latter and not the former which are thesecond order of tools we need, can share, and have to use.
It is almost impossible to insist strongly enough on the distinction between means and ends in an epoch in which purposes have been reduced to operations, in an epoch in whichpeople 'raise' consciousness, movements pretend to provide'liberation,' languages rather than persons are said to 'speak,'and politicians 'make' revolutions. The law can again serve
to highlight the general difference between substance andwhat might be called not 'due process' but rather 'due procedure'.

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Two major complementary features of the common law
make its formal structure particularly applicable to the needs
which arise in a profound crisis. One is the inherent continuity of the system, and the other is its adversary nature.
Analogous features can be fow1d in other law systems; I herechoose the Anglo-American system of law as an illustrationof my more general point.
The continuity built into the lawmaking process does in
one sense conserve the substance of a body of laws. This isless obvious in the legislative stage. Legislators are free toinnovate at their own discretion, as long as they stay withina constitutional framework. But they do also have to fit any
new law into the context of existing legislation, and this tends
to ensure that new legislation will not vary too widely fromthe over-all traQition of existing law .
.The function of the courts in providing continuity to _thesubstance of the law is more obvious. A court applies existing law to actual situations. Like cases are decided alike, orthe facts are found to be of a different significance today. The
law represents the sovereign authority of the past over thepresent controversy, the continuity of a dialectic process. The
court recognizes the controversy as a social concern and incorporates its resolutions into the body of the law. In theprocess the social experience of the past is readapted topresent needs. The present decision will in turn: serve as
reference in future cases.
The continuity of the formal structure used in this process
is of- a different order from the continuous embodinlent of
one set of prejudices in a set of laws. Considered in thisformal sense, the system of continuity is not designed topreserve the content of any existing set of laws. It could evenbe used to preserve the continuous development of a set oflaws that fit an inverted society. There is nothing in most constitutions that prevents the passage of laws setting upper
linlits to productivity, privilege, professional monopoly, or
efficiency. In principle, the existing process of legislaturesand courts can, with a reversal of its focus, make and apply
such law.
The adversary nature of the common law is equally im-

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portant. The common law is not formally concerned withwhat is ethically or technically good. It is a tool for theunderstanding of mutualities that surface as actual conflicts.
It leaves to those directly concerned with a social interest
the task of insisting on the protection of their rights or the
pursuit of their claims to what they consider to be good. This
works in both legislation and jurisprudence; the decision isan act of balancing conflicting interests in a way that istheoretically best for all.
It is obvious that during the last few generations thisbalance has been wholly distorted in favour of a productionorientated society. But the current misuse of the juristic
structure is not a valid argument against its use for precisely
the opposite purpose. Interests wholly opposed to such a society, free from illusion that growth can overcome injustice,and concerned with limits, can in principle use the same tool.
It is not, of course, sufficient that new types of plaintiffs
appear; it is equally true that the growth illusions of legislators must fade, and that parties must be brought forward torepresent their interest in a reassessment of what are now
taken as facts.
Not only the legislative but also the juridical process depends on the presentation of conflicting social interests by interested parties for settlement by disinterested tribunals.
These tribunals operate in a continuous way. Ideally, judges
are ordinary, prudent men or women indifferent to the substance of the issue they are expected to reconcile, and experts
in the application of process. In practice, however, tribunals
have also come to serve the concentration of power and theincrease of industrial production. Not only do judges, likelegislators, perceive that a conflict is best balanced when thebalance is tipped in favour of the over-all interest of corporations, but society has also conditioned the plaintiffs always todemand more. A larger share of institutional output constitutes the substance of a claim much more frequently thanprotection against an institution which limits a person's freedom to do something on his own. But this abuse of theformal structure of common law does not corrupt the structure itself.

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An objection is frequently raised when adversary procedures are presented as a major tool to oppose industrial
growth. Society already relies heavily on such proceedings.
Their extension to new areas is continually recommended.
Legal reformers tend to provide new weapons to all classesof disadvantaged : blacks, Indians, women, employees,
cripples. As a result proceedings have become cumbersome,costly, and only a few of the interested parties can come forward. Decisions are often delayed until they have lost theirrelevance. Role-playing is encouraged, and this often creates
new- tensions -~etween artificial groups. In going_ Q.~t of th€;way to create structures so that adversary processes may . be
used, decisions are made scarce.
This objection is very relevant if it opposes the proliferation of adversary proceedings in the resolution of conflicts
between people. But neither the conflict between individuals
nor the competition between groups is the substance of ourissue. The fundamental conflict in society is about acts, facts,
and things on which people are opposed to corporations. Formal adversary procedure is the paradigmatic tool for citizens
to oppose the threat of industry to their basic liberties. Thisis the process suited to the opposition of two partners whom
the law has rendered equal, in which the aggrieved party isinterested in disputing one fact or a relevant law or principle, and considers this issue the only continuing interest hehas in common with the other. A group of citizens interested
in retooling society is not concerned with negotiations or
mediation but with direct opposition to the industrial modeof production and its undue expansion in a specific instance:•
Like ordinary English, formal process is a convivial tool.
Undoubtedly, industrial institutions have entrenched themselves by corrupting the habitual use of these tools by individuals and communities. Yet language and formal process
remain intrinsically distinct from the purposes for which they
are used. People can defend language and legal proceduresas inherently theirs; they can find in their inalienable natures
the confidenc-e to. use their·unchanged formal structu{es toexpress contents entirely opposed to '·those tools for .which
they were taught to use them in their childhood. The formal

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structure of the law still offers a process by which theordinary citizen can present to society his own practical interest in conflict with the interest of a corporation, even when
this corporation is an agency of the state, and even if thisinterest favours or opposes any functioning or proposed programme.
It would be absurd to expect that professionals who areexperts in the corrupt use of language or of law could suddenly think clearly and proceed rightly. Educators who areaware of the breakdown of schools usually engage in a frantio·search- for advice that permits them to "teach. mo(e people
about'lnore things. Doctors tend to believe that at least someof the generally useful knowledge they hold cannot be expressed outside their hieratic code. It is useless to expect theAmerican Medical Association, the National Education
Association, or the association of traffic engineers to explain
in ordinary language the professional gangsterism of theircolleagues. It would be equally fruitless to count on present
legislators, lawyers, and judges to recognize the indepen- ·dence", of what is right from the preconceived good, which forthem is identical with the higher output of goods by corporations. They are trained to adjust any conflict in favour ofover-all industrial growth. But just as an exceptional doctor
here and there helps people live responsibly, to suffer as amatter of fact, and to face death, so an exceptional lawyer
can help people use the formal structure of the law to represent their interest in a convivial society. Even though he willprobably be frustrated in his claims, he can use the courtroom drama- to make his point.
·
Legal procedure applied to a society filled by optimism
about its expanding tools has turned into the ·most effective
instrument for the social control of people at the service of
these tools. To advance an industrial society, the law issystematically used for social engineering and the continuallymore complete and effective elimination of waste and frictionin the mega-machine. Anglo-American industry has consis. tently been more suc~essful, in.~he long run, thim the industryof socialist coUntries. Law is more effective than cenn:alized
plaru1ing in bringing and keeping people under the rule of

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TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

machines. Yet the current misuse of the juristic structure is
not a valid argument against its use for precisely the opposite
purpose, though it suggests caution against overly optimistic
hopes for such an inverted use.
Most of the present laws and present legislators, most of
the present courts and their decisions, most of the claimants
and their demands are deeply corrupted by an overarchingindustrial consensus: that more is better, and that corporations serve the public interest better than men. But this entrenched consensus does not invalidate my thesis that any
revolution which neglects the use of formal legal and politicalprocedures will fail. Only an active majority in which all individuals and groups insist for their own reasons on their own
rights, and whose members share the same convivial procedure, can recover the rights of men against corporations.
The use of procedure for the purpose of hampering, stopping, and inverting our major institutions will appear to their
managers and addicts as a misuse of the law and as subversion of the only order which they recognize. The use ofdue convivial procedure appears corrupt and criminal to thebureaucrat, even one who calls himself a judge.

v
Political Inversion
If within the very near future man cannot set limits to theinterference of his tools with the environment and practise
effective birth control, the next generations will experience
the gruesome apocalypse predicted by many ecologists. Facedwith these impending disasters, society can stand in wait ofsurvival within limits set and enforced by bureaucratic dictatorship. Or it can engage in a political process by the useof legal and political procedures. Ideologically biased interpretations of the past have made the recognition of politicalprocess increasingly dillicult. Liberty has been interpreted asa right to power tools, a right claimed without reasonable
limitation by individuals and private associations in capitalist
countries and by the state in socialist societies. Recovery becomes feasible only if the fundamental structure of Western
societies is clearly recognized and reclaimed. Analogous
efforts to recover entirely different formal structures will
become necessary when former political or cultural colonies
shake off the Western mode of production.
The bureaucratic management of human survival is unacceptable on both ethical and political grounds. It would
also be as futile as former attempts at mass therapy. This
does not, of course, mean that a majority might not at firstsubmit to it. People could be so frightened by the increasing
evidence of growing population and dwindling resources thatthey would voluntarily put their destiny into the hands of Big
Brothers. Technocratic caretakers could be mandated to set
limits on growth in every dimension, and to set them just at
the point beyond which further production would mean utter
destruction. Such a kakocopia could maintain the industrial
age at the highest endurable level of output.
Man would live in a plastic bubble that would protect his

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survival and make it increasingly worthless. Since man's tolerance would become the most serious limitation to growth, thealchemist's endeavour would be renewed in the attempt to
produce a monstrous type of man fit to live among reason's
dreams. A major function of engineering would become thepsychogenetic tooling of man himself as a condition forfurther growth. People would be confined from birth to deathin a world-wide schoolhouse, treated in a world-wide hospital,
surrounded by television screens, and the man-made environment would be distinguishable in name only from a worldwide prison.
The alternative to managerial fascism is a political process
by which people decide how much of any scarce resource isthe most any member of society can claim; a process in which
they agree to keep limits relatively stationary over a longtime, and by which they set a premium on the constant search
for new ways to have an ever larger percentage of the population join in doing ever more with ever less. Such a politicalchoice of a frugal society remains a pious dream unless it canbe shown that it is not only necessary but also possible: (1)to define concrete procedures by which more people are enlightened about the nature of our present crisis and will cometo understand that limits are necessary and a convivial life
style desirable; (2) to bring the largest number of people into
now suppressed organizations which claim their right to a
frugal life style and keep them satisfied and therefore committed to convivial life; and (3) to discover and revalue thepolitical or legal tools that are accepted within a society andlearn how to use them to establish and protect convivial life
where it emerges. Such procedures may sound idealistic at
the present moment. This is not proof that they cannot become effective as the present crisis deepens.

1. MYTHS AND MAJORITIESThe ultimate obstacle to the restructuring of society is not thelack of information about which limits are needed, nor thelack of people who would accept them if they became inevitable, but the power of political myths.
Almost everyone in rich societies is a destructive consumer.

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Almost everyone is, in some way, engaged in aggression
against the milieu. Destructive consumers constitute a numerical majority. Myth transforms them into a political one.
Numerical majorities come to form a mythical voting bloc ona nonexistent issue; 'they' are invoked as the unbeatableguardians of vested interest in growth. This mythical majority
paralyses political action. At closer inspection, 'they' are anumber of reasonable individuals. One is an ecologist who
takes a jet plane t(f a conference on protecting the environment from further pollution. Another is an economist who
knows that growing efficiency renders work increasingly
scarce; he tries to create new sources of employment. Neitherof them has the same interests as the slum-dweller in Detroit
who purchases his colour TV on time. The three belong no
more to a voting bloc that will defend growth than clerks,
repairmen, and salesmen are somehow politically homogenized because each fears for his job, needs a car, and wants
medicine for his children.
There can be no such thing as a majority opposed to anissue that has not arisen. A majority agitating for limits to.
growth is as ludicrous a concept as one demanding growth at
all cost. Majorities are not created by shared ideologies. Theydevelop out of enlightened self-interest. The most that eventhe best of ideologies can do is interpret this interest. The
stance each man or woman takes when a social problem becomes an overwhelming threat depends on two factors: thefirst is how a smouldering conflict erupts into a politicalissue demanding attention and partisan action; the second is
the existence of new elites which can provide an interpreta~
tive framework for new - and hitherto unexpected - alignments of interest.
2. F R 0 M B R E A K D 0 W N T 0 C H A 0 S
I can only conjecture on how the breakdown of industrial society will ultimately become a critical issue. But -I can makerather firm statements about the qualifications for providing
guidance within the coming cris~s. I"bell.eve that growth will
grind to a halt.· The totaf collapse of ~ industrial monopoly
on production will be the result of syni:l'gy in the failure of

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the multiple systems that fed its expansion. This expansion is
maintained by the illusion that careful systems engineering
can stabilize and harmonize present growth, while in fact itpushes all institutions simultaneously toward their second
watershed. Almost overnight people will lose confidence not
only in the major institutions but also in the miracle of prescriptions of the would-be crisis managers. The ability ofpresent institutions to define values such as education, health,welfare, transportation, or news will suddenly be extinguishedbecause it will be recognized as an illusion.
This crisis may be triggered by an unforeseen event, as
the Great Depression was touched off by the Wall Street
Crash. Some fortuitous coincidence will render publicly obvious the structural contradictions between stated purposesand effective results in our major institutions. People will
suddenly find obvious what is now evident to only a few:that the organization of the entire economy toward the'better' life has become the major enemy of the good life.
Like other widely shared insights, this one will have thepotential of turning public imagination inside out. Large institutions can quite suddenly lose their respectability, theirlegitimacy, and their reputation for serving the public good.
It happened to the Roman Church in the Reformation, toRoyalty in the Revolution. The unthinkable became obvious
overnight: that people could and would behead their rulers.
Sudden change is of a different order than feedback or
evolution. Observe the whirlpools below a waterfall. For manyseasons the eddies stay in the same place no matter whether
the water is high or low. Then, suddenly, one more stone falls
into the basin, the entire array changes, and the old cannever be reconstructed. People who invoke the spectre of ahopelessly growth-oriented majority seem incapable of envisaging political behaviour in a crash. Business ceases to be
as usual when the populace loses confidence in industrial productivity, and not just in paper currency.
It is still possible to face the breakdown of each of ourvarious systems in a separate perspective. No remedy seems
to work, but we can still find resources to support every
remedy proposed. Governments think they can deal with the

119breakdown of utilities, the disruption of the educational system, intolerable transportation, the chaos of the judicial process, the violent disaffection of the young. Each is dealt withas a separate phenomenon, each is explained by a different
report, each calls for a new tax and a new programme.
Squabbles about alternative remedies give credibility to both:free schools vs. public schools double the demand for education; satellite cities vs. monorails for commuters make thegrowth of cities seem inexorable; higher professional standards in medicine vs. more paramedical professions further
aggrandize the health professions. Since each of the proposed
remedies appeals to some, the· usual solution is an attempt totry both. The result is a further effort to make the pie grow,and to forget that it is pie in the sky.
The Coolidge approach to the warnings of the Depression
is now applied to the signs of a much more radical crisis. ·General systems analysis is trusted to relate the institutional
breakdowns to each other, which only leads to more planning, centralization, and bureaucracy in order to achieve control over population, affluence, and inefficient industry. Unemployment in the manufacturing sector is supposed to becompensated for by growth in the output of decisions, controls, and therapies. Fascination with industry and mechanicalproduction still blinds people to the possibility of a postindustrial society in which several distinct modes of produc- _tion would complement each other. Trying to bring about
an era which is both hyperindustrial and ecologically feasible,
they accelerate the breakdown of several other nonphysicaland equally fundamental dimensions of the balance of life.
It would be a mere exercise in geomancy to predict which
series of events will play the role of the Wall Street Crash
as catalyst of the first crisis of, not just in, industrial society.
But it would be folly not to expect in the very near future an
event whose effects will jam the growth of tools. When thishappens, the noise that accompanies the crash will distract
attention from seeing it in proper perspective.
We still have a chance to understand the causes of thecoming crisis, and to prepare for it. If we are to anticipate
its effects, we must investigate how sudden change can bring
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about the emergence into power of previously submergedsocial groups. It is not calamity as such that creates thesegroups; it is much less calamity that brings about theiremergence; but calamity weakens the prevailing powers
which have excluded the submerged from participation in thesocial process. It is the power of surprise that weakens control, that shakes up the established controllers, and brings to
the top those people who have not lost their bearings.
When controls are weakened, those accustomed to control
must seek new allies. In the weakened economic-industrial
state of the Great Depression, the establishment could not
do without organized labour, so organized labour got its shareof power within the structure. In the weakened labour market
during the Second World War, industry could not do without black labour. The blacks began to assert their power.
3. IN SIGHT IN T 0 C R I SIS
Forces tending to limit production are already at work within society. Public, counterfoil research can significantly help
these individuals become more cohesive and self-conscious
in their indictment of growth they consider destructive. We
can anticipate that their voices will acquire new resonancewhen the crisis of overproductive society becomes acute. They
form no constituency, but they are spokesmen for a majorityof which everyone is a potential member. The more unexpectedly the crisis comes, the more suddenly their velleities cantum into a programme. But the ability to direct events at thatmoment depends on how well these minorities grasp the profound nature of the crisis, and know how to state it in effective language: to declare what they want, what they can do,
and what they do not need. The critical use of ordinary
language is the first pivot in a political inversion. A second
pivot is needed.
Further growth must lead to a multiple catastrophe. That
people would accept multiple limits to growth without catastrophe seems highly improbable. The inevitable catastrophic
event could be either a crisis in civilization or its end: byannihilation or the end in B. F. Skinner's world-wide concentration camp run by a T. E. Frazier. The foreseeable

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121

catastrophe will be a true crisis - that is, the occasion for achoice - only if at the moment it strikes the necessary social
demands can be effectively expressed. They must be represented by people who can demonstrate that the breakdownof the current industrial illusion is for them a condition forchoosing an effective and convivial mode of production. The
preparation of such groups is the key task of new politics atthe present moment.
I have already argued that these groups must be prepared to provide a logically coherent analysis of the catastrophic event and to communicate it in ordinary language. I
have argued that they must be prepared to propose the necessity for a bounded society in practical terms that have generalappeal. Sacrifice must be shown as the inevitable price fordifferent groups of people to get what they want- or at least
to be liberated from what has become intolerable. But beyond
using words to describe the limits as both necessary andappealing, the leadership of these groups must be prepared
to use a social tool that is fit to ordain what is good enoughfor all. It must be a tool which, like language, is respectedby all; a tool which, like language, does not lose its power
because of the purpose to which it has been put in recent
history; a tool which, like language, possesses a fundamental
structure that misuse cannot totally corrupt.
I have already argued that such a tool can only be theformal structure of politics and law. At the moment of thecrash which is industrial rather than simply financial, thetransformation of catastrophe into crisis depends on the confidence an emerging group of dear-thinking and feelingpeople can inspire in their peers. They must then argue thatthe transition to a convivial society can be, and must be, theresult of conscious use of disciplined procedure that recognizes the legitimacy of conflicting interests, the historical precedent out of which the conflict arose, and the necessity ofabiding by the decision of peers. Convivially used procedure
guarantees that an institutional revolution will remain a tool
whose goals emerge as they are enacted; the conscious use ofprocedure in a continually antibureaucratic sense is the only
possible protection against the revolution itself becoming an

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institution. Whether the application of this procedure to theinversion of all major institutions of society is then called acultural revolution, or the recuperation of the formal structure of law, or participatory socialism or a return to the spiritof the Fueros de Espana, is merely a matter of labelling.
4. S U D D E N C H A N G E
When I speak about emerging interest groups and their preparation, I am not speaking of action groups, or of a church,
or of new kinds of experts. I am above all not speaking about
one political party which could assume power at a moment ofcrisis. Management of the crisis would make catastrophe
irreversible. A well-knit, well-trained party can establish its
power at the moment of crisis in which the choice to be madeis one within an over-all system. Such was the Great Depression. What was at issue was control over the tools of production. Such were the events which brought the Marxists topower in Eastern Europe. But the crisis I have described as
imminent is not a crisis within industrial society, but a crisisof the industrial mode of production itself. The crisis I havedescribed confronts people with a choice between convivial
tools and being crushed by machines. The only response tothis crisis is a full recognition of its depth and an acceptanceof inevitable self-limitations. The more varied the perspectives from which this insight is shared by interest groups andthe more disparate the interests that may be protected only
by a reduction of power within society, the greater the probability that the inevitable will be recognized as such.
I am also not speaking about a majority opposed to growthon some abstract principles. Such a majority is unfeasible. A
well-organized elite, vocally promulgating an antigrowthorthodoxy, is indeed conceivable. It is probably now forming.
But such a programmatic antigrowth elite would be highly
undesirable. By pushing people to accept limits to industrial
output without questioning the basic industrial structure ofmodern society, it would inevitably provide more power tothe growth-optimizing bureaucrats and become their pawn.
One of the first results of transition toward a stable-state industrial economy would be the development of a labour-

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intensive, highly disciplined, and growing subsector of production that would control people by giving them jobs. Sucha stabilized production of highly rationalized and standardized goods and services would be - if this were possible even further away from convivial production than the industrial-growth society we have now.
The proponents of a bounded society have no need to put
together some kind of majority. A voting majority in a democracy is not motivated by the explicit commitment of allits members to some specific ideology or to some particularvalue. A voting majority in favour of a specific institutional
limitation would have to be composed of very disparate elements: those seriously aggrieved by some aspect of overproduction, those who do not profit from it, and those who may
have objections to the over-all organization of society -but
not directly to the specific limit being set. How this functions
in times of normal politics can be well illustrated by theexample of school. Some people are childless and resent theschool tax. Others feel they are taxed more heavily andserved less well than their peers in another district. Others
object to tax support of schools since they want to send theirchildren to parochial schools. Others object to compulsory
schooling as such: some because it does harm to the young
and others because it fosters discrimination. All these people
could form a voting majority, but not a party or a sect.
Under present circumstances they might succeed in cutting
school down to size, but thereby they would merely assure its
more legitimate survival. A majority vote to limit one major
institution tends to be conservative when business is as usual.
But a majority can have the contrary effect in a crisis
which affects society on a deeper level. The joint arrival ofseveral institutions at their second watershed is the beginningof such a crisis. The crash that will follow must make it clearthat industrial society as such - and not just its separate institutions- has outgrown the range of its effectiveness.
The nation-state has become so powerful that it cannot perform its stated functions. Just as General Vo Nguyen Giap
could use the US military machine to win his war, so themultinational corporations and professions can now use the124

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law and 1he two-party system to establish their empire. But
while democracy in the United States can survive a victoryby Giap, it cannot survive one by ITT and its like. As a
total crisis approaches, it becomes more obvious that thenation-state has grown into the holding corporation for a
multiplicity of self-serving tools, and the political party into
an instrument to organize stockholders for the occasional
election of boards and presidents. In this situation, parties
support each voter's right to claim higher levels of individual
consumption and to enforce thereby higher levels of indus~rialconsumption. People can claim cars; but the appropriation ofsociety's over-all resources by a transportation system which
determines that cars are useful is left to the decision of experts. Such parties support a state whose only purpose is the
support of an increasing GNP, and they are obviously useless at the moment of a general crash.
When business is normal, the procedural opposition between corporations and clients usually heightens the legitimacy -of the latter's dependence. But at the moment of astructural crisis not even the voluntary reduction of overefficiency on the part of major institutions will keep any ofthem functioning. A general crisis opens the way to social
reconstruction. The loss of legitima.:y of the state as a holding corporation does not destroy, but reasserts, the need forconstitutional procedure. The loss of confidence in parties
that have become stockholders' factions brings out the importance of adversary procedures in politics. A loss of credibilityof opposing claims for more individual cons\lmption only
highlights the importance of the use of adversary procedures
wherr the issue to be decided upon is the reconciliation of
opposing sets of society-wide limitations. The same generalcrisis that could easily lead to one-man rule, expert government, and ideological orthodoxy is also the great opportunity
to reconstruct a political process in which all participate.
The structures of political and legal procedures are integral
to one another. Both shape and express the structure of freedom in history. If this is recognized, the fr~mework .of due
procedure can be med as the most dramatic, symbolic, andconvivial tool in the political area. The appeal to law remains

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powerful even where society makes access to legal machinerya privilege, or where it systematically denies justice, or where
it cloaks despotism in the mantle of show tribunals. Even
when he who upholds the formal structure of ordinary language and procedure earns the scorn, ridicule, and persecutionof his fellow revolutionaries, the appeal of an individual to
the formal structure embedded in a people's history remains
the most powerful instrument to say the truth and denounce
the cancerous domination of the industrial dominance overproduction as the ultimate form of idolatory. I feel almost
unbearable anguish when faced by the fact that only the word
recovered from history should be left to us as the power forstemming disaster. Yet only the word in its weakness can
associate the majority of people in the revolutionary inversion of inevitable violence into convivial reconstruction.
Reconstruction for poor countries means adopting a set of
negative design criteria within which their tools are kept, inorder to advance directly into a postindustrial era of conviviality. The limits to choose are of the same order as thosewhich hyperindustrialized countries will have to adopt for thesake of survival and at the cost of their vested interest. Suchsocial reconstruction cannot be supported by a high-powered
army, both because the maintenance of such an army would
foil reconstruction and because no such army would be powerful enough. Defence of conviviality is possible only if undertaken by the people with tools they control. Imperialist mercenaries can poison or maim but never conquer a people whohave chosen to set boundaries to their tools for the sake ofconviviality.