According to the most widely accepted view, we enjoy the singular fortune of living in the age, in the world, of ‘technology’.

Our ancestor of barely three centuries ago, in serious cases, sought out a confessor; we, in order to pose the questions that weigh on us, go in search of the technician, the specialist, the expert.

Everything around us was then regarded as administered by God, and He had created a network of His ministers so that we might consult them. Today, according to a certain rhetoric, we administer and govern ourselves by ourselves, thanks to representative institutions; according to another, we are in the hands of a few ‘great men’, whose names are on everyone’s lips. But, whether they be collective assemblies or supreme Men, whilst they may be quick to pontificate on the most difficult general issues and to lay down the highest principles of life, every now and then they pause and, with self-importance, declare: here what is needed is the technician; and they seek his enlightened counsel.

The expert adviser then enters the scene, be it a fixed and cumbersome office complex with endless corridors, where one must locate department y and room x in order to learn everything about the issue at hand; or a figure, often anonymous but always full of pomposity, who, furnished with a large leather briefcase, follows, silent and fateful, in the guise of an expert, the most famous figure who has managed to break through onto the stage of history, and is a bit of an ass.

The self-propelled Heroes of the present, in the glare of the cameras, with a host of open notebooks and a flotilla of microphones within earshot of their illustrious lips, do not feel they have given the world’s expectations a worthy response unless they demonstrate, after due preparation, that they have been constructive; once, with simpler means, and perhaps relying more on physical prowess, or at least flashing glances, and a thunderous voice emanating from lungs of steel, it was enough, without stooping to details or padding one’s words with figures, to soar into the heavens of lyricism and, with the fire of souls, unleash the stirring of emotions.

Upon the multitudes, usually cheering, whereas then poetry used to rain down, today it drips accounting and engineering.

So should we then, we inveterate materialists, sing victory? We are immensely far from it.

When the much-maligned darkness of the Middle Ages and Scholasticism still loomed, and the principle of authority dominated, both on the level of culture and on that of social administration, it was dictated to men (in the church, in the school, or in the public square) that every directive had to be sought in the sacred and fundamental texts, and the task of interpreting them was assumed by teachers, priests, or officials, embedded within the hierarchy of qualified investitures. Billions of written and spoken words have striven to persuade us, for several generations now, that this millennia-old system constituted the finest breeding ground of nonsense, lies, and fraud, and that it deserved to be decisively written off at a stroke.

Since the time of Thomas Aquinas and Dante, that system had been erected upon the well-ordered contributions of long and hard-fought epochs of work and research by human communities, weaving together the data transmitted from the Greco-Roman era, the Eastern-Semitic world, and Arab civilisation itself; forming within it a complex and powerful constellation of science, art, philosophy, and theology.

However, with the development of new forces in life and in production, in art and in science as applied to labour, the frameworks, however vast, began to creak, and the rising bourgeois class had little trouble in laughing at practices now become stale and foolish.

In the great social calamities, such as the plague of the seventeenth century, and in their effects on populations now grown in number, dense and bound by frequent communications unknown in antiquity, the reflexes of the old method increasingly began to reveal its failure. The consulted petty priest (or archbishop) spoke of sins and divine punishment; the common people readily believed in witchcraft and sorcery and hunted down the plague-spreader who spread the disease, whether devil or criminal he seemed to them; the scholar (whom Lisander [Milanese familiar form of Alessandro, i.e. Manzoni, tr. ed.] satirises in Don Ferrante) resorted to scholastic texts and applied their now impotent formulas; dying of the plague, after having demonstrated that contagion could not exist, being neither substance nor accident, whereas everything had to fall into one of the two categories.

The sceptical smile of the new sages, who consider themselves very skilled in wielding their red and blue pencils to mark up the blunders in the pages of Aristotelian Physics, or the Thomistic Summa, or the Dantean Comedy, does not express a new light that has finally pierced the darkness and made man master of a truth hitherto held captive by circles of initiates and deceivers: it expresses, today it is quite clear, a need for new social forces, which in commerce, manufacturing, and industry require the unhindered application of standards not dictated by the priest, the noble, or the monarch. This class revolution appeared before the eyes of the people, who did not know whether, like the witch and the plague-spreader, they ought not to burn the loom, the steamboat, and the locomotive, as a sumptuous transition from Authority to Reason.

Nations no longer needed priests, or lords of select bloodlines (a criterion not without scientific foundation, provided it is not studied demagogically...), or old big-wig pedants leafing through yellowed octavo volumes, but rather thinkers, scholars, philosophers. These new leaders no longer claimed to come from the secrecy of the temple, or the cave of the Sibyl, or from meditation in penitence, but proclaimed themselves children of doubt and criticism, and heralds to the people of the Truth, no longer covered by any veil.

In the first parliaments, great orators invoke at every turn these new ideals as a guide to collective life, which they claim were not revealed by divinity to a circle of mystical agents, but discovered in the universal values common to all mankind. Thus every question, every problem, as we say today, every measure to be taken and applied in matters of government and administration, will not be measured against the will of God, the verses of the Bible, or the theorems of the traditional philosopher, but rather against the ‘triumph’ of Justice and Liberty. The individual formerly asked the confessor how to behave, and the latter assured him that he had consulted moral theology before forbidding or permitting; and individuals were made to believe that the captain, the nobleman, and the king likewise determined their own proper conduct. The new prophets, however, proclaim that, just as every private individual possesses within himself his own Conscience to act in accordance with Morality, so too in collective and general life it is sufficient to consult and serve the moral and ‘civil’ conscience. From the penitent to the citizen, from the Church to the State.

The ultimate expression of this constant invocation of ethical standards in political affairs is found in its oratorical and literary aspect in Robespierre (a man, in reality, of profound historical intellect), in the Incorruptible. The fact that he, incorrupt, ascended the scaffold for his final execution in no way detracts from our radical transcendence of his horizon.

This first historic shift from Authority and Faith to Reason and Conscience, within the superstructures that served to provide public guidance, will soon be followed by another. It is the shift from Ideology and political philosophy to Economy.

The substructure, inexorable, reveals itself. Gladstone, a pure and classical liberal, would not hear a word about the social question. But he was perhaps the last to hold such an attitude, the last or among the last to maintain that the perfect citizen, whenever called upon to delegate his molecule of public power, ought to decide according to a general vision of the whole State, reflected in his inner conscience, and never according to the influence of his own material interest, or of a need he shared with others in a similar condition.

Yet Gladstone himself did not shy away from speaking in the House of Commons, no longer of principles but of figures of wealth; and he raged in vain when Marx, in the Address of the First International, translated his words into class language, revealing in them not a hymn to the people’s welfare, but to the savage, inflationary might of British capitalism.

From that point on, however much exaltable and exalted by their own still not yet withered romantic spring, the orators of the bourgeoisie had to contend not only with thought and conscience, but also with the needs and hunger of the citizens, and above all of the less well-off classes, exploited by the industrial system and by the omnipotence of the new State. The old order was – in their view – despotic, but its tentacles reached only a short way beneath the social crust, and broad layers knew of it less than the god of whom the parish priest preached; the new and liberal order reaches everywhere, classifying and registering everyone, in order to conscript them when needed into the army of labour or into that of national and bourgeois war: above all, onto the stinking electoral roll.

The Chambers from which the bourgeoisie pretends to govern society (while it holds in its grasp quite different and powerful mechanisms, unknown to the world of the ancien régime, or introduced into it only to the extent that bourgeois demands compelled it), concerned themselves less and less with constitutions, codes, and fine proclamations or contests of literary oratory, and more and more with budgets, taxes, loans, allocations; and finally with the irresistible deluge of thousands upon thousands of ‘special laws’.

The politician, initially conceived as a melodious trumpet capable of echoing what lay in the ‘spirit’ of the citizens and their ‘passions’, increasingly evolved into the figure of someone who had to know how to manage their finances. But this does not lead us to the naïve and pedestrian view of the late-nineteenth-century socialists, according to whom electoral statistics could truly reflect a statistical representation of those concerned, in proportion to their numbers, and thus provide the many poor with a means of asserting themselves against the few rich: rather, it was the large and concentrated interests, which had always set everything in motion, that came to the forefront of the debate; and, unsurprisingly, all the State measures that were of concern to capital were presented as measures for the good of the people and for the general interest: a very famous general, for he has always lost all his battles.

In any case, following the transition from Authority to Rationality, we have the transition from Ideality to Economicity.

The third transition, from this to Technicality, of these Public Men stemmed from the tremendous complications of State intervention in matters of production, the market, and everything else. Everything is regulated by a specific state measure, and it could not be otherwise, given the hailstorm of new inventions and innumerable applications, in which human life becomes entangled, turning every ancient natural function, such as drinking, keeping warm or being illuminated, or speaking to one another, or lending a hand when someone slipped or the house caught fire, into a public service; furthermore creating a thousand new services for previously unknown needs, from cinema to radio, from aviation to television, and so on and so forth; not to mention (of course) the grandiose new organisations designed to kill one another, a task originally carried out by means as uncivilised as they were rudimentary.

And so, if it is clear that all this must be administered and governed, and if the argument that it would be better to do without so many innovations, devoting oneself to efforts to de-mechanise, de-electrify, and ‘re-naturalise’ society, is entirely untenable (save perhaps for some madman), and if all this new machinery is a clear consequence of physical conditions, should we be surprised that technical matters come to the fore when the task facing the conscript fathers is to lay down the rules in all these difficult and complex fields? Evidently not; we shall not be surprised by it at all.

Above all, we see, for the ruling class, a great advantage in the fact that the discourse, having moved from the themes of the spirit and its dignities to those of economic interests, shifts from overly narrow economic assessments to technical ones, which rise to become new, superior ‘sanctities’ beyond reproach. In matters of economics, one must clearly record figures for income and expenditure, and however sophisticated the language of budgets and legislative articles may have become (Don Abbondio’s latinorum to Renzo was, by comparison, as clear as spring water), one ends up being unable to conceal the flow of profits, the home address of those who gain and those who lose. National wealth and the citizen’s average income are fine entities and notions of modern financial science, but where on earth do they actually reside? Did not that fellow Marx, that impossible big brute, set about calculating, using official figures, that the richer the country is, the more its less well-off classes are fleeced? And with all this talk of investments and the employment of capital and labour, of inflation and deflation, of deficits and surpluses, the thoroughly enfoncé citizen could conceive of only one general economic subject, and he called it Pantalone, the one who always pays up whenever there are losses to be covered, and who, whenever there is something to be shared, stands there, dazed, watching those who know how to handle it.

With technology, it’s a different matter altogether; and all that tacky talk about who got the better deal and who got ripped off is put aside. Technology, what do you think? It’s science! Science is science; four and four makes eight, and there’s nothing more to say; so when a matter is in line with technology, and especially when updated with the most recent discoveries, everyone benefits, and honny soit qui mal y pense!

It was not difficult for grace and the Holy Spirit to hover in equal measure over both the great and the small; and the same held true, to a fair degree, of the grandeur and freedom of the Fatherlands and the civic dignity of modern institutions. But the Economy and Finance, Money and Capital, Public Credit and National Wealth, encounter no small amount of trouble when they must prove that, like Death in Horace, aequo pulsant pede divitum aedes pauperumque tabernas; they knock with equal force at the villa of the rich and the hovel of the poor...

Technology, on the other hand, claims to be an absolute value, outside of any ‘double-entry accounting’; build a road, a railway, a port, a power line, and so on, in strict accordance with the dictates of technical science; and the conscience of the rulers is in order: indisputably, each and every one, individuals and the people, outside the outdated concept of class, has achieved a triumph.

Above all party and class divisions, gentlemen, we have carried out public works and built new facilities; setting aside our differences of opinion and ideals, however respectable, and the conflicts of particular interests, all honest people applaud, enthusiastic and moved! This speech is heard or read a hundred times a day from all corners of the horizon and from governments and leaders of every stripe and persuasion. And us? We stand with the dishonest.

Well then, never before have charlatanism, the duping of one’s fellow man, and the most brazen peddling of lies reached such heights as in this age in which we are ‘scientifically’ governed according to the canons of ‘technology’.

Not even the sorcerers of the earliest tribes, the priests of the countless deities and churches history records, the philosophers, the enlightened ones or the fanatics of liberal romanticism, nor the nineteenth-century windbags of every election rally and parliamentary session, who filled the heads of their listeners with fiery sermons and sentimental tirades, the pre-war reformist administrators, who boasted of having been able to get to the heart of social issues and concrete problems, studying the details of the distribution of economic benefits, and pursuing improvements in wages and assistance of every kind; have as many lies, as many frauds, to their credit as today’s wheeler-dealers of public affairs, who justify their actions at every turn by proclaiming that they have had their decisions duly scrutinised in the impartial and objective light of technology.

There is no nonsense so preposterous that modern technology is not ready to endorse and cloak in pristine plastic, whenever it answers to the irresistible pressure of capital and to its sinister appetites.

The divide between ‘ideologues’ and ‘technicians’ within the ranks of the bourgeoisie was mirrored in the leadership of the workers’ organisations. In Italy, bourgeois ‘intelligence’ was, through various ‘journals’ and reviews, making a major shift away from the problems once favoured in the literary, philosophical, artistic, and historical spheres in the old-fashioned way, towards economic and statistical studies and a focus on concrete issues. The overuse of this adjective, a true parvenu in rhetoric, was beginning. Agriculture, industry, and commerce were being studied with a professional air, and the pseudo-intellectuals were discovering with condescension that the bipedal man eats, drinks, works, and produces, and cast their eyes upon the complicated devices and equipment that provide for such lowly matters, in order to ascertain their defects and propose reforms: all of them urgent, pressing, and imperative; and it was not long before a ritual list of these was drawn up, a fine substitute for the series of ‘communes loci’, that is, ready-made passages which every professional orator knew by heart and reeled off at the right moment, in the days of long moustaches and the tailcoat.

And the socialists of the time claimed to be at the forefront: to defeat the bourgeoisie and its parties, they said, we must show that we are truly the ones who get things done, that within our ranks, all the more so because many of us have risen through the ranks from the fields or the workshops, there are those ‘equipped’ to provide concrete technical solutions. Another thing they displayed, out of sheer naivety, was the belief that technical supremacy was followed by moral supremacy, in that the men of the proletarian party, in municipalities, mutual societies, cooperatives, even workers’ banks, and in a thousand other bodies, not only demonstrated excellent administration but also absolute selflessness and morality, contenting themselves with low salaries and forbidding any irregularity, favouritism, or preferential treatment. A supremacy which the profiteering of the ruling classes left them to enjoy with great satisfaction, developing its movement amidst the mighty carrozzoni and boundless protectionism, of which the Italian social system provided, as soon as the novel of freedom had come to an end, historical examples of record-breaking proportions.

In this way, the trust and solidarity of the masses, not just the workers, but all ‘free and upright Italians’ would have been obtained, and the capitalist class would have been defeated in the... elections.

The leading figures of this movement, whose names are still cited as those of ‘model’ administrators – Caldara, Filippetti, Zanardi, Greppi, and so on – who placated red cities such as Milan, Bologna, Verona, Novara and so on, accused the left wing of the party, which declared itself an enemy of reformism, of feeding on empty ideology and sterile doctrine, and derided it as already outdated and backward-looking.

These ‘two souls’ of socialism struggled against one another for a long time, and the split came to a head when the world war brought a stormy gale to the calm waters of good-natured, smiling, defenceless reformism. With its fleet of paper boats soon sunk, almost all its followers boarded the sinister, armoured vessels of bourgeois and nationalist combat.

The aim here is not to recount this bitter episode once again, but to move on to the current resurgence of concretism and technicism within the proletarian parties, following two world wars.

The classical position of the Marxist radical left has practically no organised representation left. Our task is not to build, but to destroy, to tear down certain obstacles! Not only has capitalism long since built more than enough for us to serve as a ‘technical’ basis, that is, as a stock of productive forces, so that the great historical problem is not – in the white area – to increase the labour potential, but to break down the social forms that hinder the proper distribution and organisation of useful forces and energies, preventing their exploitation and squandering; but capitalism itself has built too much and lives within the historical antithesis: to destroy, or to blow up.

But whilst our ‘destruction’ will sweep away not massive labour forces, but structures, first of all military and political, of privilege and exploitation, the brutal self-destruction necessary for capitalist longevity cuts off at the root useful and fertile forces, first and foremost that of the human species; even though the latter triumphantly responds by singing, through the gag and shackles of class oppression, the irresistible hymn to life and revolution, with seventy-five thousand additional little creatures sprouting every day upon the crust of the terrestrial spheroid. In the end, the ‘values of the spirit’ and the ‘resources of the most modern technology’ will have to reckon with their unconscious mewling.

Instead, we see the left-wing parties feigning descending onto the concrete, pledging to work together, proclaiming themselves to be constructive and champions of the collective well-being and the prosperity of the country, as well as of emulation before the world, and jumping on the ‘reconstruction’ bandwagon, the most obscene of comedies, in which the actors of the technical troupe were led onto the stage, no sooner had those uniformed and clanking actors of military cretinism left it.

But in this rush towards technology, the characteristics have changed radically compared to those of pre-war reformism. Opportunists and counter-revolutionaries were those of the past, and so are these of today, but whilst those of the past earned the right to treat the extremists as dreamers and perhaps as windbags (some indeed were) by making an effort to prepare for the minutiae of administration and through daily, honest drudgery in the offices of secretaries, commissioners, councillors, and the like; today’s opportunists do not give a damn about any of this. They do indeed turn up their noses at outdated ‘matters of principle’ and boast of being practical men and opportunists, but they have cast aside every remaining scruple and are not worth a penny as technicians, whilst they would consider it naïve and playing into the opponents’ hands even to forgo making money once they have sunk their claws into Pantalone’s coffers, or to keep the scale of their fees and the luxury of their offices and their private life below what is found in the bourgeois sphere.

The forces of conservation can easily mock the ‘cadres’ of the enemy class. They used to attribute to them two souls in perpetual conflict: one was that of the ignorant braggart, the other that of the diligent, upright workhorse. Nowadays, however, demagogic windbaggery, stupidity, and thievery increasingly combine to form a single soul.

Someone from the small but indomitable current of integral Marxism will write a treatise on our clear thesis: we are in a historical period not of progress, but of outright decay and degeneration of official science and technology, of base charlatanism in both doctrine and application; and, with a list of irrefutable facts drawn from all the ganglia of modern organisation and their actual links and mechanisms, will refute the facile, prevailing opinion that the usual figures propagate, through the well-known journalistic means of brainwashing, regarding the alleged dizzying growth in quantity and quality of ‘implementations’ in all fields.

Is such a process of degenerative decay, set against the frightening increase in material energies available to the dominant groups, a historically new process? Not at all; on the contrary, it is an obvious and inevitable process that occurs whenever a major historical and social form has grown out of all proportion, and its revolutionary destruction, its final catastrophe, becomes imperative.

These gigantic, colossal, grandiose works, whose simplicity surpasses in its power millennia upon millennia, are followed at a great distance by the capitals of the Eastern and Egyptian empires risen to immeasurable dominion and wealth: the dwellings of kings and fabulously wealthy lords where, amidst the overflowing opulence, taste has become depraved and corrupted into lasciviousness and into details that history itself will forget. The power of the earliest Greco-Roman monuments still speaks through imposing ruins, whilst the houses of the Alcibiades and the palaces of the last Caesars, the ‘domus aureae’, have crumbled, places where the immensity of resources had sown gold, purple, jewels, and depraved displays of the prostitution of art and morals. And throughout the course of medieval civilisation, whilst at the outset the soaring Gothic cathedrals stand tall, masterpieces which even from a technical standpoint would give today’s imitators pause for thought, the last seventeenth-century affectations of the extremely rich Baroque, to which recent kings and popes devoted far greater economic resources than those of the first modest civic communities, of the first, almost impoverished knights of feudalism, are fading away.

The super-wealth and super-power of capitalism may today strike us as astonishing in the facile worship of the blockbuster, or in the imbecile admiration for all things American, but to the investigator who knows, and will know, how to get to the bottom of things, the widespread manifestations of corruption, emptiness, boorishness, ignorant and charlatanish frivolity, and asinine inconsistency, all bearing the hallmarks of university degrees and the most renowned specialist firms, are plain to see.

This requires a study of modern technology, undertaken with a breadth of vision, without asking anything of the individual little cleric, to whom a stall in the spaccio of the triumphant beast [a pun in Italian: spaccio meaning ‘expulsion’ and ‘shop’, the former referencing Giordano Bruno’s ‘The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast’ tr. ed.] has been entrusted, regarding the specific sector in which the others, bound by the same pact, more ironclad than that of the ancient little churches and chapels, are determined not to enter or investigate, in exchange for an equal benefit for their own little sacristy.

It would be best to confine ourselves to a few brief observations, which will allow us to take a glimpse behind the scenes of some of the major and minor councils, synods and syllabi of the super-scientific, most progressive mid-twentieth century.

With all the abundance of research institutes and reporting and information networks, which go into endless detail about every trivial matter, from raids for brassieres and sanitary pads to the conflict between advocates of pyjamas and nightgowns, it is not possible for this world of learned men to establish, not only what they are, but even whether they exist. They were quicker in the days of Scholasticism to establish the quid and the quod regarding the Almighty Himself. A sphere flying through the air, like the first hot-air balloons, is seen from any direction as a perfect circle; whereas modern flying machines, airships or aeroplanes of every kind, have forms of limited symmetry, and from different angles and during a journey made in a very short time they appear in quite different perspectives, and so every faithful fool now recognises them. But a disc, or plate, or bowl, or salt shaker (there you are, oh most cerebral age) can only be seen as perfectly round from one particular direction, almost flat from another, and from all others it would appear as a convex lens. The shape, therefore, is precisely the one for which, without too many distinctions, it is easy for everyone to say they have seen it, or... to imagine they have seen it.

There may well be details then: they may be more or less bright and radiant, they may or may not leave a trail of smoke or light, they rise, they fall, and then they shoot off.

Mechanically, such a machine, once the gas-powered rocket or jet engine has been implemented, can be conceived without being a Leonardo. If, along the rim of the sauce dish (pardon me, not a salt shaker; a saucer is the little dish for sauce, and we wouldn’t want to be seen as simpletons in every American intellectual centre with a population of eight thousand), we arrange a number of rocket tubes inclined slightly downward, with their angle of inclination also varying along the rim, we could achieve the rotation of a ring encircling the vehicle, an upward thrust to overcome gravity, and, on command, a translational thrust.

So then, madam modern technology, go and make us a flying saucer in the factory and show it to any ordinary fool. Then we shall know how to enlighten ourselves. In those dark and ignorant times, they didn’t take long to come up with a single version for everyone on the Unity and Trinity, on consubstantiation, or on the soul within the female body. We would therefore like to know officially, given that, among other things, there is a cultural section of the UN (the name escapes us; is it perhaps called the ‘non-flying sauce-dish’?), whether the discs are vehicles from Mars – or German V-2 rockets used by the Soviets – or weapons being tested by the USA – or electrical discharges occurring in the atmosphere, of the St Elmo’s fire variety – or air serpents, relatives of the nineteenth-century sea serpent.

In the meantime, we venture to put forward this general theorem: the capitalist social form is far better suited to pulling the wool over people’s eyes than the uncivilised social forms that preceded it, which lacked modern critical thinking.

Those who know everything through Digests and Selezioni tell us that there is one for every three people, that there are more graveyards of automobiles than of human corpses, that they are churned out on an assembly line and are produced at a rate of one every few minutes, and many other fine things besides. Although certain factories have been designated for the production of tanks (a situation parallel to that of Russian dual-purpose factories: tractors for agriculture, or armoured vehicles that rain down death), everyone considers it a given that the American car holds the record not only amongst those of the entire world, but amongst all the achievements of modern mechanical industry.

The truth, however, is that (although there is one undisputed first place, that of American commercial advertising in foisting upon consumers the shoddiest, most useless, and unbearable things to anyone who might receive them as a gift) Americans, who nevertheless constitute the fertile ground for that advertising sowing, are thoroughly fed up with the automobiles manufactured in their own country.

Complaints from motoring clubs regularly reach the Society of Automotive Engineers in New York. First of all, a new model is released every year, fleecing the owner of the previous year’s model, whose market value is sent plummeting: the provincial little bumpkin from the countryside doesn’t want to look like a fool because his cousin replaces his and he doesn’t. A real squeeze. Then, in order to sell the cars, they are fitted out with the strangest accessories under the pretext of making them more comfortable: breakdowns and stoppages multiply endlessly; spare parts are sold only at designated service stations, and every year they are deliberately changed. We’ve been had.

The models from the various manufacturers are unpopular because they keep getting bigger and use too much fuel; at the same time, the build quality is poor, whereas a Ford from the early post-war years would last ten times as long, running without a hitch, because back then there weren’t any super-engineers trying to save on every last kilo of steel. Certain traditional accessories, such as the throttle and ignition-advance levers beside the steering wheel, extremely useful in certain cases of long journeys through freezing regions, are no longer made; to be sure, those who want them pay an extra 5,000 lire; 20,000 for anyone wanting the sun visor, which has disappeared due to the craze for lowering everything, thereby reducing the driver’s upward visibility, which, says one engineer, means that if you find yourself on a rollercoaster-like road, you’d be better off getting out and continuing on foot. He must be a rare engineer with sensitive calluses.

It was impossible to ascertain what precious cargo went down with the Flying Enterprise, on which the captain and the boatswain remained after the accident and the abandonment: secret weapons found in Germany, stolen works of art, new atomic devices – all sorts of rumours were circulating. The captain declared: ‘Ships and cargo worth millions of dollars are entrusted to us; it is not a responsibility that one can abandon lightly’. Another mystery was his refusal to head for the nearest French port of Brest, instead joining the convoy towing the wreck into the area of the ‘boiling sea’ at the mouth of the English Channel to reach the English port of Falmouth. There was the right of salvage enshrined in maritime law; it is certain that Carlsen, rather than saving the ship (impossibilia nemo tenetur), was accountable for another outcome, and for that he risked his life: namely, that it should not be salvaged by unwelcome rescuers.

Amidst the flurry of news, one story stood out: the brand-new and luxurious ship that Carlsen had kept polished like a mirror, and which was supposed to make an ultra-safe crossing, had a flat keel. A technical innovation which, in its inexhaustible ingenuity, mocks the past and makes a mockery of the traditions of the early navigators. We do not know whether the Polynesians undertook their migration from South America or Asia: their fleets sailed in a long line within earshot of one another and transported to unknown settlements a race said to be similar to our own. But what is certainly known is that this daring undertaking was possible because those primitives learnt to shape the outline of the canoe from giant tree trunks of heavy timber using fire, and adopted a keel with a sharp, cutting edge, deep in the water, which provides stability and safety. Why on earth has the ultra-modern shipyard of the Flying then adopted the flat keel, typical of a lake boat? One newspaper stated it in no uncertain terms: to reduce the unit production cost. The mysterious treasure, which those ancient navigators are said to have transported safely from one continent to another with the sole aid of ‘voice’ commands, despite the marvellous resources of radar, wireless telegraphy, and the entire international ocean-rescue network, could not avoid being swallowed up by the abyss.

Herein lies the key to all modern applied science. Its studies, its research, its calculations, its innovations, all aim at this: reducing costs, raising freight rates. Thus, the ostentation of lounges, mirrors, and ornaments to attract high-paying customers, and miserly skimping on the structure, pushed to the extreme of mechanical stress and minimal dimensions and weight. This tendency characterises all modern engineering, from construction to mechanical engineering, that is, presenting with opulence, to ‘épater le bourgeois’, the fittings and finishes that any fool is capable of admiring (having, indeed, a special culture of kitsch formed in the cinema and through glossy illustrated magazines) whilst being indecently stingy with the solidity of the load-bearing structure, invisible and incomprehensible to the layman.

With the end of capitalism, this criterion of construction engineering, which today is presented in schools and on construction sites as an eternal truth, will come to an inglorious end: the criterion that says that the greatest loads and the greatest stresses are to be borne by structures of the lightest possible weight, and above all the lowest possible cost.

Another hypocritical formula complements the first two: that of the shortest possible lifespan, given the relentless progress! Stop with the progress, stick to the cross-section of the canoe, drawn without knowing vector theory, and let’s start with this general principle: don’t try to cheat!

There have been recent reports of massive river breaches in Italy, France, the United States, and elsewhere. Here, as has been demonstrated on another occasion, we have witnessed a spectacular failure of modern engineering. The capitalist economic tendency dictates: make it lighter! But embankments and dams are structures that rely on gravity and must be as heavy as possible, and the relevant theory, compared to that available to Leonardo da Vinci or the Moors in Spain, has developed in the direction of setting a higher value for the overturning force from the front and below, which can only be countered (see major historical disasters such as that of Gleno ⁽¹⁾ by increasing the gross weight. Here, therefore, little has been gained through the use of metal and concrete works; undeniable, however, is the advantage of the moderns in meteorological and rainfall monitoring, in the speed of communication and transport, and thus in predicting critical moments and taking action. The results, however, are negative, and these are linked to the reluctance of cumbersome bureaucratic bodies, especially following the disorganisation caused by the wars, to carry out diligent monitoring and maintenance in a field where there are no obvious speculative profits in the capitalist sense.

What happened last autumn on the Po should have been foreseen in the wake of what had happened on the Reno: but we are living under a regime of charlatanism, and the technical incompetence is compounded by the methods of both the governments and the oppositions; since the latter proclaim their desire to collaborate and govern, the responsibility for this shameful mismanagement is shared; and any polemic seeking to exploit the disasters politically is idiotic, unless it gets to the root of the phenomenon, which lies in the social system and not in the fact that this or that one of the party leaders is in power.

A minister took pleasure in speaking on the radio from atop an embankment fixed up by his officials (or rather, by the contractors, who choose, decide, and design according to their own profit and nothing else, and then lay the folders on the office desks, which pleases the sleepy bureaucrat, even if there is no bribe under the first cover), and after a quick glance he said that everything was done well, the embankment was higher, and in any case he had ordered it to be raised by another metre. Little Napoleons! Perhaps they do not know that the data for determining the height of the embankments are derived from surveys carried out over a radius of thousands of kilometres (which today are sought from paperwork rather than from the terrain), so that they know as little as we do at this moment whether the overflow and breach will occur in a different stretch, when there, where they had brought the microphone, the water might still be a metre and a half below the crest; and so the order should be to raise the embankment in a completely different area.

Why the company chooses is easily understood: when it’s the minister who chooses, it’s every man for himself.

Whilst we have failed to keep the old Eridanus in check, the super-equipped Americans have fared no better with the Mississippi-Missouri: perhaps the largest river basin in the world. They boast of keeping the artificial hydroelectric basin of the Tennessee in check with a few telephone calls, opening and closing dams upstream and downstream and forcing the mass of water not to ruin capital investments, whilst at the same time providing millions of useful kilowatts. But the Tennessee is a mere puddle, and it was easy to design it ‘from scratch’ so as not to run into any major blunders.

With the Mississippi, the situation is quite different, as it involves discovering the behaviour of a hydraulic regime governed largely by uncontrolled natural forces; the variability of factors such as meteoric precipitation, soil permeability, the course and breadth of natural riverbeds, and the extent of secondary and main basins creates a problem theoretically indecipherable even to electronic brains (let us resist this temptation too!) And even if the systems of equations were solved, and the velocities, flow rates, and maximum flood levels were found at all the critical points, the works required would be so vast that even the dollar might have to back down.

Initially, attempts were made to discipline, divert, delay or, where appropriate, bring forward the dissipation of the large, forecasted rain clouds, using electrical or nuclear means; but in an extremely vast basin, this is a pipe dream. Then American engineering sought to address the issue with an experimental procedure. An immense model of the geographical basin of the two great rivers was made. It covers one million square metres (yes! one million, that is, one square kilometre, being two thousand times smaller in length, and therefore four million times smaller in surface area compared to the ‘real’ one). Data from 1,500 stations will serve as the basis for ‘reproducing’, with water artificially poured in on a small scale, the actual flow of all the tributaries, natural lakes, and collection and holding reservoirs within this vast area.

This information comes from a reliable source, Castelfranchi, who reports that work on the model is currently underway: it is clear that an enormous amount of earthworks is required to reproduce, on a reduced scale, the whole country in its external form and natural geological quality: covering over a third of the States!

As the cost of the Vicksburg model is not specified, we venture to estimate it: it exceeds ten billion Italian lire.

We will be brazen and malicious enough to assert that this must be a massive scam, designed to make firms spend, let’s not even say the ten billion or so cited in the model, but the billions and billions of dollars that will emerge for flood defences, dams, and drainage systems calculated using that system.

Although there are precedents, it seems, for modelling in this field, our objection is founded on this. Assuming that distances, volumes of water, and even the degree of porosity and roughness of the terrain and riverbeds can be reproduced with reasonable accuracy, the elevation scale has nevertheless had to be adjusted; otherwise, the result would have been a flat area, in practice. By scaling it up to 1:100, that is, twenty times larger, there will be appreciable differences in elevation within the model, and the highest mountains will appear to be a few dozen metres high. But then the ‘slopes’ of the terrain all turn out to be exaggerated by a factor of twenty, both in the rainwater runoff areas and in the cross-sectional views of the riverbeds and channels. Therefore, the velocities and flow rates obtained experimentally from the model will, in our view, be even less reliable than those sought in vain through overly complex theoretical mathematical analysis. In fact, and we cannot go further into technicalities here, the velocities and flow rates do not vary ‘in proportion’ to the flow gradients, but in a highly complex manner; moreover, in hydraulic formulas, account is taken of the area and perimeter of the wetted cross-section, the relationships between which are distorted in a non-homothetic model.

It might be a shot in the dark, but we’d swear by this being a load of rubbish too.

Another topic that deserved attention was the news regarding the colossal hydraulic works that the Soviet Union has planned in the basins of the Volga, the Don, the Dnieper, and above all the Amu Darya. The former are reportedly nearing completion in terms of hydroelectric power, agriculture, and inland navigation, and although vast in scale, they do not give as much cause for concern as the latter project, which, even if undertaken, will take many years to complete. It was noted that the Aral, like the Caspian, is an inland sea; between the two there is a difference in elevation of some eighty metres, but through the connecting channel would flow highly saline water, unsuited to agriculture and perhaps to the energy-generating machinery using the metals employed to date. And so the idea was to dam the mouth of the great Amu Darya River before its entry into the Aral, diverting its fresh waters into the great Central Asian canal. The question was raised as to whether even such a solution, though doctrinally appealing, might not have caused variations in the water levels of the two inland seas, and whether its consequences (we do not believe a model could be used here either) could be calculated, including on the climate and the habitability – already difficult today – of those semi-desert regions.

A subsequent, even more spectacular report perhaps offered an answer, though certainly not to our humble doubts. Through yet another immense channel, the waters of none other than the Siberian Yenisei River (even further away than the Ob), which currently flows toward the Arctic Ocean, would be channelled all the way to the Aral Sea, thereby flooding Central Asia and freeing it from millions of years of aridity. It was easy to envisage the length of such a channel, stretching for thousands of kilometres, and it was stated that the maximum height at the watershed with the basin of the Arctic Ocean did not exceed a few hundred metres: the excavations would be immense, unprecedented.

We do not know whether the Soviet engineers have surveyed the true elevations along the outline of that future cyclopean canal, where, amidst rivers, forests, and unexplored areas, some unknown mountain might even rise up before them.

We are struck by a coincidence that mirrors the ‘classic’ approach to design under a capitalist framework. When an unforeseen difficulty arises that renders an initial project, if not unfeasible, then at least enormously more costly, the solution is not to abandon the project or leave the work half-finished: this happens, if at all, under the influence of other economic causes; that the funds allocated have all been exhausted, and the contractors have no further glory or gold to extract from it. The solution is very simple: a larger project is devised, a much larger one, which encompasses the first within its new and broader scope, and calculates and anticipates the far greater works that will provide the answer to the recognised material impossibility of the first plan.

It is perhaps possible that the designers of those vast plans, having realised that the Amu Darya–Caspian Canal, though theoretically feasible, might bring not boundless fertility but drought, famine, or epidemics around the Aral Sea, along with drastic changes in humidity and temperature, might have calculated that a remedy could be found by supplying the Aral Sea with replacement water, drawing it – no less – from the boundless basins of the Siberian rivers.

A loan, an advance on the future generation. The individual private owner of capital begins, on a molecular scale, with a loan ‘a babbo morto’. In the spectacular macrocosm of contemporary high capitalism, technicians, economists, and political leaders silence us all with ever grander schemes, and draw mighty bills of exchange on the humanity of the future.

But a liquidator steps forward. His name is: revolution.

If the Jews, a people chosen to poke fun at others, invented the tale of the Tower of Babel, they certainly hit the nail on the head. It has repeated itself in our own time with the construction of the skyscraper housing the United Nations offices on the East River in New York. It has 5,400 windows, and just to clean the glass, the global superstate spends $63,000 a year – that is, 50 million Italian lire.

Twenty architects from fifteen different nations were summoned, and talk about a confusion of tongues! The rationalist verticalist Le Corbusier won out over the soon-to-die naturalist Wright, who wrote: plant grass where you want to build a skyscraper... Once the great glass-curtain structure was designed, 97-metre-wide, 165-metre-tall with over 40 floors, just a few metres thick between the two closed end-walls, and with two large, fully glazed façades, Le Corbusier triumphed; but he had to grapple with the Swede, the Englishman, and the Russian, who demonstrated to him that such a parallelepiped would be an oven in summer and an icebox in winter, unless one spent millions of dollars annually on an artificial air system. Le Corbusier then reportedly proposed to ‘wrap’ the entire building in a double outer wall of glass and steel, keeping the ‘actual’ windows permanently closed, and circulating a stream of cold or hot air through the cavity. Man as a plant in a greenhouse. But this cladding was never erected, and we carry on with air conditioning, one of the most elegant contemporary mockeries, which has dispelled an old illusion: that anything comes free, and it is the air we breathe.

We can’t be the only ones who are a bit crazy, if a certain Lewis Mumford, a technical critic for the non-revolutionary ‘New Yorker’, was able to write: the building by Le Corbusier and his colleagues is an extremely fragile aesthetic achievement, a symbol not of the modern age, but of an era of shaky finances and large-scale speculation. But precisely! we might add, the authentic modern age.

The fact is that, although land prices in major cities, as a reflection of the economic absurdity underlying capitalist concentration and urbanising dementia, have reached absurd levels, to the point that (in an area such as that) perhaps in a single premises the cost of the land is twenty times greater than the cost of top-class construction, in terms of materials and labour, and therefore this class regime ‘benefits’ from this monstrous verticalism; practice has shown that all the countless ‘technological systems’ that equip a modern building: water, gas, light, energy, heating, air conditioning, elevator, telephones, etc., etc., do not function properly beyond ten or twelve floors, and for a greater field of action they break down far too often, leaving everyone without services, so that it is necessary to have an autonomous control centre for each group of floors for all these systems. And so the UN building is not a single unit, it is not a building, it does not merit the name ‘work’ in the classical sense: it consists of four buildings banally stacked one on top of the other, with the sole consequence that the foundations and skeleton of the first one are foolishly working to support a weight four times greater. If from all corners of the earth the fools, we fools, have paid for this, it will be easy for us to think that tomorrow’s society will affix a sign to the monster glistening in the sun: here lies the symbol of a moronic humanity.

In speaking ill of the contemporary turn of technology, we have by no means implicitly conceded that an equivalent decline does not, in this high capitalist era, affect literature, art in all its manifestations. Modern intelligence, even amidst all this, is, alarmingly, in decline. Of all the arts, the one closest to our theme is architecture, and at every turn one hears it being criticised for its coldness, nakedness, and sterility; for its box-like, drawer-shaped structures and skeletal linearity. For all this, perhaps wishing to lay the blame at the feet of the inexorability of determinism, a single culprit is blamed: a criminal of technology, reinforced concrete.

Fancy a headline or two? Do not stain the face of the Italian landscape. Beauty and nature condemned by His Majesty, Reinforced Concrete.

At most, determinism might be considered a distant relative of that school in which construction is called functionalism: the concept, after all, recurs in all fields of technology. The sole concern is with utility, with ensuring that the structure to be built fulfils its actual functions; calculations, plans, and sections are drawn up, and the resulting dimensions are adopted without any regard for the final aesthetic effect. This theory maintains that what is useful is also beautiful, just as the muscles and limbs of a racehorse, whether in motion or at rest, lend the utmost elegance and harmony of line to the animal’s body.

A strictly functional architect, then, much like the first builders of porticoes and arches, whose joints of beams and stone blocks gave rise to the ‘modules’ of the classical styles, does not sketch out elevations or create plastic models; he sizes, shapes, and assembles the materials he needs, and only once the work is complete does he step back and contemplate the effect.

If this criterion were applied to the theory of statics as applied to reinforced concrete, or to other structures, but above all to the former, since its components do not come from industry as fixed, ‘standard’ measurements, but are shaped at will into the form devised for the casting, we would see the emergence of dynamic, curved, slender structures and members, with varying cross-sections, in a fecundity without limits. The projections, the overhangs, which, when realised in the ancient cut-stone masonry of illustrious monuments, inspire wonder in descriptions such as Hugo’s of Notre Dame de Paris, would blossom easily and in entirely new forms from the sides of buildings; bold and slender arches would become possible; new silhouettes would arise as if by magic...

This strict verticality stems from the use of traditional materials, from the piling of stones that function solely by withstanding normal pressure, to the extent that it was already a bold step to move from the pyramid with its immense base to the prismatic building. If, with iron, the Eiffel Tower rested on its four clumsy nineteenth-century legs, with reinforced concrete it would be easy to make it bloom from a base as wide as its tip. The conglomerate innervated by steel bars, being able to withstand stresses from every direction, frees buildings from the slavery of prismatic aesthetics, whenever this is necessary and useful.

The culprit is therefore not the new material, nor the rules of its mathematical mechanics from which the prescribed operational measures are worked out each time. The culprit is speculative self-interest, the economic account in mercantile terms, which seeks to reduce operating costs in order to maximise profit, and to cut installation expenditure in order to reduce the advance and the interest owed.

The reinforced concrete designer is therefore not the deus ex machina of the modern world of construction. He is a poor panderer who must sell himself in the most diverse directions, and the dictatorship lies in two sets of hands. Partly in the hands of the architect and decorator, who must cater to the increasingly distorted and deformed sensibilities of the bourgeois and parvenu buyer, showing him effects ranging from cheap set design to the highest poetics of the very room where he deposits his excrement; and to achieve this whilst economising on the contested space of fashionable neighbourhoods, he squeezes the rooms and lowers the floors, and compresses the reinforced-concrete members – precisely those that once allowed for the construction, as if it were child’s play, of immense spaces where ancient forests could not provide sufficient beams and the masonry could not support vaults of great span and low rise – into incredible cramped spaces and forced passageways. The other dictatorship, the decisive one, belongs to the capitalist entrepreneur who wants, here we are again, to lower costs. When the latter builds to sell directly, he wants to construct the same building with little iron and little cement, and the cross-sections get cut down to the bone.

When a contractor works to order, because the public is paying, he insists that ‘science’ prove that pillars, beams, or other elements must be made heavier and thicker, so that the total volume of the order increases; and also because, with massive structures, the cost per unit is lower and the profit margin higher. Finally, for the sake of economy in forms and craftsmanship, he imposes uniformity and the standardisation of types; and if twenty structural members are in twenty different mechanical conditions, he has them all calculated as identical. Thus the trivial cube was born and triumphs.

* * *

A series of isolated and incomplete examples have been enough to demonstrate what science, when applied to technology, has become today: venal, elastic, capable of all answers and of all changes of flag.

If the confessor responded differently to the poor peasant who had stolen a loaf of bread than to the gentleman who had raped and killed, demonstrating that religious morality could be stretched elastically in every direction, we must not for a moment think that the contemporary system, born from the triumph of reason and experience, has in the new priest, whom we call a specialist, expert, technician, or scientist created a better tool.

The augurs of old would smile when they met each other in the street. Their modern counterparts have an opposite directive, which for them is a matter of their daily bread: they know full well what beasts and liars they are, yet they put on a show of taking one another seriously.

The capitalist age is more steeped in superstition than any that came before it.

Revolutionary history will not define it as the age of the rational, but as the age of defects.

Of all the idols that man has ever known, it will be that of the modern progress of technology that will be toppled from its pedestal with the most tremendous crash.