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LEWIS MUMFORD

from Technics and Civilization (1934)

Lewis Mumford also responded to the Great Depression by elevating and

intensifying his anti-urban polemics of earlier years, and Technics and Civilization has a
right to he considered one of the great books of the century. Mumford remained very
active in the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), and in 1931 he undertook
a trip to Europe to view firsthand the European housing experiments of the 1920s. His
earlier positions were fortified, but in this book they take on a more general cast. His
thesis is that human technology has undergone several stages of evolution and now has
entered "neotechnic" era that allows a complete mechanization of work and therefore a
complete break with the capitalist system. As an alternative, Mumford proffers a "basic
communism," that is, a non-Marxist planned economy that freely dispenses the basic
services of food, shelter, and medical care. Taylorized in theory, anti-consumptive in
practice, this society is designed to reduce human labor to a minimum, while at the same
time putting an end to liberalism, commercialism, population growth, war, economic
downturns, and the destruction of the environment. It is another vision that could only
have been conceived at the height of the Great Depression and i reflects the general
disenchantment of these gloomy years.

To speak of a "planned economy," without such a basic standard of consumption

and without the political means of making it prevail, is to mistake the monopolistic
sabotage of large-scale capitalist industry for intelligent social control.

The foundations of this system of distribution already, I repeat, exist. Schools,

libraries, hospitals, universities, museums, baths, lodging houses, gymnasia, are
supported in every large center at the expense of the community as a whole. The police
and the fire services similarly are provided on the basis of need instead of on the ability
to pay: roads, canals bridges, parks, playgrounds, and even - in Amsterdam - ferry
services are similarly communized. Furthermore, in the most jejune and grudging form, a
basic communism is in existence in countries that have unemployment and old-age
insurance. But the latter measures are treated as means of salvage, rather than as a
salutary positive mechanism for rationalizing the production and normalizing the
consumptive standards of the whole community.

A basic communism, which implies the obligation to share in the work of the
community up to the amount required to furnish the basis, does not mean the complete
enclosure of every process and the complete satisfaction of every want in the system of
planned production. Careful engineers have figured that the entire amount of work of the
existing community could be carried on with less than twenty hours work per week for
every existing worker: with complete rationalization all along the line, and with the
elimination of duplications and parasitisms, probably less than twenty hours would suffice
to produce a far greater quantity of goods than is produced at present. As it is, some 15
million industrial workers supply the needs of 120 million inhabitants of the United States.
Limiting rationed production and communized consumption to basic requirements, the
amount of compulsory labor would be even less. Under such provisions, technological
unemployment would be a boon.