Take a moment to look at the things in your surroundings. Remind yourself of the fact that these chairs, curtains, windowpanes, doorknobs, lightbulbs, TVs, and smartphones were fabricated by somebody, somewhere, at some time in the past. You almost certainly do not know the names of these people, or anything about them really. Chances are you do not know much about how they made these objects either. Maybe if you flip one over, you’ll see “Made in China” or “Product of Mexico” printed on an inconspicuous surface. This tells you something, but it’s still virtually nothing—especially when you consider that the raw materials and preliminary manufacturing steps may originate in an entirely separate country than that claimed on the tag. There is a long chain of hands through which this matter passed before it took its final shape. You may not personally know the people these hands are attached to, but you in fact have a deeply intimate relationship to these people—and they to you.

Capitalism entangles humanity together through the mutual implication of life and labor across the global economy. You have a social relation to the people who made the objects in your surroundings—indeed the surroundings themselves if you consider the building and the generationally-shaped land it sits on—because your needs and those of the invisible workers are mediated by the market wherein the stuff you buy and the time spent making that stuff become commensurate in measures of money. Capitalism forces people into a position of dependence on commodities: objects produced specifically to be sold in the market. The people who make these commodities do so not because they will use the commodities themselves, but because they need the money paid to them as wages. They, like you, use that money to buy commodities. We are all dependent on each other’s labor for the satisfaction of our needs. We quite literally provide for each other, even as strangers separated by oceans and price tags. But this mutual entanglement at the basic metabolic level is coordinated, controlled, and obscured by the market.

Capitalism hides a world-spanning system of production, a veritable global factory, behind even the most mundane commodities. What appears as a common object on a store shelf or a simple quantity of currency is really the secretion of a global social system wherein the collective labor of the human species reshapes vast quantities of terrestrial matter into forms amenable to profit above all else. With capitalism’s enclosure of the globe, the total weight of anthropogenic mass—i.e. the concrete, steel, glass, drawn copper, plastic, and other materials we shape into the seemingly-infinite forms of the commodity—is now larger than all biomass on Earth.¹ The material world, made and re-made in the image of capital, looms large over humanity’s future.

To place humanity’s destiny back in our own hands, the process of communist construction will require grappling with capital’s literal encrustation on the planet’s surface. If this world was made how it is through human labor, it can also be made into something else through human labor. In order to not only dismantle the machinery of planetary capitalism, but to also then repurpose its components into a planetary communism worthy of the name, it will be crucial to leverage the relevant technical expertise currently held by the industrial workforce. Industrial know-how is, of course, not the only relevant expertise to communist construction. But it is essential and frequently overlooked by communists for whom the global factory is simply a black box beyond the horizon of day-to-day imagination. The question of how to carry out this restructuring cannot be answered properly without the variegated forms of industrial, technological, and scientific knowledge cultivated in the relevant portion of the global proletariat, of which it constitutes an increasingly small minority.

A central challenge for the task of communist construction is therefore the leveraging and deployment of technical expertise. This expertise is not internally homogeneous, and therefore has a multifaceted relationship to the communist project. The deleterious effects of its uneven distribution must be corrected whilst simultaneously leveraging the capacities it engenders as they happen to exist. This has deep implications for present-day communist politics—chiefly the horizon of political imagination² and the strategic dimensions of class struggle. But the current makeup of this technical expertise also portends, however hazily today, the contours of communist construction’s central challenge: the breaking of this mode of production and the creation of a new one. In order to conceptually map this corpus of knowledge and theorize its implications, it is important to first understand how capitalism currently distributes it.

Black Box

Productive knowledge is imbued into people who work in specific productive processes. The overall distribution of productive knowledge should track employment across industries where production occurs. The central mechanism that structures this distribution is capitalism’s tendency towards increasing labor productivity. The resulting arrangement is called the industrial division of labor. Because of the pressure to maximize profits, capitalists find ways to reorganize production that reduce their labor costs, increase output per worker, or both. This appears first as a division of particular labor processes into separate, simplified tasks. Individual workers are made to focus on a handful of these tasks rather than the whole process. This reduces the skill required and increases the output efficiency (measured in units of time) of the average worker. As tasks are simplified, they become increasingly amenable to the implementation of machinery. Mechanization and automation reduce the skill required from individual workers even further, reducing their control over how things are made. Decisions over the structure of production are concentrated in a smaller share of elite workers and managers, along with the expertise required for making those decisions.

At an aggregate level, this has the effect of pushing workers out of production, since capitalists can produce ever greater amounts of commodities with fewer and fewer workers. Historically this has manifested in a dramatic shift of humanity out of agricultural labor due to mechanization, paired with a swelling of workshops and factories with newly proletarianized workers. But the nascent industrial system could not absorb the entirety of rural humanity shunted off the fields. The absorption of the proletariat into industrial labor has always been partial. Marx famously noted that, during his time in London, more people worked as domestic servants than in factories.³ Capitalism obscures production by only-ever-partially employing the proletariat in productive activities—a hidden abode indeed.⁴

Today, over a century-and-a-half later, production has moved to abodes even more hidden from the public eye. As of 2023, less than a quarter of the global workforce is employed in industry, with roughly the same proportion working in agriculture. The remaining half works in the nebulously-defined “service sector,” which is essentially a catch-all for any work that does not fit into the preceding two categories.⁵ The trajectory towards a deindustrialization⁶ of employment becomes obvious when the data is analyzed geospatially: the countries with the most developed industrial sectors feature small agricultural employment, shrunken industrial employment, and ballooning service sector employment. The United States and Canada each feature industrial employment figures of 19%, with most Western and Northern European countries and Australia sitting between 14% and 20%. Portugal, Italy, and Germany sit somewhat higher at 25%, 27%, and 27% respectively. Service sector employment for all these countries, meanwhile, ranges from 70% to 84%.

This trend is not distinctly Western, and manifests plainly in more-recently industrialized East Asia as well. Japan, which began developing its domestic industrial capacity only slightly later than most of Europe, has 24% of its workforce employed in industry and 73% in services. For South Korea these figures are 24% and 71% respectively. For Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong, the rise and fall of industrial employment paired with a subsequent predominance of the service sector very closely mirrors the trajectory experienced by early industrializers, but at a historically accelerated pace. Chinese industrial employment remains comparatively high at 33%, but service sector employment sits higher at 46%. Echoing the trend set by prior industrial powerhouses, China’s service sector has employed a higher share of its workforce since the early 1990s, and the gap only continues to widen.

These statistics are aggregated at a national level, which gives the impression that each nation state undergoes a similar “development” trajectory modulated by local conditions. In actuality, capitalism structures capital allocation and workforce compositions at a society-wide (i.e. global) level, with borders acting as interface mechanisms for different factional blocs of capitalists to assert their interests against each other and against the proletariat. From this planetary perspective, the dynamic is clear: the spread of capitalist social relations creates a larger proportion of people who work outside of the sphere of production (or who do not work at all) than the proportion of those who do. As industrial technology enables greater output from each labor-hour, this differential only continues to grow.

This is particularly apparent when examining late-developing countries, wherein industrial employment peaks even lower and faster. Declining agricultural employment coincides with only modest growth in industrial employment. The service sector very rapidly outpaces the other two in a pattern aptly termed “premature deindustrialization.”⁷ Proletarians in such countries are drawn into industrial production in diminishing numbers because the efficiency standards for production have already been set very high at an international level, meaning new ventures typically must use highly automated techniques in order to be profitable. Workers in late-developing countries drawn into production are more likely to be employed in extremely low-paid work performed with very little overhead expenses—i.e. sub-industrial highly manual work typically in resource extraction or quasi-handicraft goods production. Capitalism therefore has a tendency to concentrate the technical knowledge required for modern production in an ever-shrinking proportion of the populace. This effect is only compounded by the division of labor where technical knowledge is purposefully kept away from workers in highly sophisticated production lines to the greatest feasible degree. The expertise required for appropriating and reconfiguring the existing capitalist productive infrastructure for communist ends slips further from the grasp of the great majority of humanity. Assimilating, deploying, and universalizing this productive knowledge will, nonetheless, be a central necessity to any project of communist construction.

Quadripartite

Technical know-how is not homogeneous; different kinds of workers develop different types of knowledge about production based on their particular role in the global factory. Understanding the internal differentiation of this body of knowledge is critical to theorizing how it may be used and transformed for communist ends. The industrial workforce can be grouped into four rough categories: deskilled labor, skilled technicians, technical professionals, and management.⁸ This categorization should be understood as a form of subjective violence imposed upon the proletariat—a separation of people from the technical knowledge necessary for informed and participatory social decision-making. This applies as much to deskilled workers from whom advanced technical expertise is withheld as it does to professionals and managers who are forced by capitalism to relate to the labor of others as an endless procession of commodities cleaved from the social context that created them. Despite the fact that communism will imbue humanity with productive knowledge in radically different ways than capitalism, the fact remains that communism must be built by people deeply shaped by capitalism. It is therefore critical to understand the knowledge and capabilities held by each of these groups and what that implies for communist construction.

Deskilled labor describes the largest group of workers involved in the production process. Responsible for carrying out the work of production most directly, this group has the most “hands-on” exposure to the actual fabrication, assembly, and transport of commodities. Examples include high-volume assembly line workers, low-level machine operators, and general warehouse staff. Despite the “deskilled” descriptor, these workers do in fact develop appreciable capacities on the job. This includes proficiency with certain tools, ability to perform basic troubleshooting, and familiarity with the general flow of their line of work. But the extent to which these workers are permitted to develop these skills is suppressed—sometimes as an intentional method of wage suppression, but typically because it is simply the structural outcome of that firm’s division of labor. By design, competency in this type of labor can be achieved quite quickly with limited training. There is comparatively little expertise to be gained by workers in these positions. Indeed, the scientific and engineering dimensions of production are experienced as an imposition from those higher in the expertise hierarchy rather than a process in which they can meaningfully participate. Because their agency is limited to simply executing tasks devised by others, deskilled workers have little industrial expertise to contribute to the project of communist construction.

Skilled technicians, by contrast, carry a much more expansive range of productive knowledge.⁹ Workers in this category typically have the capacity to set up, modify, maintain, or repair the machinery and labor processes that constitute industrial production. For some technicians, such as machinists, welders, inspectors, and practitioners of various construction trades, this means skilled control over specific types of machines and/or tools which they use to carry out production processes themselves. Other types of skilled technicians do not use complicated machine systems to perform production directly themselves, but rather to enable other workers to do so. These technicians, such as industrial machine programmers, millwrights, mechanics, and repair technicians instead install, program, calibrate, qualify/commission, maintain, or repair such machinery and equipment.

Skilled technicians are the linkage where the dictates of market pressures and profitability, filtered through scientific research and engineering design, are inscribed into the practical character of production itself. Technicians, in order to complete their work, must learn a large quantity of specific knowledge. This requires extensive hands-on training, if not also several years of specialized schooling. Such knowledge is best described as the “nitty-gritty” that keeps the global factory running—things like which exact type of cutter to use for what purpose on a lathe, the fastest way to identify a faulty component deep in a machine’s electrical cabinet, or why one type of lubricant is appropriate in one system but not another. Such knowledge is simultaneously practical and theoretical, but the theoretical dimension of this knowledge is purposefully limited to only the most immediately relevant to their work. In general, technicians are expected to understand enough technical theory to make decisions on the job, but not necessarily to understand the scientific or engineering principles that set the context for those decisions. Because the role of technicians is to act as the front-line interface between managerial intent—crystallized into engineered designs—and the contingency of the tangible world, there is little need for technicians to develop more abstract forms of productive knowledge. Instead, that sort of capacity is reserved for those who decide the actual structure of production rather than those who “simply” build and maintain it.

The design of production’s systems is relegated to technical professionals, most commonly engineers. This category also includes various forms of scientists. Regardless of their exact discipline, the role of this stratum as a whole is to leverage scientific knowledge attained through experience and university-level education to design commodities and the various processes and equipment required to fabricate and sell them.¹⁰ The commodities and the methods by which they will be made must conform to the interests of the capitalists who stand to profit from those commodities. But in practice, optimizing for profitability is very complicated—tradeoffs must be made at all stages between different technical options that carry different advantages and risks to profitability. What may be cheap to manufacture may not sell very well. What does sell well may be expensive to manufacture or reduce the frequency at which consumers must buy a replacement. Business decisions and technical decisions are not so easily separated. The challenges faced by this stratum are deeply technical and complex in nature, but all technical facets are ultimately appraised through their financial dimension.

It is in this professional stratum where the overwhelming bulk of production’s abstract and theoretical knowledge is held and where it is instrumentalized for profit. For these workers, the conceptual dimension of labor is primarily concerned with the structure and character of technical systems rather than solely their use or maintenance. Engineering and scientific labor seek to evaluate different potential structures for the system being developed and choose the one most amenable to the firm’s goals. This is in contrast to technician labor which, while often quite abstract, revolves more around ensuring that existing production systems remain within an optimal state without changing the fundamental structure of the system itself.

The highest tier, management, is where decisions carry the most systemic implications for the structure of capitalist production. Modern supply chains have enabled an expansive interlinking of individual sites of production all over the globe. This, in combination with a perpetual revolutionizing in the means of production, has engendered a high level of industrial and business complexity that must be managed by firms. The role of managers is to ensure that this complex interfacing between all subordinate labor processes in fact yields the desired outcomes—i.e. is profitable. At lower levels of management this looks like task-level and short-to-medium-term project planning, tracking deliverables, coordinating with other functional teams, and general leadership of workers through some combination of delegation, mentorship, and discipline. At higher levels, managers plan larger and longer-term projects, dictate standards and critical metrics at an organizational level, and craft strategy oriented towards firm-level financial goals.

By issuing commands to workers and setting the terms of their employment, managers carry out the exploitation of workers by specific capitalists. Management is crucial to reproducing both individual capitals and the class antagonism between capitalists and the proletariat. In this sense, management expresses most acutely the fact that all technical knowledge in all strata of the workforce reproduces specific capitals and, in doing so, capitalism in general. However, because managers have a comparatively high level of agency, they express a deep tension inherent to capitalist production: by being responsible for condensing the world’s endless complexity into a singular monetary dimension, managers must engage with society as it actually exists more so than any other stratum—but in doing so must flatten it more severely than any other stratum. Management evaluates the world within and beyond the firm, in all its inscrutable multiplicity, and guides the firm in harvesting profit from its dynamism. Managers understand society to be far deeper and more complex than its appearance on the balance sheet, but this understanding is developed specifically in service of violently condensing society into that balance sheet.

Construction’s Contours

Communist construction’s industrial-productive dimension can be described as two distinct yet overlapping efforts: the provisioning of society with the existing means of production, and the transformation of those means of production in accordance with communist social imperatives. At its heart, communist construction is a process of extensive decision making. In this case, it requires decisions on a large variety of technical matters at various scales of abstraction. Furthermore, these decisions need to be made not by an elite minority in accordance with capital, but instead in such a way that deepens collective decision making over production for the benefit of all. These decisions will be impossible to make without access to the various kinds of technical expertise distributed throughout the industrial workforce. But because this expertise takes various forms with different social roles, it is important to consider the relationship between specific kinds of technical expertise and specific aspects of communist construction.

Initially, provisioning the population will require the use of production systems as they exist, regardless of the fact that these systems were structured primarily for profitability. The fact that the design and configuration of a given machine was driven by one social impetus does not automatically foreclose the possibility of using that machine in a new social context. The core function of a forklift, grinding wheel, or air compressor remains intact even when its social character as a commodity is actively being dissolved. Because the knowledge required to enable and reproduce the core function of the planetary factory’s myriad machine systems is primarily held by technicians, workers of this particular stratum will play a central role in ensuring that a nascent communist society can retain continuity of desired production processes. Not only will it be absolutely critical to ensure adequate participation of large quantities of technicians at the outset of communism’s establishment, but every effort must be made to generalize this knowledge across as much of the population as possible.

This generalization of expertise serves both a practical-strategic purpose and a social-transformational one. Proliferation of intimate knowledge of critical production technologies ensures that material provisioning is less likely to be disrupted by lack of available expertise. This is crucial, as a failure to materially provision the population will cripple or even foreclose the possibility of communism. But this proliferation is also a crucial first step for mending humanity’s relationship to its own productive capacities. By cultivating technician-level expertise throughout the species, people will relate to production not as individuals objectified by capital, but as meaningful participants in steering humanity’s collective metabolic flux with the material world. Initially, this simply means demystifying the black box of production: familiarizing people with the labor processes that enable their daily lives. But the trajectory ultimately transcends the activity that appears as “work” or “labor.” It extends into a conscious and collective mediation of humanity’s mutually constitutive relationship to not just the rest of the biosphere but all geospheric systems that bear the marks of our activity. This species-level capacity can only be built upon a foundation of intimate hands-on knowledge seamlessly woven into holistic and scientific forms of knowledge that unify the social, ecological, productive, and reproductive spheres.

Deskilled workers would be the best positioned to first receive this training, as technician-level knowledge is already rendered visible to them, albeit just out of reach. But ultimately the goal is to generalize the capacity for skilled technical labor across the entirety of society. Communism is built through a suffusion of conscious and collective intent throughout society and its inscription into the physical environment. At minimum, this requires that the average communard be capable of sustaining, maintaining, and nourishing the industrial-agroecological ecosystem that mediates their metabolic ties to not just the earth but every other living human being. The practical nuances of metalworking, soil stewardship, digital electronics, pharmacological chemistry, environmental monitoring, statistical modeling, software development, ceramics fabrication, hydroelectricity, vehicle repair, and many more fields of knowledge will become “common sense” to many, and easily acquired by everyone else.

Because communism inherits a global factory attuned specifically to profit accumulation rather than collective deliberation by a humanity in common, it will be necessary to reconfigure production to better accord with communist social imperatives—rather than merely reproduce it as capitalism has made it. This is essential not only to remediate the countless brutalities capitalism inflicts on us and our environment, but also to perpetually reproduce the minimal material conditions for communism. Such a reconfiguration is impossible without the engineering and scientific expertise that underpins decisions about production’s structure. This is where the task of restructuring production is truly differentiated from simply ensuring its continuity. In order for production to meet social needs articulated through collective deliberation, the people who decide the structure of production will need to decide which technologies and specific pieces of equipment and infrastructure to decommission and which to keep, how to change the way they are used, and which entirely new technologies to research and develop. Certain technologies, such as those that are only viable in the context of unsustainable fossil fuel combustion or only useful for surveillance and weaponized harm, would be intentionally discontinued. The rest will be iteratively transformed to better accord with communist social imperatives. This will serve as the foundation for the development of new technologies whose realization, or even conception, was not possible in capitalism.

These are deeply technical decisions, loaded with ambiguity and competing priorities. Expansive forms of technical expertise are necessary but, by themselves, insufficient for this task. Communism must dissolve the artificial distinction between technical and social matters.¹¹ Capitalism currently concentrates this scientific and engineering expertise in a small minority of the workforce, and as such communist construction must not only leverage this knowledge but also ensure it does not remain the purview of a narrow minority. Transforming production requires a transformation of the expertise that structures production in turn. Communicability between the technical administration of production and society’s deliberative organs would require not just that those in positions to make structural decisions about production be integrated into the institutions where deliberation occurs, but that specialized engineering and scientific knowledge be more legible to society as a whole.

The ubiquity of technician-level knowledge throughout the populace would be a significant dimension of this legibility. If the means of production are the objects of engineering and scientific decision-making, familiarity with the usage and maintenance of the means of production enables the average communard to understand the implications of technical decisions over production’s structure. Simultaneously, this higher baseline-level technical competency enables more people to organically develop engineering and scientific capacities for themselves. Not only do the concepts become more accessible in a pedagogical sense, but quotidian familiarity with production offers significantly more opportunities to learn and apply specialized technical knowledge day-to-day. With the dissolution of profit, the practical realities of production would produce an increasingly flattened hierarchy of technical expertise. In effect, science and engineering would cease to be the exclusive domain of an elite professional stratum. Practical capacities and abstract technical theory will relate to each other as a smooth continuum of knowledge distributed according to functional necessity and personal interest rather than social class.

Workers in the technical professional stratum are therefore less crucial for the initial establishment of communist production than technicians are, but are indispensable for catalyzing communism’s transformational program. The managerial stratum, however, poses a strange tension for the communist movement. It is obvious that managers enjoy significant social privilege due to their role in administering capitalist production, which rarely produces communist sympathies. However, the matter remains that coordinating efforts between different units of production is itself a highly technical domain of expertise. Even if the social basis for capitalist forms of management is dissolved during communist construction, the need for managerial capacities in general will actually grow in communism rather than diminish, albeit in highly transformed ways. Rather than optimizing production for the singular metric of profitability, communist production will be continually optimized for a balance between a large variety of metrics. What these metrics are and what the optimal balance is between them can only be decided through collective deliberation at different scales. Because the relationships between units of production will involve coordination oriented around these socially-deliberated metrics, rather than through a market that mystifies social coordination in the form of money, it will be necessary to make use of the relevant skills for networked and institutional cooperation that are presently concentrated within the managerial stratum. The skills required to translate abstract or ambiguous goals into tangible, actionable directives and to shepherd their execution over short and long time horizons in complex organizations staffed by a diversity of people will be crucial for communist reconfiguration of production.

Stripped of its distinctly capitalist class character, what is left of managerial expertise will be the starting point for developing a historically novel and distinctly scientific form of social cooperation between institutions on a global scale. Liberated from the imperatives of profit, humanity can choose how to manage its own material existence rather than ceding it to the logic of capital.

Production, in the end, is not so much a black box but rather something very knowable. The central contour of communist construction is the arc of restructuring this essential human capacity. Who currently holds this knowledge? How do we redistribute it? How and where will future knowledge be generated? In building the tangible answers to these questions, communism liberates productive knowledge from its present role as a weapon of class domination. The radiance of collective emancipation illuminates the black box, revealing the shared birthright held captive within. Dismantling the black box is the key to placing humanity’s social metabolism, for the first time, under the collective and deliberate control of the entire human species.

Footnotes

1. Elhacham, E., Ben-Uri, L., Grozovski, J. et al. “Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass.” Nature 588, 442–444 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-3010-5 ↩

2. Phil A. Neel and Nick Chavez, “Forest and Factory: The Science and the Fiction of Communism” Endnotes, 2023, https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/forest-and-factory ↩

3. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (Penguin Classics, 1992), 574-75 ↩

4. Marx, Capital, 279 ↩

5. All statistics cited in this section are sourced from ILO datasets accessed through the World Bank (SL.IND.EMPL.ZS and SL.SRV.EMPL.ZS) ↩

6. Deindustrialization of employment should not be conflated with a reduction in actual material output. ↩

7. For extended discussion, see Phillip Neel, “Broken Circle: Premature Deindustrialization, Chinese Capital Exports, and the Stumbling Development of New Territorial Industrial Complexes” International Labor and Working-Class History 102 (2022): 94–123. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000321. See also David Oks and Henry Williams, “The Long, Slow Death of Global Development,” American Affairs Vol VI, no. 4 (Winter 2022): 122-50. https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/11/the-long-slow-death-of-global-development/ ↩

8. These categories are generalizations. Individual workers may straddle two different categories or move between them throughout their career. In newly proletarianized populations, some workers in the deskilled labor category may even hold highly technical knowledge of craft production methods that are simply not useful in capitalism’s industrial context. ↩

9. For further discussion see Nick Chavez “Technical Expertise and Communist Production,” The Brooklyn Rail, December 2022. https://brooklynrail.org/2022/12/field-notes/Technical-Expertise-and-Communist-Production/ ↩

10. See Nick Chavez, “The Present and Future of Engineers,” The Brooklyn Rail, October 2021. https://brooklynrail.org/2021/10/field-notes/THINKING-ABOUT-COMMUNISM/ ↩

11. Of course, under capitalism all technical matters are inextricably social already. But capitalism deprives the vast majority of people of both the power and knowledge required to participate in the technical decisions that structure their lives. ↩