Session 1: In Conversation – Radical science and STS

Mike: Dave and I have known each other from what we now call the Radical Science Movement in the ‘70s. It had networks, overlapping networks. The British Society for Social Responsibility and Science was one of the parts of the nexus at the time. What was the project, Robin asks? All sorts of things in Marc’s talk resonated. One of the things that resonated strongly was this sense of ‘we don’t know what the hell we’re doing here, we’re going to have to make it up’. As a 20 something year old graduate: ‘I really don’t know what’s going on here, I’m going to have to make some sense of this’.

The thing it turned out I was having to make sense of was the emergence of post-Fordism out of Fordism, a complete transformation of the economy in relation to the state and industry, the nature of labour, class, relationships between the nation’s trade, and so on, and so on. We didn’t know that that’s what we were trying to make sense of at the time. There was this personal sense: I was a working class kid who’d gone off to the university, suddenly found myself a member of the professional managerial class working in a global chemical corporation. After a couple of years I thought ‘hang on a minute, this isn’t right, this isn’t right, there must be something else here’ and so I dived for cover and went back to school and became a Postgraduate at Sussex University doing a Masters in the History and Philosophy of Science, turned my back on engineering, took up the humanities.

But that problem of what is going on here remained. What is the nature of what’s going on here? Although, of course, capitalism and the end of capitalism is the project and the problem, for many of us in this room, the professional managerial class, was that you’re above the problem, part of the problem, and you’re part of the solution. So, being pitched into the professional managerial class the question is how do you act against this class formation and all the other formations that it contributes to? That’s how I would describe it now.

One more resonance with Marc. Marc’s discovery of action research you might call it. At that same sort of time in a very different context at Sussex University as a research postgraduate I was learning very similar things about the production of knowledges How do you produce knowledges? How do you produce capabilities? And realising that knowledges are produced and that we have to understand the production of knowledges because how you organise those things determines what you can know and what your capabilities can be. [Mike produced the major book Living Thinkwork about thinking as labour]. So, I think that in your way there and in my way here we were engaged in that same kind of project.

Coining that term think-work in the 1980s, what I was doing I was taking the Marxian vocabulary of manual labour and thinking you can’t have a book called mental labour, so I used the term living think-work. I was also trying to take a participant kind of anthropological approach: this is work that you’re doing and, you have to go in day-by-day and find something to do which progresses, you have to find something that is transformative rather than confirmative. So that idea of living think-work was more or less a codification of living labour as an Marxian construct.

Mike: I don’t think I ever had a sense of strategies myself. I’ve wandered from place to place on the landscape of wage labour and political organisations and cultural movements, so I don’t think I’ve ever had a strategy or a need to question what’s the next step? So, in response to that kind of question I can say ‘well in the ‘70s I was doing this and in the ‘80s I was doing this and in the ‘90s I was doing that’.

But I learnt something very early on as a PhD researcher in the ‘70s, I decided I was going to look at the emergence of operational research as a branch of management science, as a study of science and ideology. One of the interesting things about operational research was that it came out of cultural formations in the ‘30s and ‘40s of what were called the left scientists in Britain. So, there was a lot of affiliation with communism, with Soviet Russia, the idea that society can be converted rationally, the economy could be organised rationally, there could be science of science, so there was this whole politicised formation in the ‘40s. And during the war these people got involved in the conduct of the war and they did operational research and that was seen as an innovation and in the post-war period people said ‘we must do more of this, it’s really good getting these scientists working on operational issues, it really matters’.

And what I saw in the early ‘70s was this emergent practice still being created. I had a supervisor who had the first chair of operational research, it had clearly become part of the mainstream, where did this left-ness go? It turns out that they were inventing market research, it turns out that they were inventing management science, it turns out they were inventing all this algorithmic stuff that we’re over our heads with now. And what I saw looking back at that left generation was that these people who’d seen themselves as progressives were actually members of a professional managerial class that hadn’t formed properly yet and they just wanted more status, they wanted more funding, they wanted more recognition, they wanted more people like them doing important things.

Basically, what happened with these technocratic people in the ‘40s was they were looking to do things in professional ways and they would organise a better world for all the rest of us. And very quickly in the middle of the ‘70s I kind of knew and said ‘well, you know, that’s no good, you know, that’s a dead loss, that vision of change through science and technology’.

The thing that set me off was the Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards’ Combine Committee. The workers in Lucas Aerospace were looking for ways of retaining their jobs in the face of layoffs and redundancies and closures and they decided that ‘well we know all about these technologies and so we can invent ways of producing socially useful products and of course that’s reasonable so why doesn’t it happen?’ That inspiration took me out of being a graduate student and took me into industry as a trade union organiser.

Marc: Mike’s mention of operational research does resonate. The funny thing is when I started studying at university I didn’t start with economics, I started with this mongrel degree which was an intersection of engineering and the business school and actually one of the main elements was operations research. It’s only after a couple of years that some professor of economic history whose courses I enjoyed enormously said: ‘you like this thing, why are you then in this programme? Do you want to become a manager of Coca-Cola?’ and I was really embarrassed. I switched that year.

But it was rather funny because when we were working in Mozambique in the harbour on the Port Project I actually went back to operations research because I had to think about how do you do container and port management? When a port is 100% full, is too full basically, how to understand what was going on. This is about strategy but I think it’s also about the relation between strategy and tactics.

About the general, if you talk about general strategies you’re not going to get anywhere and that was one of the problems we had in Mozambique. Some people came into the meeting, with big discussions about relations of production and forces of production which didn’t work very well. That’s where I learned that using concrete examples can be incredibly powerful because you’re talking about tactical things. In the Mozambican Miner we met a village leader who preached about socialism and against migrant work: ‘we must build socialism here and stop going to the mines’ and so on. Afterwards he took Ruth First and me for tea at his home and he said: ‘you know it’s hard, it’s very hard, all these people who go to the mines and make money and I have to stay here and build socialism”, you know. In the past I might have thought ‘hey, you know, you are a hypocrite aren’t you?’ but I learned from anthropologists that people do say different things in different context and not because they’re hypocritical, The village leader was committed, and he had his doubts. That is about the particular being more important than the general and tactics trumping strategy maybe.

Mike: The Lucas Aerospace struggle was about trying to build a future. I think that one of the foundations of it was a male labour aristocracy trying to defend its capacity to do what it does best, which is to use skills in a good way, you know. It’s a tremendously powerful motivator, people say ‘I just want to do a good job thank you very much, I want to go home at the end of the day feeling that I’m doing something good with my skills’. And that was a motivation for lots of work in the ‘70s in radical economics, radical mathematics, radical statistics, radical healthcare, all these professionals wanting to do a good day’s work thank you very much, and this was also very part of the motivation behind the working class but also white-collar trade union movement.

And I see it today in young people, I see it in HCI designs, in web designs, people who improve design user experience. There’s a movement for design justice now more in the US than it is here and there are these young people who’ve been through graduate programmes in user experience design and they just want to design good systems and feel useful to people. And I think they’re making the same kind of misjudgement that we did in the ‘70s. You can practice your profession and it can kind of help the world. I think it’s actually part of the problem, not part of the solution. So, the Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards didn’t really believe that you could build a world like they were saying you could with the workers running systems of production. That was a fantasy that they believed in wholeheartedly but I think their strategy was technological agitprop. Basically you say: ‘look, doesn’t this look realistic, doesn’t this look helpful, doesn’t it look nice? But oh dear, it’s not going to work. Why doesn’t it work? Oh it’s capitalism, okay’ and then you start with the real story.

What’s really interesting from that is that in the ‘80s the Greater London Council started to try and figure out how to develop a regionally innovative economy of Greater London and to do it through mechanisms that were called popular planning, the involvement of Londoners in the creation of the economic strategies and transformation of the regional economy. And the principles from Lucas Aerospace became part of that range, the idea that you could have technological innovation institutions in London that would generate alternative technologies that would build transformation. And it just didn’t work at all in that regional economic development setting. You know, the issues like: where’s the purchasing power? The practicality of relations in the market, funding issues. I think the practice that was created at the Greater London Council was not a movement of working people at all, it was a movement of academics who were seen as having spare time with research students who had nothing to do really and you would create this radical space of expertise in London which would be used to create new gadgets that would create a new economy. It did not make any sense at all.

My own personal relationship with that in the ‘80s was that I began to see how male it was, how workerist it was, how terribly populist it was, there was no class analysis at all. And what began to happen was in the field of digital technologies and women’s work and office work. The emergence of digital technologies in white collar workplace was where I found myself moving to, and then you had feminists and you had women and office work, feminised work. I took that direction with technology in the ‘80s and it took me into the Scandinavian traditions of collaborative participatory design of IT systems.