Scholarship at UWindsor

Kropotkin, Expropriation, and Technologies of Oppression

Beginning with revolutionary political theory, drawing heavily on the anarcho-communism of the late nineteenth-century author Peter Kropotkin, this paper explores the problem of liberation from within oppressive technological systems.

Leftist theory often calls for the expropriation of the means of production, meaning, in practical terms, the seizure of technical systems. A clear conception of technology, however, must recognize that technical systems themselves have political values embedded into them. A clear revolutionary praxis must, therefore, account for the oppressive politics embedded in technology, and provide a scheme for the liberation from those systems, which nonetheless fulfills the goal of economic liberation by means of distributing the products of those systems. This paper begins the work of constructing this scheme by reconciling Kropotkin's views on technology and technological inheritance with theories drawn from more recent philosophy of technology.