Flávio Chedid Henriques, Felipe Addor, André Malina and Celso Alexandre Souza de Alvear (eds.), Tecnologia para o desenvolvimento social: Diálogos Nides-UFRJ, Marília: Lutas Anticapital, 2018, 457 pp. ISBN: 978-85-53104-06-2.
Tecnologia para o desenvolvimento social: Diálogos Nides-UFRJ is a collective work that examines the relationships between technology, labour, self-management, and social development. Emerging from the research, teaching, and extension activities of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Social Development (NIDES) at UFRJ, the book covers a broad range of topics, from critical technology studies and the solidarity economy to workers’ self-management, agroecology, race and gender, and polytechnic education. One of the collection’s common starting points is the idea that science and technology are neither neutral nor independent of social relations, and that it is therefore necessary to place at the centre of analysis the question of which social needs, actors, and relations of production technological development serves.
The first part of the book is devoted particularly to a critique of the capitalist model of technological development. Alongside the relationships between technology, energy, and hegemony, it addresses Henrique Tahan Novaes’s approach to critical technoscience, Renato Dagnino’s discussion of “engineering beyond capital,” and workers’ resistance in the sphere of production in Brazil. In this way, the contributions seek to show that technological choices are not determined solely by technical efficiency, but are connected to relations of production, power, capital accumulation, and control over the labour process.
This framework is directly connected in the book to the discussion of the solidarity economy and self-management. According to the editors, the contribution of the solidarity economy is not limited to developing collective, cooperative, and solidaristic economic relations; self-management must also be extended to the very process through which technologies are developed. Alternative forms of production are therefore considered not only in terms of changing the ownership of the means of production or the management structures of enterprises, but also in terms of who produces productive knowledge and technological decisions and how these are created.
One of the book’s most concrete examples from the perspective of workers’ self-management is the experience of self-management at the Cooperminas coal enterprise. Through NIDES’s work with this enterprise, the book examines both the possibilities and the limits faced by an associated collective of workers in managing production collectively. As the editors emphasise, the case is used to assess the “advances and limits” of workers’ collective management. Self-management is thus approached not simply as an alternative form of ownership, but as a contradictory process aimed at transforming workers’ control over the production process, organisation, and technological knowledge.
The collection also extends the discussion of technology towards the relationship of knowledge production between the university and workers, social movements, and local communities. In the NIDES experience, action research and participatory methods are seen as means of incorporating popular knowledge into the process of technological design. Instead of a one-way model in which technologies developed by experts are transferred to society, this approach proposes a relationship in which technical knowledge is produced together with different social actors. In the later sections of the book, this perspective is broadened to include agroecology, traditional peoples, race and gender, as well as labour and polytechnic education.
In these respects, Tecnologia para o desenvolvimento social is an important resource that connects the discussion of workers’ control and self-management with the question of democratic control over technology and productive knowledge. The book brings together different theoretical and practical contributions showing that alternative relations of production require transformations not only in forms of ownership and management, but also in the processes through which technology is designed, developed, and used. In doing so, it establishes connections between workers’ self-management, the solidarity economy, and social technology, while framing one of its central questions in terms of by whom, together with whom, and for what social purposes technological knowledge is produced.