As a profession, engineering is the concrete manifestation of the bourgeois impulse to utilize science in service of maximizing profit. But how does this actually work? What is the procedure by which technical theory and practice materialize?

Engineering is fundamentally a process of mediating interplay between models and phenomena.

This essay will do two things. The first is to elucidate the fundamentally materialist kernel of the engineering process and its compatibility with a communist outlook. The second is to describe the relationship between engineering, both as an abstract process and as a profession made up of real people, to the communist project.

There is never such a thing as purely technical phenomena, except in our models. All technical matters are actually socially contingent, and social contingency is by nature political. The social context in which technologies are developed and deployed is inseparable from not only the qualitative character of that technology, but from the effects that technology has on societal matters. If to engineer is to mediate the interplay between model and phenomena, then engineering is to mediate the interplay between model and the combined socio-technical contextual specificity of this phenomena.

Engineering as a methodology thus contains a fundamentally materialist kernel, even if its present incarnation as a bourgeois science drives engineers to think and behave otherwise.

The structuring logic of the contemporary human metabolism with the non-human world, of contemporary human productive activity, is capitalism. To free humanity from servitude to capital accumulation, communists must restructure this productive activity along new lines of human wellbeing and cooperation rather than profit. This metabolic system contains and is conditioned by the planetary-scale industrial apparatus through which most goods are now produced. To restructure this global machine for human - rather than capitalist - ends, requires communist engineers. Engineers not only embody a significant concentration of the technical expertise required for this task, but also come prepackaged with a methodology that, once reformulated along the lines of its latent materialism, is amenable to this restructuring.

Complexity is expensive to manage, and when it cannot be managed solely with a machine it is managed with a worker paid to act like a machine. All labor power, no matter how skilled, is rendered interfaceable with industrial processes only when it is modeled as a commodity as manipulable, controllable, and interchangeable as any other. It is here that engineering is most deeply afflicted by what Marx called commodity fetishism: the obfuscation of social relations behind the appearance of a society comprised of relations between inhuman things, such as money and commodities.

For engineering to take on a specifically communist character its practitioners must do two things. First, the scope of phenomena to be modeled must extend beyond that which appears solely technical into the realm of social relations. Secondly the engineers must adopt as their goal the dissolution of capitalism in favor of a social system where production is a deliberate, collectively-driven process capable of modeling and accounting for phenomena

Engineers trained in the more classical7 disciplines of mechanical, electrical, chemical, and civil engineering tend to differ about whether or not software engineering is considered “true” engineering.

When faced with uncooperative phenomena (downstream software, user behavior, hardware latency, etc.) the software engineer can conjure more software to handle these contingencies at a high level of abstraction rather than implementing solutions more proximate to the phenomena itself. Instead of being forced from the model back down to Earth by the phenomena, the software engineer has the option to simply ascend higher and further. An orbital velocity can be reached where all work performed is in various stratospheric layers of high abstraction all within manipulable grasp of the software engineer’s IDE.

In software work it is the engineers who are best trained to resist the allure of intoxicating escape into deep abstraction.

My proposal is that communists should think more like engineers.

The beauty of the engineering method, of mediating abstraction and phenomena towards a desired goal, is the way that the engineer is forced to retain fidelity to the world as it exists, not simply the way we want it to exist.

Understanding the collective grievances of your coworkers,12 for instance, is not very different to characterizing a subsystem in a gas turbine.

Engineers, who sit at the apex of this technical expertise stratification, hold a very key position for any political project aiming to reconfigure society on the social-technical axis.

What can be said with near certainty is that a revolution that does not have substantial participation from engineers is doomed to fail at implementing communism.

The material basis for communism is not proletarian rage or mass-scale dispossession, it is centuries of labor now embodied in the form of fixed capital: machinery, buildings, global productive infrastructure, and countless commodities.