Applied Critical Theory

Introduction

Here we apply Critical Theory to details of various productive segments of civilization, starting with construction.

Based on Critical Theory, A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress. - Marcuse. Further- The social reality in advanced industrial societies is that very sophisticated systems of domination are in place and they are capable of transforming themselves to meet the challenge of any movement for liberation. Ie, in a world of absolute abundance, the myth of scarcity prevails. Here we make observations, towards eradicating such artificial scarcity. The point is to be taken: the mechanisms for scarcity are subtle. Scarcity = unfreedom. Here we explore some of these subtleties.

Construction

• Architects defend the agency of tradespeople by not producing detailed design documents, nor digital automated design, which would eliminate the architect from the equation. The subtlety in this is that this drives labor costs up by a factor of - not only 2 or so - but 5 according to our build data. See Comparison of OSE Build Costs to Industry Standards.

Thugs

There is organized crime which is a specific mechanism of force used for securing a livelihood. Russian kleptocrats, drug lords, military juntas, and mafias fall into this category. Very pernicious it is when such governance is written into the legal system such as in Russia, but subtle hegemony of sophisticated systems - that are widely accepted as legal - has perhaps a much greater negative effect on society. Corruption is only a few percent of the global economy if we judge that lost tax revenue from corruption is about 1% of global GDP? [1]