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authorSilvio Rhatto <rhatto@riseup.net>2018-02-03 15:08:50 -0200
committerSilvio Rhatto <rhatto@riseup.net>2018-02-03 15:08:50 -0200
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Books: One-dimensional man: chapter two
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domination, creating a truly totalitarian universe in which society and nature,
mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of
this universe.
+
+### Revolution
+
+ The classical Marxian theory envisages the transition from capitalism to
+ socialism as a political revolution: the proletariat destroys the political
+ apparatus of capitalism but retains the technological apparatus, subjecting it
+ to socialization. There is continuity in the revolution: technological
+ rationality, freed from irrational restrictions and destructions, sustains and
+ consummates itself in the new society. It is interesting to read a Soviet
+ Marxist statement on this continuity, which is of such vital importance for the
+ notion of socialism as the determinate negation of capitalism
+
+ [...]
+
+ To be sure, Marx held that organization and direction of the productive
+ apparatus by the “immediate producers” would introduce a qualitative change in
+ the technical continuity: namely, production toward the satisfaction of freely
+ developing individual needs. However, to the degree to which the established
+ technical apparatus engulfs the public and private existence in all spheres of
+ society—that is, becomes the medium of control and cohesion in a political
+ universe which incorporates the laboring classes—to that degree would the
+ qualitative change involve a change in the technological structure itself. And
+ such change would presuppose that the laboring classes are alienated from this
+ universe in their very existence, that their consciousness is that of the total
+ impossibility to continue to exist in this universe, so that the need for
+ qualitative change is a matter of life and death. Thus, the negation exists
+ prior to the change itself, the notion that the liberating historical forces
+ develop within the established society is a cornerstone of Marxian theory.2
+
+### Hell
+
+ Those whose life is the hell of the Affluent Society are kept in line by a
+ brutality which revives medieval and early modern practices. For the other,
+ less underprivileged people, society takes care of the need for liberation by
+ satisfying the needs which make servitude palatable and perhaps even
+ unnoticeable, and it accomplishes this fact in the process of production
+ itself.
+
+### Automation
+
+ (1) Mechanization is increasingly reducing the quantity and intensity of physical
+ energy expended in labor. This evolution is of great bearing on the Marxian
+ concept of the worker (proletarian). To Marx, the proletarian is primarily the
+ manual laborer who expends and exhausts his physical energy in the work
+ process, even if he works with machines. The purchase and use of this physical
+ energy, under subhuman conditions, for the private appropriation of
+ surplus-value entailed the revolting inhuman aspects of exploitation; the
+ Marxian notion denounces the physical pain and misery of labor. This is the
+ material, tangible element in wage slavery and alienation—the physiological and
+ biological dimension of classical capitalism.
+
+ “Pendant les siècles passés, une cause importante d’aliénation résidait dans le
+ fait que l’être humain prêtait son individualité biologique à l’organisation
+ technique: il était porteur d’outils; les ensembles techniques ne pouvaient se
+ constituer qu’en incorporant l’homme comme porteur d’outils. Le caractère
+ déformant de la profession était à la fois psychique et somatique.”3
+
+ 3. “During the past centuries, one important reason for alienation was that the
+ human being lent his biological individuality to the technical apparatus: he
+ was the bearer of tools; technical units could not be established without
+ incorporating man as bearer of tools into them. The nature of this occupation
+ was such that it was both psychologically and physiologically deforming in its
+ effect.” Gilbert Simondon, Du Mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris:
+ Aubier, 1958), p. 103, note.
+
+ Now the ever-more-complete mechanization of labor in advanced capitalism, while
+ sustaining exploitation, modifies the attitude and the status of the exploited.
+ Within the technological ensemble, mechanized work in which automatic and
+ semi-automatic reactions fill the larger part (if not the whole) of labor time
+ remains, as a life-long occupation, exhausting, stupefying, inhuman
+ slavery—even more exhausting because of increased speed-up, control of the
+ machine operators (rather than of the product), and isolation of the workers
+ from each other.4 To be sure, this form of drudgery is expressive of arrested,
+ partial automation, of the coexistence of automated, semi-automated, and
+ non-automated sections within the same plant, but even under these conditions,
+ “for muscular fatigue technology has substituted tension and/or mental
+ effort.”5 For the more advanced automated plants, the transformation of
+ physical energy into technical and mental skills is emphasized:
+
+ “… skills of the head rather than of the hand, of the logician rather than the
+ craftsman; of nerve rather than muscle; of the pilot rather than the manual
+ worker; of the maintenance man rather than the operator.”6
+
+ This kind of masterly enslavement is not essentially different from that of the
+ typist, the bank teller, the high-pressure salesman or saleswoman, and the
+ television announcer. Standardization and the routine assimilate productive and
+ non-productive jobs. The proletarian of the previous stages of capitalism was
+ indeed the beast of burden, by the labor of his body procuring the necessities
+ and luxuries of life while living in filth and poverty. Thus he was the living
+ denial of his society.7 In contrast, the organized worker in the advanced areas
+ of the technological society lives this denial less conspicuously and, like the
+ other human objects of the social division of labor, he is being incorporated
+ into the technological community of the administered population. Moreover, in
+ the most successful areas of automation, some sort of technological community
+ seems to integrate the human atoms at work. The machine seems to instill some
+ drugging rhythm in the operators:
+
+ “It is generally agreed that interdependent motions performed by a group of
+ persons which follow a rhythmic pattern yield satisfaction—quite apart from
+ what is being accomplished by the motions”;8 and the sociologist-observer
+ believes this to be a reason for the gradual development of a “general climate”
+ more “favorable both to production and to certain important kinds of human
+ satisfaction.” He speaks of the “growth of a strong in-group feeling in each
+ crew” and quotes one worker as stating: “All in all we are in the swing of
+ things …”9
+
+ The phrase admirably expresses the change in mechanized enslavement:
+ things swing rather than oppress, and they swing the human instrument—not only
+ its body but also its mind and even its soul. A remark by Sartre elucidates the
+ depth of the process:
+
+ “Aux premiers temps des machines semi-automatiques, des enquêtes ont montré que
+ les ouvrières spécialisées se laissaient aller, en travaillant, à une rêverie
+ d’ordre sexuel, elles se rappellaient la chambre, le lit, la nuit, tout ce qui
+ ne concerne que la personne dans la solitude du couple fermé sur soi. Mais
+ c’est la machine en elle qui rêvait de caresses.…”10 The machine process in the
+ technological universe breaks the innermost privacy of freedom and joins
+ sexuality and labor in one unconscious, rhythmic automatism—a process which
+ parallels the assimilation of jobs.10
+
+ 10. “Shortly after semi-automatic machines were introduced, investigations
+ showed that female skilled workers would allow themselves to lapse while
+ working into a sexual kind of daydream; they would recall the bedroom, the bed,
+ the night and all that concerns only the person within the solitude of the
+ couple alone with itself. But it was the machine in her which was dreaming of
+ caresses …” Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, tome I (Paris:
+ Gallimard, 1960), p. 290.
+
+ The machine process in the technological universe breaks the innermost privacy
+ of freedom and joins sexuality and labor in one unconscious, rhythmic
+ automatism—a process which parallels the assimilation of jobs.
+
+ [...]
+
+ (2) The assimilating trend shows forth in the occupational stratification. In
+ the key industrial establishments, the “blue-collar” work force declines in
+ relation to the “white-collar” element; the number of non-production workers
+ increases.11 This quantitative change refers back to a change in the character
+ of the basic instruments of production.12 At the advanced stage of
+ mechanization, as part of the technological reality, the machine is not
+
+ “une unité absolue, mais seulement une réalité technique individualisée,
+ ouverte selon deux voies: celle de la relation aux éléments, et celle des
+ relations interindividuelles dans l’ensemble technique.”13
+
+ 13. “an absolute unity, but only an individualized technical reality open in
+ two directions, that of the relation to the elements and that of the relation
+ among the individuals in the technical whole.” Gilbert Simondon, loc. cit., p.
+ 146.
+
+ [...]
+
+ To the extent to which the machine becomes itself a system of mechanical tools
+ and relations and thus extends far beyond the individual work process, it
+ asserts its larger dominion by reducing the “professional autonomy” of the
+ laborer and integrating him with other professions which suffer and direct the
+ technical ensemble. To be sure, the former “professional” autonomy of the
+ laborer was rather his professional enslavement. But this specific mode of
+ enslavement was at the same time the source of his specific, professional power
+ of negation—the power to stop a process which threatened him with annihilation
+ as a human being. Now the laborer is losing the professional autonomy which
+ made him a member of a class set off from the other occupational groups because
+ it embodied the refutation of the established society.
+
+ The technological change which tends to do away with the machine as individual
+ instrument of production, as “absolute unit,” seems to cancel the Marxian
+ notion of the “organic composition of capital” and with it the theory of the
+ creation of surplus value. According to Marx, the machine never creates value
+ but merely transfers its own value to the product, while surplus value remains
+ the result of the exploitation of living labor. The machine is embodiment of
+ human labor power, and through it, past labor (dead labor) preserves itself and
+ determines living labor. Now automation seems to alter qualitatively the
+ relation between dead and living labor; it tends toward the point where
+ productivity is determined “by the machines, and not by the individual
+ output.”14 Moreover, the very measurement of individual output becomes
+ impossible:
+
+ “Automation in its largest sense means, in effect, the end of measurement of
+ work.… With automation, you can’t measure output of a single man; you now have
+ to measure simply equipment utilization. If that is generalized as a kind of
+ concept … there is no longer, for example, any reason at all to pay a man by
+ the piece or pay him by the hour,” that is to say, there is no more reason to
+ keep up the “dual pay system” of salaries and wages.”15
+
+ Daniel Bell, the author of this report, goes further; he links this
+ technological change to the historical system of industrialization itself: the
+ meaning of industrialization did not arise with the introduction of factories,
+ it “arose out of the measurement of work. It’s when work can be measured, when
+ you can hitch a man to the job, when you can put a harness on him, and measure
+ his output in terms of a single piece and pay him by the piece or by the hour,
+ that you have got modern industrialization.”16
+
+### Servitude
+
+ (4) The new technological work-world thus enforces a weakening of the negative
+ position of the working class: the latter no longer appears to be the living
+ contradiction to the established society. This trend is strengthened by the
+ effect of the technological organization of production on the other side of the
+ fence: on management and direction. Domination is transfigured into
+ administration.21 The capitalist bosses and owners are losing their identity as
+ responsible agents; they are assuming the function of bureaucrats in a
+ corporate machine. Within the vast hierarchy of executive and managerial boards
+ extending far beyond the individual establishment into the scientific
+ laboratory and research institute, the national government and national
+ purpose, the tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of
+ objective rationality. Hatred and frustration are deprived of their specific
+ target, and the technological veil conceals the reproduction of inequality and
+ enslavement.22 With technical progress as its instrument, unfreedom—in the
+ sense of man’s subjection to his productive apparatus—is perpetuated and
+ intensified in the form of many liberties and comforts. The novel feature is
+ the overwhelming rationality in this irrational enterprise, and the depth of
+ the preconditioning which shapes the instinctual drives and aspirations of the
+ individuals and obscures the difference between false and true consciousness.
+ For in reality, neither the utilization of administrative rather than physical
+ controls (hunger, personal dependence, force), nor the change in the character
+ of heavy work, nor the assimilation of occupational classes, nor the
+ equalization in the sphere of consumption compensate for the fact that the
+ decisions over life and death, over personal and national security are made at
+ places over which the individuals have no control. The slaves of developed
+ industrial civilization are sublimated slaves, but they are slaves, for slavery
+ is determined
+
+ “pas par l’obéissance, ni par la rudesse des labeurs, mais par le statu
+ d’instrument et la réduction de l’homme à l’état de chose.”23
+
+ 23. “neither by obedience nor by hardness of labor but by the status of being a
+ mere instrument, and the reduction of man to the state of a thing.” François
+ Perroux, La Coexistence pacifique, (Paris, Presses Universitaires, 1958), vol.
+ III, p. 600.
+
+ This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument, as a thing. And
+ this mode of existence is not abrogated if the thing is animated and chooses
+ its material and intellectual food, if it does not feel its being-a-thing, if
+ it is a pretty, clean, mobile thing. Conversely, as reification tends to become
+ totalitarian by virtue of its technological form, the organizers and
+ administrators themselves become increasingly dependent on the machinery which
+ they organize and administer. And this mutual dependence is no longer the
+ dialectical relationship between Master and Servant, which has been broken in
+ the struggle for mutual recognition, but rather a vicious circle which encloses
+ both the Master and the Servant. Do the technicians rule, or is their rule that
+ of the others, who rely on the technicians as their planners and executors?
+
+ [...]
+
+ A vicious circle seems indeed the proper image of a society which is
+ self-expanding and self-perpetuating in its own preestablished direction—driven
+ by the growing needs which it generates and, at the same time, contains.