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.