Books: One-dimensional man: conclusion

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     become part of socially necessary labor—necessary in the sense that without it,
     the established mode of production could not be sustained. Neither problems of
     psychology nor of aesthetics are at stake, but the material base of domination.
+
+### Imagination
+
+    In reducing and even canceling the romantic space of imagination, society has
+    forced the imagination to prove itself on new grounds, on which the images are
+    translated into historical capabilities and projects. The translation will be
+    as bad and distorted as the society which undertakes it. Separated from the
+    realm of material production and material needs, imagination was mere play,
+    invalid in the realm of necessity, and committed only to a fantastic logic and
+    a fantastic truth. When technical progress cancels this separation, it invests
+    the images with its own logic and its own truth; it reduces the free faculty of
+    the mind. But it also reduces the gap between imagination and Reason. The two
+    antagonistic faculties become interdependent on common ground. In the light of
+    the capabilities of advanced industrial civilization, is not all play of the
+    imagination playing with technical possibilities, which can be tested as to
+    their chances of realization? The romantic idea of a “science of the
+    Imagination” seems to assume an ever-more-empirical aspect.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Imagination has not remained immune to the process of reification. We are
+    possessed by our images, suffer our own images. Psychoanalysis knew it well,
+    and knew the consequences. However, “to give to the imagination all the means
+    of expression” would be regression. The mutilated individuals (mutilated also
+    in their faculty of imagination) would organize and destroy even more than they
+    are now permitted to do. Such release would be the unmitigated horror—not the
+    catastrophe of culture, but the free sweep of its most repressive tendencies.
+    Rational is the imagination which can become the a priori of the reconstruction
+    and redirection of the productive apparatus toward a pacified existence, a life
+    without fear. And this can never be the imagination of those who are possessed
+    by the images of domination and death.
+
+    To liberate the imagination so that it can be given all its means of expression
+    presupposes the repression of much that is now free and that perpetuates a
+    repressive society. And such reversal is not a matter of psychology or ethics
+    but of politics, in the sense in which this term has here been used throughout:
+    the practice in which the basic societal institutions are developed, defined,
+    sustained, and changed. It is the practice of individuals, no matter how
+    organized they may be. Thus the question once again must be faced: how can the
+    administered individuals—who have made their mutilation into their own
+    liberties and satisfactions, and thus reproduce it on an enlarged
+    scale—liberate themselves from themselves as well as from their masters? How is
+    it even thinkable that the vicious circle be broken?
+
+### Qualitative Change
+
+    Qualitative change is conditional upon planning for the whole against these
+    interests, and a free and rational society can emerge only on this basis.
+
+    The institutions within which pacification can be envisaged thus defy the
+    traditional classification into authoritarian and democratic, centralized and
+    liberal administration. Today, the opposition to central planning in the name
+    of a liberal democracy which is denied in reality serves as an ideological prop
+    for repressive interests. The goal of authentic self-determination by the
+    individuals depends on effective social control over the production and
+    distribution of the necessities (in terms of the achieved level of culture,
+    material and intellectual).
+
+    Here, technological rationality, stripped of its exploitative features, is the
+    sole standard and guide in planning and developing the available resources for
+    all. Self-determination in the production and distribution of vital goods and
+    services would be wasteful. The job is a technical one, and as a truly
+    technical job, it makes for the reduction of physical and mental toil. In this
+    realm, centralized control is rational if it establishes the preconditions for
+    meaningful self-determination. The latter can then become effective in its own
+    realm—in the decisions which involve the production and distribution of the
+    economic surplus, and in the individual existence.
+
+    In any case, the combination of centralized authority and direct democracy is
+    subject to infinite variations, according to the degree of development.
+    Self-determination will be real to the extent to which the masses have been
+    dissolved into individuals liberated from all propaganda, indoctrination, and
+    manipulation, capable of knowing and comprehending the facts and of evaluating
+    the alternatives. In other words, society would be rational and free to the
+    extent to which it is organized, sustained, and reproduced by an essentially
+    new historical Subject.
+
+    At the present stage of development of the advanced industrial societies, the
+    material as well as the cultural system denies this exigency. The power and
+    efficiency of this system, the thorough assimilation of mind with fact, of
+    thought with required behavior, of aspirations with reality, militate against
+    the emergence of a new Subject. They also militate against the notion that the
+    replacement of the prevailing control over the productive process by “control
+    from below” would mean the advent of qualitative change. This notion was valid,
+    and still is valid, where the laborers were, and still are, the living denial
+    and indictment of the established society. However, where these classes have
+    become a prop of the established way of life, their ascent to control would
+    prolong this way in a different setting.  And yet, the facts are all there
+    which validate the critical theory of this society and of its fatal
+    development: the increasing irrationality of the whole; waste and restriction
+    of productivity; the need for aggressive expansion; the constant threat of war;
+    intensified exploitation; dehumanization. And they all point to the historical
+    alternative: the planned utilization of resources for the satisfaction of vital
+    needs with a minimum of toil, the transformation of leisure into free time, the
+    pacification of the struggle for existence.
+
+### What brings chance: practice
+
+    Dialectical theory is not refuted, but it cannot offer the remedy. It cannot be
+    positive. To be sure, the dialectical concept, in comprehending the given
+    facts, transcends the given facts. This is the very token of its truth. It
+    defines the historical possibilities, even necessities; but their realization
+    can only be in the practice which responds to the theory, and, at present, the
+    practice gives no such response.
+
+    On theoretical as well as empirical grounds, the dialectical concept pronounces
+    its own hopelessness. The human reality is its history and, in it,
+    contradictions do not explode by themselves. The conflict between streamlined,
+    rewarding domination on the one hand, and its achievements that make for
+    self-determination and pacification on the other, may become blatant beyond any
+    possible denial, but it may well continue to be a manageable and even
+    productive conflict, for with the growth in the technological conquest of
+    nature grows the conquest of man by man. And this conquest reduces the freedom
+    which is a necessary a priori of liberation. This is freedom of thought in the
+    only sense in which thought can be free in the administered world—as the
+    consciousness of its repressive productivity, and as the absolute need for
+    breaking out of this whole. But precisely this absolute need does not prevail
+    where it could become the driving force of a historical practice, the effective
+    cause of qualitative change. Without this material force, even the most acute
+    consciousness remains powerless.
+
+    No matter how obvious the irrational character of the whole may manifest itself
+    and, with it, the necessity of change, insight into necessity has never
+    sufficed for seizing the possible alternatives. Confronted with the omnipresent
+    efficiency of the given system of life, its alternatives have always appeared
+    utopian. And insight into necessity, the consciousness of the evil state, will
+    not suffice even at the stage where the accomplishments of science and the
+    level of productivity have eliminated the utopian features of the
+    alternatives—where the established reality rather than its opposite is utopian.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The enchained possibilities of advanced industrial societies are: development
+    of the productive forces on an enlarged scale, extension of the conquest of
+    nature, growing satisfaction of needs for a growing number of people, creation
+    of new needs and faculties. But these possibilities are gradually being
+    realized through means and institutions which cancel their liberating
+    potential, and this process affects not only the means but also the ends. The
+    instruments of productivity and progress, organized into a totalitarian system,
+    determine not only the actual but also the possible utilizations.
+
+    [...]
+
+    But the struggle for the solution has outgrown the traditional forms. The
+    totalitarian tendencies of the one-dimensional society render the traditional
+    ways and means of protest ineffective—perhaps even dangerous because they
+    preserve the illusion of popular sovereignty. This illusion contains some
+    truth: “the people,” previously the ferment of social change, have “moved up”
+    to become the ferment of social cohesion. Here rather than in the
+    redistribution of wealth and equalization of classes is the new stratification
+    characteristic of advanced industrial society.