one-dimensional-man.md

[[!meta title="One-Dimensional Man"]]

* Author: Hebert Marcuse

## Snippets

### Intro

    From the beginning, any critical theory of society is thus confronted with the
    problem of historical objectivity, a problem which arises at the two points
    where the analysis implies value judgments:

    1. the judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can be and ought to
    be made worth living. This judgment underlies all intellectual effort; it is
    the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical)
    rejects theory itself;

    2. the judgment that, in a given society, specific possibilities exist for the
    amelioration of human life and specific ways and means of realizing these
    possibilities. Critical analysis has to demonstrate the objective validity of
    these judgments, and the demonstration has to proceed on empirical grounds. The
    established society has available an ascertainable quantity and quality of
    intellectual and material resources. How can these resources be used for the
    optimal development and satisfaction of individual needs and faculties with a
    minimum of toil and misery? Social theory is historical theory, and history is
    the realm of chance in the realm of necessity. Therefore, among the various
    possible and actual modes of organizing and utilizing the available resources,
    which ones offer the greatest chance of an optimal development?

    [...]

    The “possibilities” must be within the reach of the respective society; they
    must be definable goals of practice. By the same token, the abstraction from
    the established institutions must be expressive of an actual tendency—that is,
    their transformation must be the real need of the underlying population. Social
    theory is concerned with the historical alternatives which haunt the
    established society as subversive tendencies and forces. The values attached to
    the alternatives do become facts when they are translated into reality by
    historical practice. The theoretical concepts terminate with social change.

    But here, advanced industrial society confronts the critique with a situation
    which seems to deprive it of its very basis. Technical progress, extended to a
    whole system of domination and coordination, creates forms of life (and of
    power) which appear to reconcile the forces opposing the system and to defeat
    or refute all protest in the name of the historical prospects of freedom from
    toil and domination. Contemporary society seems to be capable of containing
    social change—qualitative change which would establish essentially different
    institutions, a new direction of the productive process, new modes of human
    existence.

    [...]

    As a technological universe, advanced industrial society is a political
    universe, the latest stage in the realization of a specific historical
    project—namely, the experience, transformation, and organization of nature as
    the mere stuff of domination.

    As the project unfolds, it shapes the entire universe of discourse and action,
    intellectual and material culture. In the medium of technology, culture,
    politics, and the economy merge into an omnipresent system which swallows up or
    repulses all alternatives. The productivity and growth potential of this system
    stabilize the society and contain technical progress within the framework of
    domination. Technological rationality has become political rationality.

### Freedom in negative terms

    Contemporary industrial civilization demonstrates that it has reached the stage
    at which “the free society” can no longer be adequately defined in the
    traditional terms of economic, political, and intellectual liberties, not
    because these liberties have become insignificant, but because they are too
    significant to be confined within the traditional forms. New modes of
    realization are needed, corresponding to the new capabilities of society.

    Such new modes can be indicated only in negative terms because they would
    amount to the negation of the prevailing modes. Thus economic freedom would
    mean freedom from the economy—from being controlled by economic forces and
    relationships; freedom from the daily struggle for existence, from earning a
    living. Political freedom would mean liberation of the individuals from
    politics over which they have no effective control. Similarly, intellectual
    freedom would mean the restoration of individual thought now absorbed by mass
    communication and indoctrination, abolition of “public opinion” together with
    its makers. The unrealistic sound of these propositions is indicative, not of
    their utopian character, but of the strength of the forces which prevent their
    realization. The most effective and enduring form of warfare against liberation
    is the implanting of material and intellectual needs that perpetuate obsolete
    forms of the struggle for existence.

    The intensity, the satisfaction and even the character of human needs, beyond
    the biological level, have always been preconditioned. Whether or not the
    possibility of doing or leaving, enjoying or destroying, possessing or
    rejecting something is seized as a need depends on whether or not it can be
    seen as desirable and necessary for the prevailing societal institutions and
    interests. In this sense, human needs are historical needs and, to the extent
    to which the society demands the repressive development of the individual, his
    needs themselves and their claim for satisfaction are subject to overriding
    critical standards.

### The irrationality of the rational

    We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced
    industrial civilization: the rational character of its irrationality. Its
    productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to
    turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which
    this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man’s mind
    and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable.

    [...]

    But in the contemporary period, the technological controls appear to be the
    very embodiment of Reason for the benefit of all social groups and interests—to
    such an extent that all contradiction seems irrational and all counteraction
    impossible.

    No wonder then that, in the most advanced areas of this civilization, the
    social controls have been introjected to the point where even individual
    protest is affected at its roots. The intellectual and emotional refusal “to go
    along” appears neurotic and impotent.

    [...]

    But the term “introjection” perhaps no longer describes the way in which the
    individual by himself reproduces and perpetuates the external controls
    exercised by his society. Introjection suggests a variety of relatively
    spontaneous processes by which a Self (Ego) transposes the “outer” into the
    “inner.” Thus introjection implies the existence of an inner dimension
    distinguished from and even antagonistic to the external exigencies—an
    individual consciousness and an individual unconscious apart from public
    opinion and behavior.3 The idea of “inner freedom” here has its reality: it
    designates the private space in which man may become and remain “himself.”

    Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological
    reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and
    industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory. The
    manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical
    reactions. The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate
    identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with the
    society as a whole.

### One-dimensionality

    Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior in which ideas,
    aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established
    universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of
    this universe. They are redefined by the rationality of the given system and of
    its quantitative extension.

    The trend may be related to a development in scientific method: operationalism
    in the physical, behaviorism in the social sciences. The common feature is a
    total empiricism in the treatment of concepts; their meaning is restricted to
    the representation of particular operations and behavior. The operational point
    of view is well illustrated by P. W. Bridgman’s analysis of the concept of
    length:5

        We evidently know what we mean by length if we can tell what the length of any
        and every object is, and for the physicist nothing more is required. To find
        the length of an object, we have to perform certain physical operations. The
        concept of length is therefore fixed when the operations by which length is
        measured are fixed: that is, the concept of length involves as much and nothing
        more than the set of operations by which length is determined. In general, we
        mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is
        synonymous with the corresponding set of operations.

    Bridgman has seen the wide implications of this mode of thought for the society
    at large:6

        To adopt the operational point of view involves much more than a mere
        restriction of the sense in which we understand ‘concept,’ but means a
        far-reaching change in all our habits of thought, in that we shall no longer
        permit ourselves to use as tools in our thinking concepts of which we cannot
        give an adequate account in terms of operations.

    Bridgman’s prediction has come true. The new mode of thought is today the
    predominant tendency in philosophy, psychology, sociology, and other fields.
    Many of the most seriously troublesome concepts are being “eliminated” by
    showing that no adequate account of them in terms of operations or behavior can
    be given.

    [...]

    Outside the academic establishment, the “far-reaching change in all our habits
    of thought” is more serious. It serves to coordinate ideas and goals with those
    exacted by the prevailing system, to enclose them in the system, and to repel
    those which are irreconcilable with the system. The reign of such a
    one-dimensional reality does not mean that materialism rules, and that the
    spiritual, metaphysical, and bohemian occupations are petering out. On the
    contrary, there is a great deal of “Worship together this week,” “Why not try
    God,” Zen, existentialism, and beat ways of life, etc. But such modes of
    protest and transcendence are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no
    longer negative. They are rather the ceremonial part of practical behaviorism,
    its harmless negation, and are quickly digested by the status quo as part of
    its healthy diet.

    [...]

    Such limitation of thought is certainly not new. Ascending modern rationalism,
    in its speculative as well as empirical form, shows a striking contrast between
    extreme critical radicalism in scientific and philosophic method on the one
    hand, and an uncritical quietism in the attitude toward established and
    functioning social institutions. Thus Descartes’ ego cogitans was to leave the
    “great public bodies” untouched, and Hobbes held that “the present ought always
    to be preferred, maintained, and accounted best.” Kant agreed with Locke in
    justifying revolution if and when it has succeeded in organizing the whole and
    in preventing subversion.

### Progress, abolition of labor, totalitarianism

    The society bars a whole type of oppositional operations and behavior;
    consequently, the concepts pertaining to them are rendered illusory or
    meaningless. Historical transcendence appears as metaphysical transcendence,
    not acceptable to science and scientific thought. The operational and
    behavioral point of view, practiced as a “habit of thought” at large, becomes
    the view of the established universe of discourse and action, needs and
    aspirations.

    “Progress” is not a neutral term; it moves toward specific ends, and these ends
    are defined by the possibilities of ameliorating the human condition. Advanced
    industrial society is approaching the stage where continued progress would
    demand the radical subversion of the prevailing direction and organization of
    progress. This stage would be reached when material production (including the
    necessary services) becomes automated to the extent that all vital needs can be
    satisfied while necessary labor time is reduced to marginal time. From this
    point on, technical progress would transcend the realm of necessity, where it
    served as the instrument of domination and exploitation which thereby limited
    its rationality; technology would become subject to the free play of faculties
    in the struggle for the pacification of nature and of society.

    Such a state is envisioned in Marx’s notion of the “abolition of labor.” The
    term “pacification of existence” seems better suited to designate the
    historical alternative of a world which—through an international conflict which
    transforms and suspends the contradictions within the established
    societies—advances on the brink of a global war. “Pacification of existence”
    means the development of man’s struggle with man and with nature, under
    conditions where the competing needs, desires, and aspirations are no longer
    organized by vested interests in domination and scarcity—an organization which
    perpetuates the destructive forms of this struggle.

    Today’s fight against this historical alternative finds a firm mass basis in
    the underlying population, and finds its ideology in the rigid orientation of
    thought and behavior to the given universe of facts. Validated by the
    accomplishments of science and technology, justified by its growing
    productivity, the status quo defies all transcendence. Faced with the
    possibility of pacification on the grounds of its technical and intellectual
    achievements, the mature industrial society closes itself against this
    alternative. Operationalism, in theory and practice, becomes the theory and
    practice of containment. Underneath its obvious dynamics, this society is a
    thoroughly static system of life: self-propelling in its oppressive
    productivity and in its beneficial coordination. Containment of technical
    progress goes hand in hand with its growth in the established direction. In
    spite of the political fetters imposed by the status quo, the more technology
    appears capable of creating the conditions for pacification, the more are the
    minds and bodies of man organized against this alternative.

    The most advanced areas of industrial society exhibit throughout these two
    features: a trend toward consummation of technological rationality, and
    intensive efforts to contain this trend within the established institutions.
    Here is the internal contradiction of this civilization: the irrational element
    in its rationality. It is the token of its achievements. The industrial society
    which makes technology and science its own is organized for the
    ever-more-effective domination of man and nature, for the ever-more-effective
    utilization of its resources. It becomes irrational when the success of these
    efforts opens new dimensions of human realization. Organization for peace is
    different from organization for war; the institutions which served the struggle
    for existence cannot serve the pacification of existence. Life as an end is
    qualitatively different from life as a means.

    [...]

    Qualitative change also involves a change in the technical basis on which this
    society rests—one which sustains the economic and political institutions
    through which the “second nature” of man as an aggressive object of
    administration is stabilized.

    [...]

    To be sure, labor must precede the reduction of labor, and industrialization
    must precede the development of human needs and satisfactions. But as all
    freedom depends on the conquest of alien necessity, the realization of freedom
    depends on the techniques of this conquest. The highest productivity of labor
    can be used for the perpetuation of labor, and the most efficient
    industrialization can serve the restriction and manipulation of needs.

    When this point is reached, domination—in the guise of affluence and
    liberty—extends to all spheres of private and public existence, integrates all
    authentic opposition, absorbs all alternatives. Technological rationality
    reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better
    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.