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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.
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