File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0107, message 180


Date: Sun, 08 Jul 2001 09:37:47 -0400
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Re: Hardt-Negri's Empire: a critique, part one


matteomandarini-AT-aol.com wrote:  on the other hand, from most of your
comments so far on this list, none of  the transformations in the mode of
production since the beginnings of fordism  appear to have had any
influence on your thinking... 

-----

To the contrary. I think that works like Lyotard's "Postmodernist
Condition" and Herbert Marcuse's "One Dimensional Man" are worth reading.
Speaking as somebody who has worked a computer programmer for 33 years,
this whole question of the transformation from a smokestack based economy
to an information one is quite relevant to my personal experience. Here are
some notes on Marcuse's book.

One of the reasons that "One Dimensional Man" is such a big advance over
other Frankfurt works like "Dialectics of Enlightenment" is that Marcuse
had gotten his sea legs in this crazy society. Adorno and Horkheimer must
have felt like the Indian in "Brave New World" when they set foot on US
soil: bewildered and angry. They spend all their time railing against
Donald Duck and Bing Crosby. 

Marcuse had spent a few years getting the lay of the land when he wrote
"One Dimensional Man" and it shows. It is one of the most deeply perceptive
studies of American society that I have read anywhere. No wonder it had
such a big impact on political thinking in the 1960s. 

I want to take a close look at a passage with the subheading "Containment
of Social Change" that appears in the first section of the work titled "One
Dimensional Society". It addresses the concerns of our cyberseminar in the
most fundamental way. I will explain why the words are profoundly true for
the period of capitalism we are *still* passing through. Then I will
conclude with some comments why they won't do for all time. 

Marcuse defines the great change that has taken place between the
conditions of the working class in Marx and Engels' age and our present day
society. "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." 

Clearly this does not describe the Manchester or Edinburgh of 1965, does
it? As opposed to the dogmatic Marxism that prevailed in the 1950s and 60s,
Marcuse preferred to see social relations as they actually existed rather
than as he would like to imagine they did. 

While Marcuse's language is less dense and allusive than Adorno and
Horkheimer's, he still has trouble explaining his ideas in clear-cut terms.
He says, "Now it is precisely this new consciousness, this 'space within,'
the space for the transcending historical experience, which is being barred
by a society in which subjects as well as objects constitute
instrumentalities in a whole that has its raison d'etre in the
accomplishments of its overpowering productivity". 

Let me attempt to translate this into English from the original English.
"New consciousness" means revolutionary socialist thought. He is saying
that in the past, revolutionary socialist thought was a product of
industrial and technological advances that tended to cause class conflict.
In our own historical epoch, the forces of production act in a different
way. They tend to make the worker feel *part* of the overall industrial and
technological substructure in such a way that revolution, let alone class
struggle, does not occur as a possibility to the proletariat. 

Thankfully, Marcuse expresses himself in plain language in the next
paragraph. "[Our society's] supreme promise is an ever-more- comfortable
life for an ever-growing number of people who, in a strict sense, cannot
imagine a qualitatively different universe of discourse and action, for the
capacity to contain and manipulate subversive imagination and effort is an
integral part of the given society." 

There are four factors that explain this social transformation and
cooptation of the laboring classes: 

1) "Mechanization is increasingly reducing the quantity and intensity of
physical labor in labor." 

Isn't this true? There was a New York Times article a few months ago about
how the newest, highly automated factories, especially steel mills, were
hiring college graduates, especially those with metallurgy or mechanical
engineering degrees. Robotics in some of these new factories could replace
*dozens* of unskilled workers. What was needed to replace the unskilled
workers were highly sophisticated and educated workers who could operate
the complex machinery that was used to forge the steel. You needed to be a
bit of a computer programmer and a bit of a jack-of-all-trades at the same
time. These jobs paid handsomely and were more attractive to some than
traditional white-collar technical jobs. Are these workers interested in
toppling the capitalist system? If nothing else changes in the class
relations between the boss and this type of worker, what objective
possibility is there for socialism? 

Not only is the work easier, the conditions of work tend to create a *bond*
between boss and worker. Marcuse states: 

"Moreover, in the most successful areas of automation, some sort of
technological community seems to integrate the atoms at work. The machine
seems to instill some drugging rhythm in the operators...[A sociologist
observing this process in one factory] 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...' 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." 

2) "The assimilating trend shows forth in the occupational stratification.
In the key industrial establishments, the 'blue-collar' worker force
declines in relation to the 'white-collar' element; the number of
non-production workers increases.' 

Again, this seems both undeniable and important. Doug Henwood has argued
that the number of white-collar workers has increased, but does anybody
think that all of the computer programmers and data entry clerks employed
by Mobil Oil, General Motors, IBM, etc. have anything in common with the
traditional working-class? All other things being equal (and this is a key
proviso), isn't the white-collar worker, especially the college-educated
one, the social base of the Republican and Democratic parties both? I am
deeply familiar with this milieu, having spent the last 28 years in its
midst. 

While many of these workers have been won to peace, environmental and
feminist movements, they have not gravitated to the sorts of class-
versus-class struggle that typified the 1930s. 

3) "These changes in the character of work and the instruments of work and
the instruments of production change the attitude and the consciousness of
the laborer, which become manifest in the widely discussed 'social and
cultural integration' of the laboring class with capitalist society. 

This statement seems to be the most dated of the four. It doesn't take
account the decades of runaway plants and downsizing that has hit America's
working-class since the book was written. In 1965, being an employee of
Mobil Oil, General Motors or IBM would certainly cause the worker to feel
integrated with the company with bourgeois society. This social compact has
broken down to a large extent. 

What must be reckoned with however is the degree to which this breakdown
has caused anything that begins to resemble a working- class
radicalization. I am not sure why this has happened, but I can make a
tentative stab at it. The unemployed worker makes the adjustment when he or
she loses a job. Instead of staying in Flint to confront the boss who has
just closed down an immense GM plant, they go to Houston or Phoenix where
the job-market is a little better. The unemployment situation has only been
a "geographical" one in the David Harvey sense for the last twenty years,
rather than a *systemic* one such as the kind that existed in the 1930s.
Unemployment benefits and welfare tend to soften the blow as well. 

The other thing that is taking place is that many of the new jobs are
created in a high-technology sector in which the 1950s type bonding is
still possible, since the profit margins are still high. The other day a
report in the NY Times spoke of the immense bonus paid to workers at
Kingston Technology, a maker of memory chips. The CEO claimed that he was
trying to develop identification between the company and the worker. Most
software firms take the same approach. Microsoft practically creates a cult
around William Gates, the CEO. Youngsters work 80 and 90 hours a week in
the belief that they are changing society. And none of them are
Trotskyists. I understand that the largest concentration of libertarians in
the US is in the Seattle HQ of Microsoft. 

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 of the established society." 

Nothing has to be added here since it is true as far as it goes. 

***** 

Marcuse's ideas were embraced by the New Left but they went through an
alteration. In his writings, he clearly states that while the working-
class is incapable of acting as a revolutionary force, it is by no means to
be identified politically with the capitalist class. 

It is enslaved by this capitalist class. While the forms of exploitation
are not the same as they were in the 1840s when Engels wrote the
"Conditions of the Working Class in England", they exist nonetheless.
People are not free. They are mere cogs in the big machine of industrial
society. While I don't have the free time to establish the link between
Lukacs' concept of an alienated working-class and the Frankfurt School, I
am sure that it is there. 

Unfortunately, this basically despairing but *pro-socialist* and *pro-
working class* point of view was taken places where the Frankfurt thinkers
never intended it to go. 

The leadership of SDS and other New Left thinkers decided that this
working-class was actually a counter-revolutionary agent. As the New Left
became more and more frustrated with the apparent complicity of the
American population in the Vietnam War, this view became more pronounced.
When an SDS'er saw Richard Nixon elected and then re- elected, he drew the
conclusion that the voters were for the Vietnam War. 

They rationalized this to themselves in the following terms. The workers
enjoyed the fruits of imperialist conquest. They were willing to put up
with these brutal wars because of the material benefits conquest brought
them. 

>From a strategic and tactical point of view, this meant that New Leftists
had no conception of drawing working-class people into antiwar activity.
The popularized version of Frankfurt School politics that filtered its way
into the student movement through a hundred different "underground"
newspapers caused this movement to substitute itself for a mass movement. 

These petty-bourgeois students acted in isolation from the working- class
who they assumed was for the war and who they had written off. They burned
draft cards, refused to go into the army and carried out other forms of
nonviolent civil disobedience. They were basically a well-meaning group. 

Out of this milieu evolved another current that decided to engage in
violent acts against the "system". Some of the SDS'ers created the
"Weatherman" group to engage in terrorist acts against the war- makers.
They set off bombs and in general acted in the most ultraleft and
counterproductive manner. Their politics could be best described as a
spoiled Frankfurter. 

The reality of working-class attitudes toward the war were a lot more
subtle than the New Leftists appreciated. I would argue that the closest we
came to involving the working-class in objectively anti-capitalist activity
since the 1930s was during the anti-war movement. 





Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/


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