Advanced industrial society’s chief achievement is containing all qualitative social change

Evidence

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. This containment of social change is perhaps the most singular achievement of advanced industrial society; the general acceptance of the National Purpose, bipartisan policy, the decline of pluralism, the collusion of Business and Labor within the strong State testify to the integration of opposites which is the result as well as the prerequisite of this achievement. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 90

Categorization

• XREF: The containment thesis is the bridge to the reader’s attention-economy interests: the system absorbs critique by integrating opposites, which connects to later theories of ideological absorption and corporate co-optation of dissent. — connects to: Containing qualitative social change is industrial society’s defining achievement; Advanced industrial society suffocates any need that demands liberation from comfort — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 120; Modern production society converts all lived experience into representations (+4 more)
• QUESTION: Marcuse says integration of opposites is both result and prerequisite of containment — worth unpacking whether he means absorption of opposition requires prior structural integration.

Broader Connections

• Containing qualitative social change is industrial society’s defining achievement #corroborates (0.95)
• Advanced industrial society suffocates any need that demands liberation from comfort #expands (0.72) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 120
• Modern production society converts all lived experience into representations #expands (0.72)
• Advanced industrial society channels erotic and aggressive instincts into socially controlled outlets. #expands (0.72) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 61
• Reason itself becomes an instrument of domination in late industrial society #expands (0.70) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 34
• The same mechanism that unites society also drives its historical change #qualifies (0.70) — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 1544