Bored isolated labor can breed nonconformist thought in workers

Evidence

American industrialists have understood all too well this dialectic inherent in the new industrial methods. They have understood that “trained gorilla” is just a phrase, that “unfortunately” the worker remains a man and even that during his work he thinks more, or at least has greater opportunities for thinking, once he has overcome the crisis of adaptation without being eliminated: and not only does the worker think, but the fact that he gets no immediate satisfaction from his work and realises that they are trying to reduce him to a trained gorilla, can lead him into a train of thought that is far from conformist. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1140

Categorization

• XREF: A mechanism of consciousness-formation relevant to Gramsci’s hegemony theory: the material condition of alienated labor itself generates critical awareness — the seed of counter-hegemonic common sense.