Containing qualitative social change is industrial society’s defining achievement

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

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: The integration of opposites and decline of pluralism echoes the standing thesis about consumption absorbing critical thought; could also connect to the Frankfurt School’s earlier culture-industry essays.

Related

• Advanced industrial society’s chief achievement is containing all qualitative social change (similarity 0.95)
• Industrial society is static while appearing dynamic (similarity 0.83)
• Marcuse held both containment and possible explosion of industrial society as live hypotheses (similarity 0.82)
• Marcuse holds containment and breakout tendencies as irreconcilable, with containment dominant. (similarity 0.82)
• Countervailing powers unite to block qualitative change (similarity 0.81)
• Preserving the status quo now unites former class antagonists in advanced societies (similarity 0.81)
• Changing ownership does not alter technology’s embedded rationality (similarity 0.80)
• Qualitative change would catastrophically transform prevailing technical rationality (similarity 0.79)
• Nationalization alone cannot alter technology’s embodied rationality (similarity 0.79)
• Technical progress may become incompatible with industrialization’s own institutions. (similarity 0.78)
• The people now function as social cohesion rather than social change (similarity 0.78)