Division of labor creates an autonomous realm of mental labor controlled by ruling classes.

Evidence

With the advancing division of labor (on which expanding material production depends) the distinction between mental and manual labor appears: each is installed in distinct spheres, in different practices and institutions, indeed in different social strata (e.g., the rise of the intelligentsia, the professional ideologues): mental labor appears as wholly autonomous from its material and social base and is projected into an absolute realm, “emancipating itself from the real.” But also, under the conditions of capitalist production, the means of mental labor are expropriated by the ruling classes. Hence we come, not simply to “ideology” as a necessary level of any capitalist social formation, but to the concept of dominant ideology—of “ruling ideas.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 887

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how ‘ruling ideas’ arise through the expropriation of mental labor by those who own the means of production.
• XREF: Links to Gramscian hegemony and to Hall’s later work on how media reproduce dominant ideology. — connects to: Standardization assimilates manual and white-collar labor into one administered population. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 171; Division of labor arose to replace clan and kin bonds in mobile modern societies. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 579; Durkheim held that extreme power asymmetries cause pathological division of labor — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 581