Economic coercion alone cannot force workers to adapt to new production methods

Evidence

It is an obvious reflection that so-called high wages are a transitory form of remuneration. Adaptation to the new methods of production and work cannot take place simply through social compulsion. This is a “prejudice” which is widespread in Europe and even more so in Japan, which cannot fail before long to have serious consequences for the physical and psychic health of the workers. It is, furthermore, a prejudice which has its roots only in the endemic unemployment which has been a feature of the post-war period. If the situation were “normal”, the apparatus of coercion needed to obtain the desired result would involve more than just high wages. Coercion has therefore to be ingeniously combined with persuasion and consent. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1141

Categorization

• DEFINE: Forward look at what ‘Americanism’ contends — this is Gramsci’s account of capitalist class autonomy being licensed within political competition only where civil society has thickened enough to restrain it.
• XREF: This sketches consensus/consent dynamics relevant for how the state manufactures consent in Islamophobia field’s hegemony readings. — connects to: Exploiting voluntary freedom yields higher returns than coercing labor — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 16