Everyday workplace grievances express class conflict while disguising it

Evidence

This point of view also made it possible to clear up the contradiction, which had remained merely an observation in the Mannesmann study, between the fact that workers generally saw higher pay as the most important objective and the fact that conditions in the immediate vicinity of the individual workplace took priority in forming their attitudes to the factory. `In both cases, the conflict of interest between management and employees is manifested in forms which at the same time conceal that conflict.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 514

Categorization

• DEFINE: A concrete instance of the Frankfurt category of ‘objective spirit’ — conflict expressed yet concealed in the surface attitude.
• XREF: Squarely in the Institute’s ideology-critique lineage, where manifest attitudes are read as misrecognized social relations. — connects to: Scattered workplace complaints condense into a demand to be treated as human. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 509; Workplace atmosphere must be explained by social conflict, not merely described — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 514; Class antagonism has moved inside the worker’s own psychology — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 74 (+8 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Scattered workplace complaints condense into a demand to be treated as human. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 509; Workplace atmosphere must be explained by social conflict, not merely described — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 514; Class antagonism has moved inside the worker’s own psychology — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 74 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Race fractures the working classes internally in ways class alone cannot explain #complicates (0.78)
• Workers define class by shared conversational and consumption resources, not formal rank #complicates (0.73) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2239