Ignorant workers make more productive industrial laborers than thoughtful ones

Evidence

Ignorance is the mother of industry as well as of supersti­ tion. Reflection and fancy are subject to err; but a habit of moving the hand or the foot is independent of either. Manu­ facture, accordingly, prospers most where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may … be considered an engine, the parts of which are men. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 542

Categorization

• CANDY: A pithy, quotable inversion of the proverb — good cocktail-party fodder about industrial capitalism’s actual attitude toward workers’ minds.
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
• XREF: connects to: Progressive school reforms failed because their goals contradict under corporate capitalism — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 547; Worker disinterest in top-level participation reflects ignorance, not lack of desire — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2073; Industrialized labor destroys manual skill and familiarity with things — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2307 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Worker disinterest in top-level participation reflects ignorance, not lack of desire #responds-to (0.90) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2073
• The worker’s alienation from his labor becomes the source of his cognitive strength #contradicts (0.82) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 4319
• The worker’s alienated self-objectification grants truer knowledge of commodities than bourgeois objectivity. #contradicts (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 379
• Industrialized labor destroys manual skill and familiarity with things #expands (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2307
• Industrial capitalism both produces inattention and pathologizes it #complicates (0.75) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 61
• Accusations of workers’ illusions presuppose workers can have no autonomous class conception #expands (0.72) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 514