Industrial work rationalization requires reshaping workers’ entire mode of living, not just their labor

Evidence

These activities were less disconnected than might appear, since the new methods of work are inseparable from a specific mode of living and of thinking and feeling life. One cannot have success in one field without tangible results in the other. In America rationalisation of work and prohibition are undoubtedly connected. The enquiries conducted by the industrialists into the workers’ private lives and the inspection services created by some firms to control the “morality” of their workers are necessities of the new methods of work. People who laugh at these initiatives (failures though they were) and see in them only a hypocritical manifestation of “puritanism” thereby deny themselves any possibility of understanding the importance, significance and objective import of the American phenomenon, which is also the biggest collective effort to date to create, with unprecedented speed, and with a consciousness of purpose unmatched in history, a new type of worker and of man. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1117

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illuminates Gramsci’s concept that new production methods demand a psycho-physical reshaping of the whole person — a core mechanism for how economic regimes forge subjectivity.
• XREF: Connects forward to Islamophobia readings on how disciplinary regimes discipline bodies and subjectivities, and to Foucault’s biopolitics. — connects to: The productive apparatus shapes individual needs, not just work roles — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 97; Maximum productive efficiency can serve the perpetuation, not abolition, of necessary labor — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 147; Workers must now perform enthusiasm for work rather than merely perform the work. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1705