Losing professional enslavement also costs workers their power of negation.
Evidence
To the extent to which the machine becomes itself a system of mechanical tools and relations and thus extends far beyond the individual work process, it asserts its larger dominion by reducing the “professional autonomy” of the laborer and integrating him with other professions which suffer and direct the technical ensemble. To be sure, the former “professional” autonomy of the laborer was rather his professional enslavement. But this specific mode of enslavement was at the same time the source of his specific, professional power of negation—the power to stop a process which threatened him with annihilation as a human being. Now the laborer is losing the professional autonomy which made him a member of a class set off from the other occupational groups because it embodied the refutation of the established society. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 178
Categorization
- XREF: The power to ‘stop a process’ is the strike — connects to how industrial labor unions lost their leverage as production became automated and globalized. — connects to: Workers’ basic insecurity stems from enslavement of labor and person — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 463; Machine mastery perpetuates rather than ends enslavement — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 635; Criticism and negativity secrete a phantom of reality that power needs — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 91 (+1 more)
- DEEPTHINKING: The dialectic that liberation-from-oppression is simultaneously loss-of-negating-power is dense enough to sit with: what is gained by escaping one enslavement may be the very ground of resistance.
Broader Connections
- Workers’ basic insecurity stems from enslavement of labor and person
#expands(0.82) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 463 - Machine mastery perpetuates rather than ends enslavement
#corroborates(0.80) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 635 - Criticism and negativity secrete a phantom of reality that power needs
#responds-to(0.78) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 91