Machinery’s skill hierarchy preselects which class ideology will arise

Evidence

Now whenever Sartre deals with the relationship of character or ideology to a given moment of historical development, his analyses are not inconsistent with the above model. Thus in describing the evolution of working-class organizations he shows how the type of machine used (in the particular case studied, the “universal machine,” like the lathe) and the economic organization to which it corresponds preselect a proletariat divided into skilled and unskilled labor; so that the anarcho-syndicalism characteristic of this period is in reality the ideology of a skilled proletariat and is as such an idea latent in the machine itself, the “thought of the machine,” which changes when it changes in the last years of the nineteenth century (pp. 292-297). — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 571

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘thought of the machine’ idea echoes Adorno’s analysis of technology’s social determination and connects to the reader’s Frankfurt-School lineage interest. — connects to: US businesses chose machines over worker skills decades ago — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 571; Job organization and hiring reflect class power, not just technology — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 812