Mechanization sustains exploitation while shifting its form from muscular to mental exhaustion.
Evidence
Now the ever-more-complete mechanization of labor in advanced capitalism, while sustaining exploitation, modifies the attitude and the status of the exploited. Within the technological ensemble, mechanized work in which automatic and semi-automatic reactions fill the larger part (if not the whole) of labor time remains, as a life-long occupation, exhausting, stupefying, inhuman slavery—even more exhausting because of increased speed-up, control of the machine operators (rather than of the product), and isolation of the workers from each other. To be sure, this form of drudgery is expressive of arrested, partial automation, of the coexistence of automated, semi-automated, and non-automated sections within the same plant, but even under these conditions, “for muscular fatigue technology has substituted tension and/or mental effort.” — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 169
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes the attention-economy thesis: exhaustion migrates from muscle to nerve — bridges to the reader’s interest in attention economics. — connects to: Technological abundance produces mass unemployment treated as reserve army material.; A body becomes a useful force only when it is both productive and subjected — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 73; Machine mastery perpetuates rather than ends enslavement — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 635 (+8 more)
Broader Connections
- Machine mastery perpetuates rather than ends enslavement
#corroborates(0.92) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 635 - Taylorism deliberately breaks up skilled workers’ psycho-physical nexus
#expands(0.82) - Mechanized work frees the worker’s brain rather than mummifying it
#contradicts(0.80) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1139 - Technology can increase human weakness even as it increases power
#complicates(0.72) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 822 - A body becomes a useful force only when it is both productive and subjected
#corroborates(0.70) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 73 - Mastery over nature becomes mastery over other humans, weakening the individual.
#expands(0.70)