Socializing production without breaking technological domination yields authoritarianism
Evidence
Horkheimer’s distaste for the technological rationalization of advanced capitalism led him to express grave doubts about a socialist movement that saw itself as its inevitable successor. Engels and others like him, Horkheimer argued, who equated the socialization of the means of production with the end of domination, were the true utopians. In fact, the naive expectation of freedom as the result of such a socialization anticipated the authoritarian state of the present. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 493
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to critiques of Soviet developmentalism and the technological-progress narrative familiar from Marxist debates and Adorno/Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. — connects to: Technologically educated masses paradoxically exhibit readiness to accept despotism; Liberation from technological domination requires preserving the technological base — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 812; Rational productivity and social control are welded together in new forms of manipulation — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 551 (+7 more)
Broader Connections
- Liberation from technological domination requires preserving the technological base
#expands(0.85) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 812 - Rational productivity and social control are welded together in new forms of manipulation
#expands(0.80) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 551 - Apparent collectivism can conceal pure domination through delegated labor
#exemplifies(0.75)