Standardization assimilates manual and white-collar labor into one administered population.

Evidence

This kind of masterly enslavement is not essentially different from that of the typist, the bank teller, the high-pressure salesman or saleswoman, and the television announcer. Standardization and the routine assimilate productive and non-productive jobs. The proletarian of the previous stages of capitalism was indeed the beast of burden, by the labor of his body procuring the necessities and luxuries of life while living in filth and poverty. Thus he was the living denial of his society. In contrast, the organized worker in the advanced areas of the technological society lives this denial less conspicuously and, like the other human objects of the social division of labor, he is being incorporated into the technological community of the administered population. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 171

Categorization

• XREF: The old proletariat as ‘living denial of society’ maps onto how contemporary critics frame the knowledge-worker’s absorption — bridges to attention economy. — connects to: Division of labor creates an autonomous realm of mental labor controlled by ruling classes. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 887
• SEED: Article angle: the disappearance of ‘living denial’ — what social position still embodies negation of the present system.

Broader Connections

• Division of labor creates an autonomous realm of mental labor controlled by ruling classes. #expands (0.78) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 887