Under postindustrial capitalism, increased freedom and abundance produce more sophisticated social control

Evidence

Abundance and total control: such is the paradoxical context in which Marcuse prepares to rethink Freud and Marx, to reevaluate the classical opposition between individual happiness and social organization with which they were both concerned. Indeed, his cultural reflections may be taken as a kind of ironic reversal of those of Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, which posited an irreversible and unavoidable interdependency between progress in the evolution of society and unhappiness in the repressed psyche of individual man, between individual self-denial and the diversion of psychic energy for collective purposes. For Marcuse, on the other side of the great watershed of postindustrial capitalism, things no longer look quite the same, and it turns out that it is precisely increased sexual freedom, greater material abundance and consumption, freer access to culture, better housing, more widely available educational benefits and increased social, not to speak of automotive mobility, which are the accompaniment to increasing manipulation and the most sophisticated forms of thought-control, increasing abasement of spiritual and intellectual life, a degradation and dehumanization of existence. Thus it is that the happier we are, the more surely we are given over, without even being aware of it, into the power of the socio-economic system itself. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 216

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Financialized capitalism shapes human activity and escapes human control — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 340; Modern freedom rests on an unacknowledged capitalist metaphysic; Power processes grow social resources and detach action from natural motives — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 634 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• The system’s celebrated freedoms function as instruments of domination #corroborates (0.85) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 45
• Rational productivity and social control are welded together in new forms of manipulation #corroborates (0.82) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 551
• Social control operates through voluntary organizations rather than formal coercion #exemplifies (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 115
• Financialized capitalism shapes human activity and escapes human control #qualifies (0.75) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 340
• Liberated capitalist subjects may use their freedom to dismantle capitalism itself #qualifies (0.72)
• Modern freedom rests on an unacknowledged capitalist metaphysic #qualifies (0.70)
• Power processes grow social resources and detach action from natural motives #responds-to (0.70) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 634