4010 Spring08 Questions and Discussion 24

From Studyplace

This week's respondents: Roy and Yasira

Contents 1 Outside Links 2 Key Terms in One Dimensional Man 3 Thumbnail Sketch Summary 3.1 Mobilization and the “New Society”:pages 19-21 3.2 Containment of Social Change: pages 23-33 3.3 Prospects of Containment (pages 34-43) 3.4 The Welfare and Warfare State (pages 48-55) 3.5 The Closing of the Political Universe 4 Some Questions to think about

[edit] Outside Links

• Marcuse's Wikipedia bio
• Wikipedia review of the book

[edit] Key Terms in One Dimensional Man

Following are some of the main points mentioned in Marcuse’s article "One dimensional Man". Some of the headings for these points are taken from a course at Regina University in Canada

Technological Order

• The society and the individuals are organized in such a technical manner that there is no room for individuality.

Democracy and Progress/Freedom from Want

• In the pre industrial time the freedom and democracy became part of social progress because it helped to overcome traditional limits. When the industrial society started, speech and conscience were critical ideas and they infused the intellectual culture by a more productive and rational thought.
• According to Marcuse the basis for human freedom is to have an economic system which can provide sufficient goods and services to meet the needs of the people. Now societies are providing these needs more than the societies could in the past and the result is that individuality, thought and political opposition are obsolete from the advanced industrial society.

Goals of Civilization

• The modern forms of economic production can lead to real freedom as people don’t have to worry about the necessities of life. But the individual is “free to exert autonomy over a life that would be his own” (pp.2). A totalitarian system emerges “where the apparatus imposes it economic and political requirements” (p. 3).
• The society is totalitarian in nature as it is operating through the “manipulation of needs by vested interests” (p.3) and the manner in which needs are met prevents critique or opposition.

Political Power and Technology

• Marcuse argues that technologies can be used to form the basis of human freedom but it is being used to maintain order in the society and it is being used for political reasons.

Unfreedom

• It is difficult to get freedom in the current limits of the organized total society, but freedom can be attained by rejecting economics, politics, and political opinion. It is the economic and political forces of the society which limit and constrain freedom.

True and False Needs

• According to Marcuse needs are historically and socially developed. True needs are those which are determined by the free individual and reinforce individuality and creativity and false needs are those which are determined by others and which we satisfy only because it makes us feel that we are doing the right thing. He says that the false needs also repress some other needs.
• He doesn’t state exactly what are true needs but from his argument it seems that the true needs are those mentioned above. In the end, the true and false needs must be answered by the individual himself but the individual must be free from the forces of the society to make this choice.
• The false needs lead individuals to relinquish their interiority, independence, and liberty and identify themselves with the ideology of the society. This ideology is one dimensional thought and behavior “in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe”(pp.12).

Preconditioned

• Each individual in this technical society is preconditioned to accept the media and the range of options it offers. Marcuse deemphasizes class distinction by talking about the equalization of class distinctions. He says that if the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort then this shows “the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population” (pp. 8).
• He argues instead that images, the media, social needs etc. dominate “the transplantation of social into individual needs is so effective that the difference between them seems to be purely theoretical. Can one really distinguish between the mass media as instruments of information and entertainment, and as agents of manipulation and indoctrination?” (pp.8). The individual then is preconditioned to accept the range of options presented in the media. So it is in the lifestyle and the consumption sphere, not in production, that the administered society finds its strength.

Rational Irrationality

• Marcuse argues that waste is turned into need, and destruction into construction. In the society, consumption becomes the way to find self so the mind and body of the individual are extensions of the social system. Creativity is also found in consumption, the seemingly rational has become irrational and the individual is so tied to society that the new needs created by society become a means of social control.
• The technological system in which we live is highly irrational because it keeps on creating false needs so that production never ends and on the other hand it is highly rational because in this way the system perpetuates itself. Marcuse when talking about advanced industrial society says, “We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced industrial civilization: the rational character of it’s irrationality. Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man’s mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable” (pp.9).

Pacification of existence

• When advanced industrial society reaches the stage where all the vital needs of the individual are satisfied with little time spent in labor, then technology would “become subject to the free play of faculties in the struggle for the pacification of nature and of society” (pp. 16). Marcuse calls for a pacification of existence, where the struggle between man and man, and man and nature are not characterized by vested interests in domination and capital accumulation but are coordinated for the betterment of the human condition.

Welfare/Warfare States

• Marcuse says highly advanced societies are welfare/warfare states. Welfare states restrict freedom because they limit free time, access to necessary goods and services, and citizen's ability to realize true self-determination. The warfare state hinders a true analysis of society because it keeps people focused on fighting the "enemy" instead of focused on internal social problems.
• Marcuse's analysis of highly advanced societies is accurate and useful. However, he does not provide realistic solutions to the problems he raises. His point seems to be that if societies can learn to use technologies in ways that benefit citizens, instead of restricting them, then the problems of humans will be solved.

[edit] Thumbnail Sketch Summary

[edit] Mobilization and the “New Society”:pages 19-21

• Unification/convergence of opposites (within the capitalist system): “Bipartisanship in foreign policy overrides competitive group interests under the threat of international communism, and spreads to domestic policy, where the programs of the big parties become ever more undistinguishable, even in the degree of hypocrisy and the odor of the clichés” (page 19). Here the common acknowledgement of a common enemy cuts across social strata, such that the “very classes whose existence once embodied the opposition to the system as a whole” (page 19) are in concert with the system’s administrators.
• Capitalist integration (within the communist system): “…testify to the depth and scope of capitalist integration, and to the conditions which make the qualitative difference of conflicting interests appear as quantitative differences within the established society” (page 21).
• Arrest of societal conflicts (capitalist system): “former conflicts within society are modified and arbitrated under the doubled (and interrelated) impact of technical progress and international communism” (page 21).

[edit] Containment of Social Change: pages 23-33

• Classical Marxian Theory: “…the proletariat destroys the political apparatus of capitalism but retains the technological apparatus, subjecting it to socialization. There is continuity in the revolution: technological irrationality, freed from irrational restrictions and destructions, sustains and consummates itself in the new society” (page 22).
• Advanced capitalism: “technical rationality is embodied, in spite of its irrational use, in the productive apparatus. This applies not only to mechanized plants, tools, and exploitation of resources, but also to the mode of labor as adaptation to and handling of the machine process…” and “Neither nationalization or socialization alter by themselves this physical embodiment of technological rationality; on the contrary, the latter remains a precondition for the socialist development of all productive forces” (pages 22-23).
• Marx and qualitative change: “…organization and direction of the productive apparatus would introduce a qualitative change in the technical continuity: namely, production toward the satisfaction of freely developing individual needs. However, to the degree to which the established technical apparatus engulfs and public and private existence in all spheres of society—that is, becomes the medium of control and cohesion in a political universe which incorporates the laboring classes—to that degree would the qualitative change involve a change in the technological structure itself. And such change would presuppose that the laboring classes are alienated from this universe in their very existence, that their consciousness is that of the total impossibility to continue to exist in this universe, so that the need for qualitative change is a matter of life and death.”
• The pleasures and perils of productivity: “…supreme promise is an ever-more-comfortable life for an ever-growing number of people who, in a strict sense, cannot imagine a qualitatively different universe of discourse and action, for the capacity to contain and manipulate subversive imagination and effort is an integral part of the given society” (page 23).
• Technology’s transformational power: “Now the ever-more-complete mechanization of labor in advanced capitalism, while sustaining exploitation, modifies the attitude the status of the exploited” (page 25) and “…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” (page 26).
• …which extends even to technology’s linguistic influences: “…quotes one worker as saying: ‘All in all we are in the swing of things….’ The phrase admirably expresses the change in mechanized enslavement: things swing rather than oppress, and they swing the human instrument—not only its body but also its mind and even its soul” (page 26).
• The increasingly comfortable (but increasingly undefined?) laborer: “…this specific mode of enslavement was at the same time the source of his specific, professional power of negation—the power to stop a process which threatened him with annihilation as a human being. Now the laborer is losing the professional autonomy which made him a member of a class set off from the other occupational groups because it embodied the refutation of the established society” (page 28).
• So many changes, so little control over them: “What is at stake in these technological changes is far more than a pay system, the relation of the worker to other classes, and the organization of work. What is at stake is the compatibility of technical progress with the very institutions in which industrialization developed” (page 29).
• The altered consciousness of the laborer: “These changes in the character of work and the instruments of production change the attitude and the consciousness of the laborer, which becomes manifest in the widely discussed ‘social and cultural integration’ of the laboring class with capitalist society. Is this a change in consciousness only? The affirmative answer, frequently given by Marxists, seems strangely inconsistent. Is such a fundamental change in consciousness understandable without assuming a corresponding change in the ‘societal existence’” (page 29)?
• Creating contradictory communities: “The same technological organization which makes for a mechanical community at work also generates a larger independence which integrates the worker with the plant. One notes an ‘eagerness’ on the part of the workers ‘to share in the solution of production problems,’ a ‘desire to join actively in applying their own brains to technical and production problems which clearly fitted in with the technology.’ In some of the technically most advanced establishments, the workers even show a vested interest in the establishment—a frequently observed effect of ‘workers’ participation’ in capitalist enterprise” (page 30), “The new technological work-world thus enforces a weakening of the negative position of the working class: the latter no longer appears to be the living contradiction to the established society” (page 31), “Domination is transfigured into administration (page 32), and “For in reality, neither the utilization of administrative rather than physical controls (hunger, personal dependence, force), nor the change in the character of heavy work, nor the assimilation of occupational classes, nor the equalization in the sphere of consumption compensate for the fact that the decisions over life and death, over personal and national security are made at places over which the individuals have no control. The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves, but they are slaves….” (page 32).

[edit] Prospects of Containment (pages 34-43)

• The ironies of coexistence: “On this assumption, the Enemy would remain ‘permanent’—that is, communism would continue to coexist with capitalism. At the same time, the latter would continue to be capable of maintaining and even increasing the standard of living for an increasing part of the population—in spite of and through intensified production of the means of destruction, and methodical waste of resources and faculties”
• ….and of coexistence within capitalism: “But the continued conflict between the productive capabilities of society and their destructive and oppressive utilization would necessitate intensified efforts to impose the requirements of the apparatus on the population—to get rid of excess capacity, to create the need for buying the goods that must be profitably sold, and the desire to work for their production and promotion. The system thus tends toward both total administration and total dependence on administration by ruling public and private managements, strengthening the preestablished harmony between the interest of the big public and private corporations and that of their customers and servants.”
• The transformation has begun (I): “Human labor then no longer appears as enclosed in the process of production—man rather relates himself to the process of production as supervisor and regulator….He stands ouside of the process of production instead of being the principal agent in the process of production….In this transformation, the great pillar of production and wealth is no longer the immediate labor performed by man himself, nor his labor time, but the appropriation of his own universal productivity, i.e., his knowledge and his master of nature through his societal existence—in one word: the development of the societal individual” (page 36).
• The transformation has begun (II): “The argument from historical backwardness—according to which liberation must, under the prevailing conditions of material and intellectual immaturity, necessarily be the work of force and administration—is not only the core of Soviet Marxism, but also that of the theoreticians of ‘educational dictatorship’ from Plato to Rousseau. It is easily ridiculed but hard to refute because it has the merit to acknowledge, without much hypocrisy, the conditions (material and intellectual) which serve to prevent genuine and intelligent self-determination…..Moreover, the argument debunks the repressive ideology of freedom, according to which human liberty can blossom forth in a life of toil, poverty, and stupidity. Indeed, society must first create the material prerequisites of freedom for all its members before it can be a free society; it must first create the wealth before being able to distribute it according to the freely developing needs of the individual; it must first enable its slaves to learn and see and think before they know what is going on and what they themselves can do to change it…..They must be ‘forced to be free,’ to ‘see objects as they are, and sometimes as they ought to appear,’ they must be shown the ‘good road’ they are in search of” (pages 39-40).
• Justifying Means with Ends: “But with all its truth, the argument cannot answer the time-honored question: who educates the educators, and where is the proof that they are in possession of ‘the good’? The question is not invalidated by arguing that it is equally applicable to certain democratic forms of government where the fateful decisions on what is good for the nation are made by elected representatives (or rather endorsed by elected representatives)—elected under conditions of effective and freely accepted indoctrination. Still, the only possible excuse (it is weak enough!) for ‘educational dictatorship’ is that the terrible risk which it involves may not be more terrible than the risk which the great liberal as well as the authoritarian societies are taking now, nor may the costs be much higher…..the slaves must be free for their liberation before they can become free, and that the end must be operative in the means to obtain it” (pages 40-41).
• Capitalism vs. Communism (Marcuse’s distinction): “But while these prospects for the containment of qualitative change in the Soviet system seem to be parallel to those in advanced capitalist society, the socialist base of production introduces a decisive difference. In the Soviet system, the organization of the productive process certainly separates the “immediate producers” (the laborers) from control over the means of production and thus makes for class distinctions at the very base of the system….Consequently, the ruling strata are themselves separable from the productive process—that is, they are replaceable without exploding the basic institutions of society….This is the half-truth in the Soviet-Marxist thesis…The other half of the truth is that quantitative change would still have to turn into qualitative change, into the disappearance of the State, the Party, the Plan, etc. as independent powers superimposed on the individuals…..If it could lead to self-determination at the very base of human existence, it would be the most radical and complete revolution in history. Distribution of the necessities of life regardless of work performance, reduction of working time to a minimum, universal all-sided education toward exchangeability of functions—these are the preconditions but not the contents of self-determination” (pages 43-44).
• What success might look like (?) (in Marcuse’s view): “To be sure, a mature and free industrial society would continue to depend on a division of labor which involves inequality of functions. Such inequality is necessitated by genuine social needs, technical requirements, and the physical and mental differences among the individuals. However, the executive and supervisory functions would no longer carry the privilege of ruling the life of others in some particular interest. The transition to such a state is a revolutionary rather than evolutionary process, even on the foundation of a fully nationalized and planned economy.”
• Looking to the developing world: “…the often-heard opinion that the new development of the backward countries might not only alter the prospects of the advanced industrial countries, but also constitute a ‘third force’ that may grow into a relatively independent power….These countries enter upon the process of industrialization with a population untrained in the values of self-propelling productivity, efficiency, and technological rationality. In other words, with a vast majority of population which has not yet been transformed into a labor force separated from the means of production. Do these conditions favor a new confluence of industrialization and liberation—an essentially different mode of industrialization which would build the productive apparatus not only in accord with the vital needs of the underlying population, but also with the aim of pacifying the struggle for existence” (pages 45-46)?
• ….Marcuse offers a question and answer: “That the underdeveloped countries can make the historical leap from the pre-technological to the post-technological society, in which the mastered technological apparatus may provide the basis for a genuine democracy? On the contrary, it rather seems that the superimposed development of these countries will bring about a period of total administration more violent and more rigid than that traversed by the advanced societies…” (pages 46-47).
• …and what he may see as a better answer: “Such indigenous progress would demand a planned policy which, instead of superimposing technology on the traditional modes of life and labor, would extend and improve them on their own grounds, eliminating the oppressive and exploitative forces (material and religious) which made them incapable of assuring the development of a human existence….Indigenous progress seems indeed possible in areas where the natural resources, if freed from suppressive encroachment, are still sufficient not only for subsistence but also for a human life” (page 47) and “Self-determination would proceed from the base, and work for the necessities could transcend itself toward work for gratification” (page 48)

[edit] The Welfare and Warfare State (pages 48-55)

• Defining the Welfare State: “…state seems capable of raising the standard of administered living, a capability inherent in all advanced industrial societies where the streamlined technical apparatus—set up as a separate power over and above the individuals—depends for its functioning on the intensified development and expansion of productivity” (page 48) and “However, with all its rationality, the Welfare State is a state of unfreedom because its total administration is systematic restriction of (a) “technically” available free time; (be) the quantity and quality of goods and services “technically” available for vital individual needs: (c) the intelligence (conscious and unconscious) capable of comprehending and realizing the possibilities of self-determination” (page 49).
• …and rejecting the Welfare State: “The growing productivity of labor creates an increasing surplus-product which, whether privately or centrally appropriated and distributed, allows an increased consumption—notwithstanding the increased diversion of productivity. As long as this constellation prevails, it reduces the use-value of freedom; there is no reason to insist on self-determination if the administered life is the comfortable and even the “good” life. This is the rational and material ground for the unification of opposites, for one-dimensional political behavior. On this ground, the transcending political forces within society are arrested, and qualitative change appears possible only as a change from without” and “At the most advanced stage of capitalism, this society is a system of subdued pluralism, in which the competing institutions concur in solidifying the power of the whole over the individual” (page 50).
• The Welfare State’s role in preventing qualitative change: “Advanced industrial society is indeed a system of countervailing powers. But these forces cancel each other out in a higher unification—in the common interest to defend and extend the established position, to combat the historical alternatives, to contain qualitative change” (page 51) and “Free institutions compete with authoritarian ones in making the Enemy a deadly force within the system. And this deadly force stimulates growth and initiative, not by virtue of the magnitude and economic impact of the defense “sector,” but by virtue of the fact that the society as a whole becomes a defense society. For the Enemy is permanent. He is not in the emergency situation but in the normal state of affairs. He threatens in peace as much as in war (and perhaps more in war); he is thus being built into the system as a cohesive power” (page 51)
• Capitalism and communism defrocked: “…the enemy without, backwardness, and the legacy of terror perpetuate the oppressive features of ‘catching up with and surpassing’ the achievements of capitalism. The priority of the means over the end is thereby aggravated—a priority which could be broken only if pacification is achieved—and capitalism and communism continue to compete without military force, on a global scale and through global institutions. This pacification would mean the emergence of a genuine world economy—the demise of the nation state, the national interest, national business together with their international alliances” (page 53) and “When capitalism meets the challenge of communism, it meets its own capabilities: spectacular development of all productive forces after the subordination of the private interests in profitability which arrest such development. When communism meets the challenge of capitalism, it too meets its own capabilities: spectacular comforts, liberties, and alleviation of the burden of life” (page 55).

[edit] The Closing of the Political Universe

Building on several themes expressed within the opening section (“The New Forms of Control,” pages 1-19), “The Closing of the Political Universe” (pages 19-55) assesses the respective influences that capitalist and socialist systems bear over the lives of individuals—in particular, laborers—living under either system. In many instances, any philosophical or operational distinctions between the two political ideologies are overwhelmed by Marcuse’s description of these systems as seemingly existing in a parallel state, within which one system is intractably the “Enemy” (note that Marcuse has chosen to capitalize the first letter of this and certain other words, such as “Reason,” lending them a monolithic quality) of the other. The convergence of opposites, as depicted by Marcuse at the opening of “The Closing of the Political Universe” to explain the emergence of synergies between (to cite just one example) business and organized labor within the capitalist system, ultimately foreshadows an even more ironic convergence between opposites in evidence by the end of this long section.

[edit] Some Questions to think about

• What is the role of technology in our lives these days? Can it still be defined as rational/irrational?
• What might pacification of existence be like for the individual on a day-to-day basis?