Class Consciousness under the Technological Age: The False Promise of Machinic Utopia and The Embers of Revolution

Introduction

Karl Marx stipulated capitalism to be a tension-filled mode of production whose biggest contradiction lies in the opposing class interests of the capitalists and the workers. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels painted the picture of Capitalism waiting for its curtain call as the class struggle boils between the fewer and richer bourgeoisie and the internationally allied proletariat. Conversely, Herbert Marcuse posited a different future where technology overrode capitalism to dictate productions, therefore dissolving the classes into atomic individuals that fully submits to the benefit of technology and achieve human realization without the need of critical rationality.

This essay aims to show that the machinic apparatus of technological production does supersede the capitalistic mode of production, but it does not guarantee a toil-free utopia with complete realizations of the human sphere, such that workers’ struggles persist, especially under the intensified demand for technological efficiency. This struggle exists in the modern masses that share the same miseries as the proletariat. However, this class consciousness appears dormant due to the complete absorption of workers in technology through its pervasiveness in the private spheres. Nevertheless, this new social context grants methods to evoke class consent and guide revolutions in compromised scale and radicalness than that of full emancipation.

Background

The class conflict, according to Marxism, is a battle of “right” against “right”. The capitalists were performing their duty to valorization and consuming the labour power purchased to the maximum extent. The workers were also in perfect reason not to work longer than what their pay prescribes, creating an unresolvable conflict that orders the termination of capitalism as this class conflict overgrown. However, as capitalism evolves into more and more mature forms, generating an increasingly centralized possession of massive wealth in the hands of a few that contrasts the rest of the population’s dim assets ownerships, its eventual collapse, as anticipated by Marx and Engels, is yet to surface our social world. Internationalism collapsed with the first world war, and socialism struggled to spread over nations (Adamson 1986, 795). As the images of the proletarian and the bourgeois class became blurred behind an uncertain fate of a full-scale revolution, other Marxist theorists arose to shed light on the trajectories of capitalism, providing alternative thinking outside the orthodoxy of Marxism.

Herbert Marcuse, a Frankfurt School philosopher, experienced the crisis of Marxism in post-war Germany (Adamson 1986, 796). He is one of the first Marxists to rearticulate the basis of post-war capitalism with considerations of a fully submerged rationality under technology and consumerism. To Marcuse, capitalism was the dominant mode of production only for a brief period in Europe during the early factory years. During this time, mechanization allowed the valorization of capital to overthrow previous class relations, appointing a bourgeois class to replace the feudal lords and dutifully committed to capital valorization's sole productivity. Over time, this short-lived capitalism has become a variance of the new technological mode of production. As a result, the individuality based on rational self-interest and gave birth to the nascent form of capitalism gradually surrendered its liberating aspects to technological rationality. The critical rationality, which is the key to workers’ self-identification in the global class struggle, is now lost in the face of the machinic apparatus that demands no autonomies and requests subscriptions to the technological truth. Therefore, the machine age rids hope for emancipation and produces crowds of individuals subjected to its preservation. Nevertheless, Marcuse postulates a possibility for human realizations, as less physical energy is expended in labour and more freedom can be allocated to individualize personal creativities.

Profit is No Longer the Priority

Marcuse considers technology a mode of production that surveils all aspects of human activities with its overarching operations of neutral and machinic infrastructures, resulting in social processes that characterize the prevailing thought and behavior patterns. Through the endless cycles of commodity production, humanity grew a heavy reliance on reproducing the same machinic infrastructure that allows socially-determined needs to be repeatedly satisfied. Therefore, the technological apparatus weakens the prior purpose of production, and capital valorization and generates a new goal: to preserve the machines. Profit is no longer the priority, and rather, it is to maintain and update technological efficiencies.

Writing in the 1940s, Marcuse’s foresight on the pervasive power of technology became even more pronounced in today's information age. From newspapers-printing by the end of the Middle Ages to the birth of the internet and computing technologies in the last century, information has undoubtedly become a necessity and a commodity to the social person today. Even personal information has been commodified through digital channels such as social media. The arrival of these digital tools for communication and socialization modified the behavior of the modern species. Over time, they transformed into “matter-of-factness” (1998, 44), attached to our beings as technological extensions, slowly subjecting our social actions to its operating rules.

Today, the typical digital human sends tweets in the wake of breaking news, shares pictures of social gatherings on Instagram, updates Facebook statues for commemorations, etc. In any event of disruption, the aftermath could be detrimental, both financially and mentally. It is even more so given the monopolization of these technologies, which Marcuse attributes to the fact that “mechanization and rationalization forced weaker competitors under the dominion of the giant enterprises of machine industry” (1998, 43). Interestingly, the personal use of social media is mostly free. It is a form of “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff and Schwandt 2019) that profits from the commodification of personal data in ways such as personalized advertisements. However, this revenue stream is heavily dependent on the successful training of users to be habitually addicted to its technological presence, which also adheres to Marcuse’s stipulation of technology being the grand dictator of commodity production instead of capital valorization.

One indication of the subjugating power of digital technology occurred on October 4th, 2021, when the social media platforms owned by Facebook Inc., including Instagram and Snap Chat, shut down for 6 hours due to an erroneous update to the routers, blocking over 3.5 billion global users’ access. This disruption caused a dip in Facebook’s share price by 4.9 percent, recording the highest daily drop since November 2020[1]. In addition, users who operate their businesses on these platforms and some of Facebook’s employees, lost a day of work due to inaccessibility to the technics provided by these temporarily defective infrastructures[2]. Moreover, the sudden deprivation of these digital tools caused panic and anxiety for the modern users who are the factum to these technological factors. In this instance, for all the counterparties involved, including the corporations, the employees, and the users, whether or not money can be made in the form of income or profit is critically contingent on the livelihood of technology itself. Today, capital can only be valorized through the technological mode of production.

Critical Rationality in Agentic Beings

Being immersed in the machine age, Marcuse argues that humans “introcept the dictates of the apparatus” (1998, 44). It infers acceptance of the machinic conveniences, preservation of its orders, and vigilante avoidance of any damages to the functioning of the apparatus. However, the totality of this transformation is questionable and can be contested with historical evidence.

According to Marcuse, the critical rationality once actualized in the early capitalistic years became irrational as its principles “accuses social injustice in the name of individualistic society’s own ideology” (1998, 50). Therefore, under this infrastructure of machines, the proletariats lost their critical rationality to form alliances. To this, Munshi critiqued Marcuse’s thinking to be overstretching, such that humanity was postulated to be under “total prevalence of false consciousness” (1977, 29). In this conclusion, Marcuse did not account for workers as agentic beings that might have abilities to identify the changes in their environment and respond to them. Autonomy might not be necessary to the apparatus, but the apparatus cannot immediately terminate all consciousness for it.

As an example, the history of the working-class movements proved to disagree with Marcuse’s statements. In 1968 France, the wave of civil unrest and general strikes against capitalism exhibited French unions to be Marxist-oriented, demanding radical political changes in response to the growing class conflict. Even though automation has released skilled workers from poverty, trade unions remained ambivalent about technology. Moreover, labour unions are in clear opposition to new inventions due to the threats they pose to working conditions (Wall 1986, 84-87). In these historical occurrences, the individualistic rationalities didn’t easily surrender to machines; rather, class-based movements from the Marxist tradition continued with alarming provisions on the hegemonizing effect of technologies.

The Unachieved Utopia

After the 1970s, the global economy was injected with adrenaline in the name of “neoliberalism,” starting with the western powers such as the United States and Britain. As a result, welfare policies began to be rolled back, public enterprises became privatized, tax requirements were lowered, trade unions were attacked, and breaking social solidarities in the name to promote a free market economy best secured with private properties. The US federal minimum wage fell 30 percent lower in the 1990s, accomplishing an inverse growth relationship between real wages and productivity (Harvey 2018, 23-26). Rapid industrialization did not actualize the promise of a life without worries for necessities as Marcuse predicted. The drudgery-free utopia only belonged to the “little capitalists” and the “leisure class” (Veblen 1899), where the former possessed skilled knowledge of modern technology and served as managers for the latter, who seemed invisible to the masses but held enormous economic power. Class power was restored to the top one percent through a redistribution of national income that favored the historical bourgeoise. In short, Marcuse envisioned true happiness in the machine age on the premise that the human essence can only be located when false needs are satisfied by consumerism with the highest efficiency (Kellner 1984). However, this premise was not met. Technology alone did not even achieve financial freedom for the workers, let alone the freedom to pursue human essence.

Furthermore, the assumption of technologies’ capability to salvage individual freedom is challenged. David Graeber contended that the productivity increase led by mechanization did not free up human potential; instead, it proliferated a surge in “bullshit jobs”. They originated to be in service to the administration and organization of the ever-growing conglomerates of machines and corporations (2018). As the technological apparatus expanded in size and complexity, jobs with mindless repetition of simple tasks were burgeoned to ensure flawless operations of the gigantic machine. These jobs return meager financial and intellectual rewards but require rigid work schedules and ethics. Workers in these positions are not immersed in Marcuse’s utopia. Here, technological innovations have failed to guarantee basic health and material needs.

The End to the Class of Proletariat?

Marcuse has an inauspicious vision for the class of proletariat under technology, which is a disassembling of these workers with common interests against capitalists into a crowd of individuals who are the “standardized subject of brute self-preservation” without the aggressive impulses developed under the scarcity of the prior capitalistic years (1998, 53). Pertaining to this idea, Marcuse is often criticized to be progressing from Marxism to pessimism (Munshi 1977, 27). However, he may have come to the conclusion of a lost radicalism too soon.

As argued earlier, technological advancements only eradicated scarcity for a very tiny population, who are the skilled managers of technology and the unreachable leisure class of super elites. Productivity never fully alleviated the frustrations of the common masses. In some instances, it has burdened modern workers even more by subjecting them to technological operations, meaning extended hours and hectic schedules that are in rhythmic sync with the machines. Even though this modern age offers myriad entertainment forms that penetrate workers’ private lives as distractions and comfort, it cannot exterminate the suppressive feeling of having a never-ending workday that needs infinite care and improvement. In short, the need for better technologies is equivalent to the need for ongoing and undisrupted hard work.

Alternatively speaking, the class-consciousness that holds together the proletariat is not lost, but transitions into states of temporary dormancy from time to time. I argue that it is due to the anesthesia injected into the proletariat through the omnipresence of culturally hegemonic consumerism. Examples of this form of anesthesia are ubiquitous in North America, such as the advocacy of “self-care” or the discourses on the importance of being confident, boasting the idea that the source of frustrations stems from the inner self and can be fixed with better and more creative ways of leisure such as fancy retreat packages and varieties of digital products. While at the same time, the anxiety that came with automation, the surge in productivity, and the lack of equitable distribution of the overly produced resources were still there, unsolvable by the imaginative brain of consumerism.

Critical moments of true urgencies need to be examined to show that class consciousness is still alive but appears inactive at times. In fact, technological innovations provided new methods to build class-resonance in these moments. In 2014, Michael Brown, a black teenager, died from a police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri. In this case, social media acted in a crucial position to raise awareness of black Americans’ social realities and promote reforms. Immediately after the shooting, over 3.6 million tweets were sent in the first week of protests (Bonilla and Rosa 2015, 4). Racial injustice may seem farfetched from workers’ struggles. Still, in spirit, the revolution called for by Marx and Engels relies on a similar discrepancy in social positions as the protests against racism. Black bodies are commonly misrepresented and overly exploited by white supremacy; proletariats are also in positions of unfair treatment or poor labour conditions put in by the bourgeoisie. Social media is an assimilated tool for the muted that can “document, contest and ultimately transform their quotidian experiences” (Bonilla and Rosa 2015, 9) by assertions of their particularities, unseen in the hegemonic discourses.

Another example closer to the revolutionary will of the proletariat can be found in China, where technology tycoons have an unspoken rule that requires employees to work overtime. The work schedule is commonly referred to as “9-9-6”, which means working from 9 AM till 9 PM and for 6 days a week. These corporations promote an involuted culture that praises competition and puts workers under insane pressure to launch technological products with tight deadlines. In early 2021, two workers of a popular e-commerce company, Pinduoduo, died from exhaustion and despair under this work culture. One suffered a sudden death as she was leaving the company after midnight, and the other committed suicide. Following these tragedies, employees who criticized the company were punished or fired. Shortly after, a delivery driver burned himself to death in a desperate statement to acquire back his unpaid wages.[3] To provide more background, the delivery services in China is famed to be the most efficient in the world. Still, unfortunately, automation never resolved the repressive working conditions where the computed routes assigned for drivers often disregard the actualities of real-time traffic and roadblocks. Instead, the delivery drivers had to race with death to complete orders on time to earn commissions of 1 CAD per order. If the orders were late, deductions would be made to their basic salary of 500 CAD a month.

Marcuse might not even believe unbearable working conditions would exist in the 21st century and in a country known to be the leading force in breaking technological ceilings. Fortunately, there was a silver lining. This shocking news of workers’ death in 2021 riled up the whole Chinese social media, resulting in rages from workers across sectors that empathized with similar inhumane coercion at work. Following this wave of social unrest, Tencent, which owns the biggest Chinese social media, has announced a new work schedule “10-6-5” to appease the controversies to “9-9-6” in 2022.[4] One might consider this a milestone of proletariats’ success in the technological apparatus, which was undoubtedly won with the help of social media that united workers in distances to voice their dissents.

 The Embers of Revolution

With the evidence discussed in the prior section, one can envisage the revolutionary spirit as intact, however small it might be compared to the apparatus itself. On the one hand, Marx and Engels might critique the current wealth disparity and the aggravating labour conditions to be at the tipping point for a communist transformation. Because the modern reality I argued fits the scenario in the Communist Manifesto. A large amount of wealth is controlled by thinner and thinner sections of the social strata. Workers, internationally connected through social media, suffer in the same mechanized predicaments under the demanding nature of technological advancement.

On the other hand, Marcuse may counter by arguing that the immersive apparatus could easily absorb any opposing forces and therefore would render any revolutions to be unrevolutionary. This can be demonstrated through the integration of social concerns by the businesses as they rebrand their images with inclusivity or corporate responsibility to conciliate workers’ dissatisfactions. At the same time, the same operational models were kept intact. In the end, the apparatus itself may never tremble to its core by the revolutionists.

Indeed, despite the rebellious will of the modern proletariat, full-scale emancipation that brings forth a clean slate to allow workers to be in charge politically and redesign the whole social apparatus might never see the day of dawn. Conversely, reforms might be more realistic in execution, and the debates between reform and revolution will never go out of fashion for the left. Instead of drawing decisive borders between them and discrediting any material faculty of reforms, it might be helpful to consider reforms as a “bridge to greater revolutionary consciousness” (Cox 2019). A case in point might be the immense appeal of Bernie Sanders to the younger generation during the 2020 presidential election, whose campaign funding is backed mainly by individual donors and whose advocacy included universal healthcare and raising the minimum wage (González 2021, 44). These redistributive strategies are not a direct challenge to the apparatus itself but are reformative steps that reignite the livelihood of working-class movements and may potentially channel a future of greater revolutionary changes.

Conclusion

Technology became a new productive force that establish new production relations within its scope. Marcuse’s contention on the overarching dictations of technology on all economic subjects is true, where capital valorization abdicated the ruling position of production to technology. However, through brief examinations of the modern history of workers and the economic policies, this essay demonstrated that critical rationality was not lost, and the proletariats are still alive. Marxian class interests never died out with technology. On the contrary, it is intensified under this changing context to be a particular kind of workers’ struggle, which is oppressed by the technological demand.

Further speaking, even though the proliferating environment is filled with individualistic messages that sublimate the collective consciousness of shared hardships, the technological age presents tools to spread revolutionary fire. The proletariat was never presented with a tool more powerful than social media to unite one another and collectively respond to the resemblances of their struggles. Nonetheless, full emancipation toward the socialistic future envisioned by Marx and Engels might never be achieved. In the meantime, radical reforms will act as driving forces to nurture the revolutionary consciousness.

 [1] “Facebook, Instagram, And WhatsApp Shutdown On October 4, 2021: The Legal And Social Perspectives,” Mondaq, October 14, 2021, https://www.mondaq.com/nigeria/social-media/1120900/facebook-instagram-and-whatsapp-shutdown-on-october-4-2021-the-legal-and-social-perspectives..

[2] Jonathan Franklin and Bill Chappell, “Why Facebook and Instagram Went Down for Hours on Monday,” National Public Radio, October 5, 2021, npr.org/2021/10/05/1043211171/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-outage-business-impact.

[3] Vivian Wang, “Worker Deaths Put Big Tech in China Under Scrutiny,” The New York Times, February 5, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/business/china-technology-worker-deaths.html.

[4] “Tencent’s WeChat trails ‘1065’ Work Schedule Amid Criticism of ‘996’”, Asian Tech Press, February 18, 2022, https://www.asiantechpress.com/tencents-wechat-trials-1065-work-schedule-amid-criticism-of-996.html.

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