One-dimensional man: relevance for contemporary management

¶ … dimensional man'? What is the relevance of this concept for management today?

One-Dimensional Man will dither all over between two opposing theories: which is modern industrial community is able to restrict qualitative alteration for the anticipatory future; power and propensities are there that might shatter this repression and blow up this society. The two propensities are present, concurrently and also one within the other. The initial propensity is foremost, and whatever prerequisite for a turnaround is available are being employed to avert it. It seems that a catastrophe might transform the state, but unless the acknowledgment of what is being performed and what is being checked undermines the awareness and the conduct of man, a calamity will not be enough to unleash the transformation. The study is concentrated on modern industrial society, wherein the technological equipment of manufacturing and delivery operates, not as the aggregate of just tools which can be capable of segregating from their social and political influences, but somewhat as a structure which governs a priori the creation of the machinery as also the functions of checking and widening it. (The Paralysis of Criticism: Society without Opposition)

In this society, the manufacturing machinery has a propensity to be authoritarian to the degree to which it resolves not just the socially required professions, proficiencies, and mind-set, as also personal requirements and objectives. It just destroys the conflict among the private and public subsistence among personal and social wants. Technology gives to establish novel, more efficient, and more enjoyable types of social management and social unity. The authoritarian penchant of these appears to claim itself in yet another meaning through distributing to the areas that have grown less and also to the pre-industrial regions of the globe, and also by making closeness in the growth of capitalism and communism. In the countenance of the authoritarian characteristics of this society, the conventional view of the impartiality of technology can no more be uphold. Technology in itself cannot be segregated from the utility to which it is put; the technological society is a system of authority that functions by now in the notion and creation of methods. (The Paralysis of Criticism: Society without Opposition)

The manner in which a society systemizes the existence of its members entails a preliminary choice between past options that are resolved by the innate intensity of physical and intellectual culture. The decision per se is an outcome of the interaction of the main preferences. It anticipates particular forms of altering and using humans and nature and discards other forms. It is a program of understanding among others. However, when the program has started to be operative in the fundamental organizations and associations, it has a propensity to become special and to find out the progression of the society in its totality. Like a technological world, modern industrial society is a political world, the most recent phase in the understanding of a particular former protect-namely, the knowledge, revolution, and systemization of nature as just the stuff of control. While the program opens up, it molds the total world of communication and achievement, intellectual and material culture. In the medium of technology, culture, politics, and the economy unite into a ubiquitous system that consumes or repels every option. The efficiency and intensification capability of this arrangement balances the society and has the technological advancement within the structure of control. Technological wisdom has come to be political wisdom. (The Paralysis of Criticism: Society without Opposition)

Modern industrial societies exploit technology, science and technicalities to augment their abilities of creation. The equipment comes to be the extremely potent political means and beats the political strength of any person or assembly of people. This occurrence has been dealt with in an encouraging way. "To the stage to which the occupational universe is envisaged of as a mechanism and automated consequently, it comes to be the potential basis of novel free will of humans." (The Search for Freedom: Part II- One Dimensional Man) This never entails the socialization of financial being. The people who discharge their duties in their places of work rule over their machines. Through uniting their endeavors they can be capable to take the place of the power of the managers and leaders of the companies and leave behind the people who utilize the benefits for exploiting political power and utilize the power for their self benefit. The wants of the One Dimensional Man are pre-accustomed. The pre-customization is prone to more instruction by a regular media. (The Search for Freedom: Part II- One Dimensional Man)

The media imparts, "To act and devour as per the advertisements, to emulate others in their love and hate decisions. "Societal benefit inflicts "fake" wants. The "fake" wants satisfy the person however they "affect slog, fierceness, sadness and unfairness." (The Search for Freedom: Part II- One Dimensional Man) The continual efforts for these continual "fake" wants need extra endeavors, and gives aggravation and misery, which build up antagonism. Autonomy hands a broad array of preferences, however fails to let the person to find out what can be preferred and what is preferred. Emancipation is unable to describe the number of hours individuals are agreeing to put their duties to satisfy their wants. Products cater to train and maneuver. The instruction comes to be a habit of living. It is an excellent manner of life -- much improved compared to before- and as an excellent manner of living, it conflicts against qualitative alteration. Therefore appears a pattern of one dimensional thought. (The Search for Freedom: Part II- One Dimensional Man)

One-dimensional thinking is methodically advertised by the creators of politics and their supplier of mass information. Better affluence has affected improved homogeneity of attention. Increased complains against U.S. government rules have come down considerably from the days the Vietnam War has been fought. Persistent armed solutions to disagreements, which result in assaults on innocent countries, are championed by a society that has constricted the proportions of its ways of thinking. The university, once a multitude pool of youthful censure and movements, has come to be distinctly aimed in the direction of a sole objective -- to teach for inclusion into a corporate society. It was Marcuse who foretold these happenings. He uses languages with freedom and employs a metaphorical tactic to attain important finale. (The Search for Freedom: Part II- One Dimensional Man)

According to Marcuse therefore, in the capitalistic system, the technology implies to an unusual form of social regulations. Such regulations have authoritarian features. Therefore no non-aligned status of technology can be maintained. The mass media invents and maneuver the awareness. The capitalistic structure involves technology as the form of social regulation and authority. The technological devices decide the social necessities, capabilities, employment relationships and intentions -- and therefore, the types of social control and coherence. According to Marcuse the negative aspects of automation is evidently governing. In the prevailing circumstances the negative characteristics of automation have leading impacts; accelerate technological unemployment, reinforce the stand of management, enhancing the incapacity and giving up of the jobs by the employees. The scope for development reduces as the management favors engineers and college graduates. 9 On the Topicality of Selected Aspects of Herbert Marcuse's Works)

The technologies involved in the transformation of production process vary the awareness in particular modes. The orientation of labor forces to cater to the automated and semi-automated reactions is an exhausting, astonishing, inhuman slavery. The capitalistic involvement of technology is viewed as increased technological progress giving rise to the more wealth in the society and in turn enhances the slavery. According to Marcuse the prevailing means and the possibility of regulation have been enjoined by a new momentum that is concerned with the principles of the technological advance, increasing computerization, technological excellence in collection of data and with observation. He emphasized on the particular propensity of the workers to become really interested in the corporations they are engaged. After about thirty years such workers participation is regarded as the participative management and has one of the most significant rudiments in the theory of management.

Actually it do not refer to the increasingly labor oriented production; instead a new ideological process is infused that guarantees capital accumulation and finishes the crisis of capital by assimilating the workforce psychologically. According to Marcuse the automation implies to the declining amount of living labor power with transformation of the living labor into the dead labor. Therefore, the propensity towards the law of value is completed. This also is applied to the concepts of surplus value and the organic composition of capital. This indicates low relevance of the traditional concepts of labor theory of value with the declining trend of the industrial labor. This made us to understand of the sublation of labor on the one aspect and the source of profit on the other. Marcuse is of the view that this contradiction results in technological unemployment and poverty. (On the Topicality of Selected Aspects of Herbert Marcuse's Works)

In the present stage of capitalism attributed by more aggravated social relationships, however exhibiting more developed material preconditions of liberations and the people becoming more ignorant of the emerging scopes, it is very essential to have a stress on linking of the theory and practice. The Critical Theory of Herbert Marcuse seems not have avoided the essence of topicality with the resulting crisis of the society that is also a crisis of the left and of Marxism. Conversely the degeneration of Soviet-system has revealed that the capitalism is not the better substitute that indicates the 'socialism' and also the western forms of capitalism are not the sustainable form of society. This is quite evident from the spreading up of the global problems. (On the Topicality of Selected Aspects of Herbert Marcuse's Works)

Marcuse resolutely criticizes the restrictions of bourgeois democracy based on private property as well as social and economic inequality. He emphasized the combination of enhanced productivity and increasing destruction, the resulting human society at the threshold of annihilation, the yielding of thought, hope and fear to the commands of the authority considered to be the accumulation of misery in the face of unparalleled wealth that comprise of the most impartial denunciation, its far-reaching rationality, that drifts efficiency and growth is self contradictory. According to him the automation and separation of the working class, the legislation of the capitalist state generated to defend private property and the function of the repressive state apparatus found in the aggressive restriction of any practical application of democratic rights and freedom in the mechanized democracies. (On the Absolute Rational Will)

Marcuse illustrates on the works of Marx mainly as his study concentrates on the manner in which the economy restricts the capability of individuals. According to Mascuse, individuals are in bondage since they operate within the framework like the economy. If individuals were genuinely liberated, they might have been without the clutches from these systems. For instance, individuals would just be obliged to be engaged for the barest minimum to meet for their wants, not a conventional quantity of time. He declares that when they are able to liberate from these systems, they will be able to find out what their genuine requirements or desires are. Since, we are yet to be liberated; we possess "fake wants." These wants are typified by the array of preferences that are presented in our economy. But, every of these options strengthen the social rule which is present at the moment. Since every option possesses the identical outcome, there is no true option.

According to Marcuse, increasingly sophisticated societies are welfare/welfare states. Welfare states curtail liberty as they restrict free time, availing required products and services and the capability of the citizens to understand genuine independence. The welfare state obstructs a genuine study of society as it allows individuals who are concentrated on combating the "foe" instead of concentrating on domestic social crisis. Marcuse's study of more sophisticated societies is precise and helpful. But he is unable to give a genuine answer to the difficulties he puts forth. His argument appears to be that in case societies are capable of being taught to use technologies in manners that are advantageous for the citizens, in place of confining them, the crisis of human beings will be cracked. (Hebert Marcuse: One-Dimensional Man)

After deliberating on the political unification of sophisticated industrial society, an accomplishment made likely by mounting technological efficiency and the increasing invasion of humans and nature, we will at present shift our attention to an equivalent unification in the sphere of culture. The accomplishments and the disappointments of this society annul its advanced culture. The thing which is occurring at the moment is not the worsening of advanced culture into mass culture nevertheless the repudiation of this culture by the actuality. The actuality exceeds its culture. Currently humans are able to perform more than culture heros and demi-gods; he has unraveled a lot of mysterious problems. However, he has even deceived the hope and shattered the reality that was conserved in the sublimations of advanced culture. (The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness: Repressive Desublimation)

In order to be certain, the advanced culture was all the time in disagreement with social truth and just a fortunate minority benefited from its blessing and stood for its principles. The two opposing realms of society have all the time existed in tandem; the superior culture has all the time been obliging, when the truth was sparingly bothered by its principles and its facts. The current era's new characteristic is the loosing steam of enmity between culture and social truth by the destruction of the hostile, foreign and inspirational essentials in the superior culture through the merit of which it formed another dimension of truth. The bankruptcy of the two-dimensional culture happens not by way of negation and refusal of the "cultural values," nevertheless through their complete inclusion into the customary order, by way of their creation and exhibition on an enormous level. Indeed, they cater as tools of social unity. (The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness: Repressive Desublimation)

Conventional Marxism as well as postmodernism is not able to understand the vibrant nature of the cultural and economic procedure forming the awareness of the bourgeois theme. Conventional Marxists have a propensity to discern the procedure from a trans-historical viewpoint; class disagreement within a perspective of financial determinism, and to tackle with the bourgeois theme through creation of its own "socialist man." Postmodernism, to a huge degree, looks to elude the crisis by doing away with the topic on the whole. The two teams are not able to bring out an analysis of the procedure and the two are unable to translate what they comprehend into an awareness that is able to thwarting bourgeois. The automated procedure of manufacturing of delayed capitalism facilitates a complete manner of life which moulds individual into estranged customer and lessens every personal and social principles to economic product. The sole expectation for re-thinking remaining is to nurture susceptibility of liberation that makes novel potential and novel paths of life. (One-Dimensional Man in the Postmodern Age)

In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse interrogates the Marxian hypothesis of the groundbreaking working class and certainty of capitalist predicament through the study of the amalgamation of the industrial working class into capitalist culture and fresh types of capitalist balancing. As opposed to conventional Marxism, Marcuse supported fragment groups of minorities, strangers, and sweeping intellectuals in an effort to encourage conflicting idea and conduct by means of encouraging sweeping feelings and resistance. It persuaded many in the New Left even with its pessimism because it expressed their rising displeasure with both capitalist societies and Soviet communist societies. (One-Dimensional Man: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Marcuse claims that contemporary, capitalist society has turn out to be one-dimensional, a society with no resistance, but subjugated by planned forces that restrict conflict, alternative, and assessment. This society is not apparently authoritarian as there seems to be equality, freedom, and autonomy in it, but real resistance and sweeping transforms are shut owing to the manners this society is prearranged; the society seems approachable and liberal but is capable of sucking up disagreement and resistance and formulation is communally hopeless or unproductive. A fiscal system that can give enough goods and services to satisfy the requirements of members of the society is the foundation for real human liberty as per Marcuse. More and more societies are able to give this much more compared to past societies with their restricted industrious capability. (Sociology 319: Herbert Marcuse)

However, the related consequences of this contain a dampening of the vital features of personality, thinking, and political antagonism. To a certain extent, disagreement, antagonism, and peculiarity can be contained within the system by restraining the variety of choices that are accessible. Even though these restrictions on liberty may appear as a segment of authoritarian political and communal makeup, as per Marcuse, there may be small distinction among supposedly free and elected societies and those that are authoritarian. The increased output of modern types of economic manufacturing could result in the likelihood of true liberty thereby people would not be restricted by the needs to manufacture the essentials of life. Instead, such beneficial possibility could make a fresh type of human liberty, where the person would be open to exercise independence over a life that would be his own and this would make real independence achievable for the person. (Sociology 319: Herbert Marcuse)

In highly developed industrial civilization a calm, even, sensible, democratic dependence exists, which is an indication of technical progress. Undoubtedly nothing is more sensible than the containment of independence in the automation of socially essential but agonizing feats; the ruling of free rivalry among unevenly prepared economic subjects; the intensity of individual enterprises in more efficient, more prolific corporations; the limitation of privileges and national sovereignties which obstruct the international organization of resources. That this technological regulation also includes a political and scholarly harmonization may be an unfortunate and yet potential growth. To the level that the real stuff of all liberty, namely, liberty from desire, is turning out to be a genuine probability, the liberties that relate to a state of inferior efficiency are escaping their earlier substance. (Chapter 1: The New Forms of Control)

Freedoms of thinking, independence and the privilege to political opposition are being removed from their fundamental vital role in a society that appears more and more competent of fulfilling the requirements of the individuals through the way in which it is prearranged. Such a society may reasonably insist approval of its philosophy and organizations, and decrease the resistance to the conversation and encouragement of optional policies inside the status quo. In this regard, whether an authoritarian or a non-authoritarian system achieves the growing satisfaction of requirements appears to build tiny difference. In these conditions of a growing level of comfort, oddness with the system itself seems to be socially hopeless, and the more so when it involves concrete fiscal and political drawbacks and intimidates the efficient function of the entire system. In fact, at any rate, as long as the requirements of life are included, there appears to be no reason why the production and distribution of goods and services should continue through the competitive agreement of personal freedoms.

Autonomy of enterprise was from the start not a blessing in overall terms. As the freedom to work or to go hungry, it implied hard work, lack of confidence, and dread for the huge bulk of the inhabitants. The vanishing of this type of liberty would be one of the supreme attainments of civilization if the person were no longer forced to establish himself on the market, as a free economic subject. The technological procedures of automation and homogeny might liberate individual energy into a yet unexplored kingdom of liberty further than requirement. The very form of human continuation would be modified; the person would be enlightened from the unfamiliar requirements and unfamiliar potentials forced by the world of job upon him. The person would be open to apply independence over a life that would be his personal. If the creative machinery could be arranged and aimed in the direction of the fulfillment of the very important requirements, and if the control is well balanced, such control would not stop individual independence, but make it achievable. (Chapter 1: The New Forms of Control)

Apart from the truth that even without co-existence aggressive capital buildup produces sufficient motivating power to augment the output of labor, it should be obvious that the forces of capital creation are not similar with technological growth. It is not manufacturing and output per se which push capitalism, but the creation of income as the buildup of capital. For example, it is not a physical failure to create which results in a fall of production in a tragic circumstance, but the failure to manufacture gainfully. The product excess on the market shows the dissimilarity between production and capitalist production. Then, it is not the technical power to manufacture in excess decides the condition of the capitalist economy, but simply the authority or the lack of it to manufacture in excess of income.

A technology of real or possible excesses does not indicate true excesses able to fulfill present social requirements. Undeniably, the actual salaries of workers have augmented in current times. But only under circumstances of capital growth, which indicates that the relation between salaries and income stays normally equal. The output of labor went up quick enough to permit for both capital buildup and a higher level of comfort. In times of despair there was a provisional turnaround of this fashion. Where capital did not accrue, living standards either dropped, or stayed what they were earlier to the appearance of capitalism. Problems in the manufacture of capital are, obviously, tangibly opposed by all accessible means able to reinstate a necessary profitability, which, if victorious, promise the sustained continuation of capitalism. (Paul Mattick 1972: One Dimensional Man In Class Society)

However, an enhancement of production is not a symbol of the capitalist expansion; it is so only when contributing towards the capital formation and by doing so in progressive method. Irrespective of the fact that there is an enormous increase in production at times of war, it is associated with an exceptionally low rate of capital formation. The residual labor is used in generation of waster and mass annihilation of capital already attained rather than utilizing it is additional profit-yielding means of production. Similarly at times of peace the production is enhanced irrespective of the fact that a stable or reducing rate of capital formation by way of compensatory government-induced production. The dichotomy between the private and public production is however not rigid.

The political constraints tempt the government to interfere the private market production, to illustrate, by promoting certain commodities and by acquiring surplus products to be utilized in foreign and domestic aid projects. There exists some interaction of private and public business concerns in various fields of production along with their marketing and financing. Normally however, one can speak of the splitting up of the economy into a profit oriented private sector and another comparatively smaller public sector operating with non-profiteering motive. The private sector accumulates its profits by way of market dealings and the public sector dealings are viewed to be quite independent of the market forces irrespective of the fact that its prevalence and operation influences the dealings of the private sector profoundly. The profitability is not enhanced by way of non-profitable production. Production by capital without any concern for profitability said to have not functioned as capital. (Paul Mattick 1972: One Dimensional Man In Class Society)

Marcuse points out that the dominion of public communication is confined to hover around a social project that characterizes the constant supply of 'false needs' catering to the one-dimensional consumers. Any conception that is not compatible to the social project is barred from the pubic debate. Within the limitations of consumer society the liberty tends to be a concept condensed the terms of commercial dealings. The appealing output of the entertainment and information industry results in the approved intentions and habits. The products instruct and maneuver; they uphold a false awareness that is resistant against the falsehood. Since these advantageous products have been made available to more individuals in more social classes the propaganda they warrant closes down to be publicity; it evidently tends to be a way of life. (Negations: the Manifesto: An Introduction to the Journal)