Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 18

 

Summary of Chapter 18: The “Middle Layers” of Employment

Braverman turns now from the proletariat to the new “middle class,” which, however, differs from the old petty-bourgeois middle class of pre-monopoly capitalism, in that it lacks independence and access to the means of production (e.g. as oldtime artisans, farmers, etc. had), instead having some characteristics of a working class, in particular being dependent upon capital for employment:

This portion of employment embraces the engineering, technical, and scientific cadre, the lower ranks of supervision and management, the considerable numbers of specialized and “professional” employees occupied in marketing, financial and organizational administration, and the like, as well as, outside of capitalist industry proper, in hospitals, schools, government administration, and so forth. (279)

The stark contract between the old class structure and the modern one is that, before monopoly capital, a large portion of the working population were independent of capital per se, being neither owners nor employees of capitalist enterprises. Today, however, “almost all of the population has been transformed into employees of capital” (ibid., emphasis original).

However, for the middle class, it is about more than the mere structural fact that they are employees, for this technically holds true also of upper management:

These operating executives, by virtue of their high managerial positions, personal investment portfolios, independent power of decision, place in the hierarchy of the labor process, position in the community of capitalists at large, etc., etc., are the rulers of industry, act “professionally” for capital, and are themselves part of the class that personi­fies capital and employs labor. Their formal attribute of being part of the same payroll as the production workers, clerks, and porters of the corporation no more robs them of the powers of decision and command over the others in the enterprise than does the fact that the general, like the private, wears the military uniform, or the pope and cardinal pronounce the same liturgy as the parish priest. (280)

Thus, the shared “form of hired employment” in fact represents two distinct realities: on the one side that of the working class, selling their labor power, and on the other a mechanism by which the ruling class selects representatives from within itself to carry out leadership roles in the corporation.

Then, “between these two extremes there is a range of intermediate categories, sharing the characteristics of worker on the one side and manager on the other in varying degrees,” primarily in terms of relative authority and expertise, as well as “working independence.” These intermediate positions are those held by the new middle class in the corporation.

Their pay level is significant because beyond a certain point it, like the pay of the commanders of the corporation, clearly represents not just the exchange of their labor power for money—a commodity exchange—but a share in the surplus produced in the corporation, and thus is intended to attach them to the success or failure of the corporation and give them a “management stake,” even if a small one.

There is a vast hierarchy which blends into management at the top, and the workers at the bottom. This “new middle class” is distinct from the old middle class, again, because they are not outside the capital-labor relationship, but possess a status combining aspects of both sides, though increasingly of the latter, in that, like workers, they are subject to downward pressure on wages from an unemployed reserve army, and their workplaces are periodically subject to “rationalization” in the interests of capital (282). B notes that employment crises in the 20^th century exposed the myth that these middle class workers were independent “professionals:”

... rising rates of unemployment among “professionals” of various kinds once more brought home to them that they were not the free agents they thought they were, who deigned to “associate themselves” with one or another corporation, but truly part of a labor market, hired and fired like those beneath them.

In such occupations, the proletarian form begins to assert itself and to impress itself upon the consciousness of these employees. Feeling the insecu­rities of their role as sellers of labor power and the frustrations of a controlled and mechanically organized workplace, they begin, despite their remaining privileges, to know those symptoms of dissociation which are popularly called “alienation” and which the working class has lived with for so long that they have become part of its second nature.

Thus, the new “middle class” either is going or will go through the same shifts towards proletarianization as the clerical class discussed earlier in the book. Braverman draws from this the moral that class is not a static “thing” (as presumed by those who want to come up with inherent definitions for classes), but a relationship (283).

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 6

Summary of Chapter 6: Decompression and the third force

V’s summary:

Up till now, tyranny has merely changed hands. In their common respect for rulers, antagonistic powers have always fostered the seeds of their future coexistence. (When the leader of the game takes the power of a Leader, the revolution dies with the revolutionaries.) Unresolved antagonisms fester, hiding real contradictions. Decompression is the permanent control of both antagonists by the ruling class. The third force radicalises contradictions, and leads to their transcendence, in the name of individual freedom and against all forms of constraint. Power has no option but to smash or incorporate the third force without admitting its existence. (57)

V begins with a parable of people living in a windowless tower, with the poor responsible for providing light with oil lamps. A revolutionary movement calls for the socialization of light, and radicals call even for the demolition of the tower; a stray bullet cracks the walls, letting natural light pour in. Windows are constructed and the radicals who had advocated the destruction of the building quietly eliminated; however, dissatisfaction soon reappears, as people are now unhappy about living in a “greenhouse.”

V charges that “The consciousness ofour time oscillates between that of the walled-up man and that of the prisoner” (58). A man enclosed in darkness sees his condition clearly and is filled with desperate rage, battering his head against the walls to break them down by any means; a prisoner in a cell, on the other hand, is passive because of the barred window or door which keeps alive the hope of escape or reprieve. “The man who is walled up alive has nothing to lose; the prisoner still has hope. Hope is the leash of submission” (58).

Thus, power has learned how to keep hope alive among the downtrodden and exploited, in order to render them passive, or rather, in order to be able to channel their resistance into controllable forms. In particular, V is referring to the cold war opposition of Capitalist and Communist states, each standing as an alternative to the exploited subjects of the other, while at the same time both retain their faithfulness to the principle of hierarchy:

The hierarchical principle remains common to the fanatics of both sides: opposite the capitalism of Lloyd George and Krupp appears the anti-capitalism of Lenin and Trotsky. From the mirrors of the masters of the present, the masters of the future are already smiling back. (58-9)

The Russian Revolution, for example, had started as a real, anarchist, uprising and organization from below, but had been betrayed and coöpted by the Bolsheviks:

As soon as the leader of the game turns into a Leader, the principle of hierarchy is saved, and the Revolution sits down to preside over the execution of the revolutionaries. We must never forget that the revolution­ary project belongs to the masses alone; leaders help it - Leaders betray it. To begin with, the real struggle takes place between the leader of the game and the Leader. (59)\

While the cold war powers go through the motions of opposition as part of the global spectacle, the people of the modern nation-states are kept entertained and confused by a multitude of momentary mini-conflicts, propagated in the media:

There is no one who is not accosted at every moment of the day by posters, news flashes, stereotypes, and summoned to take sides over each of the prefabricated trifles that conscientiously stop up all the sources of everyday creativity. In the hands of Power, that glacial fetish, such particles of antagonism form a magnetic ring whose function it is to make everybody lose their bearings, to abstract individuals from themselves and scramble all lines of force. (61)

[And how better to describe the workings of social media today, than as the algorithmically moderated flow of “particles of antagonism?”]

“Decompression is simply the control of antagonisms by Power” (61). Decompression, like the window in the jail cell, allows the pressure of despair and rage to relax into a controllable energy, which can be fed back into maintaining the spectacular oppositions which stand in for the possibility of real revolution. He cites old arcane church disputes as an example: a stark choice of god vs the devil would have overthrown the church; instead smaller, more arcane conflicts are promulgated, that don’t threaten the overall structure.

“In all conflicts between opposing sides an irrepressible upsurge of indi­vidual desire takes place and often reaches a threatening intensity.” (62) This is the third force, a true opposition to the spectacle and the workings of power, which can only have reality outside of the controlled binary of decompression.

From the individual's point of view the third force is what the force of decompression is from the point of view of Power. A spontaneous feature of every struggle, it radicalises insurrections, denounces false problems, threatens Power in its very struc­ture.

Individualism, alcoholism, collectivism, activism ... the variety of ideologies shows that there are a hundred ways of being on the side of Power. There is only one way to be radical. The wall that must be knocked down is immense, but it has been cracked so many times that soon a single cry will be enough to bring it crashing to the ground. Let the formidable reality of the third force emerge at last from the mists of history, with all the individual passions that have fuelled the insurrections of the past! Soon we shall find that an energy is locked up in everyday life which can move mountains and abolish distances. (62)

The long revolution is this history of seemingly failed insurrections, revolutionary communes, momentary resistances, etc., which have each left cracks in the wall; each revolutionary individual or generation adds their own impetus to it, playing their part in “the great gamble whose stake is freedom” (63).

Swindell et al., Against Automated Education

 

Swindell, Andrew; Luke Greeley, Antony Farag, and Bailey Verdone (2024), “Against Artificial Education: Towards an Ethical Framework for Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Use in Education” Online Learning 28(2), 7-27.

Summary:

This interesting article argues for an ethical framework drawing on the work of Gunther Anders, Michel Foucault, Paolo Freire, Benjamin Bloom (actually, the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy), and Hannah Arendt. In the event, Anders, Foucault, and Freire are discussed briefly for broader ethical context, but the main focus of the article is the addition of an ethical dimension to Bloom’s Taxonomy using Arendt’s hierarchy of labor, work, and action.

They apply this to the actually existing use of AI by imagining this, frankly, quite likely scenario:

Let’s consider an example of how AI might be used with current GPT technology in a classroom. A journalist, under pressure to produce more consumable content for its struggling publication, uses a GPT to write a story about the benefits and costs of electrical vehicle production and use. A teacher, excited by the labor-saving allure of an AI teaching assistant product called Brisk, uses the software extension to read the news story about electric vehicles and design a 60-minute lesson plan for their students, complete with learning goals, discussion prompts, a presentation activity, and summary quiz about the reading. The students, given carte blanche to use their school-provided Chromebooks, “read” the story using an AI platform like Perplexity, which provides summary analysis and key takeaways for them to use in their discussion and respond to the quiz. Simultaneously, they use Microsoft’s AI image generator to create a slide deck for the class to graphically represent their group’s ideas. The teacher completes the assessment cycle by having their AI assistant grade the quizzes, provide feedback to the students, and input their scores into a learning management system. (Swindell et al., 2024: 17).

[Brisk is a classic example of the stark cynicism of our current use of GAI, allowing “instructors” (the term loses meaning in this context) to automatically generate “feedback” on student essays, which you (the instructor) are then encouraged to “personalize” and present to the students as “from you.”]

The authors’ critique of such a situation:

In this scenario, the AI engages in activities of labor and consumption, while all of the parties involved advance nothing of lasting significance, and if debate or critical reflection arise amongst students it is an incidental, rather than planned, outcome of the AI-prescribed lesson. Indeed, the Brisk teaching assistant might be well programmed to incorporate into the lesson features of the RBT such as understanding, evaluating, and creating activities; but unless a human being in this process is attuned to helping learners act in the world and make it a place, using Arendt’s (1963/2006) words, “fit for human habitation,” ... the most common educational experience might become, ironically, ones in which humans are unnecessary. (ibid., 18)

They go on to propose a “Framework for Ethical AI Use in Education,” in the form of a graphic inputting insights from each of the five philosophies they are drawing on. They apply this framework in two examples, which are, unfortunately, not particularly satisfying. They begin with a list of “guiding questions” for lesson design using AI:

1. In what ways are our historical, technological, social contexts shaping how we think and act; what activity or experience can shock learners into appreciating their contingency?

2. Will the technologies we are going to use advance humanizing ends? In what ways can the technology enhance or harm the co-creation of knowledge?

3. How can we design learning activities that have benefits beyond their own sake; how are the learning activities helping students to act in the world?

4. In what ways can AI reduce the burdens of teaching and learning labor while increasing the capacity to act in the world? (ibid., 22)

[The first two questions show the influence of Foucault and the rest; the last two are primarily informed by Arendt.]

Their first proposed exercise involves a research project in which students seek to learn about their local “political landscape.” AI is used to conduct research on who the local elected officials are, what the local issues are, and what are the important fora for discussion and debate. Students then form their own positions using this knowledge: the idea is that AI performs the “labor” (Arendt’s lowest category), leaving humans free to focus on “action” (Arendt’s highest category.

However, having done exercises like this in the past without AI, this just seems like so many attempts to rationalize an “ethical” or “harmless” use of AI – namely, AI is inserted as an extra element where it is not actually needed. Local political entities, candidates, electoral bodies, and so on, have websites with all this information – it is not hard to find. Using a generative AI search tool only introduces the likelihood of errors, along with the dangerous habit of taking AI as a reliable source of information. At best, AI could be asked what websites contain this information, and then the information looked up on those websites (with the added hope that the list is correct, of course). What is more difficult is not the “labor” of looking up information, but the process of reading through debates, articles, and so on to try and evaluate and formulate issues and positions, and it is this that students are likely to use AI for – against the recommendations of Swindell et al, since after all this involves higher-level Bloom’s and corresponds with “action,” which is supposed to be left to humans.

In their second example,

students are tasked with researching a topic of their choosing both to learn about it and apply this knowledge to their own context. To facilitate this endeavor, AI acts as an agent of Socratic dialogue and questioning for the student, helping students generate research idea topics that will be specifically catered towards student interests. AI will be equipped to ask students questions regarding their level of interests and commitment, suggest other topics of potential interest based on specific student response in addition to refine students’ thinking regarding logical sequencing of topic selection and eventually argument. This personalized approach allows them to analyze how these topics manifest in their own lives and communities, gaining valuable insights. (ibid., 24)

Again, why is AI required to engage in Socratic dialogue? First of all, isn’t this the instructor’s job? (And one of Brisk’s more cynical applications is just such an automated “feedback” generator). But more deeply, isn’t this an opportunity for students to engage in Socratic interaction and mutual critique with each other? After all, the authors have been citing Freire on conscientization and the need to allow students to develop control over their learning process. The instructor could easily model Socratic questioning in class, and give students example questions and topics to guide them in developing their own practice. Delegating this to AI is an opporyunity lost.

Thus, we have yet another attempt at reasoning out an ethical use for AI in the classroom, which fails to provide any good reason for actually using AI in the first place. Seeing as the primary use of AI today is 1) to avoid having to do any actual work or difficult thinking, and 2) to avoid interacting with people, it is hard to see how a “humanist” or ethical use can gain much traction, until this situation – and the underlying causes, pre-existing the development of generative AI – are addressed.

Another limitation of the model could be the reliance on Arendt’s hierarchy of labor-work-action, which has been reasonably criticized as reproducing an arbitrary, classist distinction (cf. also Sennett 1990). It is not true that we don’t learn or gain from anything classed in this model as “labor,” or that there can in fact be a clear line drawn between the actual, complex, productive activities which Arendt has delineated into these three a priori types. More to the point, it is not the type of work, but the social context, aka the relations of production, which render some kinds of work more meaningless or alienating than others. Likewise, it is not the mere fact of automation that is problematic, but how that automation is deployed, to what ends, and in whose ultimate interests. The authors make some nods to this political-economic context (via their discussion of Freire, Foucault, etc.) but the proposed ethical framework does not much reflect this.

Beyond this, the insistence on a “humanist” framing could be a limitation (Arendt in fact called herself an “anti-humanist”). The result is yet another call to keep “humans in the loop,” as masters, rather than servants, of the technology—as if it were the relations between humans and machines, rather than those between humans and other humans, that was ultimately at stake.

What difference might a post-humanist view have on the issue? ANT, for example, could have been brought in to consider the human subject as a historically and contextually created “figure” in a larger more-than-human assemblage, and the dissolution of this figure, with the supplanting of the disciplinary society with the control society, occurring, in Foucault’s words, like the erasure of “a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (Foucault 1970: 387).

Foucault, Michel (1970) The Order of Things. Vintage Books, New York.

Sennet, Richard (1990) The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Part 3, Chapter 1

Summary of Part 3, Chapter 1: The Genesis of Technicity

S begins by introducing the concept of phase:

By phase, we mean not a temporal moment replaced by another, but an aspect that results from a splitting in two of being and in opposition to another aspect; this sense of the word phase is inspired by the notion of a phase ratio in physics; one cannot conceive of a phase except in relation to another or to several other phases; in a system of phases there is a relation of equilibrium and of reciprocal tensions; it is the actual system of all phases taken together that is the complete reality, not each phase in itself; a phase is only a phase in relation to others, from which it distinguishes itself in a manner that is totally independent of the notions of genus and species. (173, emphasis added)

[The temporal meaning of “phase” is actually a derived sense, by way of the phases or appearances/aspects of the moon. Another related sense to how S uses the word is that of variant in biology, e.g., orange or red phase bearded dragons.]

The existence of a plurality of phases finally defines the reality of a neutral center of equilibrium in relation to which there is a phase shift.

[He goes on to explain how this is different from a dialectical schema, but I think it is also interesting to consider how this view of a system of plural phases with a “neutral center of equilibrium” replaces or surpasses the cybernetic emphasis in homeostasis.]

Each phase in such a system is “a symbol of the other,” i.e., they necessarily refer to each other in a system of differences, like letters or words, etc.

He thus describes the “phase shift” from the system of magical thinking to the split between technics and religion, each of which is a phase in a new system centered on aesthetic thought, which becomes the neutral point, or center of equilibrium, of this system, and an incomplete analog of the previous magical unity. Religion and technics then split further into theoretical and practical modes; scientific thought is the neutral point of the two theoretical modes, and ethical thought of the two practical modes. Philosophical research is an attempt within this system to find a new, superior analog to the magical unity, surpassing the first analog of aesthetic thought through the convergence and reunion of science and ethics.

S proceeds to discuss the phase shift from the “primitive magical unity,” drawing on the concepts of figure and ground from Gestalt theory, with the caveat that Gestalt’s emphasis on stability be replaced with metastability (177). The primitive magical universe defines “a universe that is at once subjective and objective prior to any distinction between the object and the subject, and consequently prior to any appearance of the separate object.” It is in the phase shift and fragmentation that comes after this that the technical object becomes objectified, and a religious mediator is subjectified.

The magical world is structured through a network of key points (points-clés) which are both spatial (privileged or special locations) and temporal (privileged or special moments or dates). It is these key points which have power, and human specialists access this power through them:

The magical universe is made of a network of access points to each domain of reality: thresholds, summits, limits, and crossing points, attached to one another through their singularity and their exceptional character. (180)

Individuals interact with these key-points through [ritual and] “friendship,” not as dominating, detached subjects:

To climb a slope in order to go toward the summit, is to make one’s way toward the privileged place that commands the entire mountain chain, not in order to dominate or possess it, but in order to exchange a relationship of friendship with it. (179)

It is wrong to suppose that the remnants of magical thinking in the present world are represented by superstitions, which are just degraded vestiges. Rather, it is in “high, noble, or sacred forms of thought” such as the will to exploration or ascent, that we see the survival of magical thinking and its relation to the world of key points. Even contemporary holidays and vacations are attempts to reconnect with key points.

With the phase shift away from the magical order, “figure and ground separate by detaching themselves from the universe to which they adhered” (181). The key-points as figure, “detached from the ground whose key they were, become technical objects, transportable and abstracted from the milieu.” Ground becomes “detached powers and forces,” subjectivized “by personifying themselves in the form of the divine and the sacred (God, heroes, priests).” Thus, the figure is fragmented into individual technical objects, while the ground is universalized into forces, the first thought through technics and the second through religion. After the phase shift and the loss of unity, technics is left with a status, and focus, lower than unity, and religion with a status higher than unity (185). Technics takes the element as its object, decomposing actions into elementary operations that can be solved technically; the technical object is always less than, and subordinate to, the reality it is a part of, acting only on some particular place and time. Religion, for its part, takes aim at intention and tries to solve questions of universal validity, such as ethical rules applicable in all times and places. Technics focuses on the how and on results; religion on the why and on intention (188).

But religious thought, inversely, which is the foundation of obligation, creates a search in ethical thinking for an unconditional justification that makes each act and every subject appear as inferior to real unity; related back to a totality that dilates infinitely, the moral act and subject derive their meaning only from their relation with this totality; the communication between the totality and the subject is precarious, because at every instant the subject is brought back to the dimension of its own unity, which is not that of the totality; the ethical subject is de-centred by the religious requirement. (190)