After examining the way advanced industrial civilizations have organized their technological base, it becomes apparent that they are totalitarian in nature (3). This is due to the fact that it functions within a economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interest. Today political power in such societies asserts itself through the power over the machine process. “the brute fact that the machine’s physical power surpasses that of the individual, and of any particular group of individuals, makes the machine the most effective political instrument in any society whose basic organization is that of the machine process” (3). Contemporary industrial civilization appears to have reached the stage at which “the free society” can no longer can adequately defined in the traditional terms of economic, political, and intellectual liberties, because they are too significant to be within the traditional forms (4). What needs to be realized are new modes, which correspond to the new capabilities and advancements of society.

These new modes would only be referred to with negative connotation because they represent the development of something revolutionary and non-conformist. Economic freedom would mean freedom from economy as a whole – from being manipulated by economic forces, freedom from the daily struggle for survival, from earning a living. Political freedom would consequently mean freedom from the imposed policies which are created to cage the individuality. Intellectual freedom would mean abolition of “public opinion”, and the restoration of individual thought. The sound of these ideas seems unrealistic not because of their utopian nature but because of the intense power of the forces who prevent their realization..

“The most effective and enduring form of warfare against liberation is the implanting of material and intellectual needs that perpetuate the obsolete forms of struggle for existence” (4).

The intensity, desire, and necessity of human needs, beyond the biological level, has always been preconditioned. Weather or not something is desired or not desired, accepted or rejected, enjoyed or destroyed, solemnly depends on whether of not it can be seen as desirable and necessary for the interest of the societal institution. Marcuse refers to such desires as false needs:

False Needs True (Vital) Needs

• Needs that are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests, and witch lead to the repression of that individual

• The needs that perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice

• Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and to hate what others love and hate

• Such needs have societal content and function which are determined by external powers over which the individual has no control

• “No matter how much such needs may have become the individual’s own, reproduced and fortified by the conditions of his existence; no matter how much he identifies himself with them and finds himself in their satisfaction, they continue to be what whey were from the beginning – products of a society whose dominant interest demands repression • The only needs that have an unqualified claim for satisfaction

• Vital needs – nourishment, clothing, lodging at the attainable level of culture

• The satisfaction of these needs is the prerequisite for the realization of all needs

* The judgment of needs and their satisfaction involves standards of priority

In attempting to determine for one’s self what desires and needs are that of his own, free from the manipulation of the society, he/she needs to be aware of the operation of the machine which drives consumerism and to remain conscience as to the effect that machine has on his/her process of functioning - “as long as they are kept incapable of being autonomous, as long as they are indoctrinated and manipulated, their answer to this question can not be taken as their own” (6).

All intellectual, spiritual, and physical liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude. This consciousness and full awareness of the fact that we are enslaved by the system provided possibility for freedom and liberation. The emergence of this consciousness is hampered by predominance of needs and satisfaction which fuel consumerism. The process always replaces one system of pre-conditioning by another, and the main goal become to replace false needs which true ones (7).

Furthermore, the power of the media is overestimated in a sense that is given full credit for the manipulation and brainwashing of the people. The preconditioning does not start with the mass production of ideology-sustaining television shows and films. The people enter the stage of manipulation already existing as vulnerable receptacles and when the process of the flattening out of the given and the possible, the satisfied and the unsatisfied needs begins, they are more then ready of its penetration. Here the so-called equalization of class distinction reveals its ideological function. There is a general misconception that seeing the boss and his employee dressed in the same clothing and driving the same cars, means that the class distinction is decreasing, however, the truth remains that this indicates not the disappearance of classes but rather “the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the establishment are shared by the underlying population” (8).

Today the private space which we call “inner freedom”, has been invaded and shaped by technological reality (10). Through the muting down of critical thinking and the critical power of Reason, industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition (11). The products that are constantly imposed on the members of a highly industrial society, indoctrinate and manipulate, and promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood. And as these products become more mainstream and available to more social classes, they cease to be publicity; they become a way of life. “it is a good way of life – much better then before – and as a good way of life, it militates against qualitative change (12). Therefore, emerges the pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior (12).

One-dimensional thought is promoted by the makers of politics. Both capitalist and communist systems present non-operational ideas that are non-behavioral and subversive (14). The activity of thought is barricaded at the limits of Reason itself. “The techniques of industrialization are political techniques; as they prejudge the possibilities of Reason and Freedom (18).

2. The Closing of the Political Universe

The main trends within which the industry-advanced societies function are familiar. They concentrate the national economy on the needs of the big corporations, with the government playing the role of the controlling, stimulating, and supporting force. In the United States, what becomes apparent is the alliance between businesses and organized labor. What happens is that “the union becomes almost indistinguishable in its own eyes form the corporation”. Thus the unions are not really there to represents the interests of the workers, but are rather looking to fulfill their own interests.

Containment of Social Change

(1) Mechanization – is drastically and increasingly reducing the amount of energy that is exhausted in labor. This statement greatly relates to Karl Marx’s theories on the worker (proletarian) (24). To Marx, the proletarian is the manual laborer who expands his physical energy in the work process, even in when he works with machines. The purchase and use of this energy, under subhuman conditions, entails the “revolting and inhumane aspects of exploitation” (24). However, this is the physiological and biological component of capitalism.

Sartre stated that, “The machine process in the technological universe breaks the innermost privacy of freedom and joins sexuality and labor in one unconscious, rhythmic automatism – a process which parallels the assimilation of jobs” (27).

(2) The assimilating trend – becomes evident in the occupational stratification (27), which is the situation or condition where something is arranged in several strata. In the major industrial establishments, the “blue-collar” work force declines in relation to the “white-collar “element, thus the number of non-production workers grows. Industrialization did not arise with the arrival of factories, but rather it arose out of “measurement of work. Its when work can be measured, when you can hitch a man to his job, when you can put a harness on him, and measure his output in terms of a single piece and pay him by the piece or by the hour, that you have got modern industrialization” (29). What is jeopardized with such technological changes is far greater then just a pay system, the relation of the worker to other classes, and the organization of work. What is at stake is compatibility of technical process with the very institutions in which industrialization developed (29).

(3) Such changes in the character of work and the instruments of production change the consciousness and the attitude of the laborer. Assimilation in needs and aspiration, in the standard of living, in politics, in standard of living derives from an integration in the plant itself, in the material process of production (29).

(4) 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 of the established society (31). “Domination is transfigured into administration” (31). The bosses within the capitalist system are losing their identity as responsible agents; they are taking on the role of “bearcats in a corporate machine”. Hatred and frustration are deprived of their specific target and the technological veil conceals reproduction of inequality and enslavement (31).

“In reality, neither the utilization of administrative rather than physical controls, 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 decision 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 civilizations are sublimated slaves, but they are slaves, for slavery is determined (32).

Marcuse believes that this is the pure state of servitude. In a society that is designed to indirectly oppress its members reduce them to existing as mere instruments, as things to serve a purpose. And the degree to which each of us is “a thing” is drastically multiplied if we are not able to accept this truth, because this only leads to further ignorance and lack of consciousness.

Prospects of Containment

Marcuse asked the question of whether this chain of growing productivity and repression may be broken. In attempting to answer such a question one would have to look into the future, and neglect the very real possibility of a nuclear war (32).

The material base for this capability would have to do with a number varying factors such as: (a) the growing population of labor (technical progress, (b) the rise in the birthrate of the underlying population, (c) the permanent defense economy, (d) the economic-political integration of the capitalist countries, and the building up of their relations of the underdeveloped areas (34).

Automation, which is the mechanization aspect of material production, would revolutionize the whole society once it becomes the process of material production (36). This would shatter the reified form of previous operation by cutting the chain that ties the individual to the machinery, which is the mechanism through which his own labor enslaves him. “Complete automation in the real, of necessity would open the dimension of free time as the one in which man’s private and societal existence would constitute itself. This would be a historical transcendence towards a new civilization” (37).

The Welfare and Warfare State

The prospect of containment of change, offered by the prospects of technological rationality, depend on Welfare State. This state seems capable of razing the standard of administered living – which is inherent in all advanced industrial societies, and which depends on the expansion of productivity. Under such conditions, the decline of opposition and freedoms is not a product of moral or intellectual deterioration or corruption, but is rather a societal process. It is a societal process in so far as the production and distribution of an increasing quantity of goods and services make compliance and cooperation a rational attitude (48).

However this state is a state of unfreedom as its system restricts:

(a) “technically available free time

(b) the quality and quantity of goods “technically” available for vital individual needs

(c) the intelligence (consciousness and unconsciousness) capable of realizing the possibilities of self-determination (49)

Within the Welfare State, the rising standard of living is unavoidable, at the cost of its members being politically manipulated. An increased sense of necessity for mass production and consumption reduces the value of freedom. “There is no need to insist on self-determination if the administered life is the comfortable and even the “good” life” (49). The individuals who make up such a state are pre-conditioned so that the satisfying goods are not simply material but they include, thoughts, feelings, and aspirations. These are the goods that are supplied by the administration, which is never questioned or doubted due to its seemingly satisfactory nature.

3. The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness: Repressive Desublimaion

This chapter Marcuse demonstrates, through a number of key notions, how the progress of technological rationality is liquidating and eliminating the elements of “higher culture”. What is taking place in the advanced industrial societies is not the deterioration of higher culture into mass culture, but rather refusal of this culture by the reality. “The reality surpasses this culture” (56). It has always been the case that higher culture was in contradiction with social reality, and only a privileged few could enjoy its benefits. The mass communications bled together: art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their “common denominator” – the commodity form (57).

Marcuse makes a reference to Bertolt Brecht. The character of the established society confronts the playwright with the question of whether it is still possible to “represent the contemporary world in the theatre” - meaning to represent the world in such a manner that the audience recognizes the truth which the play is to convey (66). Brecht states that, “the contemporary world can be thus represented only if it is represented as subject to change – as a state of negativity” (66). The complete mobilization of the media for the defense and perpetuation of the established reality has penetrated the means of expression to the point where the communication of transcending content becomes impossible (68). Within the industrialized societies, loss of consciousness, due to the satisfactory liberties granted by unfree society, makes for a happy consciousness, which creates acceptance of that flawed society (76).

“This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and of exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression. Sexuality is no exemption” (78).

4. The Closing of Universe of Discourse

The Happy Consciousness – which is the belief that the real is rational and that the system delivers the necessary goods – reflects the conformist, which correlated to technological rationality (84).

The Language of Total Administration

In the prevailing modes of speech or dialogue, the contrast appears between two-dimensional, modes of thought and technological behavior or “habits of thought”. In the carrying out of these “habits of thought, the tension between appearance and reality, and fact and factor, tend to disappear” (85). In other words, unconscious submission in thought and action translates into a complete disability to differentiate between fact and factor or reality and illusion.

The Research of Total Administration

Fragmented or functional communication is only one of the characteristics of the one-dimensional universe in which man is trained to forget – to translate the negative into the positive, in order for him/her to be able to function (104).