James Heartfield wrote:
> Sadly the insights of the labour movement in the nineteenth century
> were a high point from which we have fallen back. The disappointed
> Marxists Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse imagined that they were
> enriching, and making more sophisticated Marx's analysis. Drawing
> on the Nazi philosopher Heidegger, they argued that alienation was
> implicit in the technology itself.
>
> This Adorno-Horkheimer critique of technology passed as oh so
> radical in German and American universities in the sixties and
> seventies - 'look not only capitalism is oppressive, but the very
> technology itself is too'. But in the end it was just a counsel of
> despair. Marx's scientific socialism was replaced by a hippy
> romanticism that was unhappy with industrial society and the masses
> it gathered. It was a step backwards, not forwards.
>
I'm not sure this correctly states the problem with Marcuse et al. It's not a mistake to identify capitalist technology with alienation. Marcuse, however, doesn't just identifyt alienation with capitalist technology; he identifies it with technology per se. Thus he assumes that labour must remain alienated in the "realm of necessity" of an ideal community.
"Possession and procurement of the necessities of life are the prerequisite, rather than the content, of a free society. The realm of necessity, of labor, is one of unfreedom because the human existence in this realm is determined by objectives and functions that are not its own and that do not allow the free play of human faculties and desires. The optimum in this realm is therefore to be defined by standards of rationality rather than freedom - namely, to organize production and distribution in such a manner that the least time is spent for making all necessities available to all members of society. Necessary labor is a system of essentially inhuman, mechanical, and routine activities; in such a system, individuality cannot be a value and end in itself.Reasonably, the system of societal labor would be organized rather with a view to saving time and space for the development of individuality outside the inevitably repressive work world. Play and display, as principles of civilization, imply not the transformation of labor but its complete subordination to the freely evolving potentialities of man and nature. The ideas of play and display now reveal their full distance from the values of productiveness and performance: play is unproductive and useless precisely because it cancels the repressive and exploitive traits of labor and leisure; it 'just plays' with the reality. But it also cancels their sublime traits - the 'higher values.' The desublimation of reason is just as essential a process in the emergence of a free culture as in the self-sublimation of sensuousness." Eros and Civilization,pp. 195-6
In Marx, in contrast, science and technology are transformed by the further development of mind made possible by the removal from relations of production of all obstacles to full development. This means that the instrumental activity (which is unfree because it isn't an end in itself) that would continue to be necessary in an ideal community would not be alienated labour. It would be the instrumental activity of "universally developed individuals." It would necessarily be this because only this would be consistent with ""conditions most worthy and appropriate for their [the associated producers'] human nature," because this is necessary for the production of the quality of means required for life in the "true realm of freedom," and because it's necessary for the minimization of the time taken up by this activity. Marx doesn't treat the mentality dominant in capitalism, including its expression in science and technology, as fully rational. For him, therefore, the true "standards of rationality" are the standards of "freedom" and would govern activity in both the "realm of necessity" and the "true realm of freedom" of an ideal community.
Ted