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  • Chapter 12 - Industry Culture: Labor and Technology in Marxist Critical Theory

  • Edited by Colleen Lye, University of California, Berkeley, Christopher Nealon
  • Book:
    After Marx
    Published online:
    12 March 2022
    Print publication:
    17 March 2022, pp 192-208

  • Summary

    This chapter takes up the ways Marxist cultural theory has explored the intensified mechanization or automation of labor. It suggests that the relationship between labor-saving industrial technology and cultural transformation has been central to twentieth-century Marxist thought, from Frankfurt School theorists Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno; to mid-century forebearers of cultural studies like Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse; to activist thinkers C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and James Boggs; to the Italian autonomists. Despite and often alongside their persistent interest in consumption and the commodity, these thinkers have also explored the ways transformations in the “instruments of labor” affect productive workers themselves. The chapter concludes by drawing attention to the genre of the workers' inquiry, which yokes structural analysis of capital accumulation to a careful rendering of workers’ own experiences, and by calling for future workers inquiries exploring technology and the exploitation of university labor.