Radical Philosophy Review

Volume 19, Issue 1, 2016

Refusing One-Dimensionality, Part 1

"An Explosive Catalyst in the Material Base"
Technology, Precarity, and the Obsolescence of Labor; One Dimensional Society, 2016

In the mid-twentieth century when One-Dimensional Man was first published, the rapid advance of technology was already beginning to render “labor”—that is, what is known as “work”—superfluous. In 2016, half a century later, the process of “work” is being made largely redundant, if not “unnecessary”: the material truth of capitalist society that can never be uttered since as “work” disappears, so does what was one of its functional cornerstones. This article seeks to contribute to identifying some of the trends in the early twenty-first century first outlined by Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man fifty years ago, in critically defining One-Dimensional Society in 2016.