I told the workers they had to be prepared for the tortures of success. Success in our business, the trade union business, means getting workers to middle-class status. You succeed and Huelga is just going to be an exciting recollection. The guy who carried a banner in 1966—well, in five years you're going to have a hard time getting him to a union meeting: Revolutions become institutions, that's a truism of our business.

Reams of empirical studies and a century or two of social theory have noticed that modernity produces increasingly shallow and instrumental relationships. Where bonds of mutuality, based on face-to-face connection, once survived, we now tend to exist in a depthless, dematerialized technoculture. This is the trajectory of industrial mass society: not transcending itself through technology, but instead becoming ever more fully realized. In this context, it is striking to note that the original usage of “virtual” was as the adjectival form (...) of “virtue.” Virtual reality (VR) is not only the creation of a narcissistic subculture; it represents a much wider…. (shrink)

Jenkins has observed that “The impression has begun to get about that the Industrial Revolution is not going to work out after all.” In light of the profound malaise of blue and white collar workers, the decline of output per worker since 1973, and increasing signs of a pervasive anti-union sentiment complementing anti-management restiveness, Jenkins' remark does not seem so shocking. The 1973 Health, Education and Welfare report, Work In America, remarked, in a similar vein, that “absenteeism, wildcat strikes, turnover, (...) and industrial sabotage (have) become an increasingly significant part of the cost of doing business.” The location of this quote from the HEW report in the section tided, “The Anachronism of Taylorism” is suggestive. (shrink)