1 1. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, translated by Martin Milligan (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959), p. 30.

      2 2. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), p. 246.

      3 3. Ibid., p. 247.

      4 4. André Gorz summed up the volte-face as follows: ‘The thirst for consumption, throughout the 1950s, remained intense, and seemed to confirm the managers in their deep conviction: […] there is nothing a man will not agree to do for money; he will sell his labour force, his health, his youth, his nervous equilibrium, his sleep, his intelligence. This lasted for a while. Then, by the mid-1960s, disturbing murmurs started to be heard in the big factories’ (Michel Bosquet, ‘Les patrons découvrent “l’usine-bagne”’, Le Nouvel Observateur, no. 384, 20 March 1972, p. 64).

      5 5. Gooding, ‘Blue-Collar Blues on the Assembly Line’, p. 65.

      6 6. Malcolm Denise, quoted in Weller, The Lordstown Struggle, p. 4.

      7 7. Gooding, ‘Blue-Collar Blues on the Assembly Line’, p. 62. They enter the world of work after experiencing ‘rebellion in their school lives and in the military’ (Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises, p. 35).

      8 8. See Abraham Harold Maslow, ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, Psychological Review, vol. 50, no. 4, 1943, pp. 370–96. According to Maslow, human beings have several strata of different needs, from the most basic to the most elaborate, from the need to find food to the need for spiritual fulfilment. Economic ‘progress’ thus corresponds to an elevation on the pyramid of needs, from the bottom (very materialistic) to the top (very ethereal). However much satisfaction we provide the rebel with, he will always want, not necessarily something more, but something better.

      9 9. Richard E. Walton, ‘How to Counter Alienation in the Plant’, Harvard Business Review, November/December 1972, pp. 70–81 (p. 72).

      10 10. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 33.

      11 11. ‘Who Wants to Work? Boredom on the Job’, Newsweek Magazine, 26 March 1973.

      12 12. Among the models offered at the time by the American social sciences was the famous ‘J-curve’ put forward by James C. Davies: revolts or revolutions are most likely to occur when a prolonged phase of economic and social development is followed by a sudden stalling of the economy. In this diagram, it is not poverty in itself which is a factor in rebellion, but the mismatch between the subjective expectations generated by a phase of relative prosperity and their actual level of satisfaction when this latter suddenly drops below the expected level. See James C. Davies, ‘Toward a Theory of Revolution’, American Sociological Review, vol. 27, no. 1, 1962, pp. 5–19. A psycho-sociological variant of this socio-economic theory of rebellion has been proposed by Ted Robert Gurr, on the basis of a concept of ‘relative deprivation’, defined as the perceived gap between people’s expectations on the one hand, and their abilities to obtain and to maintain the ‘values’ to which they think themselves entitled. ‘Frustration’ then tends to turn into ‘aggression’ and social violence. See Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). In the sphere of the political sciences, Walter Korpi criticizes this model; for him, the power relation is essential. ‘Relative deprivation explains nothing by itself: it tends merely to lead to open conflict only when the power differential has swayed in favour of the least powerful actors, who may be all the more inclined to engage in struggle as they have seen their “resources of power” grow’. See Walter Korpi, ‘Conflict, Power and Relative Deprivation’, American Political Science Review, vol. 68, no. 4, 1974, pp. 1569–78. For a discussion of these theories and some more finely-nuanced hypotheses, see Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly, Strikes in France 1830–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 337ff.

      13 13. Walton, ‘How to Counter Alienation in the Plant’, p. 71.

      14 14. Ibid.

      15 15. Ibid.

      16 16. James O’Toole, Work in America. Report of a Special Task Force to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Special Task Force on Work in America, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Washington, DC, December 1972, p. 19. ‘The acts of sabotage and other forms of protest are overt manifestations of a conflict between changing employee attitudes and organizational inertia. Increasingly, what employees expect from their jobs is different from what organizations are prepared to offer them’ (O’Toole, p. xi).

      17 17. See Worker Alienation, Hearings Before the Subcommittee of Employment, Manpower, and the Poverty of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, U.S. Senate, 192nd Cong. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1972).

      18 18. Leland M. Wooton, Jim L. Tarter and Richard W. Hansen, ‘Toward a Productivity Audit’, Academy of Management Proceedings, 1975, pp. 327–9 (p. 327).

      19 19. O’Toole, Work in America, p. 16. ‘General Motors had calculated that if every worker at Lordstown worked for an extra half-second every hour, the company would save a million dollars per year’. Except that, of course, ‘productivity – in other words, production per hour of work – has decreased due to worker agitation arising from their dissatisfaction’ (John Zerzan, Un conflit décisif: les organisations syndicales combattent la révolte contre le travail (Echanges: n.p., 1975), p. 22).

      20 20. Zerzan, Un conflit décisif, p. 14. See also Harold Wilensky, ‘The Problem of Work Alienation’, in Frank Baker, Peter J. McEwan and Alan Sheldon, Industrial Organizations and Health (New York: Tavistock Publications, 1969), pp. 550–70 (p. 556).

      21 21. Note, however, that this was a minimum definition of alienation at work which, while superficially drawing on a Marxist notion, surreptitiously proceeded to excise its most problematic aspects. For the young Marx, wage alienation was not characterized solely by a situation of heteronomy, by the fact of being subjected to the command of a foreign will, but also by a process of dispossession at the end of which the worker saw his own activity escape his control and become objectified in the property of another. This aspect (i.e. appropriation) disappeared from the managerial reinterpretation of the concept in the early 1970s. This semantic restriction set the political limits of the problematization adopted, since it was thereby forbidden by definition to extend the question of workers’ alienation to the question of the property relationships that conditioned it. Provided with this intellectual equipment, one could certainly admit that alienation was ‘inherent in pyramidal, bureaucratic forms of management and taylorized technology’, but it could also be claimed that the problem had been fixed without wage exploitation ever being questioned; all one had done was move away from certain worn-out forms of hierarchical management.

      22 22. Richard E. Walton, ‘Quality of Working Life: What is it?’, Sloan Management Review, vol. 15, no. 1, Autumn 1973, pp. 11–21 (p. 13).

      23 23. Alfred J. Marrow, ‘Management by Participation’, in Eugene L. Cass and Frederick G. Zimmer (eds.), Man and Work in Society (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1975, pp. 33–48 (p. 35). In the late 1950s, the labour psychologist Douglas McGregor drew a contrast between a managerial theory X, which ‘places exclusive reliance upon external control of human behavior’, and a theory Y resting on ‘self-control and self-direction’. Douglas McGregor, ‘The Human Side of Enterprise’ (1957), in Harold J. Leavitt, Louis R. Pondy and David M. Boje, Readings in Managerial Psychology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 314–24 (p. 322).

      24 24. Richard E. Walton, ‘From Control to Commitment in the Workplace’, Harvard Business Review, March–April 1985, pp. 77–84 (p. 79). Several commentators, quick to announce a paradigm change, interpreted such statements as the sign of a real break, as the shift from one modality of power to another: from ‘direct control’ to ‘autonomous responsibility’. But this kind of argument, relying on large schematic changes, and the quest for the new form of control (the new strategic panacea that would take over from one whose reign was coming to an end), neglects the fact that, as John Storey showed, management