The Inglorious Years

The Collapse of the Industrial Order and the Rise of Digital Society

Daniel Cohen, Jane Marie Todd, Jane Marie Todd

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691222264
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

How populism is fueled by the demise of the industrial order and the emergence of a new digital society ruled by algorithms In the revolutionary excitement of the 1960s, young people around the world called for a radical shift away from the old industrial order, imagining a future of technological liberation and unfettered prosperity. Industrial society did collapse, and a digital economy has risen to take its place, yet many have been left feeling marginalized and deprived of the possibility of a better life. The Inglorious Years explores the many ways we have been let down by the rising tide of technology, showing how our new interconnectivity is not fulfilling its promise.In this revelatory book, economist Daniel Cohen describes how today's postindustrial society is transforming us all into sequences of data that can be manipulated by algorithms from anywhere on the planet. As yesterday's assembly line was replaced by working online, the leftist protests of the 1960s have given way to angry protests by the populist right. Cohen demonstrates how the digital economy creates the same mix of promises and disappointments as the old industrial order, and how it revives questions about society that are as relevant to us today as they were to the ancients.Brilliant and provocative, The Inglorious Years discusses what the new digital society holds in store for us, and reveals how can we once again regain control of our lives.

PART I

Going Away, Coming Back

CHAPTER ONE

Modern Mythologies

FOR THOSE WHO ARE NOW TWENTY, the sixties are as far away in space-time as the World War I was fifty years ago for their precursors. In both cases, the weight of the past is considerable. The young people reproached their parents for having forgotten the tragedies of history in the boring comfort of consumer society. The youth of today launch an accusation at their elders that is the exact opposite. It is the precariousness of the world, economic insecurity, that is now the object of reproach against their forerunners.

The critics of the counterculture of the sixties have accused the movement of being responsible for the contemporary world’s sense of abandonment. The Woodstock crowd is said to have prepared the way for the rise of individualism and to have sown the seeds of economic liberalism. Thus, the San Francisco hippies and the young people who occupied the Odéon theater in Paris were working toward Wall Street’s power grab? That is clearly completely idiotic. It was Reagan and Thatcher, the enemies of the sixties’ protests, who twenty years later would discover an incredibly successful formula, pushing an ultraliberal agenda in economics under cover of achieving a moral restoration in the field of values.

The sixties were far more a critique of the growing individualism of its time than its cause.¹ Everywhere, whether in Berkeley, Paris, or Rome, young students expressed their anger against a society devoted to the cult of consumption. But for the economists who analyze that period, it looks like a true golden age. Growth was extraordinary, unemployment almost nonexistent. As Jean-Pierre Le Goff says in his memoirs: “Progress seemed finally to be fulfilling its promises: it was no longer put off as a bright future that could only be achieved through further sacrifices and efforts. It was becoming concrete in the present, through access to consumer goods and lifestyles that changed everyday life. The past seemed to be becoming obsolete.”²

Under a veneer of opulence, however, a malaise was beginning to make itself felt. The newspaper Le Monde, in its edition of March 15, 1968, published a now-famous article by Pierre Viansson-Ponté, which perfectly summed up the torpor from which May ’68 sought to wrest French society: “When France Gets Bored …”. France, he explained, was at peace for the first time in a century. It had traded the heroic life for the comfort of bourgeois society. And it was bored! But Viansson-Ponté concluded, “for a people, that may be what we call happiness.” It was that very happiness, the daily grind of métro-boulot-dodo (subway-work-sleep), that the young rejected. At both ends, in both production and consumption, industrial society was reaching its limits.

The world of production was that of assembly-line work, Taylor’s organization of labor. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management, written in the early twentieth century, remained the businessman’s Bible. It brought the “stopwatch onto the shop floor,” timing the average duration of each task to reduce it to the minimum. Under Taylor’s influence, workers saw their activities reduced to a single, endlessly repeated gesture. Taylorism excludes laborers from the production process of which they are supposed to be the agents. They are excluded from the work itself: All the conditions necessary to perform the task are taken out of their hands. They are excluded from the realm of knowledge: the worker is not there to think. And they are denied control of their time: The pace of work and their breaks is predetermined. One exclusion sums up all the others: the worker is alone at his station, forbidden to communicate with others.³

Taylor was not unaware of the human tragedies that his system would engender. But he also surely thought that the workers, becoming richer thanks to the new productivity, would enjoy the fruits of prosperity outside work. Henry Ford, creator of the Ford automobile, grasped this very quickly. To tie workers to the boring work of the assembly line, he understood that he had to pay them as well as possible. There is a time to weep and a time to laugh.

It was this stark division at the root of the industrial world—work hard so as to be able to consume later—that became intolerable. Added to the fatigue of producing under dehumanizing conditions was an unexpected weariness with consumption itself. In 1957 Roland Barthes’s cult book Mythologies had exposed with consummate humor consumer society’s promise of achieving, under cover of emancipation, the petty bourgeois happiness of “calculation and order.”⁴ The first World Detergent Conference, held in Paris in 1954, had allowed him to comment with scathing glee on the success of the laundry soap Omo. “To say that Omo cleans in depth … is to assume that laundry is deep, which no one had previously thought, and this unquestionably results in exalting it, by establishing it as an object favorable to those obscure tendencies to enfold and caress which are found in any human body.” Then, commenting on a new Citroën DS, the famous French luxury car, Barthes noted that it marked a change in automobile mythology. Previously paeans to power, the automobile was becoming “more homely, more attuned to this sublimation of the utensil which one also finds in the design of contemporary household equipment. The dashboard looks more like the working surface of a modern kitchen than the control-room of a factory: the slim panes of matt fluted metal, the small levers topped by a white ball, the very simple dials, the very discreteness of the nickel-work, all this signifies a kind of control exercised over motion, which is henceforth conceived as comfort rather than performance.”

For the sociologist Jean Baudrillard, inspired by Barthes, consumer society is pervaded by a fundamental tension: it wants comfort and heroism. It is torn between “the passivity it entails and a social morality that for the most part remains that of action and sacrifice.”⁵ The way to resolve that contradiction, according to Baudrillard, is to dramatize life through the media. The consumer’s tranquility in front of his television must be presented as a feat “wrested” from the turpitudes of the outside world. The violence of that world must be shown as crudely as possible, to allow the observer to savor the tranquility being offered. “Consumer society is experienced as a besieged Jerusalem, rich and threatened: that is its ideology. It is the ideology of the TV viewer relaxing in front of the horrors of the Vietnam War.”

Fifteen years after May ’68, the American economist Albert Hirschman, reconsidering Baudrillard’s analysis, added an essential corrective.⁶ In his eyes, the weariness of moderns in the face of consumer society must be understood as one of the consequences of prosperity. It is when the economic situation is good, when wealth exceeds expectations, that people believe they have had their fill of material riches. They then demand higher satisfactions; they want heroism, generosity. But prosperity is always relative. Whatever the level of wealth already achieved, the desire to consume, when it ceases to be satisfied, is quickly reignited. In periods of weak growth, the order of priorities is reversed. Crisis makes people selfish and leads them to turn inward. “Depression” can then be understood in both senses of the term, economic and psychological. Desire, according to Hirschman, runs counter to the economic cycle: it wants authenticity when growth is strong and material wealth in periods of recession. This theory would allow him to interpret the sixties and to anticipate the conservative revolution of the eighties that would follow, when the demand for “petty bourgeois comfort” would return in force, prompted by an economic crisis.⁷

Writing in 1978, Hirschman did not know that the sixties marked much more than the culmination of a growth phase. A far more fundamental upheaval was taking place: the fall of industrial society. Against all expectations, the trumpets of Jericho blown in 1968 would bring down the walls of the old fortress. The protesters that year obviously had nothing to do with its fall. They were more aware of the fragility of industrial society than they were responsible for its collapse. A totally unprecedented cycle was beginning, marked through and through by a loss of meaning. It would take fifty years to unfold.

Are Young People Bored?

The celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of May ’68 made it possible for the French to relive, in pictures and as if in real time, that month of madness when France as a whole decided to stop working. Patrick Rotman gave a sober and precise account of “May ’68 for those who did not live through it.”⁸ Strictly speaking, the Paris Spring began on May 3, with the first significant day of student demonstrations, and ended on June 30, 1968, with the legislature elections and the French people’s departure on summer vacation. Viewed in terms of a decade, May ’68 was situated halfway between the end of the Algerian War and the oil crisis of 1973. Decolonization was in full swing. The image of America, yesterday the liberator of Europe, had profoundly deteriorated. American support for Latin American dictatorships effaced the heroism of the generation that had defeated Nazism.⁹ For young Americans themselves, the Vietnam War was the greatest abomination. Their loathing would extend beyond their country’s borders. On February 17 and 18, 1968, a major demonstration against the war was held in Berlin. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Alain Krivine, Henri Weber, and several hundred French people attended. In Germany, the leader of the student protest was Rudi Dutschke, known as Rudi the Red. Born in East Germany, he rejected both capitalism and communism. Following a vicious press campaign, he was the victim of an attempted murder. Two bullets to the head would leave him hovering between life and death for several days.¹⁰

In Paris, the spark ignited on March 21, when a Paris-Nanterre University student was accused of breaking the windows of the American Express office during a rally against the Vietnam War.¹¹ The next day, the university’s administrative buildings were occupied. The March 22 movement was born. On May 2, Dean Grappin decided to close the campus after several classes were disrupted, including that of the historian René Rémond. The students left Paris-Nanterre for the Sorbonne, which would be closed in turn at the request of Dean Jean Roche. The May ’68 movement was launched.

The police violated the immunity of the university and intervened. A night of street protests followed in Paris, on May 3. The movement spread to the provinces. In Toulouse, Lille, Bordeaux, and Marseille, thousands of students protested against police repression. Events reached the boiling point on the night of May 10: The students “occupied” the Latin Quarter in response to occupation of the Sorbonne. Paving stones were torn from the streets (“Under the paving stones, the beach” would be another famous May slogan), spontaneously, without planning. At two o’clock in the morning, the police mounted an assault: many would be wounded on both sides. The next day, the trade unions called for a general strike to be held on May 13. Ten years earlier to the day, in Algeria, demonstrations had led to the fall of the government and had precipitated De Gaulle’s return. Ten years, a century, the general must have thought.

Working-class France joined the students. Work gradually came to a halt. In little more than a week, from May 14 to 25, the number of strikers reached ten million. The pro-China protestors brandished a banner that proclaimed: “The working class will take the banner of revolt from the students’ fragile hands.” On May 22 Dany Cohn-Bendit was expelled for declaring that the French flag should be ripped up and only the red flag kept. On the twenty-fourth, the students mobilized around the famous slogan “We are all German Jews.”

On May 25 Prime Minister Georges Pompidou organized the response of the authorities. At the Ministry of Labor, he opened negotiations with the unions. The Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT; General Labor Confederation), perhaps encouraged by Moscow through the French Communist Party, played the negotiation game. At dawn on May 27, as another demonstration was being planned for the Charléty stadium, with the support of the union’s rivals in the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT; French Democratic Federation of Labor) and supported by Pierre Mendès France, a former French prime minister who ended the French war in Vietnam, an agreement was hastily signed. Wages were increased by 7 percent, the minimum wage by 35 percent, and union shops were recognized.

On May 29 de Gaulle vanished! He secretly met with General Massu, commander of the French forces in Germany. A photo published by Paris-Match showed the president getting out of a helicopter, his face haggard, looking defeated. On May 30, however, he took back the initiative. At the urging of the prime minister, he announced the dissolution of the National Assembly, while several hundred thousand demon...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Preface to the English Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Going Away, Coming Back
• Part II: A Time of Debasement
• Part III: Back to The Future
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index