If the petty manipulations of personnel department and industrial
psychology and sociology have not played a major role in the habituation
of worker to work, therefore, this does not mean that the “adjustment”
of the worker is free of manipulative elements. On the contrary,
as in all of the functionings of the capitalist system, manipulation is
primary and coercion is held in reserve--except that this manipulation
is the product of powerful economic forces, major corporate employment
and bargaining policies, and the inner workings and evolution of the system
of capitalism itself, and not primarily of the clever schemes of labor
relations experts. The apparent acclimatization of the worker to
the new modes of production grows out of the destruction of all other ways
of living, the striking of wage bargains that permit a certain enlargement
of the customary bounds of subsistence for the working class, the weaving
of the net of modern capitalist life that finally makes all other modes
of living impossible. But beneath this apparent habituation, the
hostility of the worker to the degenerated forms of work which are forced
upon them continues as a subterranean stream that makes its way to the
surface when employment conditions permit, or when the capitalist drive
for a greater intensity of labor oversteps the bounds of physical and mental
capacity. It renews itself in new generations, expresses itself in
the unbounded cynicism and revulsion which large numbers of workers feel
about their work, and comes to the fore repeatedly as a social issue demanding
solution (103-104).