The transformation of working humanity into a “labor force,” a “factor
of production,” and instrument of capital, is an incessant and unending
process. The condition is repugnant to the victims, whether their
pay is high or low, because it violates human conditions of work; and since
the workers are not destroyed as human beings but are simply utilized in
inhuman ways, their critical, intelligent, conceptual faculties, no matter
how deadened or diminished, always remain in some degree a threat to capital.
Moreover, the capitalist mode of production is continually extended to
new areas of work, including those freshly created by technological advances
and the shift of capital to new industries. It is, in addition, continually
being refined and perfected, so that its pressure upon the workers in unceasing.
At the same time, the habituation of workers to the capitalist mode of
production must be renewed with each generation, all the more so as the
generations which grow up under capitalism are not formed within the matrix
of work life, but are plunged into work form the outside, so to speak,
after a prolonged period of adolescence during which they are held in reserve.
The necessity for adjusting the worker to work in its capitalist form,
for overcoming natural resistance intensified by swiftly changing technology,
antagonistic social relations, and the succession of the generations, does
not therefore end with the “scientific organization of labor,” but becomes
a permanent feature of capitalist society (96).