With increasing bureaucratization, it becomes plain to
all who would see that man is to a very important degree controlled by
his social relations to the instruments of production. This can no
longer seem only a tenet of Marxism, but a stubborn fact to be acknowledged
by all, quite apart from their ideological persuasion. Bureaucratization
makes readily visible what was previously dim and obscure. More and
more people discover that to work, they must be employed. For to
work, one must have tools and equipment. And the tools and equipment
are increasingly available only in bureaucracies, private or public.
Consequently, one must be employed by the bureaucracies in order to have
access to tools in order to live. It is in this sense that bureaucratization
entails separation of individuals from the instruments of production, as
in modern capitalistic enterprise or in state communistic enterprise (of
the midcentury variety), just as in the post-feudal army, bureaucratization
entailed complete separation from the instruments of destruction.
Typically, the worker no longer owns his tools nor the soldier, his weapons.
And in this special sense, more and more people become workers, either
blue collar or white collar or stiff shirt. So develops, for example,
the new type of scientific worker, as the scientist is “separated” from
his technical equipment—after all, the physicist does not ordinarily own
his cyclotron. To work at his research, he must be employed by a
bureaucracy with laboratory resources (1968, pp. 250-251).