22 SOCIAL SCIENTIST discussion will move from working out their expositions towards a critical examination of the formulations. In developing a critique, some of the criticisms made earlier by others will also be borne in mind. DECISIVE TRANSFORMATION? Marcuse maintains that the ^labouring classes in the advanced areas of industrial civilization are undergoing a decisive transformation." He enumerates four factors as the main elements of this transformation. First, ^Mechanization is increasingly reducing the quantity and intensity of physical energy expended in labour".2 To be sure, old misery remains, even more acutely because of increased speed-up and the like but, in his own words, this form of drudgery is expressive of arrested, partial automation, of the coexistence of automated, semi-automated, and non-automated sections within the same plant, but even under these conditions, ^Tor muscular fatigue technology has substituted tension and/or mental effort55. For the more advanced automated plants, the transformation of physical energy into technical and mental skills is emphasized.8 He continues: The proletarian of the previous stages of capitalism was indeed the beast of burden, by the labour of his body procuring the necessities and luxuries of life while living in filth and poverty. Thus he was the living denial of his society. In contrast, the organized worker in the advanced areas of the technological society lives this denial less conspicuously and, like the other human objects of the social division of labour, he is being incorporated into the technological community of the administered population.4 Secondly, ^the assimilation trend shows forth in the occupational stratification. In the key industrial establishments, the ^blue-collar5 work force declines in relation to the ^white-collar5 element; the number of non-production workers increases. This quantitative change refers back to a change in the character of the basic instruments of production5.5 The suggested technological change has serious implications: To the extent to which the machine becomes itself a system of mechanical tools and relations and thus extends far beyond the individual work process, it asserts its larger domination by reducing the ^professional autonomy5 of the labourer and integrating him with other professions which suffer and direct the technical ensemble. To be sure, the former ^professional5 autonomy of the labourer was rather his professional enslavement. But this specific mode of enslavement was at the same time the source of his specific, professional power of negation—the power to stop a process which threatened him with annihilation as a human being. Now the labourer is losing the professional autonomy which made him a member of a class set