Modern Times is a film that has great importance in terms of relations for postmodern societies, because it can be approached from many critical perspectives. This film captures the living conditions experienced in the United States during the Great Depression, a phenomenon that had catastrophic repercussions for the western economies of the 1930s. Throughout the film you can see the importance of industrialization and mass production for the US economy. The workers, are not more than a gear of these factories comparable to a simple, palpable, closed and dynamic-duplicative system. Simple because the work team is not more than the sum of the employees, palpable because human and production resources are clearly tangible, closed because the entire production process occurs exclusively within the factory and “dynamic – duplicative” because despite that there is great activity, this is repeated again and again. In this paper I argue the alienation of the workforce with the final production.
An analogy can be made between an anthill and the working class. The latter is comparable to the apparent perfection with which the large colonies of ants, extremely hardworking and precise, move, organize and live. There is no time for laziness or sluggishness, much less for the satisfaction of particular desires.
In modern societies, it seems that these anthropic collectivities are ideal. A society that is constituted by individuals configured with the idea of ”working to live” and who in turn do what they have to do regardless of the particular goals or objectives of the organizations, is the most convenient for capitalism. However, the illusion of this analogy collapses if we consider the following: While the ants have a common goal meaning survival, humans have intimate goals, which will have to interpose the organizational. If an ant does not comply with what is required in this process that we can consider as work, possibly the affectation is minimal, on the other hand if a subject acts contrary to what is expected, the repercussions in the development of the work can be catastrophic and it could ruin all of the work. In a work group like the one that captures the film, the dissatisfaction is present in each one of the employees, in such a way that the conditions of work become even more difficult with time.
The workers in the industrial and economic system raised in the history are adjacent to machinery gears. Their conception as subjects is overshadowed by the circumstances that surround them. They seek to obtain what is necessary to live by means of their work, while the capitalist wishes to accumulate and increase his wealth, partly thanks to the surplus originated by the application of labor power. In such a way that the workers become fetishes. Marx speaks of this phenomenon in his work “Capital” where he explains how the world of produces is opposed to human in mercantilist societies. When a certain product is spoken in the West, it is customary to assign certain qualities, as if it had a personality, and rarely is discussed or thought of its manufacturing. It seems that the relationship between labor and the product is nonexistent. In the end, manpower sells itself as another tool and objects acquire social properties, that is, things acquire a subjective state and subjects assume themselves as commodity-things.
It is probably convenient to talk about merchandise, products or selling oneself to an organization, because that is how the truth is disguised and the relations of power and exploitation become mere ghosts. In the film there is an obvious metaphor related to this because the main character is inside the machine, consolidating the gear that makes the whole system work. In such a way that human relationships seem to be veiled by relations with objects.
We can also a see clear projection of the Taylorism and Fordism approaches in their maximum expression through the absolute elimination of unproductive times and chain production. In the factory there are the chronometers that determine the precise duration of each task and the delimitation of the work in mass production processes is appreciated. All this leads to the alienation of employees in the work process, as the profits of the product are not shared with the employees.
Originally published 15.10.2019