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While the forms of utilization of machinery—the manner in which labor is organized and deployed around it—are dictated by the tendencies of the capitalist mode of production, the drive to mechanize is itself dictated by the effort to increase the productivity of labor. But the increasing productivi…

Such a separation of “intellectual work from the work of execution” is indeed a “technical condition” best adapted to a hierarchical organization, best adapted to control of both the hand and the brain worker, best adapted to profitability, best adapted to everything but the needs of the people. Th…

This is not to say that, in unionized situations, the pay of machinists is immediately reduced to operator levels the moment numerical control is introduced. In some exceptional instances, where very few numerically controlled machine tools have been brought into a shop, the union has been able suc…

[...] Before the human capacity to control machinery can be transformed into its opposite, a series of special conditions must be met which have nothing to do with the physical character of the machine. The machine must be the property not of the producer, nor of the associated producers, but of an…

Thus the tendency of the capitalist mode of production from its earliest days some 200 or 250 years ago to the present, when this tendency has become a headlong rush, is the incessant breakdown of labor processes into simplified operations taught to workers as tasks. This leads to the conversion of…