[...] Georg Lukács criticized this view, noting the alignment between Bukharin’s analysis and the ideology of the capitalist world’s view of science: “The closeness of Bukharin’s theory to bourgeois, natural-scientific materialism derives from his use of ‘science’ (in the French sense) as a model.” Lukács insisted that a true historical materialist analysis meant that science and technology could not be divorced from the class system in which they were embedded. “In its concrete application to society and history,” he wrote, “it therefore frequently obscures the specific feature of Marxism: that all economic or ‘sociological’ phenomena derive from the social relations of men to one another .” For Lukács, this meant that capitalist production is not so easily divorced from capitalism’s class structure and its prerogatives to rule and control workers, particularly at the point of production [...]

[...] Here Benjamin sounds similar notes as the Wobbly proponents of sabotage. Redemption from capitalism and its violence will not come from a simple appropriation of its devices. Instead, he suggests, it is borne on the backs of those sedimented experiences of the nameless people who fought against them, who broke, jammed, sabotaged—who grabbed for the emergency brake—in their circumstances. This is the raw material of future emancipation [...]

In other words, the priority for production during the war was consistency and control, not saving time or increasing profits, though wartime demand and wage controls kept corporate coffers full. An alternative form of automation popular among machinists, “record-playback,” was never seriously pursued, although it was also efficient. Unlike numeric control, the record-playback method was analog, storing the precise movement of a machinist, and so still required a skilled hand. Rather than pursue efficiency, management sought to wrest control of production away from the machinists.

King understood that automation was a weapon to be used against organized labor: “This period is made to order for those who would seek to drive labor into impotency by viciously attacking it at every point of weakness.” And the unions’ only chance to take control of the course of automation was to forge a common cause with the civil rights movement: “The political strength you are going to need to prevent automation from becoming a Moloch, consuming jobs and contract gains, can be multiplied if you tap the vast reservoir of Negro political power.” 57 Malcolm X, in contrast, argued that the threat of automation justified a separatist strategy. “At best,” he cautioned, “Negroes can expect from the integrationist program a hopeless entry into the lowest levels of a working class already disenfranchised by automation.”

This was an analysis that the Black Panther Party took into the heart of their organizational philosophy, which was geared toward organizing the “lumpenproletariat”: the class cut off from wage labor. As Eldridge Cleaver spelled out, the lumpen, which included those “who have been displaced by machines, automation, and cybernation,” represented a real contradiction within the proletariat. 72 Indeed, machines were, in part, responsible for this bifurcation. The polarization of skill meant that “every job on the market in the American Economy today demands as high a complexity of skills as did the jobs in the elite trade and craft guilds of Marx’s time.”

Instead of taking operator demands seriously, union leadership praised automation for its promise of leisure. For instance, Communications Workers of America President Joe Beirne stated, “For ourselves, we welcome automation because we see in it a level for higher wages, longer vacations, shorter hours, and ultimately, greater security for ourselves and the American people.” 79 If these beneficial effects were to come— and they largely were not—they would be at the expense of operators, who found themselves out of jobs [...]