The chief advantage of the industrial assembly line is the control it affords over the pace of labor, and as such it is supremely useful to owners and managers whose interests are at loggerheads with those of their workers. From a technological point of view, it is extraordinarily primitive and has little to do with “modern machine technology.” Nevertheless, in such barbarous relics is found the seat of “scientific knowledge” and the basis for technology. Apologists for chattel slavery, from Greece to the American South, used to argue that the labors of their fieldhands and domestic slaves were necessary so that they could preserve and develop art, science, and culture. Modern apologists go further and instruct the workers that they must keep to their places on the “industrial assembly line” as a precondition for the development of a science and technology which will then devise for them still better examples of the division of labor. And it is truly in this way that workers, so long as they remain servants of capital instead of freely associated producers who control their own labor and their own destinies, work every day to build for themselves more “modern,” more “scientific,” more dehumanized prisons of labor.