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The crisis Ford faced was intensified by the unionization drive begun by the Industrial Workers of the World among Ford workers in the summer of 1913. Ford’s response to the double threat of unionization and the flight of workers from his plants was the announcement, made with great fanfare early in 1914, of the $5.00 day. Although this dramatic increase in wages was not so strictly adhered to as Ford would have had the public believe when he launched it, it did raise pay at the Ford plant so much above the prevailing rate in the area that it solved both threats for the moment. It gave the company a large pool of labor from which to choose and at the same time opened up new possibilities for the intensification of labor within the plants, where workers were now anxious to keep their jobs. “The payment of five dollars a day for an eight-hour day,” Ford was to write in his autobiography, “was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made.”
Science is the last—and after labor the most important—social property to be turned into an adjunct of capital. The story of its conversion from the province of amateurs, “philosophers,” tinkerers, and seekers after knowledge to its present highly organized and lavishly financed state is largely the story of its incorporation into the capitalist firm and subsidiary organizations. At first science costs the capitalist nothing, since he merely exploits the accumulated knowledge of the physical sciences, but later the capitalist systematically organizes and harnesses science, paying for scientific education, research, laboratories, etc., out of the huge surplus social product which either belongs directly to him or which the capitalist class as a whole controls in the form of tax revenues. A formerly relatively free-floating social endeavor is integrated into production and the market.
By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, what Landes called “the exhaustion of the technological possibilities of the Industrial Revolution” had set in.20 The new scientific-technical revolution which replenished the stock of technological possibilities had a conscious and purposive character largely absent from the old. In place of spontaneous innovation indirectly evoked by the social processes of production came the planned progress of technology and product design. This was accomplished by means of the transformation of science itself into a commodity bought and sold like the other implements and labors of production. From an “external economy,” scientific knowledge has become a balance-sheet item.21 Like all commodities, its supply is called forth by demand, with the result that the development of materials, power sources, and processes has become less fortuitous and more responsive to the immediate needs of capital. The scientific-technical revolution, for this reason, cannot be understood in terms of specific innovations—as in the case of the Industrial Revolution, which may be adequately characterized by a handful of key inventions—but must be understood rather in its totality as a mode of production into which science and exhaustive engineering investigations have been integrated as part of ordinary functioning. The key innovation is not to be found in chemistry, electronics, automatic machinery, aeronautics, atomic physics, or any of the products of these science-technologies, but rather in the transformation of science itself into capital.*
A new line of development was opened by Frank B. Gilbreth, one of Taylor’s most prominent followers. He added to time study the concept of motion study: that is, the investigation and classification of the basic motions of the body, regardless of the particular and concrete form of the labor in which these motions are used. In motion and time study, the elementary movements were visualized as the building blocks of every work activity; they were called, in a variant of Gilbreth’s name spelled backward, therbligs. To the stopwatch were added the chronocyclegraph (a photograph of the workplace with motion paths superimposed), stroboscopic pictures (made by keeping the camera lens open to show changing positions assumed by the worker), and the motion picture; these were to be supplemented by more advanced means. In its first form, motion study catalogs the various movements of the body as standard data, with the aim of determining time requirements and making the procedure “primarily a statistical problem rather than a problem of observation and measurement of particular workers.”
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A management team with the Dickensian name of Payne and Swett see in this the very first advantage of standard data: its “favorable impact on employee relations,” which is their euphemism for the above.
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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 the greatest possible mass of labor into work of the most elementary form, labor from which all conceptual elements have been removed and along with them most of the skill, knowledge, and understanding of production processes. Thus the more complex the process becomes, the less the worker understands. The more science is incorporated into technology, the less science the worker possesses; and the more machinery that has been developed as an aid to labor, the more labor becomes a servant of machinery.
[...] 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 alien power. The interests of the two must be antagonistic. The manner in which labor is deployed around the machinery—from the labor required to design, build, repair, and control it to the labor required to feed and operate it—must be dictated not by the human needs of the producers but by the special needs of those who own both the machine and the labor power, and whose interest it is to bring these two together in a special way. Along with these conditions, a social evolution must take place which parallels the physical evolution of machinery: a step-by-step creation of a “labor force” in place of self-directed human labor; that is to say, a working population conforming to the needs of this social organization of labor, in which knowledge of the machine becomes a specialized and segregated trait, while among the mass of the working population there grows only ignorance, incapacity, and thus a fitness for machine servitude. In this way the remarkable development of machinery becomes, for most of the working population, the source not of freedom but of enslavement, not of mastery but of helplessness, and not of the broadening of the horizon of labor but of the confinement of the worker within a blind round of servile duties in which the machine appears as the embodiment of science and the worker as little or nothing. But this is no more a technical necessity of machinery than appetite is, in the ironic words of Ambrose Bierce, “an instinct thoughtfully implanted by Providence as a solution to the labor question.”
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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 successfully to insist that the entire job, including programming and coding, be handled by the machinist. In many other cases, the pay scale of the machinist has been maintained or even increased by the union after the introduction of numerical control, even though he has become no more than an operator. But such pay maintenance is bound to have a temporary character, and is really an agreement, whether formal or not, to “red circle” these jobs, as this is known in negotiating language; that is, to safeguard the pay of the incumbents. Management is thus sometimes forced to be content to wait until the historical process of devaluation of the worker’s skill takes effect over the long run, and the relative pay scale falls to its expected level, since the only alternative to such patience is, in many cases, a bitter battle with the union.
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. These needs, however, are, in the word of the economists, “externalities,” a notion that is absolutely incomprehensible from the human point of view, but from the capitalist point of view is perfectly clear and precise, since it simply means external to the balance sheet.
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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 productivity of labor is neither sought nor utilized by capitalism from the point of view of the satisfaction of human needs. Rather, powered by the needs of the capital accumulation process, it becomes a frenzied drive which approaches the level of a generalized social insanity. Never is any level of productivity regarded as sufficient. In the automobile industry, a constantly diminishing number of workers produces, decade by decade, a growing number of increasingly degraded products which, as they are placed upon the streets and highways, poison and disrupt the entire social atmosphere—while at the same time the cities where motor vehicles are produced become centers of degraded labor on the one hand and permanent unemployment on the other. It is a measure of the manner in which capitalist standards have diverged from human standards that this situation is seen as representing a high degree of “economic efficiency.” The most advanced methods of science and rational calculation in the hands of a social system that is at odds with human needs produce nothing but irrationality; the more advanced the science and the more rational the calculations, the more swiftly and calamitously is this irrationality engendered. Like Captain Ahab, the capitalist can say, “All my means are sane, my motives and object mad.”
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