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.”

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.

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.”

Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman. But it is only in the factory system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality. By means of its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the labourer, during the labour-process, in the shape of capital, of dead labour, that dominates, and pumps dry, living labour-power. The separation of the intellectual powers of production from the manual labour, and the conversion of those powers into the might of capital over labour, is, as we have already shown, finally completed by modern industry erected on the foundation of machinery. The special skill of each individual insignificant factory operative vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity before the science, the gigantic physical forces, and the mass of labour that are embodied in the factory mechanism and, together with that mechanism, constitute the power of the “master.”47

In reality, machinery embraces a host of possibilities, many of which are systematically thwarted, rather than developed, by capital. An automatic system of machinery opens up the possibility of the true control over a highly productive factory by a relatively small corps of workers, providing these workers attain the level of mastery over the machinery offered by engineering knowledge, and providing they then share out among themselves the routines of the operation, from the most technically advanced to the most routine. This tendency to socialize labor, and to make of it an engineering enterprise on a high level of technical accomplishment, is, considered abstractly, a far more striking characteristic of machinery in its fully developed state than any other. Yet this promise, which has been repeatedly held out with every technical advance since the Industrial Revolution, is frustrated by the capitalist effort to reconstitute and even deepen the division of labor in all of its worst aspects, despite the fact that this division of labor becomes more archaic with every passing day. This observation may easily be verified by the fact that workers in each industry today are far less capable of operating that industry than were the workers of a half-century ago, and even less than those of a hundred years ago. The “progress” of capitalism seems only to deepen the gulf between worker and machine and to subordinate the worker evermore decisively to the yoke of the machine.*

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.