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.

Like James, he saw salutary effects in how automation organized workers.

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.”