by
Jacobin
With these three principles, Braverman restored Marx’s emphasis on the class implications of technology in capitalist society. Scientific management was no neutral technique for improving efficiency, but a scheme for controlling labor in its struggle with capital. The failure to appreciate this point is clear in Lenin and Gramsci’s discussions of Taylorism and Fordism, and leads quite directly to the one-sided conclusions they reached about the applicability of Taylorist techniques in post-capitalist society.
Braverman defines three principles of Taylorism:
- dissociation of labour process from skills of workers (deskilling them to reduce their power)
- separating conception from execution (instead of allowing workers to design their own processes, which again gives them too much power)
- scientific management, where management redesigns the production process for maximum profit