Insofar as these changes have been governed by manufacturing rather than marketing considerations (and the two are by no means independent), they have been brought about by the drive for greater productivity: that is, the effort to find ways to incorporate ever smaller quantities of labor time into ever greater quantities of product. This leads to faster and more efficient methods and machinery. But in the capitalist mode of production, new methods and new machinery are incorporated within a management effort to dissolve the labor process as a process conducted by the worker and reconstitute it as a process conducted by management. In the first form of the division of labor, the capitalist disassembles the craft and returns it to the workers piecemeal, so that the process as a whole is no longer the province of any individual worker. Then, as we have seen, the capitalist conducts an analysis of each of the tasks distributed among the workers, with an eye toward getting a grip on the individual operations. It is in the age of the scientific-technical revolution that management sets itself the problem of grasping the process as a whole and controlling every element of it, without exception. “Improving the system of management," wrote H. L. Gantt, “means the elimination of elements of chance or accident, and the accomplishment of all the ends desired in accordance with knowledge derived from a scientific investigation of everything down to the smallest detail of labor. . . ."² And it is the scientific-technical revolution which furnishes the means for the partial realization of this theoretical ideal.
Thus, after a million years oflabor, during which humans created not only a complex social culture but in a very real sense created themselves as well, the very cultural-biological trait upon which this entire evolution is founded has been brought, within the last two hundred years, to a crisis, a crisis which Marcuse aptly calls the threat of a “catastrophe of the human essence."3 The unity of thought and action, conception and execution, hand and mind, which capitalism threatened from its beginnings, is now attacked by a systematic dissolution employing all the resources of science and the various engineering disciplines based upon it. The subjective factor of the labor process is removed to a place among its inanimate objective factors. To the materials and instruments of production are added a “labor force," another “factor of production," and the process is henceforth carried on by management as the sole subjective element.\* This is the ideal toward which management tends, and in pursuit of which it uses and shapes every productive innovation furnished by science.
This displacement of labor as the subjective element of the process, and its subordination as an objective element in a productive process now conducted by management, is an ideal realized by capital only within definite limits, and unevenly among industries. The principle is itself restrained in its application by the nature of the various specific and determinate processes of production. Moreover, its very application brings into being new crafts and skills and technical specialties which are at first the province of labor rather than management. Thus in industry all forms of labor coexist: the craft, the hand or machine detail worker, the automatic machine or flow process. But far more important than this relative restraint on the operation of the principle is the resulting continual shifting of employment. The very success of management in increasing productivity in some industries leads to the displacement of labor into other fields, where it accumulates in large quantities because the processes employed have not yet been subjectedand in some cases cannot be subjected to the same degree—to the mechanizing tendency of modern industry. The result therefore is not the elimination of labor, but its displacement to other occupations and industries, a matter which will be discussed more fully in later chapters.
The reduction of the worker to the level of an instrument in the production process is by no means exclusively associated with machinery. We must also note the attempt, either in the absence of machinery or in conjunction with individually operated machines, to treat the workers themselves as machines This aspect of scientific management was developed by Taylor's immediate successors.
Taylor popularized time study as part of his effort to gain control over the job. Time study may be defined as the measurement of elapsed time for each component operation of a work process; its prime instrument is the stopwatch, calibrated in fractions of an hour, minute, or second. But this kind of time study was found too gross to satisfy the increasingly demanding standards pursued by managers and their engineers. From their point of view, Taylor's approach had two major defects. First, the various activities oflabor could by this means be analyzed only in their actual daily practice, and in relatively gross increments. And second, the method remained tied to particular forms of concrete labor. In other words, the universality of the approach Taylor had taken was not matched by an equally universal methodology.
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
The Scientific-Technical Revolution and the Worker
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labour as its governing unity." The Grundrisse consists of monographs written by Marx for his own clarification and served as a preparatory manuscript for Capital. Here Marx allowed himself to speculate further, to revolve his subject under his eye more freely, than in the writings he prepared for publication. The sections on labor and production are thus extraordinarily interesting, although substantially everything in them appears in a more fully worked out and final form in Capital; the bold formulation quoted above is one of the more suggestive remarks which did not find a place, to my knowledge, in the writings he published.
\* When the conditions are fully realized through an automatic machine system, wrote Marx in the Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, then: “The production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by