Machinery offers to management the opportunity to do by wholly mechanical means that which it had previously attempted to do by organizational and disciplinary means. The fact that many machines may be paced and controlled according to centralized decisions, and that these controls may thus be in the hands of management, removed from the site of production to the office——these technical possibilities are of just as great interest to management as the fact that the machine multiplies the productivity oflabor.\* It is not always necessary, for this purpose, that the machine be a well-developed or sophisticated example of its kind. The moving conveyor, when used for an assembly line, though it is an exceedingly primitive piece of machinery, answers perfectly to the needs of capital in the organization of work which may not be otherwise mechanized. Its pace is in the hands of management, and is determined by a mechanical device the construction of which could hardly be simpler but one which enables management to seize upon the single essential control element of the process.
To explore this subject in somewhat greater detail by means of a very recent instance, let us take as an example the work of the machine shop. This remains the fundamental branch of all industry, not only because of the great role which machine tools play in a great many areas of production, but also because it is in machine shops that the machinery ofindustry is itself fabricated. It is also particularly important because of the recent innovations in machine control which are revolutionizing production methods in machine shops, and which have initiated control systems that are spreading into many quite different industries. It has a further interest for this discussion because in this industry one may see how machinery is utilized to tackle the very machineshop problems with which Taylor wrestled for so many years.
The problem of controlling machine tools presents itself to management largely as a problem of unit or small-batch production. Highly automatic machine systems adapted to mass production or continuous flow processes are of little help in this respect, since they represent huge fixed investments which can return their cost only when applied to a large volume. And it has been estimated that three-fourths of all production in the metal-working industries of the United States takes place in batches of fifty units or less.1º Quantities as small as these must be manufactured on universal or general purpose machine tools, and the tooling, fixtures, and setup costs that may be distributed among these short runs are necessarily limited. Thus this vast area of metal cutting has until recently remained the province of the skilled machinist. Insofar as management has found an answer to the problems of cheapening labor and controlling production, it has taken the form, on the one hand, of breaking down the machinist's craft among machine operators specializing in the lathe, milling machine, and other individual machines, and making machine setup itself a specialty; and, on the other hand, of predetermining operations according to management standards in the Taylor tradition.
The mechanical solution to the problem has taken the form of numerical control,\* which has been called “probably the most significant new development in manufacturing technology since Henry Ford introduced the concept of the moving assembly line."" In application to machine tools alone, this concept is working a revolution in industry, but its applications are spreading beyond machine tools and potentially embrace a great variety of machine and hand operations. It is therefore worth considering in detail, as a prime instance of the managerial use of machinery in the capitalist mode of production, and how this affects the worker and the labor process.
The concept of this form of control over machinery has been traced back to two French inventions: that of Falcon in 1725, a knitting machine controlled by a perforated card, and that of Jacquard in 1804, a knitting and weaving machine controlled in the same way. The principle is like that of the player piano, which is actuated by holes in a paper roll. It was picked up again by an American inventor who in 1916 patented a continuous-path machine for cutting cloth in the garment industry. An application of this method to the control of machine tools was patented in 1930, but the development and application of the concept did not really begin, despite this long history, until after the Second World War. Financing for the research was made available by the United States Air Force and was carried on by the John Parsons Corporation and later by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which demonstrated in 1952 a prototype in the form of a vertical milling machine operated under numerical control.12
134 Labor and Monopoly Capital
Machinery
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\* “One great advantage which we may derive from machinery," wrote Babbage, “is from the check which it affords against the inattention, the idleness, or the dishonesty of human agents."9
\* The term comes from the control (usually by a punched-tape reading device) over the movements of the tool or the work by means of numbers (for instance, 2.375 inches) which represent distances along three axes, and by means of which the tool may be guided to any point in a three-dimensional solid.