Mental and Manual Labor
In the beginning, the office was the site of mental labor and the shop the site of manual labor. This was even true, as we have seen, after Taylor and in part because of Taylor: scientific management gave the office a monopoly over conception, planning, judgment, and the appraisal of results, while in the shop nothing was to take place other than the physical execution of all that was thought up in the office. Insofar as this was true, the identification of office work with thinking and educated labor, and of the production process proper with unthinking and uneducated labor, retained some validity. But once the office was itself subjected to the rationalization process, this contrast lost its force. The functions of thought and planning became concentrated in an ever smaller group within the office, and for the mass of those employed there the office became just as much a site of manual labor as the factory floor.\* With the transformation of management into an administrative labor process, manual work spreads to the office and soon becomes characteristic of the tasks of the mass of clerical workers.
Labor in general is a process whose determinate forms are shaped by the end result, the product. The materials and instruments used by the shoemaker, tailor, butcher, carpenter, machinist, or farmer may vary with the state of technology, but they must be adapted to the production of footwear, apparel, meat, wooden structures, metal shapes, or grain. The typical, although not exclusive, product of mental labor consists of markings on paper. Mental labor is carried on in the brain, but since it takes form in an external product—symbols in linguistic, numeric, or other representational forms—it involves manual operations such as writing, drawing, operating writing machines, etc.——for the purpose of bringing this product into being. It is therefore possible to separate the functions of conception and execution: all that is required is that the scale of the work be large enough to make this subdivision economical for the corporation.
Among the first to recognize this was Charles Babbage. Babbage was not only responsible for the design of one of the first calculating engines (“computers"), but in his On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, written in the 1830s, he included a prophetic chapter called “On the Division of Mental Labour," in which he subjected the matter to one of its earliest and most trenchant analyses."We have already mentioned," he begins, “what may, perhaps, appear paradoxical to some of our readers,—that the division of labour can be applied with equal success to mental as to mechanical operations, and that it ensures in both the same economy of time."22 This he demonstrates by the following example.
During the French Revolution, the adoption of the decimal system made it necessary that mathematical tables adapted to that system be produced. This task was given to a certain M. Prony, who soon found that even with the help of several associates he could not expect to complete the job during his lifetime. While pondering the problem, he happened to pass a bookseller's shop where Adam Smith's recently published Wealth ofNations was displayed, and opened it to the first chapter. He decided to put his logarithms and trigonometric functions into manufacture, like pins, and set up two separate workshops—the product of each to serve as verification for that of the other—for this purpose.
He divided the task among three sections. The first section, consisting of five or six eminent French mathematicians, was charged with the work of devising the formulas best adapted for use by the other sections. The second group, made up of seven or eight persons with a good knowledge of mathematics, undertook the problem of converting these formulas into numerical values and devising means of checking the calculations. The third section, varying in number from sixty to eighty persons, used nothing more than simple addition or subtraction and returned the results to the second section for checking. Babbage describes the process and its requirements as follows:
When it is stated that the tables thus completed occupy seventeen large folio volumes, some idea may perhaps be formed of the labour. From that part executed by the third class, which may almost be termed mechanical, requiring the least knowledge and by far the greatest exertions, the first class were entirely exempt. Such labour can always be purchased at an easy rate. The duties of the second class, although requiring considerable skill in arithmetical operations, were yet in some measure relieved by the higher interest naturally felt in those more difficult operations. 23
Of the third section, Babbage says: “It is remarkable that nine-tenths of this class had no knowledge of arithmetic beyond the first two rules which they were thus called upon to exercise, and that these persons were usually found more correct in their calculations, than those who possessed a more extensive knowledge of the subject." The way is thereby opened for two conclusions which capitalism finds irresistible, regardless oftheir consequences for humanity. The first is that the labor of educated or better-paid persons should never be “wasted" on matters that can be accomplished for them by others of lesser training. The second is that those of little or no special training are superior for the performance of routine work, in the first place because they “can always be purchased at an easy rate," and in the second place because, undistracted by too much in their brains, they will perform routine work more correctly and faithfully. It remains only to add to this story that Babbage foresaw the time when the “completion of a calculating engine" would eliminate the necessity for the operations of addition and subtraction performed by the third section, and that thereafter it would prove possible to find ways to simplify the work of the second section. In Babbage's vision we can see the conversion of the entire process into a mechanical routine supervised by the “first section" which, at that point, would be the only group required to understand either mathematical science or the process itself The work of all others would be converted into the “preparation of data" and the operation of machinery.
218 Labor and Monopoly Capital
Clerical Workers
219
\* In Lockwood's words: “One of the main changes in the division of labour has been the appearance of the specialized, semi-skilled office employee who is responsible for the processing' of data, The actual division of tasks very often preceded mechanization, but machinery has speeded up the trend by which a small group of executives, who make decisions about the selection and analysis of data, are separated from a mass of subordinates whose functions less and less justify their classification as brain workers."21