In the capitalist mode of production, the prolongation of an ever emptier “education” combined with the reduction of labor to simple and ignorant tasks represent a waste of the educational years and a wasting of humanity in the years thereafter. This system is understood by its apologists to exemplify efficiency raised to its highest point; where one engineer can direct fifty workers, they argue, there is no need for “wasting" the resources of society in educating all to the engineering standard. So goes the logic of the capitalist mode of production, which, rather than threaten the hierarchical social relations by which it accumulates wealth in the hands of the owners of society, prefers to leave the worker ignorant despite years of schooling, and to rob humanity of its birthright of conscious and masterful labor.
The perfect expression of the concept of skill in capitalist society is to be found in the bald and forthright dictums of the early Taylorians, who had discovered the great truth of capitalism that the worker must become the instrument of labor in the hands of the capitalist, but had not yet learned the wisdom of adorning, obfuscating, and confusing this straightforward necessity in the manner of modern management and sociology. "What happens to unskilled labor under Scientific Management?" ask the Gilbreths in their Primer on this subject. "Under Scientific Management there is no unskilled labor; or, at least, labor does not remain unskilled. Unskilled labor is taught the best method obtainable. . . . No labor is unskilled after it is taught."25 The instruction of the worker in the simple requirements of capital: here, in the minds of managers, is the secret of the upgrading of skills so celebrated in the annals of modern industrial sociology. The worker may remain a creature without knowledge or capacity, a mere “hand" by which capital does its work, but so long as he or she is adequate to the needs of capital the worker is no longer to be considered or called unskilled. It is this conception that lies behind the shabby nominal sociology in which the sociologists find “upgrading" in the new names given to classifications by the statisticians.“Training a worker," wrote Frank Gilbreth, “means merely enabling him to carry out the directions of his work schedule. Once he can do this, his training is over, whatever his age." Is this not a perfect description of the mass of jobs in modern industry, trade, and offices?
Notes
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
A Final Note on Skill
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\* The demands for“workers'participation"and “workers' control," from this point of view, fall far short of the Marxist vision. The conception of a democracy in the workplace based simply upon the imposition of a formal structure of parliamentarism election of directors, the making of production and other decisions by ballot, etc.—upon the existing organization of production is delusory. Without the return of requisite technical knowledge to the mass of workers and the reshaping of the organization of labor—without, in a word, a new and truly collective mode of production—balloting within factories and offices does not alter the fact that the workers remain as dependent as before upon “experts," and can only choose among them, or vote for alternatives presented by them. Thus genuine workers' control has as its prerequisite the demystifying of technology and the reorganization of the mode of production. This does not mean, of course, that the seizure of power within industry through demands for workers\* control is not a revolutionary act. It means rather that a true workers' democracy cannot subsist on a purely formal parliamentary scheme.
It is a mistake to think, therefore, as some apparently do, that the raising of the idea of workers' control in industry—in the sense of an electoral structure within each workplace is a demand that goes beyond Marxism. Those who incline to this belief should note how Marx's entire discussion of the capitalist mode of production in the first volume of Capítal is permeated by a much more revolutionary conception, which is the return of the process of production itself to the control of the workers in the fullest and most direct way. Marx would have viewed a philosophy of"workers' control" which made no mention of this kind of a revolution in the mode of production to be a feeble and illusory remedy, just as he would have considered a revolution, such as that in the Soviet Union, which altered property relations but left the mode of production untouched, as a hybrid form which, so long as it went no further, remained only the abortive first stage of revolution.
In this connection, see Paul Blumberg's book on workers' control. Blumberg, although he provides one of the best surveys available on the subject, fails, like so many others, to grasp the Marxist view when he complains of the “silence" of Marx and Engels on workers' control; he attributes this chiefly to “their reluctance to spell out the nature of the coming Communist social order," and goes on to say: “Nevertheless, taking their work as a whole, it is clear that, had they been more articulate about the nature of Socialism, they might have expressed sympathy for the idea of workers' control. Such sympathy is often implied in their works."24 There is no question that Marx and Engels took for granted the democratic control of workers over their own workplace and their own society as a whole. But they were concerned with a far more revolutionary concept, and one without which the idea of “industrial democracy" becomes an illusion.