The early phases of industrial capitalism were marked by a sustained effort on the part of the capitalist to disregard the difference between labor power and the labor that can be gotten out of it, and to buy labor in the same way he bought his raw materials: as a definite quantity of work, completed and embodied in the product. This attempt took the form of a great variety of subcontracting and “putting-out”" systems.\* In the form of domestic labor, it was to be found in textile, clothing, metal goods (nailing and cutlery), watchmaking, hat, wood and leather industries, where the capitalist distributed materials on a piecework basis to workers for manufacture in their own homes, through the medium of subcontractors and commissión agents. But even in industries where work could not be taken home, such as coal, tin, and copper mines, mine workers themselves, working at the face, took contracts singly or in gangs, either directly or through the mediation of the "butty" or subcontracting employer of mine labor. The system persisted even in the early factories. In cotton mills, skilled spinners were put in charge of machinery and engaged their own help, usually child assistants from among their families and acquaintances. Foremen sometimes added to their direct supervisory function the practice of taking a few machines on their own account and hiring labor to operate them. Pollard identifies practices of this sort not only in mines and textile mills, but also in carpet and lace mills, ironworks, potteries, building and civil engineering projects, transport, and quarrying.² In the United States, it has been pointed out, the contract system, in which puddlers and other skilled iron and steel craftsmen were paid by the ton on a sliding scale pegged to market prices, and hired their own help, was characteristic of this industry until almost the end of the nineteenth century.3 The following description, by Maurice Dobb, of the prevalence of such systems well past the middle of the nineteenth century points to this important fact: that the specifically capitalist mode of management and thus of production did not become generalized until relatively recent times, that is, within the last hundred years:
As late as 1870 the immediate employer of many workers was not the large capitalist but the intermediate sub-contractor who was both an employee and in turn a small employer of labour. In fact the skilled worker of the middle nineteenth century tended to be in some measure a sub-contractor, and in psychology and outlook bore the marks of this status.
It was not only in trades still at the stage of outwork and domestic production that this type of relationship prevailed, with their master gunmakers or nailmasters or saddlers’ and coachbuilders’ ironmongers, or factors and “foggers” with domestic workers under them. Even in factory trades the system of sub-contracting was common: a system with its opportunities for sordid tyranny and cheating through truck and debt and the payment of wages in public houses, against which early trade unionism fought a hard and prolonged battle. In blast-furnaces there were the bridge-stockers and the stock-takers, paid by the capitalist according to the tonnage output of the furnace and employing gangs of men, women, boys and horses to charge the furnace or control the casting. In coal-mines there were the butties who contracted with the management for the working of a stall, and employed their own assistants; some butties having as many as 150 men under them and requiring a special overseer called a “doggie" to superintend the work. In rolling mills there was the master-roller, in brass-foundries and chainfactories the overhand, who at times employed as many as twenty or thirty; even women workers in button factories employed girl assistants. When factories first came to the Birmingham small metal trades, “the idea that the employer should find, as a matter of course, the work places, plant and materials, and should exercise supervision over the details of the manufacturing processes, did not spring into existence."4
While all such systems involved the payment of wages by piece rates, or by subcontract rates, it must not be supposed that this in itself was their essential feature. Piece rates in various forms are common to the present day, and represent the conversion of time wages into a form which attempts, with very uneven success, to enlist the worker as a willing accomplice in his or her own exploitation. Today, however, piece rates are combined with the systematic and detailed control on the part of management over the processes of work, a control which is sometimes exercised more stringently than where time rates are employed. Rather, the early domestic and subcontracting systems represented a transitional form, a phase during which the capitalist had not yet assumed the essential function of management in industrial capitalism, control over the labor process; for this reason it was incompatible with the overall development of capitalist production, and survives only in specialized instances.
Such methods of dealing with labor bore the marks of the origins of industrial capitalism in mercantile capitalism, which understood the buying and selling of commodities but not their production, and sought to treat labor like all other commodities. It was bound to prove inadequate, and did so very rapidly, even though its survival was guaranteed for a time by the extreme unevenness of the development of technology, and by the need for technology to incessantly retrace its own steps and recapitulate, in newer industries, the stages of its historic development. The subcontracting and “putting out" systems were plagued by problems of irregularity of production, loss of materials in transit and through embezzlement, slowness of manufacture, lack of uniformity and uncertainty of the quality of the product. But most of all, they were limited by their inability to change the processes of production.\* Based, as Pollard points out, upon a rudimentary division of labor, the domestic system prevented the further development of the division of labor. While the attempt to purchase finished labor, instead of assuming direct control over labor power, relieved the capitalist of the uncertainties of the latter system by fixing a definite unit cost, at the same time it placed beyond the reach of the capitalist much of the potential of human labor that may be made available by fixed hours, systematic control, and the reorganization of the labor process. This function, capitalist management soon seized upon with an avidity that was to make up for its earlier timidity.
42 Labor and Monopoly Capital
The Origins of Management
43
\* Sidney Pollard, to whose The Genesis of Modern Management I am indebted for materials used in this chapter, calls this effort “if not a method of management, at least a method of evading management."1