The control of large bodies of workers long antedates the bourgeois epoch. The Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, extensive networks of roads, aqueducts, and irrigation canals, the large buildings, arenas, monuments, cathedrals, etc., dating from antiquity and medieval times all testify to this. We find an elementary division of labor in the workshops which produced weapons for the Roman armies, and the armies of pre-capitalist times exhibit primitive forms of later capitalist practices.\*\* Roman workshops for metalwork, pottery, leather, glassblowing, brickmaking, and textiles, as well as large agricultural estates, brought together scores of workers under a single management.7 These predecessors, however, were undertaken under conditions of slave or other unfree forms of labor, stagnant technology, and the absence of the driving capitalist need to expand each unit of capital employed, and so differed markedly from capitalist management. The Pyramids were built with the surplus labor of an enslaved population, with no end in view but the greater glory of the pharaohs here and in the hereafter. Roads, aqueducts, and canals were built for their military or civilian usefulness, and not generally on a profit-making basis. State-subsidized manufactories produced arms or luxury goods and enjoyed an actual or legal monopoly and large orders from noncommercial buyers, courts, or armies.8 The management required in such situations remained elementary, and this was all the more true when the labor was that of slaves, and sometimes supervised by slaves as well. The capitalist, however, working with hired labor, which represents a cost for every nonproducing hour, in a setting of rapidly revolutionizing technology to which his own efforts perforce contributed, and goaded by the need to show a surplus and accumulate capital, brought into being a wholly new art of management, which even in its early manifestations was far more complete, self-conscious, painstaking, and calculating than anything that had gone before.
There were more immediate precedents for the early industrial capitalist to draw upon, in the form of mercantile enterprises, plantations, and agricultural estates. Merchant capitalism invented the Italian system of bookkeeping, with its internal checks and controls; and from merchant capital the industrial capitalist also took over the structure of branch organization subdivided among responsible managers. Agricultural estates and colonial plantations offered the experience of a well-developed supervisory routine, particularly since much early mining (and the construction works that attended it) was carried out on the agricultural estates of Great Britain under the supervision of estate agents.
Control without centralization of employment was, if not impossible, certainly very difficult, and so the precondition for management was the gathering of workers under a single roof. The first effect of such a move was to enforce upon the workers regular hours of work, in contrast to the self-imposed pace which included many interruptions, short days and holidays, and in general prevented a prolongation of the working day for the purpose of producing a surplus under then-existing technical conditions. Thus Gras writes in his Industrial Evolution:
It was purely for purposes of discipline, so that the workers could be effectively controlled under the supervision of foremen, Under one roof, or within a narrow compass, they could be started to work at sunrise and kept going till sunset, barring periods for rest and refreshment. And under penalty of loss of 9 all employment they could be kept going almost all throughout the year.
Within the workshops, early management assumed a variety of harsh and despotic forms, since the creation of a “free labor force" required coercive methods to habituate the workers to their tasks and keep them working throughout the day and the year. Pollard notes that “there were few areas of the country in which modern industries, particularly the textiles, if carried on in large buildings, were not associated with prisons, workhouses, and orphanages.
44
Labor and Monopoly Capital
The Origins of Management
45
\* On this, David Landes writes: “. . . the manufacturer who wanted to increase output had to get more work out of the labour already engaged. Here, however, he again ran into the internal contradictions of the system. He had no way of compelling his workers to do a given number of hours of labour; the domestic weaver or craftsman was master of his time, starting and stopping when he desired. And while the employer could raise the piece rates with a view to encouraging diligence, he usually found that this actually reduced output." Landes also summarizes other “internal contradictions" of this mode of industrial organization.⁵
\*\* “In general," Marx wrote in a letter to Engels, "the army is important for economic development. For instance, it was in the army that the ancients first fully developed a wage system. . . , The division of labour within one branch was also first carried out in the armies."6