Chapter 6
The Habituation of the Worker to the Capitalist Mode of Production
The transformation of working humanity into a "labor force," a “factor of production," an instrument of capital, is an incessant and unending process. The condition is repugnant to the victims, whether their pay is high or low, because it violates human conditions of work; and since the workers are not destroyed as human beings but are simply utilized in inhuman ways, their critical, intelligent, conceptual faculties, no matter how deadened or diminished, always remain in some degree a threat to capital. Moreover, the capitalist mode of production is continually extended to new areas of work, including those freshly created by technological advances and the shift of capital to new industries. It is, in addition, continually being refined and perfected, so that its pressure upon the workers is unceasing. At the same time, the habituation of workers to the capitalist mode of production must be renewed with each generation, all the more so as the generations which grow up under capitalism are not formed within the matrix of work life, but are plunged into work from the outside, so to speak, after a prolonged period of adolescence during which they are held in reserve. The necessity for adjusting the worker to work in its capitalist form, for overcoming natural resistance intensified by swiftly changing technology, antagonistic social relations, and the succession of the generations, does not therefore end with the “scientific organization of labor," but becomes a permanent feature of capitalist society.
As a result, there has come into being, within the personnel and labor relations departments of corporations and in the external support organizations such as schools of industrial relations, college departments of sociology, and other academic and para-academic institutions, a complex of practical and academic disciplines devoted to the study of the worker. Shortly after Taylor, industrial psychology and industrial physiology came into existence to perfect methods of selection, training, and motivation of workers, and these were soon broadened into an attempted industrial sociology, the study of the workplace as a social system.
The cardinal feature of these various schools and the currents within them is that, unlike the scientific management movement, they do not by and large concern themselves with the organization of work, but rather with the conditions under which the worker may best be brought to cooperate in the scheme of work organized by the industrial engineer.\* The evolving work processes of capitalist society are taken by these schools as inexorable givens, and are accepted as “necessary and inevitable" in any form of "industrial society." The problems addressed are the problems of management: dissatisfaction as expressed in high turnover rates, absenteeism, resistance to the prescribed work pace, indifference, neglect, cooperative group restrictions on output, and overt hostility to management. As it presents itself to most of the sociologists and psychologists concerned with the study of work and workers, the problem is not that of the degradation of men and women, but the difficulties raised by the reactions, conscious and unconscious, to that degradation. It is therefore not at all fortuitous that most orthodox social scientists adhere firmly, indeed desperately, to the dictum that their task is not the study of the objective conditions of work, but only of the subjective phenomena to which these give rise: the degrees of “satisfaction" and “dissatisfaction" elicited by their questionnaires.
The earliest systematic effort in this direction took place in the field of industrial psychology. Its beginnings may be traced back to the experimental psychology taught in nineteenth century Germany, and in particular to the school of psychology at the University of Leipzig. Hugo Münsterberg, after receiving his training in Wilhelm Wundt's “laboratory" at that institution, came to the United States where, at Harvard, he was in a position to observe the development of modern management in its most vigorous and extensive forms, and it became his ambition to marry the methods of the Leipzig school to the new practice of scientific management. His Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (published in German in 1912, with an English version following the next year) may be called the first systematic outline of industrial psychology.³ Like Taylor, Münsterberg disdained to conceal his views and aims:
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\* Personnel management, although thought of as that part of the corporate structure concerned with the worker, is usually given short shrift when a reorganization of actual work is under way. In a recent book, two prominent industrial engineers accord to almost every management level a greater role in the change in work methods than the role which they prescribe for the personnel department. They say flatly, in their recommendations for an overall “operations improvement program": “In the beginning, in most organizations, the personnel director will have no active role in the conduct of an operations improvement program." They restrict the place of this official to his value “as a sounding board for employee reactions," and to orienting new employees to the program and to answering questions and complaints.' As with personnel directors, so also with their academic counterparts in labor sociology. Charles Rumford Walker, one of the more experienced and sophisticated, as well as more “humane," of these stresses this in a section of one of his papers devoted to the "Strategic Role of the Engineer," in which he recognizes that the direction of the evolution of work is determined by “managers and engineers, as architects of the future," while the role of sociologists is that of trying to importune, press upon, and persuade the real designers of the work process to take into account the “neglected human dimension" in order to reduce discontent and increase productivity, to “seize the opportunity" offered by swift technological change, etc.²
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