{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title":"Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0853459401","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","uuid":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title":"Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century","normalized_title":"laborandmonopolycapitalthedegradationofworkinthetwentiethcentury","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0853459401","isbns":["0853459401"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Labor%20and%20Monopoly%20Capital%20The%20Degradation%20of%20Work%20in%20the%20Twentieth%20Century","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/search"},"page":{"printed_page":125,"pdf_page":75,"physical_index":75,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"cc79d1cac96f8bc9d13177edc214adc1c3063ce5aee9d269cc4d0fbff14c4b85"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"The animating principle of all such work investigations is the view of human beings in machine terms. Since management is not interested in the person of the worker, but in the worker as he or she is used in office, factory, warehouse, store, or transport processes, this view is from the management point of view not only eminently rational but the basis of all calculation. The human being is here regarded as a mechanism articulated by hinges, ball-andsocket joints, etc. Thus an article in the British Journal of Psychiatry aptly entitled “Theory of the Human Operator in Control Systems\" says: “.. . as an element in a control system, a man may be regarded as a chain consisting of the following items: (1) sensory devices . . . (2) a computing system which responds . . . on the basis of previous experience . . . (3) an amplifying systemthe motor-nerve endings and muscles . . . (4) mechanical linkages . . . whereby the muscular work produces externally observable effects.\"14 In this we see not merely the terms of a machine analogy used for experimental purposes, nor merely a teaching metaphor or didactic device, but in the context of the capitalist mode of production the operating theory by which people of one class set into motion people of another class. It is the reductive formula that expresses both how capital employs labor and what it makes of humanity.\n\nThis attempt to conceive of the worker as a general-purpose machine operated by management is one of many paths taken toward the same goal: the displacement of labor as the subjective element of the labor process and its transformation into an object. Here the entire work operation, down to its smallest motion, is conceptualized by the management and engineering staffs, laid out, measured, fitted with training and performance standards—all entirely in advance. The human instruments are adapted to the machinery of production according to specifications that resemble nothing so much as machine-capacity specifications. Just as the engineer knows the rated revolutions per minute, electrical current demand, lubrication requirements, etc. of a motor according to a manufacturer's specification sheet, he tries to know the motions-of-agiven-variety of the human operator from standard data. In the system as a whole little is left to chance, just as in a machine the motion of the components is rigidly governed; results are precalculated before the system has been set in motion. In this, the manager counts not only upon the physiological characteristics of the human body as codified in his data, but also upon the tendency of the cooperative working mass, of which each worker is, along with the machines, one of the limbs, to enforce upon the individual the average pace upon which his calculations are based.\\*\n\nIt is, finally, worthy of note that in management's eyes as well as in the practice it dictates, the more labor is governed by classified motions which extend across the boundaries of trades and occupations, the more it dissolves its concrete forms into the general types of work motions. This mechanical exercise of human faculties according to motion types which are studied independently of the particular kind of work being done, brings to life the Marxist conception of “abstract labor.\"We see that this abstraction from the concrete forms of labor—the simple “expenditure of human labor in general,\" in Marx's phrase—which Marx employed as a means of clarifying the value of commodities (according to the share of such general human labor they embodied), is not something that exists only in the pages of the first chapter of Capital, but exists as well in the mind of the capitalist, the manager, the industrial engineer. It is precisely their effort and métier to visualize labor not as a total human endeavor, but to abstract from all its concrete qualities in order to comprehend it as universal and endlessly repeated motions, the sum of which, when merged with the other things that capital buysmachines, materials, etc.—results in the production of a larger sum of capital than that which was “invested\" at the outset of the process. Labor in the form of standardized motion patterns is labor used as an interchangeable part, and in this form comes ever closer to corresponding, in life, to the abstraction employed by Marx in analysis of the capitalist mode of production.\n\nand this is true of human machinery as well as mechanical. The problem as it presents itself to management is well summarized by James R. Bright of the Harvard Business School: “Meanwhile, refinement toward mechanical ends has gone onor has attempted to go on—with people. Many past efforts to gain precision in manufacturing have been to subdivide and apportion human effort to minute parts of the task and thus to increase reliability by facilitating machine-like action. Managers and engineers have tried to obtain this by arbitrary rule of quotas and standard tasks, by mechanistic devices such as the indexing machine or pacing by conveyor, and by motivating devices such as incentive systems, profit-sharing plans, or even music in the shop. In the abstract, these are nothing more than efforts to constrain people to perform consistently in the desired manner at points on the production line where machines are not available or not economical. In other words, this is force-closure’ applied to the human element of the manufacturing system. The attempt has been to create timed, predictable, consistent production action on the part of human beings. Yet, such an approach inevitably must be short of perfection. As links or resistant bodies’ in the supermachine, human beings are not mechanically reliable. They do not consistently respond in the desired manner,' nor can they be constrained to do so. . . . Thinking of the factory in these terms enables one to appreciate why the so-called automatic factory is far from automatic: only a portion of the economic task of the factory has been adequately constrained. People are needed to fill in many of the gaps in mechanization and to provide control on levels as yet beyond mechanical or economic feasibility.“15\n\n124 Labor and Monopoly Capital\n\nThe Scientific-Technical Revolution and the Worker\n\n125\n\n\\* This is a description of a \"theoretical ideal\" system from management's point of view, and not an attempt to describe the actual course of events. We are here omitting for the moment the fact that workers are rebellious, and that the average pace of production is decided in a practice which largely assumes the form of a struggle, whether organized or not. Thus the machinery operated by management has internal frictions,","previous_page":null,"next_page":null}