{"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":"132 / 133","pdf_page":79,"physical_index":79,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"5332c3e05c26ec45848cf9391179753142293467ca6cce72113914e2e7e4bf06"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"Such machines can be used for no other purpose, and they come into existence when the continuous volume of production can repay the cost of elaborate equipment. Thus one finds on many production lines carefully engineered devices—powered assembly jigs, single purpose stamping presses, rigidly positioned cutting tools adapted to a single motion, welding or riveting heads, etc.——which would have no useful function away from that particular production line. But the ability to guide the machine from an external source of control in many cases restores the universality of the machine. It can now regain its adaptability to many purposes without loss of control, since that control is no longer dependent upon its specialized internal construction. A lathe can be controlled even more efficiently by a punched-paper or magnetic tape, and be immediately adaptable to work of every kind suitable to its size and power.\n\nAs important in its way as the refinements of control in separate machines has been the process of adapting machines to one another. This process begins as a problem of plant layout of individual machines, in an arrangement that follows the sequence of operations so that each machine can deliver the work in process to the subsequent operation. The next step is the provision of chutes, conveyors, etc. for moving the work from machine to machine; in their most developed form these are the transfer machines used in the production lines for engines in the automobile industry. When such a system includes arrangements for the actuation of the machine by the workpiece, so that the need for direct labor diminishes still further, the production line has become “automatic.\" But when a production line has reached this continuous and automatic state, it is close to the point where it becomes a single machine instead of a system of connected machinery. Thus the machine which prints, folds, gathers, covers, and binds the sheets of a paperback book would hardly be recognizable to an outsider as a combination of the several machines it has brought together in such a process of evolution. For this to take place, all that need be done is for the production system of linked machines to be conceived and redesigned as a single, massive, integrated whole. In this fashion, the control over machine processes grows until they can be rendered more nearly automatic within the compass of a system of interlocked machines or a single machine which embraces an entire production process and conducts it with greatly reduced human intervention.\n\nThe evolution of machinery from its primitive forms, in which simple rigid frames replace the hand as guides for the motion of the tool, to those modern complexes in which the entire process is guided from start to finish by not only mechanical but also electrical, chemical, and other physical forcesthis evolution may thus be described as an increase in human control over the action of tools. These tools are controlled, in their activities, as extensions of the human organs of work, including the sensory organs, and this feat is accomplished by an increasing human understanding of the properties of matter—in other words, by the growth of the scientific command of physical principles. The study and understanding of nature has, as its primary manifestation in human civilization, the increasing control by humans over labor processes by means of machines and machine systems.\n\nBut the control of humans over the labor process, thus far understood, is nothing more than an abstraction. This abstraction must acquire concrete form in the social setting in which machinery is being developed. And this social setting is, and has been from the beginnings of the development of machinery in its modern forms, one in which humanity is sharply divided, and nowhere more sharply divided than in the labor process itself. The mass of humanity is subjected to the labor process for the purposes of those who control it rather than for any general purposes of“humanity\" as such. In thus acquiring concrete form, the control of humans over the labor process turns into its opposite and becomes the control of the labor process over the mass of humans. Machinery comes into the world not as the servant of “humanity,\" but as the instrument of those to whom the accumulation of capital gives the ownership of the machines. The capacity of humans to control the labor process through machinery is seized upon by management from the beginning of capitalism as the prime means whereby production may be controlled not by the direct producer but by the owners and representatives of capital. Thus, in addition to its technical function of increasing the productivity of labor——which would be a mark of machinery under any social systemmachinery also has in the capitalist system the function of divesting the mass of workers of their control over their own labor. It is ironic that this feat is accomplished by taking advantage of that great human advance represented by the technical and scientific developments that increase human control over the labor process. It is even more ironic that this appears perfectly “natural\" to the minds of those who, subjected to two centuries of this fetishism of capital, actually see the machine as an alien force which subjugates humanity!\n\nThe evolution of machinery represents an expansion of human capacities, an increase of human control over environment through the ability to elicit from instruments of production an increasing range and exactitude ofresponse. But it is in the nature of machinery, and a corollary of technical development, that the control over the machine need no longer be vested in its immediate operator. This possibility is seized upon by the capitalist mode of production and utilized to the fullest extent. What was mere technical possibility has become, since the Industrial Revolution, an inevitability that devastates with the force of a natural calamity, although there is nothing more “natural\" about it than any other form of the organization of labor. Before the human capacity to control machinery can be transformed into its opposite, a series of special conditions must be met which have nothing to do with the physical character of the machine. The machine must be the property not of the producer, nor of the associated producers, but of an alien power. The interests of the two must be antagonistic. The manner in which labor is deployed around the machinery—from the labor required to design, build, repair, and control it to the labor required to feed and operate it—must be dictated not by the human needs of the producers but by the special needs of those who own both the machine and the labor power, and whose interest it is to bring these two together in a special way. Along with these conditions, a social evolution must take place which parallels the physical evolution of machinery: a step-by-step creation of a “labor force\" in place of self-directed human labor; that is to say, a working population conforming to the needs of this social organization of labor, in which knowledge of the machine becomes a specialized and segregated trait while among the mass of the working population there grows only ignorance, incapacity, and thus a fitness for machine servitude. In this way the remarkable development of machinery becomes, for most of the working population, the source not of freedom but of enslavement, not of mastery but of helplessness, and not of the broadening of the horizon of labor but of the confinement of the worker within a blind round of servile duties in which the machine appears as the embodiment of science and the worker as little or nothing. But this is no more a technical necessity of machinery than appetite is, in the ironic words of Ambrose Bierce, “an instinct thoughtfully implanted by Providence as a solution to the labor question.\"\n\n132\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nMachinery\n\n133","previous_page":78,"next_page":80}