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# Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century

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Thus work as purposive action, guided by the intelligence, is the special product of humankind. But humankind is itself the special product of this form of labor. “By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature,"wrote Marx.º Writing in 1876, Frederick Engels had worked out, in terms of the anthropological knowledge of his time, the theory that: "First labour, after it and then with it speech—these were the two most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man." "The hand," he maintained, "is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour. "1º His essay, called “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man," was limited by the state of scientific knowledge of his day, and some of its details may be faulty or wrong—as for example his implication that the “undeveloped larynx of the ape" is inadequate to produce speech sounds. But his fundamental idea has again found favor in the eyes of anthropologists, particularly in the light of recent discoveries of stone tools in association with “near-men” or“man-apes." In an article on tools and human evolution, Sherwood L. Washburn says:

Prior to these findings the prevailing view held that man evolved nearly to his present structural state and then discovered tools and the new ways of life that they made possible. Now it appears that man-apes—creatures able to run but not yet walk on two legs, and with brains no larger than those of apes now living—had already learned to make and use tools. It follows that the structure of modern man must be the result of the change in the terms of natural selection that came with the tool-using way of life. . . . It was the success of the simplest tools that started the whole trend of human evolution and led to the civilizations of today."11

Labor that transcends mere instinctual activity is thus the force which created humankind and the force by which humankind created the world as we know it.

The possibility of all the various social forms which have arisen and which may yet arise depends in the last analysis upon this distinctive characteristic of human labor. Where the division of function within other animal species has been assigned by nature and stamped upon the genotype in the form of instinct, humanity is capable of an infinite variety of functions and division of function on the basis of family, group, and social assignment. In all other species, the directing force and the resulting activity, instinct and execution, are indivisible. The spider which weaves its web in accordance with a biological urge cannot depute this function to another spider; it carries on this activity because that is its nature. But for men and women, any instinctual patterns of work which they may have possessed at the dawn of their evolution have long since atrophied or been submerged by social forms.\* Thus in humans, as distinguished from animals, the unity between the motive force of labor and the labor itself is not inviolable. The unity of conception and execution may be dissolved. The conception must still precede and govern execution, but the idea as conceived by one may be executed by another. The driving force oflabor remains human consciousness, but the unity between the two may be broken in the individual and reasserted in the group, the workshop, the community, the society as a whole.

Finally, the human capacity to perform work, which Marx called "labor power," must not be confused with the power of any nonhuman agency, whether natural or man made. Human labor, whether directly exercised or stored in such products as tools, machinery, or domesticated animals, represents the sole resource of humanity in confronting nature. Thus for humans in society, labor power is a special category, separate and inexchangeable with any other, simply because it is human. Only one who is the master of the labor of others will confuse labor power with any other agency for performing a task, because to him, steam, horse, water, or human muscle which turns his mill are viewed as equivalents, as “factors of production."For individuals who allocate their own labor (or a community which does the same), the difference between using labor power as against any other power is a difference upon which the entire “economy" turns. And from the point of view of the species as a whole, this difference is also crucial, since every individual is the proprietor of a portion of the total labor power of the community, the society, and the species:

It is this consideration that forms the starting point for the labor theory of value, which bourgeois economists feel they may safely disregard because they are concerned not with social relations but with price relations, not with labor but with production, and not with the human point of view but with the bourgeois point of view.

Freed from the rigid paths dictated in animals by instinct, human labor becomes indeterminate, and its various determinate forms henceforth are the products not of biology but of the complex interaction between tools and social relations, technology and society. The subject of our discussion is not labor “in general," but labor in the forms it takes under capitalist relations of production.

Capitalist production requires exchange relations, commodities, and money, but its differentia specifica is the purchase and sale of labor power. For this purpose, three basic conditions become generalized throughout society. First, workers are separated from the means with which production is carried on, and can gain access to them only by selling their labor power to others. Second, workers are freed of legal constraints, such as serfdom or slavery, that prevent them from disposing of their own labor power. Third, the purpose of the employment of the worker becomes the expansion of a unit of capital belonging to the employer, who is thus functioning as a capitalist. The labor process therefore begins with a contract or agreement governing the conditions of the sale of labor power by the worker and its purchase by the employer.

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\* Veblen's “instinct of workmanship" can be understood only in a figurative sense, as a desire or proclivity to work well. A British “social psychologist" expresses himself somewhat agnostically on this matter: “Animals work too . . . and do so largely through

instinctive patterns of behaviour, which are the product of evolutionary processes. It is not clear whether man has innate patterns of work behaviour or not." He adds: “It is possible that man's capacity for learnt, persistent, goal-directed behaviour in groups is such an innate pattern."12 But the sum of the wisdom in this statement is that the human capacity to work noninstinctually may itself be called an instinct. This seems to be a useless and confusing attempt to force an assimilation of human and animal behavior.

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It is important to take note of the historical character of this phenomenon. While the purchase and sale of labor power has existed from antiquity,\* a substantial class of wage-workers did not begin to form in Europe until the fourteenth century, and did not become numerically significant until the rise of industrial capitalism (that is, the production of commodities on a capitalist basis, as against mercantile capitalism, which merely exchanged the surplus products of prior forms of production) in the eighteenth century. It has been the numerically dominant form for little more than a century, and this in only a few countries. In the United States, perhaps four-fifths of the population was self-employed in the early part of the nineteenth century. By 1870 this had declined to about one-third and by 1940 to no more than one-fifth; by 1970 only about one-tenth of the population was self-employed. We are thus dealing with a social relation of extremely recent date. The rapidity with which it has won supremacy in a number of countries emphasizes the extraordinary power of the tendency of capitalist economies to convert all other forms of labor into hired labor.

The worker enters into the employment agreement because social conditions leave him or her no other way to gain a livelihood. The employer, on the other hand, is the possessor of a unit of capital which he is endeavoring to enlarge, and in order to do so he converts part of it into wages. Thus is set in motion the labor process, which, while it is in general a process for creating useful values, has now also become specifically a process for the expansion of capital, the creation of a profit.\*\* From this point on, it becomes foolhardy to view the labor process purely from a technical standpoint, as a mere mode of labor. It has become in addition a process of accumulation of capital. And, moreover, it is the latter aspect which dominates in the mind and activities of the capitalist, into whose hands the control over the labor process has passed. In everything that follows, therefore, we shall be considering the manner in which the labor process is dominated and shaped by the accumulation of capital.\*

Labor, like all life processes and bodily functions, is an inalienable property of the human individual. Muscle and brain cannot be separated from persons possessing them; one cannot endow another with one's own capacity for work, no matter at what price, any more than one can eat, sleep, or perform sex acts for another. Thus, in the exchange, the worker does not surrender to the capitalist his or her capacity for work. The worker retains it, and the capitalist can take advantage of the bargain only by setting the worker to work. It is of course understood that the useful effects or products of labor belong to the capitalist. But what the worker sells, and what the capitalist buys, is not an agreed amount of labor, but the power to labor over an agreed period of time. This inability to purchase labor, which is an inalienable bodily and mental function, and the necessity to purchase the power to perform it, is so fraught with consequences for the entire capitalist mode of production that it must be investigated more closely.

When a master employs the services of a beast of burden in his production process, he can do little more than direct into useful channels such natural abilities as strength and endurance. When he employs bees in the production of honey, silkworms in the making of silk, bacteria in the fermentation of wine, or sheep in the growing of wool, he can only turn to his own advantage the instinctual activities or biological functions of these forms of life. Babbage gave a fascinating example:

A most extraordinary species of manufacture . . . has been contrived by an officer of engineers residing at Munich. It consists of lace, and veils, with open patterns in them, made entirely by caterpillars. The following is the mode of proceeding adopted:—He makes a paste of the leaves of the plant, which is the usual food of the species of caterpillar he employs, and spreads it thinly over a stone, or other flat substance. He then, with a camel-hair pencil dipped in olive oil, draws upon the coating of paste the pattern he wishes the insects to leave open. This stone is then placed in an inclined position, and a number of the caterpillars are placed at the bottom. A peculiar species is chosen, which spins a strong web; and the animals commencing at the bottom, eat and spin their way up to the top, carefully avoiding every part touched by the oil, but devouring all the rest of the paste. The extreme lightness of these veils, ,,15 combined with some strength, is truly surprising.

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\* Aristotle includes “service for hire—of this, one kind is employed in the mechanical arts, the other in unskilled and bodily labor along with commerce and usury as the three divisions of exchange which form an unnatural mode of wealth-getting, the natural or “"true and proper"modes being through livestock raising and husbandry. He seems, however, to have in mind the sale of one's labor power rather than the purchase of that of others as a means to wealth, an attitude the precise opposite of that which is characteristic in the capitalist era.13

\*\* Thus Marx says of the process of production that “considered . . . as the unity of the labour-process and the process of producing surplus-value, it is the capitalist ,14 process of production, or capitalist production of commodities.'

\* This is not the place for a general discussion of the capital-accumulation process, and the economic laws which enforce it on the capitalist regardless of his wishes. The best discussion remains that of Marx, and occupies much of the first volume of Capital, especially Part VII. A very clear and compressed exposition of the capitalist drive for accumulation, considered both as subjective desire and objective necessity, is to be found in Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York, 1942), pp. 79-83 and 92-95. This should be supplemented with Paul M. Sweezy and Paul A. Baran, Monopoly Capital, which is devoted to the conditions of accumulation in the monopoly period of capitalism (New York, 1966; see especially pp. 42-44 and 67-71).

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Notwithstanding the ingenuity displayed by this officer, it is evident that the entire process is circumscribed by the capacities and predisposition of the caterpillar; and so it is with every form of the use of nonhuman labor. It is implied in all such employments that the master must put up with the definite natural limitations of his servitors. Thus, in taking the labor power of animals, he at the same time takes their labor, because the two, while distinguishable in theory, are more or less identical in practice, and the most cunning contrivances can get from the labor power of the animal only minor variations of actual labor.

Human labor, on the other hand, because it is informed and directed by an understanding which has been socially and culturally developed, is capable of a vast range of productive activities. The active labor processes which reside in potential in the labor power of humans are so diverse as to type, manner of performance, etc., that for all practical purposes they may be said to be infinite, all the more so as new modes of labor can easily be invented more rapidly than they can be exploited. The capitalist finds in this infinitely malleable character of human labor the essential resource for the expansion of his capital.

It is known that human labor is able to produce more than it consumes, and this capacity for “surplus labor" is sometimes treated as a special and mystical endowment of humanity or of its labor. In reality it is nothing of the sort, but is merely a prolongation of working time beyond the point where labor has reproduced itself, or in other words brought into being its own means of subsistence or their equivalent. This time will vary with the intensity and productivity of labor, as well as with the changing requirements of “subsistence," but for any given state of these it is a definite duration. The “peculiar" capacity of labor power to produce for the capitalist after it has reproduced itself is therefore nothing but the extension of work time beyond the point where it could otherwise come to a halt. An ox too will have this capacity, and grind out more corn than it will eat if kept to the task by training and compulsion.

The distinctive capacity of human labor power is therefore not its ability to produce a surplus, but rather its intelligent and purposive character, which gives it infinite adaptability and which produces the social and cultural conditions for enlarging its own productivity, so that its surplus product may be continuously enlarged. From the point of view of the capitalist, this many-sided potentiality of humans in society is the basis upon which is built the enlargement of his capital. He therefore takes up every means of increasing the output of the labor power he has purchased when he sets it to work as labor. The means he employs may vary from the enforcement upon the worker of the longest possible working day in the early period of capitalism to the use of the most productive instruments of labor and the greatest intensity of labor, but they are always aimed at realizing from the potential inherent in labor power the greatest useful effect of labor, for it is this that will yield for him the greatest surplus and thus the greatest profit.

But if the capitalist builds upon this distinctive quality and potential of human labor power, it is also this quality, by its very indeterminacy, which places before him his greatest challenge and problem. The coin oflabor has its obverse side: in purchasing labor power that can do much, he is at the same time purchasing an undefined quality and quantity. What he buys is infinite in potential, but in its realization it is limited by the subjective state of the workers, by their previous history, by the general social conditions under which they work as well as the particular conditions of the enterprise, and by the technical setting of their labor. The work actually performed will be affected by these and many other factors, including the organization of the process and the forms of supervision over it, if any.

This is all the more true since the technical features of the labor process are now dominated by the social features which the capitalist has introduced: that is to say, the new relations of production. Having been forced to sell their labor power to another, the workers also surrender their interest in the labor process, which has now been “alienated." The labor process has become the responsibility of the capitalist. In this setting of antagonistic relations of production, the problem of realizing the “full usefulness" of the labor power he has bought becomes exacerbated by the opposing interests of those for whose purposes the labor process is carried on, and those who, on the other sie, carry it on.

Thus when the capitalist buys buildings, materials, tools, machinery, etc., he can evaluate with precision their place in the labor process. He knows that a certain portion of his outlay will be transferred to each unit of production, and his accounting practices allocate these in the form of costs or depreciation. But when he buys labor time, the outcome is far from being either so certain or so definite that it can be reckoned in this way, with precision and in advance. This is merely an expression of the fact that the portion of his capital expended on labor power is the “variable" portion, which undergoes an increase in the process of production; for him, the question is how great that increase will be.

It thus becomes essential for the capitalist that control over the labor process pass from the hands of the worker into his own. This transition presents itself in history as the progressive alienation of the process of production from the worker; to the capitalist, it presents itself as the problem of management.

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Notes

Chapter 2

The Origins of Management

Industrial capitalism begins when a significant number of workers is employed by a single capitalist. At first, the capitalist utilizes labor as it comes to him from prior forms of production, carrying on labor processes as they had been carried on before. The workers are already trained in traditional arts of industry previously practiced in feudal and guild handicraft production. Spinners, weavers, glaziers, potters, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, locksmiths, joiners, millers, bakers, etc. continue to exercise in the employ of the capitalist the productive crafts they had carried on as guild journeymen and independent artisans. These early workshops were simply agglomerations of smaller units of production, reflecting little change in traditional methods, and the work thus remained under the immediate control of the producers in whom was embodied the traditional knowledge and skills of their crafts.

Nevertheless, as soon as the producers were gathered together, the problem of management arose in rudimentary form. In the first place, functions of management were brought into being by the very practice of cooperative labor. Even an assemblage of independently practicing artisans requires coordination, if one considers the need for the provision of a workplace and the ordering of processes within it, the centralization of the supply of materials, even the most elementary scheduling of priorities and assignments, and the maintenance of records of costs, payrolls, materials, finished products, sales, credit, and the calculation of profit and loss. Second, assembly trades like shipbuilding and coach making required the relatively sophisticated meshing of different kinds oflabor, as did civil engineering works, etc. Again, it was not long before new industries arose which had little prior handicraft background, among them sugar refining, soap boiling, and distilling, while at the same time various primary processes like iron smelting, copper and brass working, and ordnance, paper and powder making, were completely transformed. All of these required conceptual and coordination functions which in capitalist industry took the form of management.

The capitalist assumed these functions as manager by virtue of his ownership of capital. Under capitalist exchange relations, the time of the workers he hired was as much his own as were the materials he supplied and the products that issued from the shop. That this was not understood from the beginning is attested by the fact that guild and apprenticeship rules and the legal restraints common to feudal and guild modes of production all persisted for a period, and had to be gradually stripped away as the capitalist consolidated his powers in society and demolished the juridical features of pre-capitalist social formations. It was partly for this reason that early manufacturing tended to gravitate to new towns which were free of guild and feudal regulations and traditions. In time, however, law and custom were reshaped to reflect the predominance of the “free" contract between buyer and seller under which the capitalist gained the virtually unrestricted power to determine the technical modes of labor.

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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.

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\* 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

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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.

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\* 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

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This connection is usually underrated, particularly by those historians who assume that the new works recruited free labour only." So widespread does he find this and other systems of coercion that he concludes that “the modern industrial proletariat was introduced to its role not so much by attraction or 10 monetary reward, but by compulsion, force and fear.

Legal compulsions and a paralegal structure of punishment within factories were often enlarged into an entire social system covering whole townships. Pollard gives the example of the enterprise of Ambrose Crowley, a large mixed ironworks which carried on both primary processes of iron production and fabricating. In the second quarter of the eighteenth century this firm employed more than 1,000 workers, scattered over its central works, warehouses, and company ships. An extraordinary Book of Laws has survived from this enterprise:

The firm provided a doctor, a clergyman, three schoolmasters and a poor relief, pension and funeral scheme, and by his instructions and exhortations Crowley attempted to dominate the spiritual life of his flock, and to make them into willing and obedient cogs in his machine. It was his express intention that their whole life, including even their sparse spare time (the normal working week being of eighty hours) should revolve around the task of making the works 11   
profitable.

In this method of total economic, spiritual, moral, and physical domination, buttressed by the legal and police constraints of a servile administration of justice in a segregated industrial area, we see the forerunner of the company town familiar in the United States in the recent past as one of the most widely used systems of total control before the rise of industrial unionism.

In all these early efforts, the capitalists were groping toward a theory and practice of management. Having created new social relations of production, and having begun to transform the mode of production, they found themselves confronted by problems of management which were different not only in scope but also in kind from those characteristic of earlier production processes. Under the special and new relations of capitalism, which presupposed a “free labor contract," they had to extract from their employees that daily conduct which would best serve their interests, to impose their will upon their workers while operating a labor process on a voluntary contractual basis. This enterprise shared from the first the characterization which Clausewitz assigned to war; it is movement in a resistant medium because it involves the control of refractory masses.

The verb to manage, from manus, the Latin for hand, originally meant to train a horse in his paces, to cause him to do the exercises of the manège. As capitalism creates a society in which no one is presumed to consult anything but self-interest, and as the employment contract between parties sharing nothing but the inability to avoid each other becomes prevalent, management becomes a more perfected and subtle instrument. Tradition, sentiment, and pride in workmanship play an ever weaker and more erratic role, and are regarded on both sides as manifestations of a better nature which it would be folly to accommodate. Like a rider who uses reins, bridle, spurs, carrot, whip, and training from birth to impose his will, the capitalist strives, through management, to control. And control is indeed the central concept of all management systems, as has been recognized implicitly or explicitly by all theoreticians of management.\* Lyndall Urwick, the rhapsodic historian of the scientific management movement and himself a management consultant for many decades, understood the historical nature of the problem clearly:

In the workshops of the Medieval "master," control was based on the obedience which the customs of the age required the apprentices and journeymen to give to the man whom they had contracted to serve. But in the later phase of domestic economy the industrial family unit was controlled by the clothier only in so far as it had to complete a given quantity of cloth according to a certain pattern. With the advent of the modern industrial group in large factories in urban areas the whole process of control underwent a fundamental revolution. It was now the owner or manager of a factory, i.e., the “employer" as he came to be called, who had to secure or exact from his “employees” a level of obedience and/or co-operation which would enable him to exercise control. There was no individual interest in the success of the enterprise other than the extent to which it provided a livelihood.13

It was not that the new arrangement was “modern," or “large," or “urban” which created the new situation, but rather the new social relations which now frame the production process, and the antagonism between those who carry on the process and those for whose benefit it is carried on, those who manage and those who execute, those who bring to the factory their labor power, and those who undertake to extract from this labor power the maximum advantage for the capitalist.

Notes

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\* For example, Leffingwell: “Effective management implies control. The terms are in a sense interchangeable, as management without control is not conceivable."12

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Chapter 3

The Division of Labor

The earliest innovative principle of the capitalist mode of production was the manufacturing division of labor, and in one form or another the division of labor has remained the fundamental principle of industrial organization. The division of labor in capitalist industry is not at all identical with the phenomenon of the distribution of tasks, crafts, or specialties of production throughout society, for while all known societies have divided their work into productive specialties, no society before capitalism systematically subdivided the work of each productive specialty into limited operations. This form of the division of labor becomes generalized only with capitalism.

This distinction is made clear, for instance, in Herskovits’ description of the division of labor in primitive societies:

Only rarely is any division of labor within an industry—or, as it might be termed, subdivision of labor-—encountered among nonliterate folk. Such intra-industrial specialization would be encountered only in the production of such larger capital goods as houses, canoes, or fish-weirs.\* Even here, it is the rule in such cultures that an arrangement of this sort is temporary; moreover, each worker devoting himself to a part of a specific task is most often competent to perform other phases of the work besides that on which he may at the moment be engaged. . . . Thus in groups where the primary division of labor is along sex lines, every man or woman not only will know how to do all those things that men or women habitually do among them, but must be able to do them efficiently. As we move to societies of somewhat greater economic complexity, we find that certain men may spend a larger proportion of their time than others doing wood-carving or iron-working, or certain women making pots or weaving cloth; but all the members of the groups will have some competence in the techniques controlled by those of a given sex. In still other nonliterate societies, certain men and women specialize not only in one technique, but in a certain type of product, as, for instance, where one woman will devote her time to the production of pots for everyday use and another make pottery exclusively for religious rites. It must again be stressed that, except under the most unusual circumstances, we do not find the kind of organization where one woman characteristically specializes in gathering the clay, another in fashioning it, and a third in firing the pots; or, where one man devotes himself to getting wood, a second to roughly blocking out the proportions of a stool or figure, and a third to finishing it.'

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\* Herskovits here performs the customary economic miracle of transforming “houses, canoes, or fish-weirs" into “capital goods," in accordance with the bourgeoiscentric view which unself-consciously projects backward and forward throughout history the categories specific to capitalist production, and according to which houses become “capital" even when they were only structures people built as dwellings.

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Herskovits gives us here a picture of a division of labor into crafts, a differentiation which in the beginning owes much to sex roles. By and large, however, there is no division of tasks within the crafts. While men or women may habitually be connected with the making of certain products, they do not as a rule divide up the separate operations involved in the making of each product.

This form of division oflabor, characteristic of all societies, is, if we follow Marx's terminology, called the social division of labor. It is a derivative of the specific character of human work: “An animal forms things in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species."² The spider weaves, the bear fishes, the beaver builds dams and houses, but the human is simultaneously weaver, fisherman, builder, and a thousand other things combined in a manner which, because this takes place in, and is possible only through, society, soon compels a social division according to craft. Each individual of the human species cannot alone “produce in accordance with the standard of every species" and invent standards unknown to any animal, but the species as a whole finds it possible to do this, in part through the social division of labor. Thus the social division of labor is apparently inherent in the species character of human labor as soon as it becomes social labor, that is, labor carried on in and through society.

As against this general or social division of labor, there stands the division of labor in detail, the manufacturing division of labor. This is the breakdown of the processes involved in the making of the product into manifold operations performed by different workers.

The practice of regarding the social and the detailed divisions of labor as a single continuum, a single abstract technical principle, is by far the greatest source of confusion in discussions of this subject.\* The division of labor in society is characteristic of all known societies; the division of labor in the workshop is the special product of capitalist society. The social division of labor divides society among occupations, each adequate to a branch of production; the detailed division of labor destroys occupations considered in this sense, and renders the worker inadequate to carry through any complete production process. In capitalism, the social division of labor is enforced chaotically and anarchically by the market, while the workshop division of labor is imposed by planning and control. Again in capitalism, the products of the social division of labor are exchanged as commodities, while the results of the operation of the detail worker are not exchanged within the factory as within a marketplace, but are all owned by the same capital. While the social division of labor subdivides society, the detailed division of labor subdivides humans, and while the subdivision of society may enhance the individual and the species, the subdivision of the individual, when carried on without regard to human capabilities and needs, is a crime against the person and against humanity.

The view which ignores the distinction between the social and detailed divisions of labor is given typical expression in the following comments: “Social differentiation and division of labor are universal attributes of human society. Contrary to the view persisting into the recent past that primitive man lives in completely homogeneous and amorphous groups, modern knowledge of primitive and peasant communities reveals much complexity and specialization. . . . Modern specialization cannot therefore be contrasted with an assumed society or period having no division of labor. The difference is one of degree and not of kind."4 Wilbert Moore here forces us to assume that the division of society among trades, crafts, professions “cannot be contrasted" with the breakup of those occupations, that there is no difference “in kind" between the practice of farming, cabinetmaking, or blacksmithing, and the repeated tightening of a single set of bolts hundreds of times each day or the key punching of thousands of cards each week throughout a lifetime of labor, because all are expressions of the “division of labor." On this level of abstraction, obviously, nothing can be learned about the division of labor, except the banal and apologetic conclusion that being “universal," each of its manifestations is probably inevitable. Needless to say, this is precisely the conclusion that bourgeois society prefers.

It is for this reason that the popularity of Emile Durkheim's work, The Division ofLabor in Society, has grown as its applicability to the modern world has dwindled. Durkheim adopts just such a level of abstraction in his approach: “The only way to succeed in objectively appreciating the division of labor is to study it first in itself, entirely speculatively, to look for its use, and upon what it depends, and finally, to form as adequate a notion as possible of it."⁵ He proceeds in this fashion, determinedly avoiding the specific social conditions under which the division of labor develops in our epoch, celebrating throughout his proposition that “the ideal of human fraternity can be realized only in proportion to the progress of the division of labor," until in the last tenth of his work he discovers the division of labor in the factories and offices of modern capitalism, and dubs them “abnormal forms." But, as has been noted by a recent critic, M. C. Kennedy, “when we inspect these abnormal forms throughout the world, it becomes difficult to find one clear-cut case of the normal division of labor." Kennedy is absolutely right when he calls Durkheim's “normal" form of the division of labor "the ideal of a moralistic sociologist and not a sociologist of morals."7 \*

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\* “But, in spite of the numerous analogies and links connecting them," Marx warned, "division of labour in the interior of a society, and that in the interior of a workshop, differ not only in degree, but also in kind."3

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Our concern at this point, therefore, is not with the division of labor in society at large, but within the enterprise; not with the distribution of labor among various industries and occupations, but with the breakdown of occupations and industrial processes; not with the division of labor in “production in general," but within the capitalist mode of production in particular. It is not “pure technique" that concerns us, but rather the marriage of technique with the special needs of capital.

The division of labor in production begins with the analysis of the labor process—that is to say, the separation of the work of production into its constituent elements. But this, in itself, is not what brings into being the detail worker. Such an analysis or separation, in fact, is characteristic in every labor process organized by workers to suit their own needs.

For example, a tinsmith makes a funnel: he draws the elevation view on sheetmetal, and from this develops the outline of an unrolled funnel and its bottom spout. He then cuts out each piece with snips and shears, rolls it to its proper shape, and crimps or rivets the seams. He then rolls the top edge, solders the seams, solders on a hanging ring, washes away the acid used in soldering, and rounds the funnel to its final shape. But when he applies the same process to a quantity of identical funnels, his mode of operation changes. Instead of laying out the work directly on the material, he makes a pattern and uses it to mark off the total quantity of funnels needed; then he cuts them all out, one after the other, rolls them, etc. In this case, instead of making a single funnel in the course of an hour or two, he spends hours or even days on each step of the process, creating in each case fixtures, clamps, devices, etc. which would not be worth making for a single funnel but which, where a sufficiently large quantity of funnels is to be made, speed each step sufficiently so that the saving justifies the extra outlay of time. Quantities, he has discovered, will be produced with less trouble and greater economy of time in this way than by finishing each funnel individually before starting the next.

In the same way a bookkeeper whose job it is to make out bills and maintain office records against their future collection will, if he or she works for a lawyer who has only a few clients at a time, prepare a bill and post it at once to the proper accounts and the customer statement. But if there are hundreds of bills each month, the bookkeeper will accumulate them and spend a full day or two, from time to time, posting them to the proper accounts. Some of these postings will now be made by daily, weekly, or monthly totals instead ofbill by bill, a practice which saves a great deal oflabor when large quantities are involved; at the same time, the bookkeeper will now make use of other shortcuts or aids, which become practicable when operations are analyzed or broken up in this way, such as specially prepared ledger cards, or carbon forms which combine into a single operation the posting to the customer's account and the preparation of a monthly statement.

Such methods of analysis of the labor process and its division into constituent elements have always been and are to this day common in all trades and crafts, and represent the first form of the subdivision of labor in detail. It is clear that they satisfy, essentially if not fully, the three advantages of the division of labor given by Adam Smith in his famous discussion in the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations:

This great increase in the quantity of work, which, in consequence of the division of labour, the same number of people are capable of performing, is owing to three different circumstances; first, to the increase of dexterity in every particular workman; secondly, to the saving of the time which is commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another; and lastly, to the invention of a great number ofmachines which facilitate and abridge labour, and enable one man to do the work of many.

The example which Smith gives is the making of pins, and his description is as follows:

One man draws out the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. 10

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\* Georges Friedmann says that had Durkheim lived to see the further development of the division of labor, “he would have been obliged to consider abnormal' most of the forms taken by labour in modern society, both in industry and in administration, and even more recently in commerce (I am thinking of the American supermarkets)."8 The idea that anyone writing several generations after the Industrial Revolution, and after Adam Smith, Babbage, Ure, Marx, and countless others, needed to wait for the “American supermarkets" to learn about the division of labor in capitalism is not convincing. But in general, Friedmann's gingerly handling of Durkheim, whom—despite the fact that in his succeeding pages he finds little of value in the book—he calls "the most vigorous mind that has ever worked on this great problem," testifies to the inflated reputation of Durkheim's contribution.

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