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

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It was not until the rise ofNazism in Germany and World War II, as a result of which a great deal of scientific talent was either driven from Germany by Hitler's racial and political policies or was appropriated by the victorious allies, that the United States acquired a scientific base equal to its industrial power, which had prior to this development depended largely upon the engineering exploitation of foreign science. Thus it has been only since World War II that scientific research in the United States, heavily financed by corporations and government, and buttressed by further drafts of scientific talent from all over the world, has systematically furnished the scientific knowledge utilized in industry.\*

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, what Landes called “the exhaustion of the technological possibilities of the Industrial Revolution" had set in.2º The new scientific-technical revolution which replenished the stock of technological possibilities had a conscious and purposive character largely absent from the old. In place of spontaneous innovation indirectly evoked by the social processes of production came the planned progress of technology and product design. This was accomplished by means of the transformation of science itself into a commodity bought and sold like the other implements and labors of production. From an “external economy," scientific knowledge has become a balance-sheet item.2' Like all commodities, its supply is called forth by demand, with the result that the development of materials, power sources, and processes has become less fortuitous and more responsive to the immediate needs of capital. The scientific-technical revolution, for this reason, cannot be understood in terms of specific innovations—as in the case of the Industrial Revolution, which may be adequately characterized by a handful of key inventions—but must be understood rather in its totality as a mode of production into which science and exhaustive engineering investigations have been integrated as part of ordinary functioning. The key innovation is not to be found in chemistry, electronics, automatic machinery, aeronautics, atomic physics, or any of the products of these science-technologies, but rather in the transformation of science itself into capital.\*

Notes

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\* As spending for research and development has grown, a characteristic pattern of financing and control has appeared. Most such research is financed by federal expenditures and controlled by private industry. Thus in the early 1960s, three-fourths of such research, concentrated chiefly in the areas of engineering and the physical sciences, was carried on by corporations, while the federal government paid for some three-fifths of the cost directly and most of the rest indirectly, through tax write-offs.19

\* A pamphlet published in 1957 by the New York Stock Exchange firm of Modell Roland, and Stone under the title "The Scientific-Industrial Revolution"notes that while the steam engine was the prime mover of the Industrial Revolution, no single innovation of recent times occupies the same position. The advances made in a large number of fields “are tightly interrelated in a veritable seamless web of technological change," so as to constitute “mere branches of one master technology” based upon an “elaborate apparatus of scientific research and testing." “Science," it concludes, “is the steam engine' we have been seeking, and the collective scientist is the master technologist."

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116 Labor and Monopoly Capital

Chapter 8

The Scientific-Technical Revolution and the Worker

“In manufacture," wrote Marx, reférring to the hand workshops that preceded the Industrial Revolution, “the revolution in the mode of production begins with the labour-power, in modern industry it begins with the instruments of labour." In other words, in the first stage of capitalism the traditional work of the craftsman is subdivided into its constituent tasks and performed in series by a chain of detail workers, so that the process is little changed; what has changed is the organization of labor. But in the next stage, machinofacture, the instrument of labor is removed from the worker's hand and placed in the grip of a mechanism and the forces of nature are enlisted to supply power which, transmitted to the tool, acts upon the materials to yield the desired result; thus the change in the mode of production in this case comes from a change in the instruments of labor.

To the next question—how is the labor process transformed by the scientific-technical revolution?no such unitary answer may be given. This is because the scientific and managerial attack upon the labor process over the past century embraces all its aspects: labor power, the instruments oflabor, the materials of labor, and the products of labor. We have seen how labor is reorganized and subdivided according to rigorous principles which were only anticipated a century ago. The materials used in production are now so freely synthesized, adapted, and substituted according to need that an increasing number of industries practice substantially altered manufacturing processes as a result of this fact alone. The instruments used in production, including those used in transport and communications, have been revolutionized not only in respect to the power, speed, and accuracy with which they accomplish their tasks, but often act to gain the desired result by way of entirely different physical principles from those traditionally employed. And the products of production have themselves been freely transformed and invented in accordance with marketing and manufacturing needs. Taking nothing for granted and nothing as permanent, modern production constantly overhauls all aspects of its performance, and in some industries has completely reconstituted itself more than once in the space of a hundred years. Thus modern electronic circuitry, to cite only a single example, would be completely incomprehensible in its mode of operation, in the manner of its production, and even in the very materials used, to those who, only a couple of generations ago, designed and made the first examples of this genre.

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Insofar as these changes have been governed by manufacturing rather than marketing considerations (and the two are by no means independent), they have been brought about by the drive for greater productivity: that is, the effort to find ways to incorporate ever smaller quantities of labor time into ever greater quantities of product. This leads to faster and more efficient methods and machinery. But in the capitalist mode of production, new methods and new machinery are incorporated within a management effort to dissolve the labor process as a process conducted by the worker and reconstitute it as a process conducted by management. In the first form of the division of labor, the capitalist disassembles the craft and returns it to the workers piecemeal, so that the process as a whole is no longer the province of any individual worker. Then, as we have seen, the capitalist conducts an analysis of each of the tasks distributed among the workers, with an eye toward getting a grip on the individual operations. It is in the age of the scientific-technical revolution that management sets itself the problem of grasping the process as a whole and controlling every element of it, without exception. “Improving the system of management," wrote H. L. Gantt, “means the elimination of elements of chance or accident, and the accomplishment of all the ends desired in accordance with knowledge derived from a scientific investigation of everything down to the smallest detail of labor. . . ."² And it is the scientific-technical revolution which furnishes the means for the partial realization of this theoretical ideal.

Thus, after a million years oflabor, during which humans created not only a complex social culture but in a very real sense created themselves as well, the very cultural-biological trait upon which this entire evolution is founded has been brought, within the last two hundred years, to a crisis, a crisis which Marcuse aptly calls the threat of a “catastrophe of the human essence."3 The unity of thought and action, conception and execution, hand and mind, which capitalism threatened from its beginnings, is now attacked by a systematic dissolution employing all the resources of science and the various engineering disciplines based upon it. The subjective factor of the labor process is removed to a place among its inanimate objective factors. To the materials and instruments of production are added a “labor force," another “factor of production," and the process is henceforth carried on by management as the sole subjective element.\* This is the ideal toward which management tends, and in pursuit of which it uses and shapes every productive innovation furnished by science.

This displacement of labor as the subjective element of the process, and its subordination as an objective element in a productive process now conducted by management, is an ideal realized by capital only within definite limits, and unevenly among industries. The principle is itself restrained in its application by the nature of the various specific and determinate processes of production. Moreover, its very application brings into being new crafts and skills and technical specialties which are at first the province of labor rather than management. Thus in industry all forms of labor coexist: the craft, the hand or machine detail worker, the automatic machine or flow process. But far more important than this relative restraint on the operation of the principle is the resulting continual shifting of employment. The very success of management in increasing productivity in some industries leads to the displacement of labor into other fields, where it accumulates in large quantities because the processes employed have not yet been subjectedand in some cases cannot be subjected to the same degree—to the mechanizing tendency of modern industry. The result therefore is not the elimination of labor, but its displacement to other occupations and industries, a matter which will be discussed more fully in later chapters.

The reduction of the worker to the level of an instrument in the production process is by no means exclusively associated with machinery. We must also note the attempt, either in the absence of machinery or in conjunction with individually operated machines, to treat the workers themselves as machines This aspect of scientific management was developed by Taylor's immediate successors.

Taylor popularized time study as part of his effort to gain control over the job. Time study may be defined as the measurement of elapsed time for each component operation of a work process; its prime instrument is the stopwatch, calibrated in fractions of an hour, minute, or second. But this kind of time study was found too gross to satisfy the increasingly demanding standards pursued by managers and their engineers. From their point of view, Taylor's approach had two major defects. First, the various activities oflabor could by this means be analyzed only in their actual daily practice, and in relatively gross increments. And second, the method remained tied to particular forms of concrete labor. In other words, the universality of the approach Taylor had taken was not matched by an equally universal methodology.

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labour as its governing unity." The Grundrisse consists of monographs written by Marx for his own clarification and served as a preparatory manuscript for Capital. Here Marx allowed himself to speculate further, to revolve his subject under his eye more freely, than in the writings he prepared for publication. The sections on labor and production are thus extraordinarily interesting, although substantially everything in them appears in a more fully worked out and final form in Capital; the bold formulation quoted above is one of the more suggestive remarks which did not find a place, to my knowledge, in the writings he published.

\* When the conditions are fully realized through an automatic machine system, wrote Marx in the Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, then: “The production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by

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A new line of development was opened by Frank B. Gilbreth, one of Taylor's most prominent followers. He added to time study the concept of motion study: that is, the investigation and classification of the basic motions of the body, regardless of the particular and concrete form of the labor in which these motions are used. In motion and time study, the elementary movements were visualized as the building blocks of every work activity; they were called, in a variant of Gilbreth's name spelled backward, therbligs. To the stopwatch were added the chronocyclegraph (a photograph of the workplace with motion paths superimposed), stroboscopic pictures (made by keeping the camera lens open to show changing positions assumed by the worker), and the motion picture; these were to be supplemented by more advanced means. In its first form, motion study catalogs the various movements of the body as standard data, with the aim of determining time requirements and making the procedure “primarily a statistical problem rather than a problem of observation and measurement of particular workers."

Therblig charts used by industrial engineers, work designers, and office managers give to each motion a name, a symbol, a color code, and a time in ten-thousandths of a minute. The basic motion symbols are given in a recent textbook by the chairman of the Industrial Engineering Division at the University of Wisconsin as follows:6

G Grasp UD Unavoidable Delay RL Release Load AD Avoidable Delay P Position H Hold PP Pre-position R Rest A Assemble PN Plan DA Disassemble Inspect U Use W Walk SH Search B Bending ST Select SI Sit TL Transport Loaded SD Stand Up TE Transport Empty K Kneel

Each of these motions is described in machine terms. For example, Bending, we are told, is “trunk movement with hips as hinge." These defined motions are in fact classifications of motion types, for each is in turn broken down into finer motion types. Thus G, Grasp, has four basic subclassifications:

Transport Empty is further defined according to the distance the hand must extend, and Transport Loaded is broken down not only according to distance but also to the weight of the load. To pick up a pencil, therefore, would involve the proper categories of Transport Empty, Pinch Grasp, and Transport Loaded, each with a standard time value, and the sum of the time categories for these three therbligs, given in ten-thousandths of a minute, constitutes the time for the complete motion.

The combination of motions required to perform each operation is worked out on a therblig chart: "The therblig chart (Therb CH) is the detailed symbolic and systematic presentation of the method of work performed by the body members."7 As a rule, the therblig chart is a two-column affair, representing separately the activities of each hand, whether in motion or at rest, during any part of the time sequence.

The therblig was only the first of a series of standard data systems, which are now constructed by many large corporations for their internal use (see Chapter 15, “Clerical Workers"), or provided by research organizations. Of these various systems of “predetermined work time," the most popular is Methods-Time Measurement, put out by the MTM Association for Standards and Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This association publishes “Application Data" in booklet form.\* In this system, the time standard used is the TMU, which is defined as one hundred-thousandth of an hour, equal to six ten-thousandths of a minute or thirty-six thousandths of a second. It offers refinements of the therblig to apply to many conditions. Reach, for instance, is tabulated separately for objects in fixed or varying locations, for objects jumbled with others, for very small objects, and so forth, and for distances varying from three-fourths of an inch up to thirty inches. For example, to reach a single object the location of which may vary slightly from cycle to cycle, twenty inches away, consumes according to the MTM chart 18.6 TMU, or .6696 second (not, we ask the reader to note, two-thirds of a second, which would be .6666 second; a difference which, in an operation repeated a thousand times a day, would add up to three seconds).

Move is defined for objects from 2.5 to 47.5 lbs.: to either hand or against stop; to approximate or indefinite location; to exact location.

Turn and apply pressure is given for pressures up to 35 lbs., and for vectors of 30 degrees to 180 degrees, in increments of 15 degrees.

Position: loosely, closely, or exactly; for easy-to-handle and difficult-tohandle objects (its opposite, Disengage, is also given for the same conditions).

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G2 Pinch Grasp (thumb opposes finger).

G1 Contact Grasp (pick up wafer by touching with fingertip).

G3 Wrap Grasp (hand wraps around).

G4 Regrasp (shift object to gain new control).

\* The front cover of the booklet bears the boxed legend: "Do not attempt to use this chart or apply Methods-Time Measurement in any way unless you understand the proper application of the data. This statement is included as a word of caution to prevent difficulties resulting from misapplication of the data."

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Release is given not only for normal release (by opening fingers), but for contact release (releasing typewriter key).

Body, leg, and foot motions are set forth for the various movements of Bend, Sit, Stop, Walk, etc., for varying distances. And finally, a formula is given for Eye Travel Time:

$$
\mathrm { E T } = 1 5 . 2 \times \frac { T } { D } \mathrm { T M U }
$$

with a maximum of 20 TMU. Eye Focus is defined as occupying 7.3 TMU.\*

More recent research has attempted to overcome the defects inherent in standard data, which, in breaking down motions into elementary components, neglect the factors of velocity and acceleration in human motions—motions which take place as a flow rather than as a series of disjunctive movements. Efforts have been made to find a means of gaining a continuous, uninterrupted view of human motion, and to measure it on that basis. In the course of this research, the use of radar, accelerometers, photoelectric waves, air pressure, magnetic fields, capacitive effects, motion pictures, radioactivity, etc., have been investigated, and in the end, sound waves, using the Doppler shift, have been chosen as the most suitable. An inaudible sound source (20,000 cycles per second) given off by a transducer is attached to the body member under consideration. Three microphones, each ten feet from an assumed one cubic yard of work area, are placed in such a way that each represents one of the three spatial dimensions, and they pick up the increased or decreased number of cycles per second as the sound source moves toward or away from each of them. These changes in cycles are converted into changes in voltage, the output of which is therefore proportional to the velocity of motion. The three velocities are recorded on magnetic tape (or plotted on oscillographic paper) and can then be combined into a total velocity by vector summation. Total acceleration and total distance can be derived, and can then be handled mathematically, and by computer, for analysis and prediction. This device goes by the name Universal Operator Performance Analyzer and Recorder (UNOPAR), and is said to be, if nothing else, an excellent timing device accurate to .000066 minutes, though not to be compared in this respect to electronic timing devices, which are accurate to a millionth of a second. (But these last, we are told ruefully, are useful only for experimental purposes, and not in the workplace.)º

Physiological models are also used for the measurement of energy expenditure, for which oxygen consumption and heart rate are the most usual indicators; these are charted by means of oxygen-supply measuring devices and electrocardiograms. Forces applied by the body (as well as to it) are measured on a force platform, using piezo-electric crystals in the mountings. In another variant, we read, in an article entitled “The Quantification ofHuman Effort and Motion for the Upper Limbs," about a framework called "the exoskeletal kinematometer," which is described as “a device which mounts externally upon the human subject for the purpose of measuring the kinematic characteristics of his limbs during the performance of a task."lº The measurement of eye movements is done through photographic techniques and also by electro-oculography, which uses electrodes placed near the eye.

The data derived from all these systems, from the crudest to the most refined, are used as the basis for engineering the “human factor"in work design. Since the accumulation of data does away with the need to time each operation, management is spared the friction that arises in such a procedure, and the worker is spared the knowledge that the motions, time, and labor cost for his or her job have been precalculated, with “humane" allowances for rest, toilet, and coffee time, before anyone was hired and perhaps even before the building was erected.\* By eliminating the need for repeated experiments, they make available to any user, at low cost, figures which may be combined and recombined in any desired fashion, merely by the use of pencil and paper, to bring into being predetermined time standards for any engineering or office purpose. The time values of given motion patterns are respected in management circles as “objective" and“scientific," and bear the authority such values are presumed to carry. In recent years, motion-time study or therblig systems have had their logic and arithmetic assigned to computers, so that the time allowance for various job elements is worked out by the computer on the basis of standard data, perhaps supplemented by time study observations.\*\*

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\* A management team with the Dickensian name of Payne and Swett see in this the very first advantage of standard data: its “favorable impact on employee relations," which is their euphemism for the above."

\*\* This was the mode used by the General Motors Assembly Division in its reorganization, begun in 1968, of the jobs of both clerical and production workers, in which the number of jobs was reduced and the number of operations assigned to each worker was increased, the number of repair or inspection workers reduced, and the number of supervisors to enforce the new standards was increased. It was this reorganization which led to the 1972 strikes in the General Motors plants at Norwood, Ohio lasting 174 days, and Lordstown, Ohio, lasting three weeks (although the Lordstown strike got all the journalistic attention because it was attributed largely to the youthful composition of the work force at that plant, while the Norwood strike was susceptible of no such interpretation).12 A vice-president of General Motors pointed out that in ten plant reorganizations conducted by the General Motors Assembly Division after 1968, eight of them produced strikes. “I'm not boasting,"he added, "I'm just relating relevant history."13

\* These last are instances of the charting approach to human sensory activity, visual, auditory, and tactile, which have been developed since the early 1950s and which aim at comprehending a larger range of work activities outside the purely manual, in order to apply them not only to clerical work but also to professional and semi-professional specialties.º

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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.

This 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.\*

It 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.

and 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

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\* 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,

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Notes

Chapter 9

Machinery

Machines may be defined, classified, and studied in their evolution according to any criteria one wishes to select: their motive power, their complexity, their use of physical principles, etc. But one is forced at the outset to choose between two essentially different modes of thought. The first is the engineering approach, which views technology primarily in its internal connections and tends to define the machine in relation to itself, as a technical fact. The other is the social approach, which views technology in its connections with humanity and defines the machine in relation to human labor, and as a social artifact.

As an illustration of the first approach, we may take the work of Abbott Payson Usher. In A History of Mechanical Inventions, Usher began with the nineteenth-century classifiers, Robert Willis and Franz Reuleaux, whose definitions he quotes. First from Willis:

Every machine will be found to consist of a train of pieces connected together in various ways, so that if one be made to move, they all receive a motion, the relation of which to that of the first is governed by the nature of the connection.

And Reuleaux:

A machine is a combination of resistant bodies so arranged that by their means the mechanical forces of nature can be compelled to do work accompanied by certain determinate motions.

Following this approach, Usher himself describes the evolution of machinery in the following way:

The parts of the machine are more and more elaborately connected so that the possibility of any but the desired motion is progressively eliminated. As the process of constraint becomes more complete, the machine becomes more perfect mechanically. . . . Such a transformation results in the complete and continuous control of motion. . . . The completeness of the constraint of motion becomes in Reuleaux's analysis the criterion of mechanical perfection. Loosely adjusted and ill-controlled machines are supplanted by closely adjusted machines that can be controlled minutely.

From a technical standpoint, the value of such a definition is apparent. The precision of the mechanism, and the degree of its automatic or self-acting character, are determined by the success of the designer in eliminating “any but the desired motion” and achieving “the complete and continuous control of motion."\* But what is missing from this definition, or present only by implication, is a view of machinery in relation to the labor process and to the worker. We may contrast the approach taken by Marx, who singles out from among a great many possible criteria this very aspect of machinery:

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The machine proper is therefore a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operations that were formerly done by the workman with similar tools. Whether the motive power is derived from man, or from some other machine, makes no difference in this respect. From the moment that the tool proper is taken from man, and fitted into a mechanism, a machine takes the place of a mere implement. The difference strikes one at once, even in those cases where man himself continues to be the prime mover.

This initial step, removing the tool from the hands of the worker and fitting it into a mechanism, is for Marx the starting point of that evolution which begins with simple machinery and continues to the automatic system of machinery. Like all starting points in Marx, it is not fortuitous. Marx selects from among a host of technical characteristics the specific feature which forms the juncture between humanity and the machine: its effect upon the labor process. The technical is never considered purely in its internal relations, but in relation to the worker.\*\*

The analysis of the machine by means of purely technical characteristics, such as its power source, the scientific principles it employs, etc., may yield much information of value to engineers, but this study of the machine “in itself’ has little direct value for a comprehension of its social role. The moment we begin to assess its evolution from the point of view of the labor process, however, its technical characteristics group themselves around this axis and lines of development begin to emerge. Such a “critical history of technology," which Marx noted had not been written in his day, is no more in evidence in ours. But if it existed it would furnish the basis for a taxonomy of machines as they are used in production, as well as a classification according to the technical features that are utilized by capital as the basis for the organization and control of labor.

Some sociologists have attempted to sketch broad “production systems” or “varieties of technology." Joan Woodward has divided production into the making of “integral products" (in single units, small batches, large batches, and by mass production); “dimensional products" (in batches and by continuous flow processes, as in chemical plants); and “combined systems" (in which standardized components are made in large batches and subsequently assembled in a continuous flow process, or, conversely, a flow process is used to prepare a product which is subsequently broken down into smaller units for packaging and sale).ª Robert Blauner divides production technologies into four varieties: craft, machine tending, assembly line, and continuous process.⁵ As distinguished from these scattergun approaches, James R. Bright of the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard has taken a much closer look at the characteristics of machines in association with labor.6 He has outlined a “mechanization profile” of seventeen levels (to be described more fully later in this chapter), which he applies to a large number of production processes and to the way they utilize varying levels of mechanization as they take their course from start to finish. The “degrees of mechanical accomplishment in machinery" are judged on the basis of the question: “In what way does a machine supplement man's muscles, mental processes, judgment, and degree of control?"7 Bright comments (in 1966): “To my knowledge, this is still the only theory interlinking machine evolution and worker contribution."8 It is worthy of note that just as Bright has apparently been alone in the academic world in this kind of detailed study of what machines actually do as they become more automatic, and what the worker is called upon to know and to do, so also are his conclusions strikingly different from those who let themselves be guided only by vague impressions.

From this point of view, the key element in the evolution of machinery is not its size, complexity, or speed of operation, but the manner in which its operations are controlled. Between the first typewriter and the electrically driven ball-type machine of the present there lies a whole epoch of mechanical development, but nothing that has been changed affects the manner in which the typewriter is guided through its activities and hence there is little essential difference in the relation between typist and machine. The labor process remains more or less as it was, despite all refinements. The application of power to various hand tools such as drills, saws, grindstones, wrenches, chisels, rivet hammers, staplers, sanders, buffers, etc. has not changed the relation between worker and machine—for all that they belong to a recent branch of machinery because they had to wait upon the development of specialized electrical or pneumatic power systems before they became possible. In all these forms, the guidance of the tool remains entirely in the hands of the worker, whatever other properties or capacities may have been added.

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\* This same definition is often used by management analysis as an overall picture of the workplace, for which they recommend the development of constraint and the elimination of all but the desired motion; and this definition may be, as we have seen, applied to the workers themselves as they are subjected to criteria of mechanical perfection.

\*\* In engineering literature, by contrast, the worker tends to disappear, which accounts for the fact that this literature is written almost entirely in the awkward grammar of the passive voice, in which operations seem to perform themselves, without human agency.

It is also worth noting that Usher, when he wishes to quote from Marx a "definition" of machinery, seizes upon a descriptive passage where Marx, before tackling the analysis of machinery, indicates that “fully developed machinery consists of three essentially different parts, the motor mechanism, the transmitting mechanism, and finally the tool or working machine."³ It is typical of the engineering mind that it is drawn by this, the technical description, while that which for the labor process is truly definitive escapes attention.

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It is only when the tool and/or the work are given a fixed motion path by the structure of the machine itself that machinery in the modern sense begins to develop. The drill press, the lathe fitted with a slide rest, and the sewing or knitting machine all move cutting tools or needles along grooves cut into the machine frame or parts. The grindstone turns in a path determined by its axle and bearings; the moving blade of the shears descends, and the head of the trip-hammer or piledriver falls in accord with the structure of each device.

But this is only the first step in the development of machinery. The laying-down of these fixed motion paths opens the way for further control of the motion of the tool or the work, by internal gearing, cams, etc. At first, as Bright points out, this takes the form of a fixed or single cycle. The cutting tool of a lathe, for instance, or the bit of a drill press, may be connected to the power source in such a way that when the connection is locked the tool will be brought against the work at a fixed rate of approach and to a predetermined depth, after which it will retract to its original position. This single cycle may also be a repeated one, as in the case of the planer which draws the full length of the work against the cutting tool, removes a shaving from the surface, and returns to repeat the process; the cutting tool is meanwhile shifted so that the next shaving may be removed, and this continues without outside intervention until the entire surface has been planed.

Once this type of cycle has been mastered, it is only a further mechanical step to the construction of multiple function machines in which the mechanism indexes its way, according to a preset pattern, through a sequence ofoperations. This is the principle of the automatic turret lathe, which carries its series of tools in a turret that revolves to the next tool as the previous one completes its cycle. In such machines the sequence of operations is either built once and for all into the mechanism and cannot be altered (this is the case with the home washing machine, for instance, which follows a sequence of operations that may be changed as to duration, or some of which may be skipped, but which can, basically, do only that which it was designed and built to do), or the machine may be adapted to a limited variety of functions by changing its internal (cam or gearing) arrangements. It is characteristic of all machinery, up to this stage in its evolution, that the pattern of its action is fixed within the mechanism and has no links to either external controls or its own working results. Its movements are not so much automatic as predetermined.\*

Between the stage represented by machines constructed according to this concept and the next stage of machine development, there is a significant difference: control over the machine in accordance with information coming from outside the direct working mechanism. This may take the form of measurements of the machine output itself. It is a simple step from installing on a printing press a counter to record the number of sheets that have passed through the press, to arranging this counter so that it shuts off the press, or rings a bell, when the selected number has been reached. The classic example of the flyball governor, which uses the motion of the weights, as they are flung outward by increasing speed or fall inward as speed reduces, to control the throttle of the engine is a perfect instance of a machine which regulates its own pace by measuring its own output. In checking the results of its own work, the machine may simply stop, signal, or reject, as in the case of the key punch verifier, which signals and marks any difference between the holes already punched in the card and the keys struck by the operator. $\mathbf { O r } ,$ in its furthest refinements, the machine may measure the results of its work while that work is in progress, compare these results with an image of the desired product, and make continual adjustments throughout the course of the operation so that the result conforms to the plan.

This capacity to draw upon information from external sources, or from the progress of its own operation, brings about a certain reversal in the trend of machine development. Prior to this, the evolution of machinery had been from the universal to the special purpose machine. The broad range of earlier machinery had been general purpose equipment, adapted not to a particular product or to a specialized operation, but to a range of operations. Lathes existed for metal-turning, not for the manufacture of a particular size and class of screw or shaft; presses were adaptable to a variety of forming operations, not to a particular part. As machinery underwent its first phase of progress toward increase in control, this took the form of fixed arrangements adapting the machine to a particular product or operation. In an advanced state, such as the machining of an automobile engine block, a single machine drills scores of holes from various angles, mills surfaces to final finish, counterbores, taps threads, etc., performing these operations simultaneously or in rapid sequence.

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\* Bright includes the possibility of reducing the need for human intervention in such a machine still further by putting the actuation of the machine under remote control, so that many machines may be set in motion or stopped from a single control site; there is also the possibility of doing away with the need to start and stop the machine if the introduction of the workpiece itself actuates the mechanism, and the completion and ejection of the workpiece stops the machine until the next piece is introduced. But this and other such refinements do not change the internally fixed character of the machine cycle.

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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.

As 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.

The 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.

But 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!

The 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."

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