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

The destruction of craftsmanship during the period of the rise of scientific management did not go unnoticed by workers. Indeed, as a rule workers are far more conscious of such a loss while it is being effected than after it has taken place and the new conditions of production have become generalized. Taylorism raised a storm of opposition among the trade unions during the early part of this century; what is most noteworthy about this early opposition is that it was concentrated not upon the trappings of the Taylor system, such as the stopwatch and motion study, but upon its essential effort to strip the workers of craft knowledge and autonomous control and confront them with a fully thought-out labor process in which they function as cogs and levers. In an editorial which appeared in the International Molders Journal, we read:

The one great asset of the wage worker has been his craftsmanship. We think of craftsmanship ordinarily as the ability to manipulate skillfully the tools and materials of a craft or trade. But true craftsmanship is much more than this. The really essential element in it is not manual skill and dexterity but something stored up in the mind of the worker. This something is partly the intimate knowledge of the character and uses of the tools, materials and processes of the craft which tradition and experience have given the worker. But beyond this and above this, it is the knowledge which enables him to understand and overcome the constantly arising difficulties that grow out of variations not only in the tools and materials, but in the conditions under which the work must be done.

The editorial goes on to point to the separation of “craft knowledge” from “craft skill" in “an ever-widening area and with an ever-increasing acceleration," and describes as the most dangerous form of this separation

the gathering up of all this scattered craft knowledge, systematizing it and concentrating it in the hands of the employer and then doling it out again only in the form of minute instructions, giving to each worker only the knowledge needed for the performance of a particular relatively minute task. This process, it is evident, separates skill and knowledge even in their narrow relationship. When it is completed, the worker is no longer a craftsman in any sense, but is an animated tool of the management. 20

A half-century of commentary on scientific management has not succeeded in producing a better formulation of the matter.\*

Notes

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\* In this connection, see also Friedmann's Industrial Society, where he summarizes "the first reactions of workers" to Taylorism in the United States, England, Germany, and France.21

Chapter 6

The Habituation of the Worker to the Capitalist Mode of Production

The transformation of working humanity into a "labor force," a “factor of production," an instrument of capital, is an incessant and unending process. The condition is repugnant to the victims, whether their pay is high or low, because it violates human conditions of work; and since the workers are not destroyed as human beings but are simply utilized in inhuman ways, their critical, intelligent, conceptual faculties, no matter how deadened or diminished, always remain in some degree a threat to capital. Moreover, the capitalist mode of production is continually extended to new areas of work, including those freshly created by technological advances and the shift of capital to new industries. It is, in addition, continually being refined and perfected, so that its pressure upon the workers is unceasing. At the same time, the habituation of workers to the capitalist mode of production must be renewed with each generation, all the more so as the generations which grow up under capitalism are not formed within the matrix of work life, but are plunged into work from the outside, so to speak, after a prolonged period of adolescence during which they are held in reserve. The necessity for adjusting the worker to work in its capitalist form, for overcoming natural resistance intensified by swiftly changing technology, antagonistic social relations, and the succession of the generations, does not therefore end with the “scientific organization of labor," but becomes a permanent feature of capitalist society.

As a result, there has come into being, within the personnel and labor relations departments of corporations and in the external support organizations such as schools of industrial relations, college departments of sociology, and other academic and para-academic institutions, a complex of practical and academic disciplines devoted to the study of the worker. Shortly after Taylor, industrial psychology and industrial physiology came into existence to perfect methods of selection, training, and motivation of workers, and these were soon broadened into an attempted industrial sociology, the study of the workplace as a social system.

The cardinal feature of these various schools and the currents within them is that, unlike the scientific management movement, they do not by and large concern themselves with the organization of work, but rather with the conditions under which the worker may best be brought to cooperate in the scheme of work organized by the industrial engineer.\* The evolving work processes of capitalist society are taken by these schools as inexorable givens, and are accepted as “necessary and inevitable" in any form of "industrial society." The problems addressed are the problems of management: dissatisfaction as expressed in high turnover rates, absenteeism, resistance to the prescribed work pace, indifference, neglect, cooperative group restrictions on output, and overt hostility to management. As it presents itself to most of the sociologists and psychologists concerned with the study of work and workers, the problem is not that of the degradation of men and women, but the difficulties raised by the reactions, conscious and unconscious, to that degradation. It is therefore not at all fortuitous that most orthodox social scientists adhere firmly, indeed desperately, to the dictum that their task is not the study of the objective conditions of work, but only of the subjective phenomena to which these give rise: the degrees of “satisfaction" and “dissatisfaction" elicited by their questionnaires.

The earliest systematic effort in this direction took place in the field of industrial psychology. Its beginnings may be traced back to the experimental psychology taught in nineteenth century Germany, and in particular to the school of psychology at the University of Leipzig. Hugo Münsterberg, after receiving his training in Wilhelm Wundt's “laboratory" at that institution, came to the United States where, at Harvard, he was in a position to observe the development of modern management in its most vigorous and extensive forms, and it became his ambition to marry the methods of the Leipzig school to the new practice of scientific management. His Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (published in German in 1912, with an English version following the next year) may be called the first systematic outline of industrial psychology.³ Like Taylor, Münsterberg disdained to conceal his views and aims:

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\* Personnel management, although thought of as that part of the corporate structure concerned with the worker, is usually given short shrift when a reorganization of actual work is under way. In a recent book, two prominent industrial engineers accord to almost every management level a greater role in the change in work methods than the role which they prescribe for the personnel department. They say flatly, in their recommendations for an overall “operations improvement program": “In the beginning, in most organizations, the personnel director will have no active role in the conduct of an operations improvement program." They restrict the place of this official to his value “as a sounding board for employee reactions," and to orienting new employees to the program and to answering questions and complaints.' As with personnel directors, so also with their academic counterparts in labor sociology. Charles Rumford Walker, one of the more experienced and sophisticated, as well as more “humane," of these stresses this in a section of one of his papers devoted to the "Strategic Role of the Engineer," in which he recognizes that the direction of the evolution of work is determined by “managers and engineers, as architects of the future," while the role of sociologists is that of trying to importune, press upon, and persuade the real designers of the work process to take into account the “neglected human dimension" in order to reduce discontent and increase productivity, to “seize the opportunity" offered by swift technological change, etc.²

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Our aim is to sketch the outlines of a new science which is intermediate between the modern laboratory psychology and the problems of economics: the psychological experiment is systematically to be placed at the service of commerce

But what are the ends of commerce and industry? Münsterberg leaves that to others: “Economic psychotechnics may serve certain ends of commerce and industry, but whether these ends are the best ones is not a care with which the psychologist has to be burdened." Having relieved his “science" of this burden, and having turned the task of setting the parameters of his investigations over to those who control “commerce and industry," he returns to this subject only when it is suggested that perhaps the point of view of the workers, who are also part of“commerce and industry," should be taken into consideration. So crass and vulgar an appeal to special interests arouses his horror, and he rejects it sternly:

The inquiry into the possible psychological contributions to the question of reinforced achievement must not be deterred by the superficial objection that in one or another industrial concern a dismissal of wage-earners might at first result. Psychotechnics does not stand in the service of a party, but exclusively 6
in the service of civilization.

Having identified the interests of “civilization"not with the immense majority of workers but with those who manage them, he can now face without blanching the everyday effects of “scientific work design" upon the worker: ". . . the development of scientific management has shown clearly that the most important improvements are just those which are deduced from scientific researches, without at first giving satisfaction to the laborers themselves, until a new habit has been formed."7 He sees the role of psychological science in industry as the selection of workers from among the pool offered on the labor market, and their acclimatization to the work routines devised by “civilization," the formation of the “new habit":

. .. we select three chief purposes of business life, purposes which are important in commerce and industry and every economic endeavor. We ask how we can find the men whose mental qualities make them best fitted for the work which they have to do; secondly, under what psychological conditions we can secure the greatest and most satisfactory output of work from every man; and finally, how we can produce most completely the influence on human minds which 8
are desired in the interests of business.

In this definition we have the aims—although rarely so flatly statedof the subsequent schools of psychological, physiological, and social investigation of the worker and work. By and large, they have sought a model of workers and work groups which would produce the results desired by management: habituation to the terms of employment offered in the capitalist firm and satisfactory performance on that basis. These schools and theories have succeeded one another in a dazzling proliferation of approaches and theories, a proliferation which is more than anything else testimony to their failure.

The spread of industrial psychology in the United States was in the beginning largely due to the efforts of Walter Dill Scott, a psychologist at Northwestern University who took his doctorate at Leipzig and came to the new field by way of a prior career in advertising. During and after World War I, psychological testing was used by a number of major corporations (American Tobacco, National Lead, Western Electric, Loose-Wiles Biscuit, Metropolitan Life), and the first psychological consulting service for industry was established at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1915, where Scott assumed the first chair of applied psychology in an American academic institution. During the war such testing was conducted on a grand scale in the United States armed forces, also under Scott, and the popularity this gave to the new device encouraged its spread throughout industry after the war. In England and Germany the trend was similar, with Germany perhaps ahead of all others in the field.º

The premise of industrial psychology was that, using aptitude tests, it was possible to determine in advance the suitability of workers for various positions by classifying them according to degrees of“intelligence,"“manual dexterity," “accident proneness," and general conformability to the “profile” desired by management. The vanity of this attempt to calibrate individuals and anticipate their behavior in the complex and antagonistic dynamics of social life was soon exposed by practice. The prolonged and exhaustive experiments conducted at the Western Electric plant on the west side of Chicago—the so-called Hawthorne experiments—during the last years of the 1920s crystallized the dissatisfaction with industrial psychology. In those experiments, a Harvard Business School team under the leadership of Elton Mayo arrived at chiefly negative conclusions—conclusions, moreover, which were remarkably similar to those with which Taylor had begun his investigations almost a half-century earlier They learned that the performance of workers had little relation to “ability" and in fact often bore an inverse relation to test scores, with those scoring best producing at lower levels and vice-versa—and that workers acted collectively to resist management work-pace standards and demands. “The belief,"said Mayo, "that the behavior of an individual within the factory can be predicted before employment upon the basis of a laborious and minute examination by tests of his mechanical and other capacities is mainly, if not wholly mistaken. 510

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100 Labor and Monopoly Capital

The chief conclusion of the Mayo school was that the workers' motivations could not be understood on a purely individual basis, and that the key to their behavior lay in the social groups of the factory. With this, the study of the habituation of workers to their work moved from the plane of psychology to that of sociology. The “human relations" approach, first of a series of behavioral sociological schools, focused on personnel counseling and on ingratiating or nonirritating styles of “face to face" supervision. But these schools have yielded little to management in the way of solid and tangible results. Moreover, the birth of the “human relations" idea coincided with the Depression of the 1930s and the massive wave of working-class revolt that culminated in the unionization of the basic industries of the United States. In the illumination cast by these events, the workplace suddenly appeared not as a system of bureaucratic formal organization on the Weberian model, nor as a system of informal group relations as in the interpretation of Mayo and his followers, but rather as a system of power, of class antagonisms. Industrial psychology and sociology have never recovered from this blow. From their confident beginnings as “sciences" devoted to discovering the springs of human behavior the better to manipulate them in the interests of management, they have broken up into a welter of confused and confusing approaches pursuing psychological sociological, economic, mathematical, or “systems" interpretations of the realities of the workplace, with little real impact upon the management of worker or work.\*

If the adaptation of the worker to the capitalist mode of production owes little to the efforts of practical and ideological manipulators, how is it in fact accomplished? Much of the economic and political history of the capitalist world during the last century and a half is bound up with this process of adjustment and the conflicts and revolts which attended it, and this is not the place to attempt a summary. A single illustration, that of the first comprehensive conveyor assembly line, will have to suffice as an indication that the wrenching of the workers out of their prior conditions and their adjustment to the forms of work engineered by capital is a fundamental process in which the principal roles are played not by manipulation or cajolery but by socioeconomic conditions and forces.

In 1903, when the Ford Motor Company was founded, building automobiles was a task reserved for craftsmen who had received their training in the bicycle and carriage shops of Michigan and Ohio, then the centers of those industries. “Final assembly, for example," writes Eli Chinoy, "“had originally been a highly skilled job. Each car was put together in one spot by a number of all-around mechanics."12 By 1908, when Ford launched the Model T, procedures had been changed somewhat, but the changes were slight compared with what was soon to come. The organization of assembly labor at that time is described as follows by Keith Sward:

At Ford's and in all the other shops in Detroit, the process of putting an automobile together still revolved around the versatile mechanic, who was compelled to move about in order to do his work. Ford's assemblers were still all-around men. Their work was largely stationary, yet they had to move on to their next job on foot as soon as the car-in-the-making at their particular station had been taken the whole distance——from bare frame to finished product. To be sure, time had added some refinements. In 1908 it was no longer necessary for the assembler to leave his place of work for trips to the tool crib or the parts bin. Stock-runners had been set aside to perform this function. Nor was the Ford mechanic himself in 1908 quite the man he had been in 1903. In the intervening years the job of final assembly had been split up ever so little. In place of the jack-of-all-trades who formerly “did it all," there were now several assemblers who worked over a particular car side by side, each one responsible for a somewhat limited set of operations. 13

The demand for the Model T was so great that special engineering talent was engaged to revise the production methods of the company. The key element of the new organization of labor was the endless conveyor chain upon which car assemblies were carried past fixed stations where men performed simple operations as they passed. This system was first put into operation for various subassemblies, beginning around the same time that the Model T was launched, and developed through the next half-dozen years until it culminated in January 1914 with the inauguration of the first endless-chain conveyor for final assembly at Ford's Highland Park plant. Within three months, the assembly time for the Model T had been reduced to one-tenth the time formerly needed, and by 1925 an organization had been created which produced almost as many cars in a single day as had been produced, early in the history of the Model T, in an entire year.

The quickening rate of production in this case depended not only upon the change in the organization of labor, but upon the control which management, at a single stroke, attained over the pace of assembly, so that it could now double and triple the rate at which operations had to be performed and thus subject its workers to an extraordinary intensity oflabor. Having achieved this, Ford then moved to flatten the pay structure as a further cost-cutting measure:

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\* The actual place of industrial psychology and sociology in corporate policies was succinctly expressed by three specialists in industrial engineering at the end of an article called “Current Job Design Criteria": “It can be concluded that company policies and practices [this refers to the companies studied in the article] in job design are inconsistent with programs and policies in human relations and personnel administration. On the one hand, specific steps are taken to minimize the contribution of the individual, and on the other hand he is propagandized about his importance and value to the organization."" But this is more than an “inconsistency," since job design represents reality while personnel administration represents only mythology. From the point of view of the corporation, there is no inconsistency, since the latter represents a manipulation to habituate the worker to the former.

Before the advent of the assembly line, the company had made a general practice of dispensing more or less liberal bonuses in order to stimulate production and individual initiative. But the moment moving belt lines came into being, Ford did away with incentive pay. He reverted to the payment of a flat hourly rate of wages. The company had decided, said Iron Age in July 1913, to abandon its graduated pay scale in favor of “more strenuous supervision." Once the new wage policy had been put into effect, the run-of-the-mine Ford employe could expect no more variation in his earnings than in the operations which he was called upon to perform. His maximum pay was frozen, seemingly 14 for good, at \$2.34 per day, the rate of pay which was standard for the area

In this way the new conditions of employment that were to become characteristic of the automobile industry, and thereafter of an increasing number of industries, were established first at the Ford Motor Company. Craftsmanship gave way to a repeated detail operation, and wage rates were standardized at uniform levels. The reaction to this change was powerful, as Sward relates:

As a consequence, the new technology at Ford's proved to be increasingly unpopular; more and more it went against the grain. And the men who were exposed to it began to rebel. They registered their dissatisfaction by walking out in droves. They could afford to pick and choose. Other jobs were plentiful in the community; they were easier to get to; they paid as well; and they were less mechanized and more to labor's liking.

Ford's men had begun to desert him in large numbers as early as 1910. With the coming of the assembly line, their ranks almost literally fell apart; the company soon found it next to impossible to keep its working force intact, let alone expand it. It was apparent that the Ford Motor Co. had reached the point of owning a great factory without having enough workers to keep it humming. Ford admitted later that his startling factory innovations had ushered in the outstanding labor crisis of his career. The turnover of his working force had run, he was to write, to 380 percent for the year 1913 alone. So great was labor's distaste for the new machine system that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963. is

In this initial reaction to the assembly line we see the natural revulsion of the worker against the new kind of work. What makes it possible to see it so clearly is the fact that Ford, as a pioneer in the new mode of production, was competing with prior modes of the organization of labor which still characterized the rest of the automobile industry and other industries in the area. In this microcosm, there is an illustration of the rule that the working class is progressively subjected to the capitalist mode of production, and to the successive forms which it takes, only as the capitalist mode of production conquers and destroys all other forms of the organization of labor, and with them, all alternatives for the working population. As Ford, by the competitive advantage which he gained, forced the assembly line upon the rest of the automobile industry, in the same degree workers were forced to submit to it by the disappearance of other forms of work in that industry.

The crisis Ford faced was intensified by the unionization drive begun by the Industrial Workers of the World among Ford workers in the summer of 1913. Ford's response to the double threat of unionization and the flight of workers from his plants was the announcement, made with great fanfare early in 1914, of the \$5.00 day. Although this dramatic increase in wages was not so strictly adhered to as Ford would have had the public believe when he launched it, it did raise pay at the Ford plant so much above the prevailing rate in the area that it solved both threats for the moment. It gave the company a large pool of labor from which to choose and at the same time opened up new possibilities for the intensification of labor within the plants, where workers were now anxious to keep their jobs. “The payment of five dollars a day for an eight-hour day,"Ford was to write in his autobiography, “was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made."!6

In this move can be seen a second element in the adjustment of workers to increasingly unpopular jobs. Conceding higher relative wages for a shrinking proportion of workers in order to guarantee uninterrupted production was to become, particularly after the Second World War, a widespread feature of corporate labor policy, especially after it was adopted by union leaderships John L. Lewis resolved upon this course of action shortly after the war: in return for encouraging the mechanization of the coal-mining industry and the reduction of employment, he insisted upon an increasing scale of compensation for the ever smaller and ever more hard-driven miners remaining in the pits. The bulk of the organized labor movement in production industries followed his lead, either openly or implicitly, in the decades thereafter. And these policies were greatly facilitated by the monopolistic structure of the industries in question. The workers who were sloughed off, or the workers who never entered manufacturing industries because of the proportional shrinkage of those industries, furnished the masses for new branches of industry at lower rates of pay.

If the petty manipulations of personnel departments and industrial psychology and sociology have not played a major role in the habituation of worker to work, therefore, this does not mean that the “adjustment" of the worker is free of manipulative elements. On the contrary, as in all of the functionings of the capitalist system, manipulation is primary and coercion is held in reserve—except that this manipulation is the product of powerful economic forces, major corporate employment and bargaining policies, and the inner workings and evolution of the system of capitalism itself, and not primarily of the clever schemes of labor relations experts. The apparent acclimatization of the worker to the new modes of production grows out of the destruction of all other ways of living, the striking of wage bargains that permit a certain enlargement of the customary bounds of subsistence for the working class, the weaving of the net of modern capitalist life that finally makes all other modes of living impossible. But beneath this apparent habituation, the hostility of workers to the degenerated forms of work which are forced upon them continues as a subterranean stream that makes its way to the surface when employment conditions permit, or when the capitalist drive for a greater intensity of labor oversteps the bounds of physical and mental capacity. It renews itself in new generations, expresses itself in the unbounded cynicism and revulsion which large numbers of workers feel about their work, and comes to the fore repeatedly as a social issue demanding solution.

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Notes

Part II

Science and Mechanization

104 Labor and Monopoly Capital

The Scientific-Technical Revolution

Considered from a technical point of view, all production depends upon the physical, chemical, and biological properties of materials and the processes which can be based upon them. Management, in its activities as an organizer of labor, does not deal directly with this aspect of production; it merely provides the formal structure for the production process. But the process is not complete without its content, which is a matter of technique. This technique, as has been noted, is at first that of skill, of craft, and later assumes an increasingly scientific character as knowledge of natural laws grows and displaces the scrappy knowledge and fixed tradition of craftsmanship. The transformation of labor from a basis of skill to a basis of science may thus be said to incorporate a content supplied by a scientific and engineering revolution within a form supplied by the rigorous division and subdivision of labor favored by capitalist management.

With the rise of modern industry, Marx wrote, the “varied, apparently unconnected, and petrified forms of the industrial processes now resolved themselves into so many conscious and systematic applications of natural science to the attainment of given useful effects."¹ But, like many of Marx's most illuminating observations, this was in his own day more an anticipatory and prophetic insight than a description of reality. The age of“conscious and systematic applications of natural science" had barely announced its arrival when these words were published in 1867. The last two decades of the nineteenth century form a watershed marking so great a change in the role of science in production that the contrastdespite similarities which connect both periods of capitalism—can hardly be exaggerated.

Science is the last—and after labor the most important——social property to be turned into an adjunct of capital. The story of its conversion from the province of amateurs, “philosophers," tinkerers, and seekers after knowledge to its present highly organized and lavishly financed state is largely the story of its incorporation into the capitalist firm and subsidiary organizations. At first science costs the capitalist nothing, since he merely exploits the accumulated knowledge of the physical sciences, but later the capitalist systematically organizes and harnesses science, paying for scientific education, research, laboratories, etc., out of the huge surplus social product which either belongs directly to him or which the capitalist class as a whole controls in the form of tax revenues. A formerly relatively free-floating social endéavor is integrated into production and the market.

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The contrast between science as a generalized social property incidental to production and science as capitalist property at the very center of production is the contrast between the Industrial Revolution, which occupied the last half of the eighteenth and the first third of the nineteenth centuries, and the scientific-technical revolution, which began in the last decades of the nineteenth century and is still going on. The role of science in the Industrial Revolution was unquestionably great. Before the rise of capitalism—that is, until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe—the body of fundamental scientific knowledge in the West was essentially that of classical antiquity, that of the ancient Greeks as preserved by Arab scholarship and in medieval monasteries. The era of scientific advance during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries supplied some of the conditions for the Industrial Revolution, but the connection was indirect, general, and diffuse—not only because science itself was as yet unstructured by capitalism and not directly dominated by capitalist institutions, but also because of the important historical fact that technique developed in advance of, and as a prerequisite for, science. Thus, in contrast with modern practice, science did not systematically lead the way for industry, but often lagged behind and grew out of the industrial arts. Instead of formulating significantly fresh insights into natural conditions in a way that makes possible new techniques, science in its beginnings under capitalism more often formulated its generalizations side by side with, or as a result of, technological development.\* If we choose as a prime example the steam engine—because of the significant scientific principles it exemplified and because it was the central working mechanism of the Industrial Revolution we can see this clearly. One historian of science has written of the process by which the steam engine came into being:

How much of this development was owing to the science of heat? All the available evidence indicates that it was very little. This point of view was expressed emphatically by a writer on the history of the invention of the steam engine, Robert Stuart Meikleham. In the preface to his book Descriptive History of the Steam Engine, of 1824, he wrote, "We know not who gave currency to the phrase of the invention being one of the noblest gifts that science ever made to mankind. The fact is that science, or scientific men, never had anything to do in the matter. Indeed there is no machine or mechanism in which the little that theorists have done is more useless. It arose, was improved and perfected by working mechanicsand by them only."3

This view is buttressed by the fact that in the early days of the development of steam power the prevailing scientific theory of heat was the caloric theory, from which, as Lindsay points out, “few really significant deductions about the properties of steam could be drawn." Landes concludes that the development of steam technology probably contributed much more to the physical sciences than the other way around:

It is often stated that the Newcomen machine and its forerunners would have been unthinkable without the theoretical ideas of Boyle, Torricelli, and others; and that Watt derived much of his technical competence and imagination from his work with scientists and scientific instruments at Glasgow. There is no doubt some truth in this, though how much is impossible to say. One thing is clear, however: once the principle of the separate condenser was established, subsequent advances owed little or nothing to theory. On the contrary, an entire branch of physics, thermodynamics, developed in part as a result of empirical observations of engineering methods and performance.

To contrast this with the manner in which science has been employed as the cutting edge of industrial change during the past three-quarters of a century is to contrast science in two very different modes of existence. The organized scientific professions as we know them today hardly existed before the second half of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the century, the universities were still oriented toward classical learning, scientific societies were in their infancy, and scientific patronage was principally a private affair. Scientists were “typically ‘amateurs,' or men for whom science was often an avocation however passionate their interest in it. . . . Not until the late nineteenth century . . . is there a firmly established social basis for large numbers of scientists in the universities, industries, and governments of Western society."6 Even as late as 1880, Thomas Huxley could speak of those “ranged around the banners of physical science" as “somewhat of a guerrilla force, composed largely of irregulars."

The old epoch of industry gave way to the new during the last decades of the nineteenth century primarily as a result of advances in four fields: electricity, steel, coal-petroleum, and the internal combustion engine. Scientific research along theoretical lines played enough of a role in these areas to demonstrate to the capitalist class, and especially to the giant corporate entities then coming into being as a result of the concentration and centralization of capital, its importance as a means of furthering the accumulation of capital

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\* Of the technical skill that existed in Britain in the eighteenth century, Landes writes: “This should not be confused with scientific knowledge; in spite of some efforts to tie the Industrial Revolution to the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the link would seem to have been an extremely diffuse one: both reflected a heightened interest in natural and material phenomena and a more systematic application of empirical searching. Indeed, if anything, the growth of scientific knowledge owed much to the concerns and achievements of technology; there was far less flow of ideas or methods the other way; and this was to continue to be the case well into the nineteenth century."2

This was particularly true in the electrical industries, which were entirely the product of nineteenth-century science, and in the chemistry of the synthetic products of coal and oil.

The story of the incorporation of science into the capitalist firm properly begins in Germany. The early symbiosis between science and industry which was developed by the capitalist class of that country proved to be one of the most important facts of world history in the twentieth century, furnished the capability for two world wars, and offered to the other capitalist nations an example which they learned to emulate only when they were forced to do so many decades later. The role of science in German industry was the product of the weakness of German capitalism in its initial stages, together with the advanced state of German theoretical science.

It would be well for those who still do not understand the importance of German speculative philosophy to ponder, if not the example of Marx, of which they are so mistrustful, the concrete instance of modern science and its sharply contrasting careers in Germany on the one hand and in the United States and Britain on the other. “If much in contemporary Britain is to be explained in terms of Bentham's philosophy," writes P. W. Musgrave in his study of technical change in Britain and Germany, “so did Hegel have a great influence in Germany." Hegel's influence on the development of science was, as Musgrave points out, both direct and indirect. In the first instance, there was his role in the reform of Prussian education in the second decade of the nineteenth century. And next, there was the pervasive influence of German speculative philosophy, of which Hegel was the culminating thinker, in giving to German scientific education a fundamental and theoretical cast. Thus while Britain and the United States were still in the grip of that common-sense empiricism which stunts and discourages reflective thought and basic scientific research, in Germany it was these very habits of mind that were being developed in the scientific community.8 It was for this reason more than any other that the primacy in European science passed from France to Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century, while Britain in the same period remained mired in “what J. S. Mill called ‘the dogmatism of common sense' backed by rule of thumb."9

By 1870, the German university system could boast a considerable number of professors and lecturers, especially in the sciences, who, favored by light duties and well-equipped laboratories, could pursue basic research. Industrial research laboratories such as that maintained by Krupp at Essen were to become models for corporate research everywhere. The polytechnic institutes which had arisen during the 1830s and 1840s as an alternative to university education, and were to evolve into the celebrated Technische Hochschulen, attracted students from all over the world. And the apprenticeship system, stronger than elsewhere, was producing higher grades of mechanics in large quantities in those crafts required by the new industries.

The manner in which Germany anticipated the modern era is nowhere better illustrated than in the story of the German chemical industry: “It was Germany which showed the rest of the world how to make critical raw materials out of a sandbox and a pile of coal. And it was IG Farben which led the way for Germany. IG changed chemistry from pure research and commercial pill-rolling into a mammoth industry affecting every phase of civilization."1o

The leadership in chemistry and its industrial applications first belonged to France, especially after the cutting off of supplies of soda, sugar, and other products during the Napoleonic wars “promoted the French chemical industry and helped to give France chemical predominance for thirty years."" Thus Germans and others learned their chemistry in France in the first half of the nineteenth century; one of these students was Justus von Liebig, who, after studying with Gay-Lussac and other French chemists, returned to Germany to lay the foundations for modern organic, and especially agricultural, chemistry. One of Liebig's students, August Wilhelm von Hofmann, found his first teaching job in England, where in 1845 he became the first director ofthe Royal College of Chemistry. Hofmann had a particular interest in the chemistry of coal tar, a subject into which he led his best British pupils, among them William Henry Perkin. The earliest efforts of chemists had been merely to get rid of coal tar by boiling it off, but since it boiled in stages and at different temperatures, the result was a variety of tars which could, by chemical processing, be made to yield useful substances. Perkin, in 1856 (at the age of eighteen), derived the first true synthetic dye from aniline, a coal tar derivative; it could color fabrics and hold its color against washing, time, and sunlight. The importance of this discovery was the juncture it established between the older textile industry and the new steel industry which produced coal tar as a by-product of the use of coal in reducing iron.

Britain was, of course, the greatest textile and steel manufacturing country in the world, but British manufacturers turned a deaf ear to Perkin. They imported dyes from all over: indigo from the Far East, alizarin red from madder root, scarlets from cochineal and tin solutions. Germany, on the other hand, had coal but, having entered the race for colonies late, no access to the world's dyestuffs. Perkin turned to the German capitalists, and in so doing helped lay the foundation for the long German supremacy in the chemical industries. By the turn of the century, the six largest German chemical works employed more than 650 chemists and engineers, while the entire British coal tar industry had no more than thirty or forty.²\* Thus at a time when British and American industry used university-trained scientists only sporadically, for help on specific problems, the German capitalist class had already created that total and integrated effort which organized, in the universities, industrial laboratories, professional societies and trade associations, and in government-sponsored research a continuous scientific-technological effort as the new basis for modern industry. This was soon recognized by the more far sighted economists of that day (notably by Marshall and Veblen). Henry L. Gantt, after Taylor probably the foremost advocate and practitioner of scientific management of his time, wrote in 1910:

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\* James B. Conant tells this story: “At the time of our entry into World War I, a representative of the American Chemical Society called on the Secretary of War, Newton Baker, and offered the service of the chemists in the conflict. He was thanked

It is an economic law that large profits can be permanently assured only by efficient operation. . . . The supreme importance of efficiency as an economic factor was first realized by the Germans, and it is this fact that has enabled them to advance their industrial condition, which twenty years ago was a jest, to the first place in Europe, if not in the world. We naturally want to know in detail the methods they have used; and the reply is that they have recognized the value of the scientifically trained engineer as an economic factor.

In the United States, superb natural resources have enabled us to make phenomenal progress without much regard to the teachings of science, and in many cases in spite of our neglect of them. The progress of Germany warns us that we have now reached the point where we must recognize that the proper application of science to industry is of vital importance to the future prosperity of this country. . . . Our universities and schools of higher learning are still dominated by those whose training was largely literary or classical, and they utterly fail to realize the difference between a classical and an industrial age. This difference is not sentimental, but real; for that nation which is industrially most efficient will soon become the richest and most powerful.

Thus, early in the era of monopoly capitalism, the borrowings from Germany left a trail through American higher education and industry. It was not only the brewing industry which imported scientifically trained specialists (in its case brewmasters) from Germany: Carnegie put a German chemist to work at the start of the 1870s and in part through his efforts dispelled much of the uncertainty that had previously surrounded the manufacture of pig iron; and General Electric enlisted C. P. Steinmetz, the German physicist, chiefly to 15 help design alternating current equipment.

The corporate research laboratories of the United States begin more or less with the beginnings of the era of monopoly capitalism. The first research organization established for the specific purpose of systematic invention was set up by Thomas Edison at Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876, and the first government laboratories were established by the Department of Agriculture under the Hatch Act of 1887. Arthur D. Little began his independent research laboratory in 1886. These were the forerunners of the corporate research organizations: Eastman Kodak (1893), B. F. Goodrich (1895), and most important, General Electric (1900). General Motors did a great deal of its research through Charles F. Kettering's Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (DELCO), organized in 1909, and acquired by GM in 1919, although at the same time the corporation set up other laboratories, such as the one organized for it by the Arthur D. Little Company in 1911 to do materials testings and analysis; in 1920, all GM research activities were combined to form the General Motors Research Corporation at Moraine, Ohio. Frank B. Jewett began research for Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1904. The Westinghouse Research Laboratories were begun in Pittsburgh in 1917. By 1920 there were perhaps 300 such corporate laboratories, and by 1940, over 2,200. By then, corporations with a tangible net worth of over \$100 million averaged research staffs of 170, and those with a net worth exceeding a billion dollars averaged research staffs of 1,250. The Bell Telephone laboratories, employing over 5,000, was by far the largest research organization in the world.

Along with these research laboratories came the increase of scientific and engineering education in new or expanded university departments in the physical sciences, through learned journals and societies, and at trade association research facilities, as well as a growing government role in research. For a long time, however, imitation of the German example was imitation of manner rather than matter. The tradition of a thin and facile empiricism did not offer favorable soil for the development of basic science, and the corporate magnates, still impatient of free and undirected research and anxious for nuts-and-bolts engineering innovations, hardly bothered to conceal beneath their new commitment to science a contempt for its most fundamental forms. The most important of the corporate research laboratories, that organized by General Electric at Schenectady eight years after the merger ofEdison General Electric and Thomson-Houston, was typical in this regard. "It was soon recognized by the directors of this new company that the amount of technological development which could be drawn out of the scientific knowledge already accumulated, though large, was finite and that there would be a greater chance of ingenious developments if there were more science to work with."7 But the directors of the new company, and those of many others as well, were slow to understand the importance of the work of such pioneer scientists in the United States as Willard Gibbs, who helped establish a basis for physical chemistry by his use of thermodynamics in the study of chemical reactions. The general characteristic of the work required of scientists in these corporate laboratories remained Edisonian, with the modification that in place of Edison's laborious trial and error, scientific calculation was to lead to quicker solutions. Thus General Electric put Irving Langmuir to work studying the effect of various gases in lamp bulbs on the radiation of thermal energy from the filament, and on the rate of evaporation of the filament material.18 In other corporate laboratories, particularly those of the automotive industry, interest in “science"” was confined to trouble-shooting (gear noise, vibration, etc.) and product engineering (transmission fluids, paints, fuels, compression problems, etc.). The guiding principle seems to have been almost entirely fast payoff; it was this motivation which led to the disaster of the early 1920s when the entire operating force of several divisions of General Motors awaited, from day to day, the outcome of Kettering's attempts to get his so-called copper-cooled (air-cooled) engine ready for production.

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and asked to come back the next day. On so doing, he was told by the Secretary of War that while he appreciated the offer of the chemists, he found that it was unnecessary as