DIVISION OF MIND
“In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.”- Fredrick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management
Have you ever found yourself browsing through the want ads and see “Wanted: volunteers for scientific research….” and think “who would ever opt to be experimented on for money?” Meanwhile, you wake up at the same time everyday, march off to work, file in line and proceed to perform robot-like tasks to the point of automation, as if you're not the subject of an experiment that just so happens to be a little farther along in its study. Everyday, millions take part in social engineering experiments under the guise of free will and the desire for a paycheck. Guinea Pigs for the captains of industry.
“Only we’re not automatons. We have eyes to see with, ears to hear with, and mouths to talk.” - shop steward at GE- Bridgeport, Forces of Production
From 1922-1929 John D. Rockefeller donated 50 million to the study of social science throughout the world. The spur for this was the need to better organize human society, to dissuade public anger over unscrupulous business practices and violent suppression of working people. Rockefeller charities set out to change society as a whole.
So, with over 7 million in grants and just a couple months before Black Tuesday, the Yale Institute on Human Relations was founded in 1929. This is the largest social science project ever funded.
Adam Smith, once considered the greatest theorist in the free market, had warned that the division of labor would create a catastrophe for human society. Fredrick Taylor would disagree and the story of what is known as scientific management, or “Taylorism”, begins when Taylor is hired to increase efficiency in the industrial workplace.
Fredrick Winslow Taylor viewed there was far too little division of labor and would be more efficient if tasks were broken down and mechanized. In his experiments, he set out to break down every task in a factory into individual units, measured how long they took and set goals for workers to meet.
This seems great on the surface. Allowing for increase in efficiency creates more product in a shorter time, but these experiments also serve a different purpose.
Starting in the 19th century, machine shops were a bastion of skilled labor. This meant there was a considerable amount of power on the work floor. The skills that made production possible also enabled machinists to challenge shop management when they were treated unfairly. For management, this was an unacceptable bargaining chip; for Taylor, this was simply inefficient.
“Taylorism” was about deskilling. He took what the skilled worker did and decomposed them into units. Then teaches those basic elements and aspects without teaching the entire set of activities involved in the process. This is a mechanism for control because you dictate tasks to individuals rather than leaving it in the hands of the skilled to decide how it’s done.
Through this deskilling and removal of control and power from workers and the collective they become less likely to be rebellious or form organizations and movements that would operate against the corporations
This is something that management thought was a good idea for the workers but not for them. They need to be creative. In fact, Henry Ford in his biography says “I’m too smart to have these rational principles imposed on me, as opposed to these workers, we need those principles on them. They wouldn’t know what to do without those principles imposed on them.”
So Rationalization/Mcdonaldization is always something those on top want to impose on those at the bottom, but is something they don’t want to affect their work at all.
Henry Ford effectively built the assembly line and more generally the system that came forward that began to be known as “Fordism”. One aspect of “Fordism” dealt with hierarchical control over the workers and specifically control by assembly line. So, instead of a thinking, creative skilled worker, you have a sort of mindless worker who repetitively did the same task over and over again. They are forced into a series of robot-like actions, thereby becoming robot-like themselves.
Irrationality of Rationality- the inevitability of rational systems to spawn irrational consequences (i.e. the efficiency of the assembly line leads to the robotization of the worker and the dehumanization of the man)
In the study “Where Have All the Robots Gone?”, Harold Shepard and Neil Harick confirmed what many suspected- people trapped in an unrewarding work-life are more likely to be dissatisfied, but also more likely to suffer from low self-esteem, feelings of helplessness, alienation, and to be plagued by a variety of mental disorders. The dissatisfied worker who found his mental health most impaired was less likely to vote or be involved in organizations.
If the environment you work in is so fragmented, not only is your dignity robbed but so is the expression of your own capacities. You will be deadened, diminished. You will be bored, your potential will be reduced and you’ll be less likely to take dominion over other areas of your life.
Fragmentation of work is pursued for this very reason. It weakens workers not just on the job but in their communities, which is what you want so they don’t take more income from the corporation. It’s a devil’s approach and a pretty sensible policy from the view of those at the top trying to stay there and advance, for if not they’d get wiped out.
The corporate entity is pathological by nature in it’s pursuit of profit regardless of broader implications. Does your drive for profit lead to induced pain and suffering, generate pollution in the environment or destroy society? IT DOESN’T MATTER! You're forced by the nature of the social relations inside and among corporations and the market system to pursue and accumulate profit.
If hierarchy is the defining characteristic of scientific management, then it should not be surprising it met great praise not only in the capitalist world but by authoritarian communists as well when it was stated:
“We must introduce in Russia the study and the teaching of the Taylor system, and it’s systematic trial and adaptation.”- V.I. Lenin
For in the Soviet Union, as in America, workers had scientific management imposed on them and the Kromstov Rebellion of 1921 was a direct result of the implementation of “Taylorism”. After the rebellion was crushed, a government document on rationalization spoke of “the instinctive mistrust of all workers towards all kinds of experiments directed at extracting greater productivity from them”
The workers of Kromstov had actually envisioned a decentralized system where they actually owned and controlled their work and resources. Lenin had something else in mind :
“Socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly. Which is made to serve the interest of the whole people and has to that extent cease to be capitalist monopoly. The new means of control have been created not by us, but by capitalism in its military-imperialist stage.”- V.I. Lenin
The term “Socialism” was decided upon by the two major propaganda systems in the world (The West and Soviet Union) to refer to the totalitarian system of The Soviet Union, The West to discredit and the Bolsheviks to gain the credit associated with genuine socialism. It’s going to be very hard for people to remove themselves from it or as anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin predicted:
“In the future there will be two forms. One form will take over the state and they’ll create a red bureaucracy which will be the most vile and brutal regime the world has ever seen, and there will be others who understand they can’t take over the state. So they will have to serve concentrated private power and state power and they will be technical intelligentsia who implement the policies of the master, or what we call the world democracy’s”
American and Russian corporations and their ruling class set out to master the psyche of the average worker and from the Hawthorne experiments came new insights. Researchers found that the very act of allowing workers to talk about their feelings reduced the possibility of agitation and rebellion. It made them “feel” as if they mattered even if the fundamental social relationship hadn’t changed.
To avoid disgruntled employees, they decided to sit them down to discuss what was being done and found no matter what changes were implemented as long as it was discussed, production went up. Done in a democratic context, participation would have been looked into but done in a hierarchical context. So what arose from it was a social/industrial school of relations. A way to control employees through ideological manipulation. This wasn’t new, it just now had an entire school of thought behind it. You let the worker “feel” they’ve been asked, but you don’t pay any attention to it.
Optimizing the desire for better order and creating a new model for organizing and supervising industrial workers, the Hawthorne Experiment and its effect (the idea one will modify behavior simply by observing them) is widely credited for putting the human factor into industrial relations. Yet as with previous workplace experiments, it ultimately would increase the power of corporations at the expense of everyone else.
As mass production continues at pace, Taylorism combined with human relations creates a division of labor broken into nightmarish portions. In China, millions are forced to repeat the same motions thousands of times a day. In America, assembly lines are required to be in motion 57 seconds of each minute. Indonesian sweatshops owned by corporations such as NIKE chart productivity down to the 1000’s of a second.
Meanwhile in offices and service industries, they are increasingly resorting to surveillance and computerized monitoring. They might not be Big Brother but they are definitely watching, but this is another topic for another day.
