REGINALD WHITAKER
SCIENTIFIC
MANAGEMENT THEORY
AS
POLITICAL IDEOLOGY
My intention is to examine scientific management theory as a
form of political ideology appropriate to capitalist democracies.
wish to reject at the outset any mechanically deterministic basesuperstructure argument. Instead I begin from a point argued by C.B.
Macpherson in his critique of liberal democracy--there is a fundamental contradiction between the democratic and egalitarian values of
the political systems of liberal democracies and the inegalitarian
values of the economic systems upon which, and out of which, the
political institutions arose historically. 1 Macpherson takes seriously the dialectic of values and ideas. There is, he argues, a
dynamic in Western societies which can only be fully explained by
recourse to the playing out of contradictions at the ideological
level of experience. In this I do not believe Macpherson to be seriously at odds with Marx, although he is at odds with many twentieth
century Marxists.
Macpherson has, however, overemphasised the liberal aspects of
capitalist production because he has been too concerned with market
relationships, and too little concerned with authority relationships
within the units of capitalist production. The free labour market is
a liberal device which, in the traditional fashion of ideologies,
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both expresses and mystifies the real relationship of the worker to
the employer. But once employed, the worker becomes subject to
structures which are highly authoritarian and hierarchical, within
which the authority of the employer is limited only by the counterimposition of collective force on behalf of the worker (i.e., trade
unions; legislative and regulatory controls exercised over the employer, themselves the result of collective political struggles; or
the informal restrictions of output exercised through the social solidarity of the workers). How has capitalism attempted to legitimate
its undemocratic power in the workplace? To what extent has the
effective definition of political democracy been coloured by the
authoritarian nature of the workplace? These are particular ways of
approaching the general question of capitalist hegemony within societies with universal suffrage.
The rise of 'scientific management' or 'Taylorism' in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offers an especially attractive subject for examining the above questions. Scientific management was the first comprehensively articulated ideology of management--there were isolated precursors for many of the elements of
Tay10rism, but not until Frederick Taylor himself was there a systematic theory of management and work within capitalist production. It
had in the long run a very considerable practical impact on the organization of business, but along with this practical contribution
came a profound ideological expression of material changes in capitalist production and a powerful ideological mystification of the new
relationships which resulted from these changes.
Tay10rism was both theory and practice. In this paper I will
confine myself to the theoretical aspects but it is well to bear in
mind that its theoretical power was dependent upon its practical
value in increasing output and profits. The contemporary guru of
American management, Peter Drucker, is not exaggerating when he
writes that scientific management theory may "well be the most
powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made
to Western thought since the Federalist Papers." 2 I propose to
subject this theory to critical scrutiny in an attempt to uncover its
unstated assumptions.
The outlines of scientific management or Tay10rism are well
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known. It began with job analysis, which involved breaking down a
job into its component parts, with an emphasis on increasing specialization along functional lines. The second step, once a job had been
narrowed down to its essential elements, was time study. This aspect,
symbolized by the stop watch which popular opinion took to be the
essence of Taylorism, involved the analysis of how a specific task
could be completed with the minimum necessary motions in the shortest
possible time. Standard times were established, after superfluous
motions were eliminated, which would serve as benchmarks by which the
efficiency of workers could be measured in strict quantitative terms.
Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, inventors of filmed motion study, went so
far as to believe that science could ultimately indicate the 'one best
way' of accomplishing every task. Taylorites believed that on this
scientific basis, piece~rate systems could be devised to reward
workers in exact relation to their efficiency--or to punish them for
inefficiency. This would, it was believed, put an end to the practice
of 'soldiering' or the deliberate restriction of output by workers.
This latter practice was only possible because management had not
hitherto been privy to the secrets of the crafts which the workers
alone had possessed. Under scientific management, time study would
allow management to accumulate more knowledge of the work process than
the.workers. This analytical separation of skills from the persons
who had exercised them and their formulation into abstract rules
controlled by management alone--or in other words the division of the
productive process between brain and hand or between conception and
execution--obviously concentrated vast power and authority with
management. This further involved a large increase in administrative
personnel to maintain highly centralized methods of control. Among
Taylor's contributions here which were generally adopted were improved
cost accounting, better purchasing and inventory control methods, and
methods of coordination of the various operations of a plant. Other
innovations such as the idea of the functional foremen to replace the old
style single foreman, are only coming into real use in more recent years.
At the historical conjuncture when Taylorism appeared, there were
both material and ideological factors contributing to its emergence.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the series of
technical transformations in capitalist production which have been
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called the 'second industrial revolution.' From the application of
electricity to plant operations to the appearance of the assembly line
at Henry Ford's auto factory, this epoch saw a host of technical innovations which in their ensemble revolutionized the productive process, permitting of vastly increased output and demanding fundamental
changes in the nature of work. 'Rationalization' was the watchword
and is nowhere more apparent than in the growth of plant size, 3 the
disappearance of face-to-face relationships between boss and worker,
and the growth of a burgeoning middle strata of managerial and administrative personnel as an integral part of capitalist production.
Taylorism gave shape to these developments while reflecting the material demands of the era. Taylor himself was the inventor of the process of high-speed steel. While his managerial ideas predated this
discovery, it is also true that high-speed steel was symptomatic of
the technical changes which demanded a 'speed-up' of the work force to
keep pace with the new productive potential: Taylor's managerial
theory offered a solution to that problem. 4
The period also witnessed a legitimation crisis. The United
States was the country which had assimilated democratic and egalitarian values into its political rhetoric long before other Western
nations; at the same time, lacking the feudal and other residues of
precapitalist society, America also revealed capitalist relations of
production in more naked form than European nations. 5 This was not
an inherently stable combination, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, the growing mil itance of the.American labour movement and
the rise of the Socialist party to electoral contention in many parts
of the country, had precipitated a legitimation crisis of considerable
proportions. The demand for economic a~ well as political democracy
struck directly at one of the deepest roots of capitalist hegemony,
authority in the workplace. Progressivism was the political expression of the middle class and business reform movement which sought,
with considerable success, to recast the legitimacy of American
capitalism. Scientific management theory reinforced Progressivism's
success. It appeared to offer a 'hard,' 'scientific' solution to the
material problems of capitalist organization created by the technical
changes in the productive process, while at the same offering a vision
of an ideal order, a new bourgeois imaginaire more coherent and more
concrete than the confused and often inarticulate strivings of the
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working people for economic democracy.
In exploring this imaginaire, it is necessary to locate the producers of this new ideology within the class structure of the era.
American capitalists were, typically, incapable of generating their
own ideological defences, and left this task to the further division
of labour: in this case to the engineers. Scientific management
theory was almost entirely the product of professional engineers who
made their money as managerial consultants to big business. It is
easy to succumb to the temptation, as many Marxists have, to dismiss
these engineers as the hired prizefighters of the bourgeoisie, but
the specificity of the scientific management movement must be examined as a first priority. In this regard the existence of a certain tension between the concepts of the engineers, and the values of
those they were to serve cannot be ignored; the tension was reflected in contradictions within the theory itself. In the long run,
there can be no doubt at all that Taylorism was 'functional' to capitalist hegemony. Yet to simply collapse the Taylorites into capitalism, as so penetrating an observer as Harry Braverman unfortunately
does, 6 is to miss an important part of the theory's specificity and
thus of its actual impact on the world. More to the point are Marx's
comments on class and ideology in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte:
One must not form the narrow-minded notion that the
petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce
an egoistic class interest •... Just as little must
one imagine that the democratic representatives are
all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual positions, they may be separated from them
as widely as heaven from earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that
in their minds they do not go beyond the limits which
the latter do not go beyond in life, that they are
constantly driven theoretically to the same tasks and
solutions to which material interests and social position practically drive the latter. This is in general
the relationship of the political and literary representatives of a class to the class that they represent.
Nowhere was the tension between engineer and capitalist more
evident than over the key concept of efficiency, the very byword of
scientific management. The capitalist viewed efficiency in commercial terms, as the input-output ratio of investment to profit,
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measured in dollars. The engineer viewed efficiency more often in a
technical sense, as the input-output ratios of materials, measured
in productivity. The two did not always match up, by any means. 7
The introduction of scientific management to a plant required heavy
initial expenditures and the permanent increase in the size of the
managerial component of the plant establishment. As Taylor himself
recognized, so long as ~ firms in an industry continued to employ
antiquated methods of management, none would suffer in dollar terms
for their inefficiency. On the other hand, once one firm was induced
to undertake the investment, its increased productivity would eventually force others to imitate its methods. In the long run, Taylor
thought, technical efficiency was compatible with and a stimulus to
commercial efficiency. But in the short run, there was considerable
resistance on the part of employers to the introduction of Taylorism,
resistance which even led to Taylor's own dismissal from Bethlehem
Steel, and which prompted Taylor late in his 1ife to lay "nine-tenths" of the trouble his doctrines had encountered at management's
door, despite his more publicized difficulties with the labour unions.
Taylor tried to overcome this contradiction by drawing a sharp distinction between industrial capitalists, who were productive, and
finance capitalists, whose activities contributed little toward the
goal of overall economic efficiency. 8 This identification of bankers and financiers as the snakes in the capitalist garden of Eden
obviously demonstrates a profound naivety about the nature of capitalist production, but it is important to grasp that this ressentiment
of the engineers was as much self-mystification as it was conscious
legitimation of capitalist hegemony. It allowed these specialized
ideologists of management just enough critical distance from capitalism to produce a new and potent theory, but never enough distance
to allow them to overcome the theoretical contradictions arising out
of their own ambiguous class position.
The efficiency engineers' ambiguous position in the class
structure may also account for a certain self-conscious concern with
the class structure of industrial production which infuses their
writings. The question of class distinctions was very much at the
heart of Taylor's project and Taylorism as a theory become decidedly
weak, even vacuous, when emptied of its class content. This has been
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missed by many observers, especially those who have tried to see
Taylorism as the inevitable triumph of impersonal technique, much as
the very process of industrialization itself. This technological
determinism is shared by those who celebrate it, in the spirit of
laisser-innover, and those who decry it, in the Ellulian spirit of
lamentation. In the former category, grotesquely enough, we find
Lenin, to whom we shall return later. Suffice to say that it is a
fundamental assumption of this paper that scientific management is
concerned less with the mastery of man over nature than with the
mastery of man over man with nature as an instrument of this power.
It is doubtful that man:nature relations have ever been devoid of
decisive implications for man:man relations; it is most certainly
not the case with scientific management theory which always had
human, although not humane, relations as its object. 9
In one sense the introduction of 'Fordism'--fully mechanized
assembly-line production--was misleading as a guide to early twentieth
century capitalist practice. Few manufacturers achieved such a high
degree of control over production, and of the workers, by technical
means alone. A direct assault on the position of the workers was
necessary to reinforce the technical changes being introduced. One
prong was the open shop campaign. Another was the adoption of new
shop management methods which would drive back workers from one
traditional defence: their ownership of their skill or craft and a
consequent degree of control over the pace of production. As David
Montgomery puts it, the appeal of scientific management' implied a
conscious endeavour to uproot those work practices which had been the
taproot of whatever strength organized labour had enjoyed in the 19th
century; he adds that scientific management not only had to abolish
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older work practices, 'but also to discredit them in the public eye.'
To change the position of the worker it was first necessary to
redefine the very concept of work. This further implied a redefinition of the functions of management as well, since the productive
process was a unity. Taylor himself was always adamant that his
system demanded a 'complete revolution in the mental attitude and the
habits of those engaged in the management, as well as of the workman'
- this was the 'essence' of scientific management. He was always
quick to deny that his system was merely a toolbox, or set of tech-
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nical mechanisms for management. He even told one follower that
scientific management was essentially the 'application of certain
broad principles, and the particular way in which these principles
are applied is a matter of entirely subordinate detail.' 11
Taylor's 'philosophic' pretensions failed to hide certain contradictions in the theory itself, particularly an uneasy tension between crude materialism and a tendency to flights of idealism. While
testifying before a congressional committee on his 'mental revolution,' Taylor was astutely questioned whether a 'state of mind' was
not a 'very unstable and changeable thing upon which to base materialistic production.' Taylor, citing religion, replied that 'there
is nothing more stable in life than our convictions.' Scientific
management was, he added, a 'slow revolution, difficult to bring
about, but once it is brought about it is apt to be very stable.' It
was left to a congressman to bring Taylor back to earth by pointing
out that Taylor's own system promised a material interest which would
reinforce this mental development. 12 We should not allow Taylor's
idealism to mislead us, for its true significance lies elsewhere.
Like all effective ideologies, Taylorism fulfilled the double task
of expressing certain material interests while mystifying others.
Taylorism's idealist elements disclose how far it was from mere technical determinism. More audaciously, it was an attempt at gaining
assent and thus legitimation for a new structure of power of man over
man in the workplace.
There is a deep ambivalence at the heart of Taylor's fundamental
concept of 'human nature,' which can only be resolved by a frank recognition of class division. On the one hand, Taylor envisaged man
as an exerter of his powers and a maximizer of utilities. On the
other hand, he was inherently lazy and stupid and had to be led by a
combination of the carrot and the stick to exert himself at all.
'Stupid,' 'phlegmatic,' 'brutal,' workers were at best like 'horses,'
at worst, 'ox-like.' Yet utopian dreams took flight in Taylor's mind
when he contemplated the productive potential of Prometheus unbound,
of man the exerter of his capacities in command of machines and the
techniques of scientific organization. Taylor's vision of human nature has at its root an Aristotelian distinction between citizen and
slave, now metamorphosed into manager and worker. Both have the
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same nature to begin with, but the lower order is incapable of
achieving its highest human potential. The worker lives wholly in
the present; 'to look ahead, to visualize the future, to sacrifice a
present satisfaction for a later and greater one,' although fundamental to progress, eludes the grasp of the worker. Taylor argued that
the mechanism of the capitalist market served a double function.
Personal ambition, which 'always has been and will remain a more
powerful incentive to exertion than a desire for the general welfare:
is the eros which leads the capitalist to invest in future production. l3--nhe same ambition, more limited and brutalized, is the motive by which means managers can manipulate workers to exert themselves more effectively. Certainly Taylor's human nature is entirely
economistic. The difference is that the capitalist, expansive in his
ambition, sacrifices today in the interest of tomorrow and is thus
creative; the worker can be made more productive by offering him a
few more pennies today while threatening to remove his livelihood if
he does not cooperate.
Since Taylor styled himself a 'democrat,' and since at the same
time he posits different capacities, distributed on a class basis, to
realize the goals of what is, after all, the same 'human nature,' his
attempt to spell out proper class roles under a system of scientific
management is not without certain ambiguities. One complexity is
Taylor's extremely moralistic attitude toward the worker who 'soldiered,' or consciously restricted production. Obviously this can
be seen as simply the class interest of the manager attempting to
squeeze more output and thus more surplus value out of the worker.
Yet Taylor was himself a fanatic on the question of efficient personal productivity. The obsessive qualities of his personality have
not escaped the attention of at least one Eriksonian psycho-biographer.14 And there is the curious fact that this scion of a wealthy Philadelphia family refused to attend university and instead began his working career by signing on as an apprentice machinist at
the Midvale Steel company. In fact, the evidence of his published
writings and personal correspondence suggests that he was not simply
being cynically self-serving in his horror of 'soldiering,' but that,
in the words of his friend and biographer, 'the spectacle of a man
doing less than his best was to him morally shocking. He was con-
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cerned for the effect of it on a man's own character. He enthusiastically believed that to do anything less than your best is to add to
the sum of the world's unrighteousness.' 15
I think we should take this point seriously, or we will otherwise miss the moral thrust of scientific management theory, its capacity to find resonance in areas of American society far removed from
the shop floor. The quasi-religious popular ideology of the ~
ethic offered fertile soil for the new managerial theory. Antonio
Gramsci pointed out that it was no accident that Henry Ford sent company spies into workers' homes to check on the probity of their sex-ual lives; the discipline required for the new speeded-up industry
demanded the rationalization of sexuality and the conservation of
energy for production. The Taylorites had what one might call a
hegemonic value on their side in attacking workers who deliberately
slowed down the pace of their production. That they believed in this
value themselves only added power to their presentation. 16
Taylor's insistence on class division as the basis of the technical division of labour in the workplace becomes clear when his notion of a 'science of work' is examined. The worker's craft is indeed
significant, but more than he himself can understand. 'In almost all
of the mechanic arts the science which underlies each act of each
workman is so great and amounts to so much that the workman who is
best ~ted to actually doing the work is incapable of fully understandil"this science without the guidance and help of those who are
working'~ith him and over him, either through lack of education, or
through insufficient mental capacity.' Once responsibility for progress in these arts is left to 'intelligent and educated' men rather
than the workers who are 'actually labouring at their trade,' then
the road is open to a science where in the past there was only
'traditional or rule-of-thumb knowledge.' The key point is that only
men whose 'education has given them the habit of generalizing and
everywhere looking for laws' can resolve the multitude of work problems in all trades into 'certain logical groups' and 'then search
for some general laws or rules to guide them in their solutions. ,17
Yet Taylor admits that these 'laws' are in fact 'so simple that
the average man would hardly dignify them with the name of a science',
More revealing yet, he admitted under questioning that 'there are
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many workmen who ...have plenty of brains and are intellectually just
as capable of developing a science as those on the managing side.'
Further, the old'rule of thumb knowledge' of the workers was 'quite
as exact as that which is finally obtained by the management, but
which the workmen in 999 cases out of a thousand kept in their heads,
and of which there was no permanent or complete record.' The real
nub of his argument rests squarely on class interests: even if workers have developed a 'science' of their work, they will keep it as a
'trade secret' for themselves and their 'friends,' instead of making
it 'public property' and thus the basis for generally increased productivity. 18 Taylor's assumption is by no means insignificant: so
long as workers remain workers, that is, sellers of their labour to
the capitalist, they cannot be expected to contribute voluntarily to
techniques of increased productivity, not because they are incapable
of doing so but because it is not in their interest to do so, since
the return on their increased productivity will be appropriated by
the capitalist. As Marx might say, the dark secret at the basis of
capitalist production is revealed in the contradictions of its most
'disinterested' and 'scientific' theory~
Within the confines of Taylor's world view, he developed a picture of class differences so compelling that only vastly increased
powers of management over workers could in any sense solve the problem of production. This becomes clear when Taylor's first experience as a foreman at the Midvale Steel company is examined. When
Taylor arrived as a worker at Midvale in 1878, he discovered that the
'shop was really run by the workmen and not by the bosses,' with the
workers setting production quotas. When he was eventually graduated
to gang boss, he then informed his former fellow workers that he was
now on management's side and declared that he was going to make them
work harder and produce more. There followed a now-celebrated war in
which Taylor used all the classic weapons of management--firing, lowering wages, bringing in new men--and workers resisted with all the
means at their command, including sabotage. 'No one,' wrote Taylor
later, 'who has not had this experience can have an idea of the bitterness which is gradually developed in such a struggle.' Management
might well have decided to sacrifice such a trouble fomenting foreman for the sake of peace in the plant. In fact the company backed
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him to the end of his successful struggle. It is Taylor's stated
reasons for his success which are fascinating, for the light they
throw on the class basis of scientific management. First, 'owing to
the fact that he happened not to be of working parents, the owners of
the company believed that he had the interests of the works more at
heart than the other workmen'. Second, and even more important, if
Taylor 'had been one of the workmen, and had lived where they lived,
they would have brought such social pressure to bear upon him that it
would have been impossible to have stood out against them.' Taylor
even admitted to the workers that they were in effect right to resist
his directives; if he had been in their place he would have done the
same. 'My sympathies were with the workmen, and my duty lay to the
people by whom I was employed.' In this classic story one can almost
visualise the disappearance of the old foreman, so often risen from
the ranks, and his simultaneous replacement by the new scientific
manager, decisively set off both by class origins and education,
from the workers he is to command. 19
The irreconcilable differences revealed in the Midvale struggle
set Taylor on the road to developing a scientific methodology for
'solving' the labour problem. The 'great mental revolution' which
was scientific management came down to this, according to Taylor:
'both sides take their eyes off of (sic) the division of the surplus
as the all-important matter, and together turn their attention toward
increasing the size of the surplus until this surplus becomes so
large that it is unnecessary to quarrel over how it should be divided.' Now this is the merest commonplace folklore of North American
capitalism, the devalued currency of every Chamber of Commerce politician. In this sense, Taylorism has little new to offer. Taylor,
however, followed this up with a second 'essential element' of the
theory: '80th sides must recognize as essential the substitution of
exact scientific investigation and knowledge for the old individual
judgement or opinion, either of the workman or the boss.' 20 Taylorism, then, purported to offer a new scientific means for legitimating
what William Appleman Williams has called America's 'great evasion'
of class conflict.
It is interesting to note that Taylor early on had set himself
the task of discovering the 'fact' of what constituted a 'proper
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day's worK. ,21 Now, a 'proper' or 'fair' day's work is not a scientific, or even an economic concept in terms of classical economic
theory.
If anything, it harks back to the prescientific and precapitalist concept of the 'just price.' This should alert us, not to
the possibility
that Taylor was a closet Thomist,
hood that his 'science' was uneasily
concealing
but to the likelia secret which was
the very opposite of science.
Taylor made it a central principle of scientific management that
workers should be kept as much as possible from working in gangs, the
ideal management being one which kept workers
fellows and under direct managerial control.
isolated from their
In defence of this he
cited the 'loss of ambition and initiative, which takes place in
workmen when they are herded into gangs instead of being treated as
separate individuals' ; when isolated, the worker's
'personal ambition is stimulated.' 22 It is only necessary to recall Taylor's own
account of his Midvale war with the workers to realize the reality
underlying this rhetoric:
workers in groups developed powerful social solidarity which resists management's speed-ups; the isolated
worker in a wage relationship to his employer can be more readily
controlled.
'Initiative' on the part of workers was the last thing
Taylor wanted. The real thrust of his argument was to increase
managerial control, but the argument was put forward in the deceptive
fashion of ideology, wrapped in the legitimating rhetoric of American
bourgeois individualism hypocritically applied to a class actually
debarred from its exercise.
We get closer yet to the mystifying
core of Taylorite
ideology
when we examine Taylor's reporting of Frank Gilbreth's experiments in
bricklaying productivity.
Gilbreth had earlier demonstrated that he
could teach his bricklayers
to raise their daily production
quota
from 960 to 2,800 bricks per day; this was made possible, he claimed,
by scientifically reducing the number of motions per brick from 18 to
5, and by offering the workers $1.50 per day above the standard union
rate. The chairman of the congressional committee to which Taylor
has reported this inspiring story was not impressed.
Assuming, he
allowed, that Gilbreth's bricklayers had voluntarily tripled their
output, 'the spirit having got into their minds,' 'do you want this
committee
to believe that the same spirit has got into the mind of
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Mr. Gilbreth when he only paid them $6.50 per those 2,800 bricks as
against $5.00 for 960?' Taylor readily admitted that his system
'seems grossly unjust,' but then advanced rationalizations.23
It was essential to Taylorism that scientifically managed workers
should be paid more than others, just as Henry Ford paid 'high wages'
-this was the carrot judicially used in conjunction with the stick.
But this carrot must be kept short. Wages must be increased by up to
60% - sometimes he spoke of 30-50% - but no more. To buttress the
arbitrary magic of this 60%, Taylor invented a grotesque pseudo-scientific law, based on 'experiment and close observation,' that increases of up to 60% made workers 'not only more thrifty but better
men in every way.' If management were to allow increases of more than
60% to its employees, 'many of them will work irregularly, and tend to
become more or less shiftless, extravagant and dissipated. Our experiments showed, in other words, that it does not do for most men to get
rich too fast.' 24 The obverse which Taylor left unstated, is that it
'does' for a few men (capitalists) to get rich fast from gains in the
productivity of their workers. The 'science' in all this is best
passed over in silence.
We reach the ideological centre of this line of reasoning when
Taylor asserts that 'it was not due to (the worker's) initiative or
originality that he did his big day's work, but to the knowledge of
the science (of work), developed and taught to him by someone else,'
that is, by scientific managers. Thus, increased output of labour is
not a product of the worker's own labour power but of the power of
management's brain, the worker being only a machine-likeconduit for
the creative capacity of management. Now we can understand the crucial significance of Taylor's testimony that scientific management begins with 'the deliberate gathering in on the part of those on the
management's side of all of the great mass of traditional knowledge,
which in the past has been kept in the heads of the workmen, and in
the physical skill and knowledge of the workman, which he has acquired
through years of experience.' 25
It is Harry Braverman who has argued the significance of Taylorism's separation of hand and brain or conception and execution most
decisively;
Not only is capital the property of the capitalist, but
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labor itself has become part of capital. Not only do the
workers lose control over their instruments of production,
but they must now lose control over their own labor and
the manner of its performance. This control now falls to
those who can 'afford' to study it in order to know it
better than the workers themselves know their own life
activity ....
The separation of hand and brain is the most decisive
single step in the division of labor taken by the
capitalist mode of production. It is inherent in that
mode of production from its beginnings, and it develops,
under capitalist management, throughout the history of
capitalism, but it is only during the past century that
the scale of production, the resources made available to
the modern corporation by the rapid accumulation of
capital, and the conceptual apparatus and trained
personnel have become available to institutionalize this
separation in a systematic and formal fashion. 26
Scientific management, as both the practical systematization and the
theoretical expression of this separation, is the ideological justification of the expropriation not only of the labour of the workers,
but of their knowledge of how to expend their labour power. The capitalists' monopolization of the means of production is to be matched
by a monopolization of knowledge as well. Braverman has laid bare a
fundamental truth about advanced industrial capitalism and has thus
extended Marxist theory significantly. At the same time, the broad
sweep of Braverman's argument underplays, perhaps justifiably, some
subtleties which in my view are relevant to scientific management ~_
a political ideology.
For one thing, as Braverman himself makes clear, Taylorism was
much more than a simple statement of managerial monopoly over labour
power, it was in fact a practical programme for the degradation of
labour to the point where it would conform,in reality, to its new
theoretical status. Taylor's purpose was to 'cheapen the worker by
decreasing his training and enlarging his output.' Or, in the words
of Frank Gilbreth with which Braverman closes his book, 'Training a
worker means merely enabling him to carry out the directions of his
work schedule. Once he can do this, his training is over, whatever
his age.' 27 The contradiction between Taylor's disdainful description of the worker's 'nature' and his recognition that the workers in
fact had demonstrated considerable skill in production, although for
their ends and not management's, was to be resolved by a process of
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progressive degradation of work, and thus workers, through the instrumentality of scientific management itself in alliance with techniques
of mechanization, to the point where. workers would eventually conform
to Taylor's reading of their nature as 'ox-like' and 'phlegmatic.'
Management not only 'gathers in' (i.e., expropriates) the knowledge
workers have accumulated, but it further prevents them from acquiring
new knowledge. One writer who has surveyed various attempts to measure man's capacity for maximum output per day, going back to the
eighteenth century, concludes that '1 am still fascinated by what
appears to be the constant of the science of manpower: the clinical
attitude of those who measure work to those who do it ...the idea of a
man-machine was a fundamental assumption ....' 28 Scientific management fell squarely withinthis tradition in its urge to reduce the
worker to a mere machine, and thus to remove his human status from
consideration in much the same way as Aristotle removed the slave from
consideration.
Aristotle's task was, however, incomparably easier than that of
the Taylorites, for slaves were not and never had been citizens.
American workers were citizens of a democratic, albeit capitalist,
republic. Universal manhood suffrage (excluding women and blacks, of
course) has existed for almost a century before Taylor's public career. Moreover, America was, in important ways, a liberal democracy:
freedom of association reinforced by freedom of speech and freedom of
the press meant that, in the long run, union organization and collective action by workers could not be repressed except by doing severe
violence to the fundamental legitimating values of the political system. Within this context, the working class was not without its own,
sometimes effective, means of resistance to the managerial onslaught.
Such resistance had to be taken into account by capitalists and, consequently, by the management theorists themselves. There is no doubt
that Braverman has correctly understood the tendency inherent in the
labour process in the twentieth century, but he does not deal adequately with the working class response, thus missing the dialectic
which was at work.
Taylor personally detested unions. Near the end of his congressional testimony he was challenged by labour representatives. In
the words of his biographer, 'With flushed face, he hurled de-
91
nunciations and made accusations which in the nature of thin9s he
could not prove. For a time it appeared as if blows would be struck
He left the stand much shaken. ,29 The initial reactions of the
unions to Taylor and his ideas was in no more question. Perhaps the
best single statement of the reasons for worker resistance to Tay10rism came from a union representative who challenged Taylor at a public
lecture in 1914:
•.. in the past one of the means by which an employee has
been able to keep his head above water and prevent being
oppressed by the employer has been that the employer didn't
know exactly what the employee could do. The only way that
the workman has been able to retain time enough in which to
do the work with the speed with which he thinks he ought to
do it, has been to keep the employer somewhat in ignorance of
exactly the time needed .... We don't want to work as fast
as we can. We want to work as we think it's comfortable for
us to work. We haven't come into existence for the purpose
of seeing how great a task we can perform throughout a lifetime. We are trying to regulate our work so as to make it
an auxiliary to our lives, and to be benefited thereby.
Most people walk to work in the morning, if it isn't too
far. If somebody were to discover that they could run to
work in one third the time, they might have no objection
to have that fact ascertained, but if the man who ascertained it had the power to make them run, they might object
to having him find out'30
Autocracy was at the very heart of Taylor's approach to the workplace. In response to the obvious question of why Gilbreth's 'science' of bricklaying only appeared in the twentieth century, when all
the elements for such a science had long existed, Taylor resorted to
the need for techniques of control: 'It is only through enforced
standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements
and working conditions, and enforced cooperation (~) that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing this cooperation
rests with the management alone.' (This argument is fascinating in
itself; more efficient production involves cooperative effort on the
part of the workers, but the structural conditions of capitalist production ensure that spontaneous cooperation of the workers will be
directed against higher productivity; hence, management must enforce
cooperation through isolating the workers from one another and then
artificially recreating cooperation through direct managerial control
of the individual worker's actions. Taylor was himself given to
92
brusquely informing subordinates who suggested ideas, 'You are not
supposed to think, there are other people paid for thinking around
here. '
I have found it necessary almost invariably to talk but
little to men, but to go right ahead and MAKE them do what
I wanted them to do, and this implies the experience of
knowing how, by hook or crook, to get men to do what at the
time they do not wish to do. It is part persuasion and part
force, and the presentation of actual object lessons of
various kinds and the academic man neither understands nor
believes in the use of this sort of force'31
A much publ icised strike at the Watertown naval arsenalapparently inspired by worker resistance to the introduction of the stop
watch and scientific management techniques focused public attention
upon labour's opposition to the new managerial theory. The Commission
on Industrial Relations, then investigating the growing incidence of
industrial violence and capital-labour conflict in America, in 1914
appointed Robert Hoxie, a Chicago professor of political economy, to
investigate the specific question of scientific management. The AFL
cooperated readily with the study, the Taylorites only grudgingly.
Hoxie's report constitutes the most thoughtful and certainly the most
anguished inquiry into the human implications of Taylorism to appear
in this era. Hoxie concluded that scientific management constituted
a definite threat to both crafts and craft unionism, strengthened
management and weakened labour, and was autocratic and not democratic.
At the same time, he recognized Taylorism as the highest development
in 'sheer mechanics of production and inherently in line with the
march of events.' Lacking intellectual defences against Taylorism's
claims to scientific objectivity and technical inevitability, Hoxie
was forced to conclude that the new theory simply 'exemplified one of
the advanced stages of the industrial revolution which began with the
invention and introduction of machinery.' Yet his obstinate refusal
to look upon workers as the Taylorites did, but to see them instead
as autonomous human beings, also led him to conclude that it was
labour's'duty' to combat Taylorism's attack on its 'human rights.'
Yet there was also a 'right of investigation, perpetual desire and
experiment ...sometimes with a beneficent front, sometimes as a Frankenstein.' Hoxie's final vision was tragic, in the Hegelian sense
that the essence of tragedy is the war of right against right: 'the
93
fact to face is that your Commission is dealing in this matter with
two forces, neither of which may nor will be sacrificed to the other.
Only four of the nine members of the Commission signed the report. The despairing Hoxie continued to write in a 'rather gloomy
manner' until he took his own life in 1916. 32
Of the initial hostility of the unions there can be no doubt,
although there is some controversy over the actual impact of this resistance in slowing down the introduction of scientific management.
Although Braverman rather unidimensionally argues for the untrammeled
triumph of Taylorism, some recent writers with a more empirical historical bent have called this into question by arguing that union
resistance was in many cases relatively effective, at least in stopping the establishment of Taylorism tout court, even though important elements of the theory may have eventually been established in
practice on a piecemeal basis. 33 It is interesting to note that the
first major revisionist trend within the Taylorite movement (apart
from Gilbreth's schismatic avowal of motion as well as time study)
was the curious development of a 'Left Taylorism' which had its origins even prior to Taylor's own death in 1915, and became more or less
dominant following the war. Two Taylorites, Robert Valentine and C.
Bertrand Thompson, had provoked their master's wrath as early as 1914
by arguing that the method of application of scientific management
must be altered to include the participation and cooperation of the
unions. The eventual acceptance of this somewhat heretical perspective within the mainstream of the Taylor Society and the efficiency
movement does seem to indicate that worker resistance to the original
autocratic form of Taylorism had in fact necessitated a more conciliatory stance on the part of the managerial theorists. As Thompson
put it, Taylorism was both a set of 'laws' and collection of 'principles': 'The laws of science are not determined by counting heads;
but principles of conduct in a free society can be enforced only by
the consent of those affected. If this consent requires the cooperation of organized labour, so be it....' 34
The integration of the organized labour movement into the war
effort seemed to offer substantive evidence of labour's willingness
to consent to Taylorism so long as the unions could participate in its
implementation. A veritable wave of cooperation between the AFL and
94
scientific managers took shape in the early 1920s. By 1930, the AFL
had a scientific management consultant who penned 'Labour's principles of scientific management' in the Federationist. For their part,
the Taylorites moved leftward. The Bulletin of the Taylor Society,
for example, sided with the workers in the bituminous coal strike of
1919. In 1921 a Taylorite committee of the Federated American Engineering Societies, headed by Herbert Hoover, published a survey of
waste in American industry which laid twice as much blame on management as on the workers. Ironically enough, all this was going on
within a context of declining unionism, the general rejection by
American industry of cooperation with the unions, and the eclipse of
Progressivism in politics as Republican 'normalcy' replaced the concerns of pre-war America. Finally the Great Depression of the 1930s
finished off Left Taylorism, just as it finished off the managerial
ideology of so-called 'welfare'capitalism, with provisions for housing, health care, pensions, education, recreation and worker representation plans, which had briefly competed with Taylorism. 35 Left
Taylorism was a doomed tendency, but it is most significant for what
it tells us about the eagerness of the American union movement to be
co-opted into the implementation of a programme to which workers felt
an instinctive aversion. Worker resistance made Taylorism more conciliatory; on the other hand, labour rarely articulated fundamental
criticisms of the theory itself, but only complained of its practical
effects. Given its inability to generate alternative visions of an
egalitarian industrial order, the best that the union movement could
do was to participate in the implementation of Taylorism with a human
face.
What then was the Taylorite vision of order, the imaginaire which
inspired such devoted enthusiasm from some of the leading intellectuals of the progressive era? Taylor's friend and biographer Copley
begins one passage with this promising introduction: 'Now, in 1894
Taylor dreamed a great dream, and in a Piece-Rate System he told as
much about it as he deemed wise ..•.' What follows, however, is a
most peculiar 'dream':
What is needed is a hand-book on the speed with which
work can be done, similar to the elementary engineering handbooks. And the writer ventures to predict
that such a book will before long be forthcoming.
95
Such a book should prescribe the best method of making,
recording, tabulating, and indexing time observations,
since much time and effort are wasted by the adoption of
inferior methods.
Copley allows that 'few ever gained any understanding of this dream
of his,' but that 'what he dreamed he set out to bring to pass ....'
Again, near death, Taylor was dreaming of a book 'giving the laws of
the movements of men in the machine shop - all the laws, not only a
few of them .... Let me predict, gentlemen, just as sure as the sun
shines that it is going to come in every trade.' This is not an unrealizable utopian vision. 'Why? Because it pays, and for no other
reason.' 36
The bourgeois imaginaire has generally been somewhat philistine,
but Taylor's seems unusually so. Other Taylorites at time permitted
themselves a trifle more poetry, even if it was the po~sie concrete
of the engineer. One Taylorite disclosed that
My dream is that the time will come when every drill
press will be speeded just so, and every planer, every
lathe the world over will be harmonized just like the
musical pitches are the same allover the world ....
That dream will come true, sometime.
The vision is mechanistic and certainly inhuman in a very literal
sense: humanity has simply disappeared from the equations of the
engineer. But let us not fall into the trap of technological determinism. If we look more closely at Taylor's imaginaire we see something else. Scientific management, he argued, results in an almost
equal division of the actual work between management and labour,
whereas in the past, 'practically all' was done by the workers. In
the ideal factory, there is 'hardly a single act or piece of work done
by any workman in the shop which is not preceded and followed by some
act on the part of one of the men in the management ... All day long
every workman's acts are dovetailed in between corresponding acts of
the management ...under this intimate, close, personal cooperation
(sic:) between the two sides, it becomes practically impossible to
have a serious quarrel.' 37 Class conflict will ultimately be abolished not by technology, but by careful, minute, scientific methods
of social control, with the controllers in a 1:3 ratio to the controlled. It is a bureaucratic-authoritarian vision, one which is far
from the old laisser-faire entrepreneurial vision of the nineteenth
96
century. It is a leap forward into the near future of the capitalist
state. Of course the reality has turned out to be a good deal less
tidy and organized than Taylor's vision, but one can still recognize
significant elements of the new order. Taylor had seen the future,
and it ~
(in both the literal and figurative senses). One thing
was sure: the old order of liberal individualist enterprise was at
an end. Scientific management heralded the coming of the bureaucrat;
whether the bureaucrat was to be industrial or governmental was, in
the end, a matter of basic indifference to the theory, just as it has
been in practice.
Some political implications of Taylorism were spelled out by
Taylor's associate Henry L. Gantt. Gantt proclaimed that 'the era of
force must give way to the era of knowledg~, but to appreciate this
maxim one must realize that to engineers like Gantt 'knowledge' was
itself power, indeed, the ultimate basis of effective and lasting
power. Leadership must be emphasized above all. Gantt significantly quotes Napoleon to the effect that it is not armies which win
battles, but generals. Men are not born equal, but democracy has one
supreme merit--equality of opportunity allows the best to rise; scientific management of every aspect of the nation's life will ensure
that this is so. 'In a successful industrial nation the industrial
leaders must ultimately become the leaders of the nation.' Gantt
admired the Soviet system--although not the Bolsheviks who ran it--as
an 'attempt to make the business and industrial system serve the
community as a whole, and in doing so to take over the function of
and entirely supplant the political system.' 38
Gantt's utopia was a 'self-perpetuating system of management
based on the efficient utilization of scientific knowledge.' This
new world was already emerging out of the womb of the old. 'Under
such a system we have cooperation like that in a football team or an
orchestra, where each man has the part he can do best.' Thus the
ancient Platonic conception of justice finds a strange rebirth in the
dreams of the efficiency engineer: A hierarchy based on meritocracy,
power derived from knowledge--but who are to be the philosopher-kings
who will command this Republic? 'The organization must be continuously perfected by men familiar with the industries and trained in the
methods of scientific investigation.' These turn out to be (who
97
else?)
who--and
the engineers,
men of 'few 0p1n10ns and many facts and deeds'
here the whining note of special pleading
becomes insistent
--will thereby gain for their profession the 'recognition to which it
is already entitled as the most important factor in modern civilization.' This was a prescription for 'real democracy,' which Gantt defined as the 'release of the infinite energy of all the people for
creative work, something more than releasing
1 imited debate.'
'Real democracy,'
their opinions
Gantt affirmed,
for un-
'consists of the
organization of human affairs in harmony with natural laws, so that
each individual shall have an equal opportunity to function at his
highest possible capacity.' 39
Inspired by his faith in Taylorism, Gantt organized a group
called, fittingly enough, the New Machine.
The Machine turned out a
letter to President Woodrow Wilson which, in its political naivety
and technocratic idealism, says a great deal about the nature and
1 imitations of the efficiency engineer in pol t t ics , 'Business,' they
argued, 'should be consciously and openly political ...the invisible
government should be made visible.'
All the productive forces should
unite to free enterprise from the yoke of unearned income, from
'idlers and wastrels,' the 'mere desk men who sit as the agents of a
leisure class.'
Production
demands that the people be liberated
the 'cold and senseless mechanism
of plutocracy.'
from
After all, the
justification of business is its material productivity, not private
profit, and if business cannot accept its social responsibility, the
'community will take it over.'
'The tools must belong to those who
know how to use them,' proclaimed the New Machine in a manifesto of
the engineers comically parodying Marx's call to the workers of the
world. Elsewhere, Gantt demanded a more specific attack on the idle
finance capitalists in the form of a 'public finance' or 'democratic
credit' system, which 'would enable us to take advantage of all the
productive forces in the community' by making finance serve industry
rather than the reverse. 40 The new credit system 'must be able to
finance not only those who have ownership but also those who have
productive capacity.'
Gantt thus stands somewhere between Major
Douglas's Social Credit and a species of vulgar proto-Keynesianism.
Needless to say, none of these moral exhortations to political power
resulted
in the slightest change in the position of finance capital-
98
ism, and the New Machine ground to an early and inglorious halt. The
efficiency engineers could no more challenge the political power of
capitalism than they could effective1! challenge the profit motive in
business. The fate of the progressive engineer Herbert Hoover, bleakly facing the Great Depression armed only with the empty homilies of
capitalist folklore speaks volumes for the ultimate absurdity of
Thorstein Veblen's misplaced faith in the engineers assaviours of a
business civilization. The irony is that despite Gantt's Caesarist
dreams, the Tay10rites were not after all generals, but valuable
members of the field staff.
Scientific management was an instrument in the hands of power and
wealth, in many cases a very effective instrument. The compelling
intellectual strength of Tay10rite doctrine is nowhere better exemplified than in its acceptance as neutral 'science' by Lenin and the
leaders of the Russian Revolution, with the most profound consequences
for the shape of the new socialist man who was supposed to emerge out
of the ruins of capitalism. It is well worth examining the evolution
of Lenin's views on Tay10rism, both for the light it sheds on scientific management's ideological power as well on the Soviet Communist ideas of work, and thus of workers.
Lenin's first indication of interest in Taylorism was in 1914 ,
but first impressions were not promising: 'The Taylor System--man's
enslavement by the machine' he wrote, describing a device whereby capitalists simply stepped up the rate of surplus value extraction by
speeding up the workers. He further perceived, however, that Tay10rism 'without its initiators knowing it or wishing it' was preparing
the time when the proletariat would take over and 'rationalize all
social labour,' allowing less working time with greater return. In
his 'notebooks on imperialism,' Lenin indicated that he had been reading Taylor's Shop Management, noting particularly Taylor's argument
that an increase in the supposedly non-productive administrative staff
could result in overall savings through increased productivity, as
well as Taylor's description of manipulating workers through pay incentives and promotion. He also hailed the Gilbreths , work on motion
study as a 'splendid example of technical progress under capitalism
towards socialism.' In State and Revolution, Lenin clarified the role
of the new managerial theories in the transition to socialism. The
99
revolutionary state of armed workers will be the employers of all the
citizens, each of whom must do their 'proper share of work'. Lenin is
confident that 'the accounting and control necessary for this have
been simpljfjed by capitalism to the utmost and reduced to the extraordinarily simple operations--which any literate person can perform-of supervising and recording, knowledge of the rules of arithmetic,
and issuing appropriate receipts.' 41
These were Lenin's views on the eve of revolution. In the event
itself, his ideas underwent further modification while demonstrating
a striking continuity. In 'the immediate tasks of the Soviet government' in April of 1918, Lenin admitted that accounting and control
had not proved so simple as he had believed, and that 'bourgeois
specialists' should be hired, at a competitive price. Turning to
labour productivity, he noted sadly that the masses suffered from a
low educational and cultural standard and that work discipline and
efficiency had to be raised by applying 'much of what is scientific
and progressive in the Taylor system,' especially the piece-rate
system which gears wages to productivity. In a much quoted passage,
Lenin asserted that
The Russian is a bad worker compared with people in
advanced countries. It would not be otherwise under
the tsarist regime and in view of the persistence of
the hangover from serfdom. The task that the Soviet
government must set the people in all its scope is-learn to work.
The Taylor system, the last word of capitalism in this
respect, like all capitalist progress, is a combination
of the refined brutality of bourgeois exploitation and
a number of its greatest scientific achievements in the
field of analysing mechanical motions during work, the
elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the
working out of correct methods of work, the introduction
of the best systems of accounting and control, etc. The
Soviet Republic must at all costs adopt all that is valuable in the achievements of science and technology in
this field. The possibility of building socialism will
be determined precisely by our success in combining the
Soviet power and the Soviet organization of administration with the modern achievements of capitalism.
In the original, unpublished version of this document, Lenin had permitted himself to speculate on why Taylorism should be opposed by the
workers under capitalism but welcomed by workers under socialism as
an instrument of liberation, permitting them to expend six hours per
100
day physical labour and four hours running the workers' state. In a
private conversation, he suggested that the Soviet regime could remove 'Taylorism's bourgeois trappings with the help of scientific research and practical experience and examine it carefully for those
elements which could facilitate the work process and offer some relief to the worker by transferring the hard physical labour to the
machine.' Yet even these glimmers of utopianism were rapidly being
dismissed from Lenin's mind. 42
By the spring of 1918 Lenin was arousing criticism by his proposal to use and even intensify existing wage differentials as a deliberate device for increasing productivity. Taylorism should be
decreed, he ordered, even if American consultants had to be hired.
Breaches of labour discipline would result in severe penalties. Ominously enough, he argued that under capitalism, factory discipline
and dismissal were subject to civil contract, but that under socialism, 'a breach of discipline ...will be a criminal offence subject to a
definite punishment'--imprisonment. The left oppositionists who feared that this concealed a restoration of capitalist relations of production were ridiculed by Lenin in 'Left-wing childishness and the
petty-bourgeois mentality.' In this speech, Lenin took the side of
giant companies, even of 'state capitalism' as more progressive than
small property, particularly as it was big business which had developed technical expertise in productivity.
Socialism is not a figment of the imagination, but the
assimilation and application by the proletarian vanguard ...
of what has been created by the trusts. We, the party of
the proletariat, have no other way of acquiring the ability
to organize large-scale production on trust lines, as trusts
are organized, except by acquiring first-class capitalist
experts.
The trade union congress voted to endorse the piece-rate system
and production bonuses, as well as accepting responsibility for enforcing the rules of order in the factories. Then with the onset of
civil war, what E.H. Carr termed a 'climate of opinion rather than a
settled policy' was 'given rapid shape and substance' by the exigencies of war communism. 43
During the war, the Mensheviks as well as the left oppositionists pressed for workers' control of the railway system. Lenin. on
the contrary, argued strongly that the railways were the Bolsheviks'
lifeline, and that military considerations demanded authoritarian
and centralized control. Taylorite discipline had to be consolidated. With a Bolshevik victory, a pattern had been firmly set. In 1920
Lenin was demanding a yet more intensified system of discipline and
incentives. He was supported by Trotsky who added a new theme--the
'militarization' of labour was not merely a necessity of war conditions,
but was 'fundamental' to the building of socialism. Trotsky declared
that 'we are now advancing towards a type of labour socially regulated on the basis of an economic plan which is compulsory for each
worker. That is the foundation of socialism
Man must work in
order not to die. He does not want to work. But the social organization compels and whips him in that direction.' In the early 1920s,
a Time League promoted 'scientific labour organization' and 'Communist
Americanism' in Soviet factories. The Central Labour Institute, under
the direction of an enthusiastic Taylorite, Alexei Gastev (who penned
Proletcult verses celebrating the triumph of a 'mechanized collectivism' in which man would merge with machine), won out over opposition
by the mid 1920s. Worker morale and worker safety were subordinated
to the goal of higher productivity at all costs. 44
Robert Linhart has recently attempted to partially extricate
Lenin from responsibility for what has happened in Soviet industry.
The Bolshevik leaders under the tsarist regime had not been able to
establish an organic relationship with the Russian workers and thus
tended to look upon the working class as an object. Moreover, Lenin
saw the end of opposition between manual and intellectual work not as
the result of the deliberate action of the proletariat, but as the
ultimate product of the development of productive forces--the proletariat should focus on control of the state, not the productive
process. Linhart tries to argue that Lenin had always understood
Taylorism in terms of the principal contradictions of the day; here
he lays great emphasis on the experience of war communism. The later
Soviet institutionalization of Taylorism allegedly constitutes a
negation of Lenin's dialectical method. 45 It does seem that Lenin
had always more or less accepted Taylorism as 'science'--not too
surprisingly, given his rather positivist understanding of science-and had always seen it as a neutral instrument which could be expropriated by the revolution and turned to its own purposes. But
102
this ready acceptance of Taylorism on its own terms involved a refusal to recognize the profound class character of the doctrine, which
I have tried to make clear. If Taylorism was not so much a science
of machine production as a system for establishing the mastery of
management over workers through the expropriation of the workers'
knowledge of the production process, then Lenin's crude 'graft' of
the theory onto the socialist project concealed a profound contradiction which was to grow malignantly within the Soviet experiment.
Even so subtle a European Marxist thinker as Gramsci showed remarkable ambivalencetoward Taylorism. In his activities in Turin in
the early postwar period, Gramsci showed an affinity for a 'productivist' approach to factory organization, which included welcoming the
scientific management of labour (introduced at Fiat before the war).
Factory Councils would help discipline workers through their participation in the implementation of the new techniques. Gramsci was
concerned not only with the development of revolutionary consciousness but with jndustrial consciousness in general. Martin Clark
suggests that Gramsci, 'regarded Taylorism--and perhaps even Marxism,
at times--as a kind of late-industrial "Methodism", with important
ideological functions'. While absorbing and dominating bourgeois
culture, revolutionary workers would especially absorb the productive values of advanced capitalism. 46
To the extent that Gramsci conflated techniques with certain
political methods of implementing techniques, he thus, like Lenin,
saw the ideological character of Taylorism as arising only from its
context, not its content. His prison notes on 'Americanism and Fordism' can thus be read as including Taylorism as an aspect of industrial rationalization. America, he wrote, was building a new man through
action, not words, 'creating a future which is intrinsic to its objective activity and which it prefers to keep quiet about. Although there
were aspects of this process which Gramsci disliked, it was to him a progressive development; the underlying tone of admiration is hard to mistake.
Working class resistance to the rationalization of production was largely a
result of backward craft rights. In Italy, skilled workers had 'never'
opposed techniques of rationalization in industry, nor should they. In
Hegelian tones, Gramsci argued that Fordism was 'rational, that is, it
should be generalized.
Gramsci even developed an argument that production
I
103
becomes more efficient the less the worker is interested in the process. Mechanization completes the separation of the worker from his
craft: 'it is done, and it is not the spiritual death of man'. He
pushed the argument further yet--mechanization liberates the brain of
the worker, which may reach a 'state of complete freedom,' while the
repetitive tasks of the assembly line are habituated into the nervous
system, like the process of walking. All this, Gramsci concluded,
will allow the worker to more freely develop his revolutionary consciousness. 47 About this latter, perhaps the less said the better.
No more than the conservative American union movement did Marxist revolutionaries develop a coherent critique of the class content
of Taylorism. Neither did they develop any real alternative vision
of socialist relations of production within the workplace. It would
be misleading to suggest only idealist explanations for their failure
to think this problem through. Lenin and Gramsci theorized within a
particular historical moment, one of local industrial underdevelopment within a world context of capitalist industrialization. This
structured and limited their universe of discourse. It is clear from
Lenin's writings that uppermost in his own mind was the state of industrial underdevelopment of the Russian economy, and the necessity,
not so much of disciplining an existing skilled work force but of
creating such a force out of peasants. Taylorism, born out of capitalism's desire to take control of the productive process away from
a skilled working class, was to be the ruling ideology of the Soviet
attempt to force peasants into the unfamiliar discipline of the industrial workplace. It is perhaps no greater irony than that Marx's
ideas, directed at the most advanced industrial nations of Europe,
should have found their most practical results in the underdeveloped,
even deudal societies of Asia, Africa and Latin America, but there it
is.
These historical ironies cast into sharp relief the power of
Taylorism as an ideology. In advanced capitalist societies it did
not resolve the contradiction between the authoritarian values of the
workplace and the democratic values of the political system, but it
did consolidate managerial authority while helping to contain the legitimation crisis of capitalism. In the Soviet Union it offered techniques for control and discipline of an emerging industrial work force
l~
which fitted
itarianism.
of authority
undreamed by
in well with tendencies to bureaucratization and authorWhat remains then is to develop that alternative vision
relations in the workplace which was so tragically left
the natural opponents of scientific management.
105
FOOTNOTES
1. The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford, 1978), Democratic
Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford, 1973), The Real World of
Democracy (Toronto, 1965), and The Political Theory of Possessive
Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1961).
2. Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management (New York, 1954),
p. 280.
3. Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory
System in the United States, 1880-1920 (Madison, Wisconsin, 1975h
offers some statistical evidence of the growth in factory size,
pp. 3-35.
4. Hugh G. J. Aitken, Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal: Scientific
Management in Action 1908-1915 (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), pp. 3032.
5. Antonio Gramsci, 'Americanism and Fordism', in Selections Fromthe
Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by
Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London, 1971, pp. 285292.
6. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work
in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1974), pp. 85-138.
7. See, for example, Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific
Management in the Progressive Era 1890-1920 (Chicago, 1965),
pp. ix-x for a discussion of contemporary concepts of 'efficiency:
and pp. 11-15 for evidence of ambivalence of Taylorites toward the
commercial concept. Brian Palmer, 'Class, conception andconflict:
the thrust for efficiency, managerial views of labour and working
class rebell ion 1903-1922,' Review of Radical Political Economies VII, argues for a single definition of efficiency which is
fully within capitalist logic - if a technique contributes to the
expansion of capital it is superior, quantitatively or qualitatively "elevating capital's status as a hegemonic force within the
social order" (p, 32). Again, the problem is a lack of nuance in
a specific historical situation. My point is that the engineers
themselves perceived some difference, and hence the difference is
worth exploring.
8. Taylor's Testimony Before the Special House Committee (New York.
------------------------------------
106
8. cont'd
1912), pp. 43, 153, 212. One should take this estimate with a
grain of salt. As Reinhard Bendix properly points out, workers
could only resist in more clandestine ways than the employer,
Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management in the
Course of Industrialization (New York, 1956), p. 280; Frank B.
Copley, Frederick W. Taylor: Father of Scientific Management
(New York, 1923), v. 1, pp. 387-388.
9. David F. Noble makes this point with a wealth of detail in America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate
Capitalism (New York, 1977), with a special emphasis on the role
of the engineers in the 'technology of social production.'
10. Nelson, op. cit., pp. 25-26; Bendix, op. c i t . , pp. 272-274; David
Montgomery, '''Workers'control of machine production in the nineteenth century," Labour History 17:4 (Fall, 1976). p , 508;
Katherine Stone, 'The Origins of Job Structures in the Steel
Industry', Review of Radical Political Economics 6:2 (Summer,
1974) .
11. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (New York, 1911),
p. 114, 131; Taylor's Testimony, op. cit., p. 27; Copley, v. 2,
p , 309.
12. Testimony, p. 257.
13. Taylor, 'A piece-rate system: a step toward partial solution of
the labor problem,' paper read at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1895. Quoted in Copley, v. 1, p. 407. See
also p , 318.
14. Sudhir Kakar, Frederick Taylor: a study in Personality and Innovation (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).
15. Copley, v . 1, p . 207.
16. 'Americanism and Fordism,' pp. 297-303. See also Daniel T. Rogers,
The Work Ethic in Industrial America 1850-1920 (Chicago, 1978)
and Allan Smith, 'The Myth of the self-made man in English Canada
1850-1914,' Canadian Historical Review LIX:2 (1970), pp , 189-219.
17. Principles of Scientific Management, p. 25, 103.
18. Principles, pp . 103-104; Testimony, pp , 41, 235-236.
19. Principles, pp. 48-52; Testimony, p. 115. Taylor told his workers
that 'if he were in their place he would fight against turning
out more work, just as they were doing, because under the piece
107
19. cont'd
work system they would be allowed to earn no more wages than
they had been earning, and yet would be made to work harder.'
Shop Management (New York, 1903), p. 31.
20. Testimony, pp. 30-31.
21. Ibid., p. 19. Milton J. Nadworny, Scientific Management and
the Unions 1900-1932: a Historical Analysis (Cambridge, Mass.,
1955), p , 9.
22. Principles, pp. 72-73.
23. Testimony, pp. 228-229; Copley, v. 2, pp. 51-52.
24. Principles, p. 74, 137; Testimony, p. 229; ~,
p. 53.
25. Principles, p, 138; Testimony, p , 46 (emphasis added); pp. 231232.
26. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, p. 116, 126. For a recent
critique and controversy on Braverman's thesis, see Michael
Buraway, 'Toward a Marxist Theory of the Labour Process: Braverman and Beyond' and comments by Leo Panitch and Don Swartz in
Alternate Routes: a Critical Review 2 (1978), pp. 1-33. A recent Weberian approach which tends to support Braverman is Craig
Littler, 'Understanding Taylorism', British Journal of Sociology
29:2 (June 1978), pp. 185-202.
27. ~,
p. 118 and 447, quoting W.R. Spriegel and C.E. Myers, eds.,
The Writings of the Gilbreths (Homewood, Illinois, 1953), p . 110.
28. Eugene S. Ferguson, "The Measurement of the 'man-day'," Scientific Americans, 225:4 (October, 1971), p. 97.
29. This section of the Testimony was striken from the record by a
sympathetic chairman. Copley, v. 2, p. 348.
30. Nadworny, pp. 70-71 (emphasis added). The speaker was N.P. Alifas,
legal representative of the organized federal employees, an active
opponent of scientific management.
31. Principles, p. 83-84; Copley, v. 1, pp. 188-189, 319-320; Kakar,
Frederick Taylor, op. cit., develops a Freudian description of
Taylor's deep ambivalence about authority arising out of unresolved conflicts over his relationship to his father, ambiguity
over the male role, etc. I suppose this kind of thing is best
left to those with a taste for it.
32. Aitken, Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal, passim; Robert Franklin
Hoxie, Scientific Management and Labor (New York, 1915), p. 112,
137-138; Nadworny, p. 93.
108
33. Palmer, 'Class, conception and conflict' and Nelson, Managers and
Workers, pp. 70-77. Unfortunately, Palmer does not present much
empirical data and Nelson's argument suffers from too many internal inconsistencies to be wholly acceptable. Nadworny,
Scientific Management and the Unions, is somewhat disappointing
on this question as he deals more with attitudes than actual behaviour. The same can be said for Jean T. McKelvy, AFL Attitudes
Toward Production (Ithaca, N.Y., 1952). Aitken's Taylorism at
Watertown Arsenal is detailed, but only looks at one plant.
34. Nadworny, pp. 68-86; C. Bertrand Thompson, The Theory and Practice
of Scientific Management (Cambridge, Mass .• 1917), p. 151, 154.
35. Nadworny, pp. 122-141; Haber, Efficiency and Uplift, p . 133, 159
Stuart D. Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism, 1880-1940 (Chicago,
1976); Nelson, pp. 101-121; Daniel Nelson and Stuart Campbell,
'Taylorism vs. Welfare work in American industry: H.L. Gantt and
the Bancrofts~ Business History Review 46:1 (Spring, 1972).
36. Copley, v. 1, pp , 410-412.
37. Haber, p. 36; Testimony, pp. 44-45.
38. Alex W. Rathe, ed., Gantt on Management: Guidelines
for Today's Executive (New York, 1961), pp. 214-219; Haber, p. 47.
39. Gantt on Management, pp. 191, 225-226; Haber, p. 48.
40. Gantt on Management, pp. 232-234, 205.
41. V.1. Lenin, Collected Works (London, 1963-1970), v. 20, pp . 152154; v. 39, pp , 152-160; v. 25, pp , 473-474.
42. Ibid., v. 27, pp. 248-259; v. 42, pp. 79-80. Rainer Traub, 'Lenin
and Taylor: The Fate of "Scientific Management" in the (Early)
Soviet Union', Telos 37 (Fall, 1978), p , 84.
43. Ibid., v. 42, pp. 86-87; v. 27, pp. 349-350; E.H. Carr, The
Bolshevik Revolution (London, 1950-53) v. II, pp. 114-115.
44. Carr, v . II, pp , 215-216; Bend i x, Work and Authority in Industry,
pp. 208-209; Traub, ~.;
Kendall E. Bailes, 'Alexei Gastev
and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism 1918-24', Soviet Studies
XXIX:3 (July, 1977), pp , 373-94.
45. Robert Linhart, Linine, les paysans, Taylor (Paris, 1976), pp.77-172.
46. Martin Clark, Antonio Gramsci and the Revolution that Failed, (Yale, 1977),
pp. 9, 17-18, 41, 69-71, 223; Charles Maier, "Between Taylorism and
Technocracy", Journal of Contemporary History 5:2 (1970).