CONTENTS - ouroboros ponderosa

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ew (l Ill, p'l"dICIIOIl Un' "I J-I ' . ". I . .
occurred in the fall b t f l ' . ,l II I I , I .sI ll (" wOllld havl'
wave This th "
its rel ones.
, u 0: t 1C war, as till' clIlrllinal iulI of (Ill' slrilr
CSIS totally confuses tht: official enemies ()r dominati()1l willi
In fact, the strikes were definitel n " ',
architects of the All', h ' Y ot InItIated hy Ulllon icadns ,
unofficially The All'
"
lance, ut m every case b k I
.
ro e out ocally alHI
Jance was not, according to G A Ph'lI' ' ..
concessIon to the pressures of rank and f'l 'I'
't d '
I was eSlgned specifically to I ' . , , '
Union officials forged th
"
I IPS, a
n r·JrY.
contro and dIscIplIne such militancy,"
I e ml Itancy' on the co t '
overriding need to avert work acti ' " n Imme late and
proclaimed that "every ctIo t h
C new structure out of a ' d'
ns, not tacliitate them. Its constitutioll
create effective and comple e o tr o O c f e e t ' h d among the three sections to
Co ' e respectIve bodIes ,,109
ncernmg the actual arrival of war, even as the axe began to fali,
t least to be expressly held to be so,
"Nobody was 'for' th
and great numbers :::;' or cared
judgment of Cameron 110 ;rgen l ;
the event: "Probably fo the cgma d
nd artIculately against it," in the
nd grasped the groundwork t{lr
war cae, above all, as a re s r ( Pi! (
s ; f
l :e o:U t : tion the
an !b sl m st dangerous discontents of 20th-ccn;ury civilizaioa !,;
ar canomzed the daily misery f th
presenting its apotheosis of authority and t h O I
terms of work Carl Zuckm '
ec no ogy most precIsely III
e modern , world,
power's univeral message th:; o s r ::; e .: as a soldier summed up
exhaustion, the unheroic mechanical'da '
fear, and death are inser;cd like the t
industrial process,"112
In a world where the spectacle of
asserted the abolition of , I b
was as possible as it
It took 50
e monstros boredom, the
,i -to.day of war III which terror,
S n mg of a timeclock in an endless
' ,
oPpOSItIOn nowhere seriously
wage· a or and Its context, this frontal assault
w h as necessary, The prewar revolution was smashed
years or t e recovery to "egin.
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TAYLORISM AND UNIONISM
Jenkins has observed that "The impression has "egun to get about that
the Industrial Revolution is not going to work out after all."l In light of
the profound malaise of blue and white collar workers, the decline of
output per worker since 1973, and increasing signs of a pervasive antiunion
sentiment complementing anti· management restiveness, Jenkins'
remark does not seem so shocking, The 1973 Health, Education and
Welfarc report, Work in America, remarked, in a similar vein, that
"absenteeism, wildcat strikes, turnover, and industrial sabotage (have)
become an increaSingly significant part of the cost of doing business,"2
The location of this quote from thc HEW report in the section titled,
"Thc Anachronism of Taylorism" is suggestive, Because of many
mistaken notions about scientific management's historical role, much of
industrial society is misunderstood, The genesis of Taylorism as
"scientific management," and the developing relation of this system to
trade unionism are especially crucial.
When Taylor began his efforts at the Midvale Steel Company in the
1880s, several members of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers
were likewise interested in labor management. Industrial capitalism
was running up against renewed resistance from the growing ranks of
labor, still committed to a sense of work intcgrity and craftsmanship.
Task management, or scientific management as it came to be called,
began to take shape in the eighties as the way to break the worker's
threatening resistance, The heart of this approach is the systematic
reduction of work into discrete, routinized tasks, totally separated from
any policy decisions about the job, Taylor realized that employees cxert
a vital int1ucnce because they possess crucial talents needed in any
productive process, As he put it in his Principles of Scientific Manage.
ment, "foremen and superintendents know, better than anyone else, that
their own knowledge and personal skill falls far short of the combined
knowledge and dexterity of all the workmen under them.'" For capitalism
to be firmly in control, it must monopolize information and tcchniques
as surely as it controls the rest of the means of production, The worker
must be permitted only to perform certain specific narrow tasks as
planned by management.