Reason

Abstract: ion of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker's consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine. The appropriation of living labour by objectified labour, ... which lies in the concept of capital, is posited, in production resting on machinery, as the character of the production process itself including its material elements and its material motion ... [A.O.'s italics] Labour appears merely 'scattered, ... subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself which confronts the 'individual, insignificant doings' of the living worker 'as a mighty organism': the worker is transformed into 'a mere living accessory of this machinery', her or his 'labour capacity is an infinitesimal, vanishing magnitude' and, similarly, 'every connection of the product with the direct need of the producer, and hence with direct use value' is also destroyed. The labour process has been transformed 'into a scientific process, which subjugates the forces of nature and compels them to work in the service of human needs' and 'individual labour ... is productive . .. only in these common labours which subordinate the forces of nature to themselves.' To put it plainly, if Nature is indeed dominated, it is so now in the sense that it is in the service of a scientific process; but this process itself is not dominated by the worker or workers. On the contrary, this process dominates the workers 'as an alien power, as the power of the machine', since the science within the latter 'does not exist in the worker's 54 CRITIQUE OF ECONOMIC REASON conscience' and, quite obviously, cannot be mastered by him or her in,' or through, her or his work. In short, the process of the domination of' Nature by Man (by science) turns into a domination of Man by the process of domination. The reader will see that this admirably perceptive description still .• remains valid in its entirety, whatever the system of property ownership; and whether machinery functions as fixed capital within the framework . of social relations of capitalism or not. It remains valid even if the ownership of capital is abolished and, with it, the goals (profit, accumu. lation) it assigns to production. Thus, when Marx concludes his exposition with the observation that: The hand tool makes the worker independent posits him as proprietor .. Machinery as fixed capital posits him as dependent, posits him as appropriated. This effect of machinery holds only in so far as it is cast into the role of fixed capital, and this is only because the worker relates to it as wageworker, and the active individual generally, as mere worker7 he is making a superfluous addition to an analysis which refutes such a statement superfluous specifically in that it in no way derives from the argument which precedes it. Indeed, it is not at all clear how refinery workers or train drivers in rolling mills could be anything other than wage-workers; how the products of their labour could relate directly to their needs; how they could look on their plant as their means of labour; how, instead of feeling they belonged to the refinery or steelworks, they could look on this industrial plant as their property, and so on. . I shall return later to the nature of this type of work which has ceased to have any but a distant connection with working-class labour as it is traditionally understood. The brief allusions Marx makes to science in this passage show that machinery is inappropriable from another point of view: the mass of necessarily specialized skills combined in social production are equally impossible to appropriate. 2. Originally, the principal aim of the subdivision of labour was to dominate the workers. Once in place, however, this subdivision was to lead to the progressive specialization of the means of production them, selves and promote the mechanization and automation of these means. As a result, technical and scientific skills and disciplines would become increasingly specialized; there would be a growing wealth of knowledge in increasingly narrow fields; and it would be necessary for the specialized, partial forms of production that make up the social process of production as a whole to be subject to increasingly laborious external THE END OF WORKING-CLASS HUMANISM 55 co-ordination. We shall call this fragmentation of production into productive activities with no individual value except when in combination with other activities the macro-social division of labour. It should not be confused with the Taylorist fragmentation of jobs on the level of the enterprise or the workshop. The fragmentation of jobs can be .. bvercome by restructuring and reskilling the work process, and allowing autonomous or semi-autonomous teams to manage the technical aspects of complex tasks themselves but its macro-social division cannot be reversed. This is due essentially to the fact that the amount of know-how needed to produce an industrial product even an everyday one far exceeds the capacities of the individual, or indeed of thousands of individuals. The wealth of industrialized societies rests precisely on . their unprecedented ability to combine, by means of pre-established organizational procedures, an immense variety of specialized knowledge which it would be impossible for their possessors to co-ordinate through mutual understanding and conscious, voluntary self-regulated cooperation. If we consider the diversity of specialized knowledge needed to produce a bicycle, for example (I am deliberately using the example of a relatively simple product instead of a complex one such as a television or a car), we must take into account not only the skills employed by the various industries which provide the components but also, prior to these, the knowledge needed to produce the specialist machines used by these industries: machines for wiredrawing, casting tubes in particular alloys, cutting cogs, manufacturing chains, electrolyzing, machining ballbearings, manufacturing paint, and so on. All this know-how must be developed, taught and renewed by a network of schools, universities, research centres and so on. Each worker, group of workers and production unit can only master a fraction of the knowledge employed in the factories, often hundreds of miles apart, which supply components to the cycle factory (and to factories of other products too, of course). The individuals who make up the 'collective production worker' are therefore in no position to become the subjects of bicycle manufacture or to appropriate the process which is both technical and social of , their production. They can obtain some powers of self-determination and workers' control, but these powers in the manufacture of ballbearings, chains, tubes, tyres and so on, will not give them control over the intended purpose and meaning of their work. This work may be or be made fascinating and stimulating but it will never ensure the 'total self-realization of individuals' in and through their social co-operation. Worse still, it will never produce that working-class culture which, together with a humanism of labour, constituted the great utopia of the Socialist and trade-union movements up until the 1920s. 56 CRITIQUE OF ECONOMIC REASON The fact is that the specialization of skills has caused the foundations upon which a work culture could be elaborated to crumble. What potentially united all workers within a common culture that is, in inter-' pretations of the world, which were derived from what was thought of as common experience and which, in return, enabled what was jn fact an extremely differentiated working-class condition to be unified through common practices was the consciousness of their common poietic power: whether they were miners, masons, navvies, casters or tool-makers, their different professions had in common a direct contact with the material world in which a manual intelligence which was impossible to formalize affirmed itself. This was what was meant by knowing one's craft: an ability to judge and react faster than speech, an immediate, synthetic grasp of the situation that was immediately controlled by manual know-how. The work situation presented a challenge to human abilities and good workers could be proud of their ability to take up this challenge and prove, in doing so, Man's sovereign power over matter. This was truer of heavy manual labour mining, iron and steel, boilermaking, road and railway building, construction and shipbuilding which moreover employed the largest number of workers, than it was in machine tending. The fact that production depended as far as quality, quantity and cost were concerned on the non-formalizable abilities of the workers; was obviously unacceptable from the point of view of economic ration-: ality. If it was to be possible to calculate and plan production, it had to cease to depend on the labour of workers producing with varying degrees of speed and efficiency. The productive activities of different individuals had to be made strictly identical; it had to become possible to , interchange their performances and measure them by the same yardstick, and to compare their output. To do this it was necessary (as Max· Weber so clearly saw) to detach labour from the actual workers, to rationalize and reify it in such a way that the same performance could be. provided by any worker in any of the factories set up in any part of the country, or even, indeed, in any of the four corners of the earth. The rationalization of labour called for the rationalization, and then the standardization, of machines. This in turn demanded the standardization of products, and that called for the standardization of workers. It was; essential that identical produ

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