Date: Tue, 9 Dec 1997 18:18:11 +1100 From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au> Subject: Re: M-TH: Taylorism: A Neutral Technique for The Most Efficient G'day Thaxists, A quote from Frederick Winslow Taylor himself: 'All possible brainwork should be removed from the shop and centred in the planning or laying out department ... The science of doing work of any kind cannot be developed by the workman. Why? Because he has neither the time nor the money to do it.' This is paving the way to fascism per the Frankfurters, as far as I'm concerned, and employs a truism peculiar to corporate capitalism to substantiate itself. And Braverman wrote: '[Taylorism] enters the work place not as the representative of science, but as the representative of management masquerading in the trappings of science.' Now, I know Justin (with whom I share, or from whom I learned, an inclination to market socialism as an answer to an awful lot of questions) doesn't think much of my political opposition to planned communism (although I also agree with his stance that Hayek's price as information thesis is compelling). Well, all I can say is that newly socialist societies have put both political and economic control in the same few hands every time - and the social system that developed every time was a closed authoritarian antidemocratic one. Not least because the centralisation of knowledges and concomitant control axiomatically grows an unnecessarily large apparat - a class who do not share the material interests of their objects of planning. The apparat grows because it is fundamentally an attractive place to be in a Taylorist society and because CN Parkinson was right: 'Work expands so as to fill the time available to complete it'. Parkinson's excoriating critique of the overly bureaucratised Royal Navy is important stuff for us I think. I don't know if this Tory cold war warrior ever wrote a book against the SU, but he should have if he didn't. I accept Lou Proyect's protestations that the SU was far messier than a truly Taylorist society should be. I submit that it got to be like it was because Taylorism was there at the start - because it is flawed: not least because Hayek's reservations about centralising all necessary knowledge are on the button; not least because Parkinson was right; and definitely not least because Taylorism is the very antithesis of socialism. The historical context of war communism and undeveloped forces of production in a hostile international environment might excuse, if not completely vindicate, Lenin - I'm looking forward to Bob's argument on this - but times have changed. Cheers, Rob. ************************************************************************ Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia. Phone: 02-6201 2194 (BH) Fax: 02-6201 5119 ************************************************************************ 'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.' (John Stuart Mill) "The separation of public works from the state, and their migration into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in the form of capital." (Karl Marx) ************************************************************************ --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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