File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9712, message 286


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)

************************************************************************




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