Class-Biased Technical Change and Socialism: Some Reflections on Benedito Moraes-Neto's “On the Labor Process and Productive Efficiency: Discussing the Socialist Project”

Abstract

Are capitalism's latest technological advances necessary/appropriate for a socialist society? Or can relatively technologically “backward” capitalist societies follow their own distinct path to socialism? Here I take Benedito Moraes-Neto's “On the Labor Process and Productive Efficiency: Discussing the Socialist Project” as a starting point for my own reflections on these questions, attempting to broaden the terms of the debate, elaborating on the class-biased nature of technical change, and laying emphasis on the dialectical relationship between technology and the relations of production. Taking a knowledge perspective on the labor process, I argue that premachinery manufacture and Taylorism-Fordism are aspects of the same class struggle, the attempt by capital to appropriate working-class knowledge and thereby create space for itself to control and manage the labor process. Finally, I question the “techno-optimism” which leads Moraes-Neto to assert that late-twentieth-century advances in technology are an exception to this rule.

Key Words:

• Labor
• Production
• Social Relations
• Taylorism
• Technical Change

Notes

1. See Shanin ([1983] 2009) for various drafts of Marx's response to Vera Zasulich, a Russian communist. In response to Zasulich's question about the prospects for building socialism on the basis of the mir, the rural commune in Russia, Marx replies that in his opinion, “the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia,” though for this to occur “it must be assured the normal conditions for spontaneous development” (124).

2. A minor inconsistency in this argument seems to be that, according to Moraes-Neto (2003, 292–3), “the manufacturing system is based entirely on the human being as an instrument of production.” But if that is the case, on what basis can we also say that Fordism is a “reinvention of manufacture”? The former statement implies that the motive force, the controlling element in the production process, is the human being, while the Fordist assembly line transfers this control over to the machine. Marx makes much of this discussion of which is the motive power, human or machine, hence I believe it cannot be glossed over lightly.

3. “After Marx's death, a certain orthodox interpretation of the production process gained widespread circulation in Marxism. In this view, production is based on a type of technology which is class neutral: technology's development is due to its inner laws of development and therefore does not carry the class content of the society which has produced it … Lenin's view of Taylorism, and of its applicability to a socialist society, rests on this technological conception” (Carchedi 1991, 14).

4. In a more sarcastic vein, parodying the bourgeois economists who do not acknowledge this class-biased nature, Marx ([1867] 1992, 568) notes:

The contradictions and antagonisms inseparable from the capitalist employment of machinery do not exist, they say, since they do not arise out of machinery, as such, but out of its capitalist employment! Since therefore machinery, considered alone, shortens the hours of labour, but, when in the service of capital, lengthens them; since in itself it lightens labour, but when employed by capital, heightens the intensity of labour; since in itself it is a victory of man over the forces of Nature, but in the hands of capital, makes man the slave of those forces; since in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but in the hands of capital, makes them paupers—for all these reasons and others besides, says the bourgeois economist without more ado, it is clear as noon-day that all these contradictions are a mere semblance of the reality, and that, as a matter of fact, they have neither an actual nor a theoretical existence. Thus he saves himself from all further puzzling of the brain, and what is more, implicitly declares his opponent to be stupid enough to contend against, not the capitalistic employment of machinery, but machinery itself.

5. I should note here that what applies to class also applies to gender. Feminist scholars, both Marxist and non-Marxist, have noted that technical change under capitalism has systematically disempowered and marginalized women, historically.

6. The attack on knowledge did not go without resistance. Braverman (1974, 94) quotes an editorial from the International Molders Journal which complains about the practice of “gathering up … scattered craft knowledge, systematizing it and concentrating it in the hands of the employer and then doling it out again only in the form of minute instructions, giving to each worker only the knowledge needed for the performance of a particular relatively minute task.”

7. See Basole (2012) for more details on lokavidya, science, and the labor process. Marglin (1996) has argued this point extensively. His terms for the two knowledge systems are episteme and techne.

8. Of course this does not mean such self-directed labor processes are not functional to capital, which is not interested in knowledge, whether scientific or traditional, but rather in value. The extraction of value is not deterministically linked to any one mode of management or any one type of knowledge. Capital vacillates between the tendency to simplify, control, and manage, which requires routines, mechanization, and procedures, and the need to grant workers a measure of autonomy and control, which requires flexibility and participation. Changing management trends reflect this fact.

9. See “The Long-Distance Journey of a Fast-Food Order,” New York Times, 11 Apr. 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/technology/11fast.html?pagewanted = all&_r = 0.

10. For a typical example of worker's knowledge from the knowledge-management literature, see Brown and Duguid (1998) on technicians who repair broken Xerox photocopiers.