Julio Huato wrote: > > Count me among those "power-hungry" people. > > Working people must develop an intense appetite for power. > > All the power to the workers!
Power takes different forms. There is, for instance, the form found in Taylor's idea of "scientific management." It's based on fragmenting the labour process, including the activities of those doing the work, into bits all of which are subject to complete control by management. Even where workers are far from "fully developed individuals," this is not, in fact, the most efficient way of organizing the process (see, for instance, the case studies in David Noble's Forces of Production). It's radically inconsistent with a process from which all barriers to full human development, in Marx's sense, have been removed, i.e. from the "socialist" process Marx envisaged workers educated by revoultionary praxis would use their sublation of capitalist forces of production to build. It's close, however, to the Foxconn labour process to which Steve Jobs allocated the labor of making Apple products. The idea is obsessional, a psychopathology hiding a significant degree of sadism. Taylor himself was an extreme obsessional neurotic. The same can be said of important aspects of the idea of "science" dominant since Newton, the idea that fragments all being, including human being, into inanimate bits and has, therefore, no logical space for the distinction Marx drew between the human activity that created medieval cathedrals (and, in a much higher form, would be required to create a socialist labour process) and the activity of bees constructing bee hives. Like Taylor, Newton was an extreme obsessional neurotic. Lenin treated Taylorism as essential to the building of his idea of "socialism" in Russia. "The Russian is a bad worker compared with people in advanced countries. It could not be otherwise under the tsarist regime and in view of the persistence of the hangover from serfdom. The task that the Soviet government must set the people in all its scope is—learn to work. The Taylor system, the last word of capitalism in this respect, like all capitalist progress, is a combination of the refined brutality of bourgeois exploitation and a number of the greatest scientific achievements in the field of analysing mechanical motions during work, the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the elaboration of correct methods of work, the introduction of the best system of accounting and control, etc. The Soviet Republic must at all costs adopt all that is valuable in the achievements of science and technology in this field. The possibility of building socialism depends exactly upon our success in combining the Soviet power and the Soviet organisation of administration with the up-to-date achievements of capitalism. We must organise in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out and adapt it to our own ends. At the same time, in working to raise the productivity of labour, we must take into account the specific features of the transition period from capitalism to socialism, which, on the one hand, require that the foundations be laid of the socialist organisation of competition, and, on the other hand, require the use of compulsion, so that the slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat shall not be desecrated by the practice of a lily-livered proletarian government." http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/mar/x03.htm Ted _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
