Seeing Like A State, Chapter 3

Summary of Chapter 3: Authoritarian High Modernism

This chapter introduces the concept of “High Modernism” which will be explored through subsequent chapters.

All the state simplifications that we have examined have the character of maps. That is, they are designed to summarize precisely those aspects of a complex world that are of immediate interest to the mapmaker and to ignore the rest. (87)

Yet they not only summarize facts, they transform them in portraying them; not just description, but prescription:

The state has no monopoly on utilitarian simplifications. What the state does at least aspire to, though, is a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That is surely why, from the seventeenth century until now, the most transformative maps have been those invented and applied by the most powerful institution in society: the state. (87-8)

This had to wait until the mid-19^th to 20^th century, when state power grew to match its ambitions. “I believe that many of the most tragic episodes of state development in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries originate in a particularly pernicious combination of three elements” (88). These are:

1. “the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society”. S terms this high modernism (after Harvey), an ideology shared by both right and [statist] left.

2. “the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs.” (88-9)

3. “a weakened or prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans”

The ideology of high modernism provides, as it were, the desire; the modern state provides the means of acting on that desire; and the incapacitated civil society provides the leveled terrain on which to build (dis)utopias. (89)

S sees Nazism as a reactionary form of Modernism. He discusses “progressive” variants of High Modernism:

Where the utopian vision goes wrong is when it is held by ruling elites with no commitment to democracy or civil rights and who are therefore likely to use unbridled state power for its achievement. Where it goes brutally wrong is when the society subjected to such utopian experiments lacks the capacity to mount a determined resistance.

A section on “the discovery of society” (90ff) details the role of the social sciences; S quotes Condorcet on the “moral sciences,” which are to be modeled after the physical sciences.

One essential precondition of this transformation was the discovery of society as a reified object that was separate from the state and that could be scientifically described. (91)

The development of statistics:

The existing social order, which had been more or less taken by earlier states as a given, reproducing itself under the watchful eye of the state, was for the first time the subject of active management. It was possible to conceive of an artificial, engineered society designed, not by custom and historical accident, but according to conscious, rational, scientific criteria. (92)

There is a link between class control, and colonialism, in this project:

It is important to recognize that, among Western powers, virtually all the initiatives associated with the “civilizing missions” of colonialism were preceded by comparable programs to assimilate and civilize their own lower-class populations, both rural and urban. The difference, perhaps, is that in the colonial setting officials had greater coercive power over an objectified and alien population, thus allowing for greater feats of social engineering. (378n19)

The difficulty with this resolution is that state social engineering was inherently authoritarian. In place of multiple sources of invention and change, there was a single planning authority; in place of the plasticity and autonomy of existing social life, there was a fixed social order in which positions were designated. (93)

In the 20^th century, industrial warfare and the response to the Depression both required a more thorough mobilization of society; as did the rebuilding of post-war states. Beyond this, both revolutionary and colonial societies exerted special concentrated power [meeting the three criteria listed above].

The “birth” of 20^th-Century High Modernism can be located in post-WWI Germany, under Walter Rathenau, who was motivated in part by his belief in productivism:

For many specialists, a narrow and materialist “productivism” treated human labor as a mechanical system which could be decomposed into energy transfers, motion, and the physics of work. The simplification of labor into isolated problems of mechanical efficiencies led directly to the aspiration for a scientific control of the entire labor process. (98)

Productivism had two lineages: 1) Taylorism; 2) the European school of “energetics.” S quotes Rabinbach (from the Human Motor book) on the point that productivism is “politically promiscuous,” embraced by both left and right (99). Productivism is a technological fix for class struggle; for capitalists, enabling control of worker; for the statist left, the elimination of capitalist management:

For much of the left, productivism promised the replacement of the capitalist by the engineer or by the state expert or official. It also proposed a single optimum solution, or ‘best practice,’ for any problem in the organization of work. The logical outcome was some form of slide-rule authoritarianism in the interest, presumably, of all.

Scott lists Thorstein Veblen, Sinclair Lewis, and Ayn Rand as all very different expounders of this ideology.

The world war was the high-water mark for the political influence of engineers and planners. Having seen what could be accomplished in extremis, they imagined what they could achieve if the identical energy and planning were devoted to popular welfare rather than mass destruction. (100)

Lenin was impressed with Rathenau’s example, and with Taylorism:

A command economy at the macrolevel and Taylorist principles of central coordination at the microlevel of the factory floor provided an attractive and symbiotic package for an authoritarian, high-modernist revolutionary like Lenin. (101)

S ends with three sources of resistance to “the authoritarian temptations of twentieth-century high modernism” in liberal democracies:

1. The “existence and belief in a private sphere of activity in which the state and its agencies may not legitimately interfere.” Scott notes that such private spheres have been much eroded, but the idea that there is a proper outside to the control of the state still forms a limit.

2. The “private sector in liberal political economy;” this is thought to be outside the capacity of the state to recreate or master, and thus limits the state’s “economic sovereignty” [quoting from The Foucault Effect].

3: Most importantly, democratic institutions and liberal freedoms; “the existence of working, representative institutions through which a resistant society could make its influence felt” (102), and thus limit the power of elites and bureaucrats.

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 8

 

Summary of Chapter 8: The Scientific-Technical Revolution and the Worker

In another short chapter Braverman further explores the scientific-technical revolution and its treatment of the worker, in particular its reduction of the worker to a machine. There had been two stages in capitalist/industrial development during the original Industrial Revolution: first, a change in the organization of labor, and second, a change in the instruments of labor. Those two stages, as described by Marx, refer to the initial industrial revolution; the ensuing scientific-technical revolution cannot be so simply described, because it involves revolutionizing all aspects of production, and manufacture in this time is also continually changing at every level:

It is in the age of the scientific-technical revolution that management sets itself the problem of grasping the process as a whole and controlling every element of it, without exception. (118). 

This involves an attack on the unity of thought and action leads to a “crisis:” labor as a subjective process is removed from the process of production and treated as an object which can then be added (or re-added) to the process conceived as steps controlled or designed by management. This ideal is not achieved in all industries, often for technical reasons; it also creates "new crafts and skills and technical specialties which are at first the province of labor rather than management" [though what these are is not specified]. Workers leave the places where tech has taken over, but move into different fields, some of which have been created by mechanization, others move into fields resistant to mechanization. Braverman promises to return to this subject in future chapters.

In addition to actual mechanization, there is the move to treat workers as machines. Gilbreth, the follower of Taylor, adds motion to Taylor's time studies, and new, more scientifically elaborated ways of studying and representing motions, the units of which are called "therbligs" (120). Gilbreth and his followers developed detailed lists of motions with initials that stand for them, like G for “Grasp,” TE for “Transport Empty.” There are also finer distinctions, such as subcategories of "grasp" [all this is clear machinification of human labor, preparation for automation, or at least dreamed-of automation].

To pick up a pencil, therefore, would involve the proper categories of Transport Empty, Pinch Grasp, and Transport Loaded, each with a standard time value, and the sum of the time categories for these three therbligs, given in ten-thousandths of a minute. constitutes the time for the complete motion. (121)

He gives further examples of "the charting approach to human sensory activity, visual, auditory, and tactile, which have been developed since the early 1950s and which aim at comprehending a larger range of work activities outside the purely manual, in order to apply them not only to clerical work but also to professional and semi-professional specialties." (122) The Universal Operator Performance Analyzer and Recorder (UNOPAR) records human movements using sound waves; other devices measure force exerted by worker, or "kinematic characteristics" of limb movement, etc. These allow the "human factor" of labor to be engineered ahead of time; instead of conducting on the job studies like Taylor had, engineers now use accumulated data to plan out work movements, breaks, etc. before even hiring people; from this point of view labor can appear to be something that is plugged in to an existing process. The numbers and statistics give the whole process an aura of authority; even greater authority is achieved as the calculations come to be carried out by computers.

Braverman provides a great summary of the view of humans as machines:

The animating principle of all such work investigations is the view of human beings in machine tenns. Since management is not interested in the person of the worker, but in the worker as he or she is used in office, factory, warehouse, store, or transport processes, this view is from the management point of view not only eminently rational but the basis of all calculation. The human being is here regarded as a mechanism articulated by hinges, ball-and­-socket joints, etc. (124)

He quotes a psychologist (Kraik) who in fact states this quite explicitly:

" ... as an element in a control system, a man may be regarded as a chain consisting of the following items: (1) sensory devices ... (2) a computing system which responds ... on the basis of previous experience ... (3) an amplifying system-the motor-nerve endings and muscles ... (4) mechanical linkages ... whereby the muscular work produces externally observable effects."

[This is immediately reminiscent of Wiener, who would no doubt wonder just what the objection is to this way of thinking. Per Braverman’s discussion, it is in part the critique of the "partial identity" in contrast to the whole or species being; or more generally, a freedom to create oneself (whether this is or is not seen as part of a "whole," it is about not being objectified or "humiliated" in Vaneigem's terms); and, of course, the struggle over control of the production process and knowledge, identity, etc.].

This attempt to conceive of the worker as a general-purpose machine operated by management is one of many paths taken toward the same goal: the displacement of labor as the subjective element of the labor process and its transformation into an object.

This means that a predetermined rate can be decided or engineered (based upon the authority of the data) and then imposed on actual workers:

In this, the manager counts not only upon the physiological charac­teristics of the human body as codified in his data, but also upon the tendency of the cooperative working mass, of which each worker is, along with the machines, one of the limbs, to enforce upon the individual the average pace upon which his calculations are based.

But, as Braverman notes in a lengthy footnote, workers are rebellious and the actual production process "assumes the form of a struggle, whether organized or not." Humans, like other machines, have "internal friction" which prevent them from working exactly as imagined or engineered.

In conclusion, Braverman observes that the process of abstracting and dividing labor into classified and generalized types of motions, is a process of making it abstract; this corresponds to Marx's concept of abstract labor, completely interchangeable, and shows that actual capitalist thinking confirms Marx’s analysis.

 

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 4

 

Summary of Chapter 4: Scientific Management

This chapter is an overview of the role of Taylor's "scientific management" in the history of the development of management. Braverman argues that it is incorrect to dismiss Taylorism as a failure or as something that has been superceded, because it is the foundation of modern management; also, related later schools such as "human relations" are actually more circumscribed, and do not get to the bottom of the issue like Taylorism. Finally, Taylor is very direct and outspoken in how he explicitly articulates the motives of his method, which are the ideology and perspective of the capitalist ruling class; later theorists are more muted and circumspect in their explanations. Taylor’s understanding of the workplace in fact derived from his own experience as a worker, and he in turn understood that the workers were being rational in fighting his system, and even admitted this to a group who asked him for advice (69). Braverman contrasts Taylor's awareness with the Hawthorne investigators (who founded the "human relations" school), who assumed workers were just irrational in resisting incentives.

He discusses the details of Taylor's physiological definition of a "fair day of work," even though Taylor clearly knew quite well that such a thing is socially determined; his fight against "soldiering" whereby workers in a piece work system conspire to keep the rate down. [It is interesting that “soldiering” is a bit like contractors or other business owners making bids, in that they want to see how much the other party is willing to pay; it is in a way typical market-driven negative reciprocity (although with the added effect of solidarity among the workers). Essentially this is the same kind of competition that the market system eulogizes in the marketplace, but shifted to the working place because of working conditions; and that shift is what Taylor and other of this monopoly over knowledge to control each step of the labor process and its mode of execution. In passing in this discussion the question of who has and controls knowledge, or could or should develop a science, is explored (e.g., why not scientific workmanship rather than scientific management?) Taylor's answer to this, stated before congress, (80) is very reminiscent of the "Why Are There No Great Women Artists?" argument – workers don’t have the opportunity, they can't afford the costs or the time for study, because they are busy working for a living. Braverman points out – this is all just the effect of the capitalist system].

 Braverman discusses how Taylor’s methods, such as the instruction list, creates the illusion, from the management perspective, that the work is in fact created by the manager, with the worker becoming only a tool (or at most a motive force, but no longer a creative force). [A parallel investigation of the "creatives" in design could be pursued, not to mention the entire "concept art" idea in which the actual production is done by someone else who gets no credit as the "artist"].

 Braverman makes an ironic point about labor and knowledge:

This same instruction card inspired in Alfred Marshall, however, the curious opinion that from it, workers could learn how production is carried on: such a card, "whenever it comes into the hands of a thoughtful man, may suggest to him something of the purposes and methods of those who have constructed it.” The worker, in Marshall's notion, having given up technical knowledge of the craft, is now to pick up the far more complex technical knowledge of modem industry from his task card, as a palaeontologist reconstructs the entire animal from a fragment of a bone! (82)

[Marshall’s claim is ironic because the worker's knowledge was in reality the starting point of the process, which management studied and replicated in the form of tasks, then hired new workers who did not have the knowledge. The "palaeontologist" line is very fitting for algorithmically controlled workers, such as drivers trying to comprehend the soft cab algorithm].