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Big Science, the Fragmenting of Work & the Left’s Curious Notion of Progress

Mitchel Cohen
U.S.A.

INTRODUCTION

The year 2004 marked the 30th anniversary of the publication of Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital. Braverman's book was and remains a seminal work analyzing from an independent Marxist perspective the fragmentation of the production process in modern capitalist society, its many effects on the workforce and the shaping of resistance movements.

I've been working on a series of essays that develop a Green critique of science and technology in which I extend Marx's analysis, but remain very critical of the typical Marxist views about what constitutes “Progress,” “development,” “efficiency,” “scientific production,” and “the Good Life.” Instead of putting forth a vision of a new society based on an entirely different organization of production (i.e., no assembly-line, no factories, etc.), that version of Marxism has led adherents to support the strategy of one arm of the ruling class whose implementation of its “developmental” schema is largely responsible for the ecological disasters facing us today.

In this work, and in appreciation of Harry Braverman's insights, I hope to journey into unexpected but productive directions that would help inform a Green as well as an emancipatory anarcho-Marxist perspective.

“You're a very good worker,” said the efficiency expert schooled in the time-and-motion studies of Frederick Taylor, as he watched a carpenter plane a piece of wood. “Now if we can just stick a buffer on your elbow you could plane and buff the wood with the same motion.”

“Yeah,” the carpenter responded, “and if you'd stick a broomstick up your ass you could take your notes and sweep the floor at the same time.”

The Atomization of Work

In the movie “Modern Times,” Charlie Chaplin plays an assembly-line worker whose job is to wrench bolts all day as they come flooding down the conveyor belt, faster, ever faster. Charlie has no idea why. He just gets paid for it, and it warps his mind as well as his body.

The film is a blistering indictment of industrial production under capitalism. Like other assembly-line workers, Charlie is a victim of the “science” of mass production. In the early 1900s, Frederick Taylor introduced Time-and-Motion studies into industry, examining the fragmentary repetitive motions of the industrial labor process with the aim of increasing output and efficiency by subdividing each task and reducing each worker's movements as much as possible to mimic the mechanical motions of a machine. Harry Braverman, in Labor and Monopoly Capital, explains the significance of this qualitative change in the way things were being produced on society in general, and what makes it unique to industrial capitalism:

The division of labor in society is characteristic of all known societies; the division of labor in the workshop is the special product of capitalist society. The social division of labor divides society among occupations, each adequate to a branch of production; the detailed division of labor destroys occupations considered in this sense, and renders the worker inadequate to carry through any complete production process. In capitalism, the social division is enforced chaotically and anarchically by the market, while the workshop division of labor is imposed by planning and control. Again in capitalism, the products of the social division of labor are exchanged as commodities, while the results of the operation of the detail worker are not exchanged within the factory as within a marketplace, but are all owned by the same capital. While the social division of labor subdivides society, the detailed division of labor subdivides humans, and while the subdivision of society may enhance the individual and the species, the subdivision of the individual, when carried on without regard to human capabilities and needs, is a crime against the person and against humanity.

While all societies have historically featured various divisions of labor — some people farming, others hunting, etc. — the atomization of work into repetitive mechanical motions within those occupational divisions was something new, ushering in an entirely new period described by Marx as the transition from the formal domination of capital to its “real domination.”

The Hawthorne Experiments: “This is the Time, and This is the Record of the Time” (Laurie Anderson)

During the 1920s and early 1930s, organizing in heavy industry and the mines led to increasingly brazen sit-down strikes at auto plants, sparking the dry grass of the Depression. The more “advanced” industrialists found it necessary to offset workplace tensions caused by their rigorous application of Taylor's division of the labor process in order to forestall rebellions and manage working class grievances. They began to experiment with different work conditions — including various labor-management relations — and asked whether it was possible to lessen workers' resistance to the grueling routine and thereby increase production by introducing different styles of management. Their goal was to squeeze even more production per labor-hour out of workers, while projecting a more humane image.

In 1924, Harvard University psychologists Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger began a series of psychological experiments on workers at the Hawthorne plant of Western Electric in Chicago to examine tensions at the workplace, with an eye towards easing them without hindering productivity. A new school of “industrial psychology” arose from these studies, which promoted “human relations in industry.” The researchers believed their efforts would ameliorate many worker grievances and enable them to be more productive.

Mayo and Roethlisberger were precursors of today's liberal sociologists. Their Hawthorne studies became required reading for academics throughout the country. Liberals and conservatives alike wrote commentaries and descriptions of the studies, culminating in new “humanistic” management techniques. They won plaudits from industrial capitalists desperate to win the support of labor in their battles against the National Association of Manufacturers and other entrenched strata of the capitalist class.

The wing of capital represented by Roosevelt helped to shape the assumptions, set-up and outcome of the Hawthorne experiments. While claiming to study the industrial labor process free from bias, Mayo and Roethlisberger wrapped themselves in the cloak of “objectivity,” but the assumptions underlying the study remained hidden: The acceptance of the capitalist framework of owners and workers, and the view that what was beneficial for the owners — the expansion of industrial production — was also in the best interests of the workers, if only some of its more abusive aspects could be ameliorated. Mayo and Roethlisberger thus promoted the Hawthorne techniques as being more profitable to industry — this was their hook — because the techniques allegedly eased resistance to the alienation, unnatural rhythms and dangers of industrial production. The experimenters took this as proof of exploitation overcome.

It is clear from re-examining the original data, however, that the workers they studied had indeed resisted, contrary to Mayo's claim. But their resistance took new forms and did not fit into neatly delineated constructs previously understood as “resistance”; it was covered up so as not to jeopardize the emerging liberal capitalist consensus being promoted: The New Deal.

The new “science” of the industrial labor process held that workers and “advanced” bosses had equal stakes in the system. The main thing wrong with capitalist industry, the new liberal ideology asserted, was the harshness of some individual bosses, the lack of proper governmental regulation of industry, hostile managers who were unschooled in the latest management techniques, unnecessarily bleak workplace environments and the lack of social safety nets — not the capitalist relation of production itself, its exploitation, nor its factory form.

Class harmony over allegedly common interests, said the researchers, must replace class struggle over exploitation. Liberal management techniques were designed to foster that illusion; they soon congealed into a new dominant paradigm — that of the “partnership” between labor and capital — which offered a “democratic” framework for intensifying exploitation and profit.

Critique of the Underlying Assumptions of the Hawthorne Study and, Consequently, the New Deal

In their path-breaking 1981 re-examination of Hawthorne, SUNY Stony Brook social-psychologists Dana Bramel and Ron Friend expose the hidden ideological nature of the Hawthorne approach. Their analysis has important implications for the way radicals look at working class history (including the Russian Revolution) and for developing a marxist critique of industrial capitalism, which challenge the Judeo-Christian glorification of the “work ethic” and assertions about what constitutes “progress” and “the good life.”

First, Bramel and Friend show that “the Hawthorne effect,” in which workers appear to be happier and more productive under a different and supposedly more humane managing style, “did not arise as simply and spontaneously from the 'revolutionized supervision' as we have been led to believe.” Indeed, workers' resistance to exploitation continued, in some cases increased, and took quite a few novel (and often unrecognized) forms. Bramel and Friend write:

This illustrates a constant theme in Mayo's industrial work: Conflict between workers and management is always [said to be] due to something other than a basic antagonism of interests in the exploitative capitalist relations of production. In [one] case . . . the workers' rebelliousness ... is due to a medical condition that produces “paranoid preoccupations.” In other cases, it represents a misunderstanding, a lack of communication. As Mayo said repeatedly, the “complaint only rarely, if ever, gave any logical clue to the grievance in which it had origin.”

It was absolutely essential, from the point of view of an expanding U.S.-based industrial capital, that all resistance to exploitation be framed as an individual problem. This enabled Mayo and others to co-opt workers' sense of meaninglessness and anger which rose from their increasingly Chaplinesque robot-like work, before it could erupt into systematic and pervasive hatred of the ruling class. Mayo's and Roethlisberger's misinterpretations and false portrayals of their data filled that important ideological function. They helped to rationalize an exploitative system, laying the ideological basis for the corporate liberalism — which included the co-optation of industrial unions — of the years to follow.

Communist Strategy in the Era of Liberal Capital and Technological “Progress”

The liberal industrial and banking sector of the bourgeoisie, represented politically by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s and early 1940s, desperately needed the support of the working class in order to defeat the policies of other capitalist sectors and consolidate its hegemony over them. This battle between competing capitalist sectors had been going on for many years — each had their own way of organizing production, requiring different and often contradictory mechanisms of control and social policies. Roosevelt, on behalf of industrial and banking capital, accomplished this by taking control of the mechanisms of the state, with the help of organized labor and avowedly Communist organizations singing the praises of the new liberal ideology. To the extent that the Hawthorne perspective began seeping into the ideological pores of the system, it helped forge a national consensus behind the approach of the most advanced wing of capital. Hawthorne's “labor-management partnership” provided Roosevelt with the “scientific” rationale he needed to legalize unions (under narrow conditions) and generate an alliance with them, enabling industrial and banking capital to wrest permanent control of the federal state apparatus away from other competing sectors while systematizing production, investment and the flow of profits.

Winning the legal right to organize was a tremendous victory for workers everywhere. But it turned out to be a mixed blessing. The 1935 National Labor Relations Act and other federal laws allowed workers, for the first time, legal protection over a narrow range of areas to negotiate with their employers, but only in exchange for accepting the legitimacy of the factory form of production itself, against which, historically, there had been massive struggles. In accepting legislation that legalized union organizing, the organized working class was required to recognize and accept the boundaries circumscribed in the new social compact, particularly the alleged “right” of capitalists to fully own the product of the day's labor and to dispense it in any way they wished — a “right” taken for granted today, but over which huge battles had been and would continue to be fought before finally gaining widespread acceptance in the 1950s. The new laws codified certain union forms and stamped them with official state approval at the expense of other far more radical working class organizations with which they, too, had been in competition for forty years. Thus, the New Deal succeeded in salvaging capitalism by perfecting a process that had begun in the early 1900s with the Rockefeller-assisted ascension of the American Federation of Labor and the consequent defeat of the more radical Knights of Labor, Western Federation of Miners, and Industrial Workers of the World.

In a sense, legalizing the right of workers to organize within certain well-defined boundaries co-opted working class struggles and upheld only those forms that were more amenable to the long-term interests of capital. Today, we call such legitimated working class formations “corporate unions.” Most marxists and other socialists have expended immense energy defending workers’ struggles over the length of their chains, and no longer over the existence of the chain itself.

As I understand Marx's analysis, the form of production cannot be separated from the social relations in which it develops, any more than ideas can be severed from the social conditions of a given society in which they arise. In practice, however, many socialists — Lenin and Trotsky among them — have separated form from content. They have insisted only that the machinery of production, as it has evolved in capitalism, be placed under public ownership and control, while forgetting the enormous working class struggles around the world against the imposition of the factory form itself. In so doing, they fail to dialectically analyze — they sometimes even praise — the institutionalization of the factory as a progressive facet of capitalism, even as the factory model begins to pervade education, recreation and other social areas of daily life. They fail to project a different way of producing the goods we need and desire, let alone investigate where our desires themselves come from and how they are manufactured by the society we live in.

Many of the Communist parties that dotted the political landscape of the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s viewed the politics of technology as being only a matter of which class owns it and to what use it's put. Technology is not, however, a composite of “neutral” instruments devoid of politics. The social and economic conditions in which the factory form of production developed — forces as well as relations — have indelibly stamped the rapaciousness of capitalism into every moment of the production process. Capitalism is “in its genes,” so to speak, both figuratively and, more and more these days, literally. And we, raised in those same conditions, can barely conceive of modern societies producing to satisfy human needs in any other way.

Taylor's transformation of the labor process and Mayo's new ideological rationalizations for the industrial workplace — which many marxists supported (and continue to endorse) — had, according to Braverman, a tremendously negative effect on the working class and on the development of socialist strategy:

Marxism ... focused increasingly not upon the profound inner nature of capitalism and the worker's position within it, but upon its various conjunctural effects and crises. In particular, the critique of the mode of production gave way to the critique of capitalism as a mode of distribution. ... Marxists adapted to the view of the modern factory as an inevitable if perfectible form of the organization of the labor process. In the Social Democracy, the pre-World-War-I socialist movement, the evolution of unions and Marxist parties went hand in hand, as part of the close association between the two and their joint drift toward a thoroughly nonrevolutionary outlook.

One of Frederick Taylor's earliest fans was V.I. Lenin, who became enamored with assembly-line time-and-motion studies as a means to dramatically increase the productivity of workers in revolutionary Russia. Lenin's embrace of capitalist assembly-line technique encouraged Communist parties around the world to acquire a “structural developmentalist” view of marxism, whose primary purpose was to accelerate the production of goods in poor countries by means of the development of factories. Taking up a theme of Marx’s — that after revolution, “unless scarcity is eliminated all the ‘old shit’ would revive” — Lenin advocated eliminating “scarcity” by imposing a regime of industrial development (as though shortage of factories was the cause of hunger, for example). Thus, instead of envisioning a society based on a very different organization of productive forces and ownership of land, marxism — especially in so-called “developing” countries and the Soviet bloc — was transformed from a philosophy of liberation into an instrument of rapid industrialization and centralized state control whose benefits, through central planning, would — Lenin hoped — be more equitably distributed.

Lenin viewed Taylorism, like marxism, as a science — the science of production. Once labeled as such and accepted as a “science,” Taylor’s legitimacy in the old left's eyes gained new stature.

Following in Lenin's shoes, the old left's critique of science has rarely gone beyond criticizing the way bourgeois society has used its products, despite the environmental and social crises we face today as a result of the fusion of science, technology and production. Since science, for the old left, is seen as value-neutral (when, in actuality, its capitalist presuppositions are inherent in its every premise), Lenin believed it could be appropriated lock-stock-and-barrel with just a bit of tinkering here and there to make it serve an emancipatory function. As Lenin observed:

[Taylorism], 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 analyzing 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 organization 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 ends.

Lenin's assertion that technology could simply be appropriated, selected and discarded at will, as many still believe, has become one of the bête noir's of the left. One of the most important challenges to that acceptance has come from the global Green movement. The extent to which “progressives” believe science and technology to be “value free” and that “it's basically how it's used that's the problem,” underscores just how deeply entrenched the problem really is.

Reframing the Dominant Paradigm

Marxists have generally portrayed science as a method for discovering objective Truths, and technology as the politics-free means for realizing them and developing products based on them. Thus, we have Lenin’s famous dictum that “socialism equals workers’ councils [soviets] plus electrification.” In this sense, marxists’ view of science is not very different than liberal policy-makers in industrial capitalist society.

Lenin, like most Marxists, acknowledged that capitalist political economy perverts these means by bending them to serve the gods of accumulation for private profit instead of universal good. But he argued that the essence of science and technology is devoid of ideology, value judgment and subjectivity.

In the early 1970s, many new leftists turned the lens of science on science itself and began formulating a radical critique of science. The movement produced magazines such as Science for the People, with the aim of demystifying science and, unlike today, challenging the core notions of science and the mindset of scientists, as well as the dangers in the way research is applied. Socialist feminists took that critique further, publishing sustained critiques of science, which have informed my own analysis, as has the work of Richard Levins, Martha Herbert, Ivan Illich and others. This “El Niño” within the vast ocean of science continued into the late 1980s, when anarchists issued critique after critique of Environmentalism, which have become grouped together under the school of Social Ecology. Those analyses enabled leftists to reveal the capitalist ideological imperative concentrated in the very essence of Science. Commensurate with mass social movements against nuclear power, genetic engineering, global warming, the globalization of capital, the robotization of work, and in favor of animal rights and alternatives to the pharmaceutical-industrial model of health care, these incisive intellectual investigations penetrated to the core of Science and have created renewed interest in the radical critique of science and industrialization.

Today, many in the new Green movement, following the radical feminist critique of Science in the 1970s and the critiques issued by Science for the People and Social Ecology, are challenging Lenin’s analysis. The factory form of production, they say, is dripping with ideology, and the idea that science and technology are somehow “neutral” or “objective” is itself an ideological construct — a figment of capitalist mythology — along with its similarly reified invention of a universal, greedy and unchanging human nature, which “objective” science first establishes and then finds wanting. In so doing, science makes the factory form seem necessary for controlling and putting to productive work the unruly human impulses that it claims are inevitable components of human nature.

Old-line Marxists, on the other hand, limit their critique of science and technology to arguing for the need to: 1) pry science and technology free from corporate control, and use them to serve humane ends instead of the god of profit; and, 2) make the communities of scientists and researchers more reflective of the overall community in terms of their racial and gender composition. Those are the only areas in which science and technology are seen to be “political” – in their application. At essence, for the majority of Marxists, “pure Science” seeks objective Truths that stand above and apart from ideology and politics.

Certainly, efforts to democratize the doing of scientific research and make it serve social instead of private ends are meaningful battles; utilized by a socialist society, science and technology should serve the people, produce better and healthier products, and be applied to different and more humane tasks such as shortening the work week and finding cures to deadly diseases. To accomplish even those goals will take a political and economic revolution. But there is a more fundamental critique that is missing from Lenin’s arguments: Like Lenin, the Left generally neglects, at its peril, the science of science and technology. Leftists cannot content ourselves with simply putting science and technology as they now exist into the hands of the working class (or of a state purporting to act in the name of the working class), even though we would hope to see them applied towards meeting human needs. While continuing to critique capitalist science, we have to begin developing our own revolutionary science. Capitalism’s undialectical science cannot solve the problems its own system has imposed on us partly because it doesn’t want to and, more importantly, because it is incapable of even asking the right questions.

Ask a Marxist to investigate the scientific method itself and the capitalist assumptions that not only condition its application but infuse its “soul,” and you’ll be treated to, at best, disquisitions on the “objective truth” that is Science “when it’s done right.” However, paralleling arguments made by the new left about the Old Left’s view of political struggles, the new ecology-based radical critics argue that the factory form of scientific production has become a model that, like the state, Official Marxism unfortunately seeks to emulate, take over and administer, not smash.

The “Truth” Is Out There?

Leading fascist scientists understood that there is an inherent politics built-in to the “search for objectivity.” That framework informed the work of, for example, physicist Werner Heisenberg – perhaps the most noted scientist who also “happened to be” a fascist in its early years. Heisenberg developed his famous (and still unsettling, in the West) “Uncertainty Principle” around the thesis that “natural science does not simply describe or explain nature. It is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning.”

Where does “our method of questioning” come from? What does it consist of? Do all scientists in a given society use this same “method”?

In calling for a “revolutionary science” in fully-developed industrial society under capitalism or socialism, one must examine those and other questions. But, following Lenin, Marxist critiques have, in general, failed to do that. They continue – in most un-dialectical fashion – to be the most vociferous proponents of the bourgeois interpretation of the Enlightenment, with its establishment of “scientific rationality” as its core religion.

Few Marxists argue against the Western notion that “objective” scientific facts exist somewhere “out there” waiting to be discovered, independent of our methods of questioning. They are barely able to accept Heisenberg’s great insight when it comes to quantum physics, let alone apply it to examine the “cause and effect” linear fusion of science and technology, upon which the factory form is based. One Leftist who did challenge the dominant orthodoxy prescribing the ways in which scientists categorized the world was Stephen Jay Gould, a towering figure in late 20 th century science. Gould’s analysis demands that we analyze the social conditions that gave rise to scientific thought. “Science,” Gould wrote, “is no inexorable march to truth, mediated by the collection of objective information and the destruction of ancient superstition. Scientists, as ordinary human beings, unconsciously reflect in their theories the social and political constraints of their times. As privileged members of society, more often than not they end up defending existing social arrangements as biologically foreordained.”

This argument and those of the radical ecology movements have failed to influence the formal Communist parties, except for forcing ecological issues to be added to the Marxian programs. V.I. Lenin’s conception has been extremely influential in framing the instrumentalist way in which the Communist parties around the world not only understand “Science,” but the entire process in which the working class becomes conscious of itself and its mission — as an essential part of an “objective” historical process — a consciousness, in Lenin’s view, that must be imparted to the working class movement from the outside. Similarly, in upholding Marxism as “scientific” socialism and Science as in itself value-free, the Communist parties cast science, technology and the “forces of production” as essentially objective processes, gaining politicization solely “from the outside” in the context of struggle between classes over who owns it and to what use it’s put.

Consequently, Marxist parties have generally endorsed the development of expanded technological projects in capitalist as well as in self-described socialist countries; the social good they are thought to bring about is seen to outweigh whatever long term negative ramifications they might have in terms that are not visible from within the “developmentalist” mindset that capitalist ideology portrays as “Progress.” Communist parties around the world promoted nuclear power in the 1950s and 60s, the misnamed “Green” Revolution, massive misdiagnosis and drugging of “hyperactive” children, the return of electro-shock “therapy”, and even genetic engineering and the development of biotechnology — all rationalized by claims of alleged “social benefits” that turned out to be few and weak, and in actuality were environmentally and socially devastating.

Many left groups supported the “Green Revolution” as a shortcut to ending hunger, even though doing so furthered the control of agrarian production by the international oil cartel, which manufactured the expensive and requisite petroleum-based fertilizers. Among many other problems, the new agricultural technology required the use of vastly greater volumes of fresh water, and portended the private patenting of seeds, which made its way into jurisprudence in the 1980s and 1990s under the aegis of “Intellectual Property Rights” and genetic engineering. The Left bought into the line that world hunger was caused by natural circumstances, and forgot that it was the capitalist ownership and control of world food production, water and land — made possible by the new technologies and promoted worldwide by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank’s “Structural Adjustment Programs” — that displaced millions of peasant farmers. It was this displacement, and the use of the confiscated lands to produce cash crops for export — and not a prior “scarcity” of food — that is the cause of the epidemic of hunger the world has experienced for the last 40 years.

Many Leftists also supported:

• the US government’s fluoridation of the drinking water (a scam of the aluminum industry in the 1940s and early 1950s to get rid of its toxic wastes). 
• the “factory-ization” of childbirth: “modern” on-your-back legs-up-in-stirrups childbirth (just about the worst possible position), systematic sonograms, amniocentesis, caesarian sections, episiotomies, hysterectomies, indiscriminate mass vaccination of children and other routinely used invasive techniques (we are not talking about emergency situations here)
• biotechnology and genetic engineering as “scientific advancement,” rationalizing the patenting of life by claiming that these technologies may discover cures for AIDS and cancer, without discussing what is causing so many people to become seriously ill at younger ages, to begin with.

All of these applications of technological development are lauded by the old left as examples of “progress.”

As genetically engineered plants turn every cell in that organism into a mini-pesticide factory; and as designer chemicals like Bovine Growth Hormone poison our food in the name of “progress”; and as radiation from nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons testing, the mass application of toxic pesticides, and the huge amount of antibiotics in animal feed create today’s epidemics of cancer, AIDS and other immune-compromising syndromes; and as the pharmaceutical-industrial-military complex invents new chemicals to treat us for the diseases that those same corporations have imparted; and as high-tech wars are waged for control of oil pipelines to supply the gas-guzzling automobiles whose emissions are destroying the ozone layer and are among the main causes of global warming, the old-line Communist parties at best take on various aspects of these issues, but nevertheless continue to endorse the unfettered development of capitalist technology that underlies the devastation we now face on a global scale.

The more “scientific” Marxism can be made to seem, the more validity its proponents are granted (and grant to themselves). They pile up cardboard credentials and doctorates, and rain “marxist experts” (with their basically liberal capitalist critiques) on society from the ivory towers of academia and, increasingly, not-for-profit foundations. The old left seems all too eager to reproduce this paradigm.

The most advanced sector of the bourgeoisie, of course, welcomes that approach, for the system requires new procedures to buffer its crises, new managers to expand its ideological hegemony and new mechanisms with which to dominate nature, the working class and the state. Since every step forward for Big Science requires Big Government, Big Capital and centralized funding, capital today needs to draw the leaders of the working class around its programs as allies in its battles against the antiquated technologies and social policies of rival sectors within the ruling class, while co-opting workers’ resistance — just as it needed to do at the turn of the 20 th century, and again in the 1930s.

By striving to out-scientize the bourgeois social scientists in order to prove the validity of Marxism and the predictability of mass behavior in response to certain key stimuli, not only do Marxists reduce the dialectic to a linear set of cause and effect relationships but reproduce the false dualities that mark capitalist ideology, making it harder for revolutionary social transformation to occur.

As capital's state religion, Science is the way capital teaches us to look at and appropriate the world around us without thinking about “the way we're thinking.” It is difficult for those of us steeped in the propaganda barrage of Big Science to even question such social norms as the mass-vaccination of children in the U.S. Mass vaccination of infants — a product of the “advancement” of technology — is such an “obvious” improvement that one rarely questions it any longer — especially when that issue, and others such as fluoridation of water or the role of the United Nations, have been bugaboos of the John Birch Society and other right wing organizations (but for the wrong reasons) over the years. And yet, legitimate alternative researchers are now linking childhood vaccination with a number of serious auto-immune diseases.

Many activists have, of course, fought against specific applications of technology in the U.S. Beginning in the mid-1970s, a widespread movement emerged against nuclear power plants; in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many were involved in groups such as ACT UP, which challenged the way medical research is done and backed up those insights with vibrant and militant street actions. But few marxists initiated those movements, which involved analyzing and resisting the dominant scientific, technological, medical and industrial/factory paradigm. Today, partly because of the eruption of social movements in African, Latin American and Asian countries which have tied the devastation of their lands, food supply and water to the free-trade economic agreements imposed by the U.S. (a bipartisan imperialism of Democrats and Republicans alike), far more Leftists in industrial countries have been forced to confront issues such as the genetic engineering of agriculture and other technologies as never before. This, then, is real progress.

Even so, it has been known for many years that a huge number of illnesses and deaths are “iatrogenic” casualties; they are caused by modern medicine’s normal “scientific” intervention into the disease and healing processes; more than one hundred thousand people die unnecessarily each year in U.S. hospitals of malnutrition caused by hospital diets, unnecessary pharmacological and medical interventions, and diseases contracted during their stay there. Yet still the Left promotes what can best be described as industrial medicine.

More than 70,000 U.S. workers have been killed on-the-job this past decade. Thousands more died from brown and black lung and other longer-term occupation-caused illnesses. Epidemics of immune-related diseases sweep over the countryside. These are taken as natural. But they are caused by pollution’s tremendous assaults on our immune systems — a pollution caused by the petro-chemical, agribusiness and nuclear industries these past forty years. Marxists tend to think they/we could repair all of that with just a few twists of the dials once they take over the State, factories and mines without uprooting the factory form of production itself.

On the other hand, radical ecologists claim that Science, western medicine and industrialization (capitalist or otherwise) not only do not hold tremendous promise for addressing our problems but cause those problems in the first place regardless of who controls that interlocking set of institutions and beliefs. They claim that although a revolution in social relations of production, which seeks to put the vast machinery of production in the hands of the working class, would hopefully relieve some of the worst abuses of the exploitation of labor upon which the wage system is based, it would not (and perhaps could not) transform the factory system (as if by magic) into being ecologically compatible with a healthy earth. Nor would socialist control of government necessarily end the drudgery of the assembly-line and office, the mass-production of rancid relationships and rotten dreams, the turning of everything and everybody into things to be bought and sold, the reproduction of hierarchy, domination and patriarchy, nor attempts to subjugate nature (and the nature within us) to the exigencies of production and the market. In fact, the history of socialist governments has shown an intensification, not a relaxation, of industrial development.

Factories, radical ecologists say (as did the new left a generation ago), can no more be “taken over” by revolutionaries and wielded for their own communalistic purposes than could the State. (Marx was particularly sharp on this vis á vis the State, but rather noncommittal when it came to the factories). As Braverman notes:

In practice, Soviet industrialization imitated the capitalist model; and as industrialization advanced the structure lost its provisional character and the Soviet Union settled down to an organization of labor differing only in details from that of the capitalist countries, so that the Soviet working population bears all the stigmata of the Western working classes. In the process, the ideological effect was felt throughout world Marxism: the technology of capitalism, which Marx had treated with cautious reserve, and the organization and administration of labor, which he had treated with passionate hostility, became relatively acceptable. Now the revolution against capital was increasingly conceived as a matter of stripping from the highly productive capitalist mechanism certain “excrescences,” improving the conditions of work, adding to the factory organization a formal structure of “workers’ control,” and replacing the capitalist mechanisms of accumulation and distribution with socialist planning.

. . . [T]he critique of the capitalist mode of production, originally the most trenchant weapon of Marxism, gradually lost its cutting edge as the Marxist analysis of the class structure of society failed to keep pace with the rapid process of change. It has now become commonplace to assert that Marxism was adequate only for the definition of the “industrial proletariat,” and that with the relative shrinkage of that proletariat in size and social weight, Marxism, at least in this respect, has become “outmoded.” As a result of this uncorrected obsolescence, Marxism became weakest at the very point where it had originally been strongest.

The factory form of production and reproduction to which capitalism and industrialization have given rise has severely influenced the ways we’ve come to think about the organization and administration of work, and about our own needs as individuals, as a class, as a society, as a species and as part of a living planet. Thinking holistically and acting to bring about a healthy future are made extremely difficult. Can we challenge today’s common wisdom and imagine life differently? Is it even possible, anymore, for us to imagine how machinery employed today in production to extract value from workers’ labor and natural resources and turned into profit for the capitalist class, would be completely different, perhaps unrecognizable from today’s vantage, in a society in which ecologically astute workers designed the kinds of places in which they’d work, and goods were produced to meet human needs instead of for private profit realized on the market? Socialism requires a revolution in social relations: Who will own and control production? Unless it also dismantles the factory form, capitalist and patriarchal relations will continue to be pushed up from within technology and destroy Nature, ecological and human alike, even under a “socialist” government.

The Old Left has never been able to put forth that vision. Instead, it has always offered Big Science as the way to “develop,” to “grow,” and has relied on it as a quick techno-fix for “solving” many of today’s problems. Today’s ecological activists — many of them a new breed of anarcho-marxists — are challenging the assumption that growth is in itself desirable. They claim that the need for production to expand is embedded in industrial technology itself (that is, in the forces of production), while most old-line Marxists believe that the expansion of the industrial system is inherent only in the social relations of production under capitalism. The old-line view enables the latter to support large-scale and very destructive industrial development projects (dams, industrial farms, biotechnology, nuclear power) in colonized countries, which they hope would serve as a basis for eliminating scarcity there, providing jobs and thus achieving a better life.

The case being offered, on the other hand, by radical ecological movements such as Earth First! and some radical Greens is profound: Even in the hands of well-intentioned people without competition or monetary profit as a motive, they assert, there is a complex internal dynamic within the nature of the technology itself that goes beyond which class owns and controls it (the “social relations”), calling into question the whole industrial schema, what constitutes progress, and traditional leftist as well as bourgeois notions of growth and “development.”

And so we come back to the profound insights offered thirty years ago in Labor and Monopoly Capital. Braverman broke new ground for the Marxist movements by sharply pointing out the impact of Marxism’s failure to apply the same skepticism it uses to shrivel the government’s posturing on economic issues to the factory model of production itself. As a result of the left’s abdication, ultra-rightwing movements have stepped into that void and are championing alternative approaches to, among others, cancer and AIDS, with a fascistic twist; where the official left had long supported Big Science as a means to Progress, the ultraright has tapped into a very real and valid vein of distrust for big government, big corporations, and Big Science by exposing carcinogenic governmental initiatives (like the fluoridation of water, construction of nuclear power plants, development of bio-technology and genetic-engineering factories and suppression of alternative treatments for AIDS and cancer) — issues that engage large numbers of people where they are most emotionally involved and bio-politically disempowered.

One of the themes Braverman develops in Labor and Monopoly Capital is that leftists need to stop romanticizing science as though its methodology and premises are somehow independent of capitalism, and turn our dialectical lens on the capitalist assumptions and ways of seeing that underlay all science in the West. A first step lies in becoming much more critical of Taylorism and those who try to reduce Marx’s vision of the total human being — for Marx, the subject of history — to an object producing value on an assemblyline. We must reject Lenin’s idea of capitalist technology as objectively neutral, that science is or could be value-free and above ideology, that such a goal is even desirable, and that industrial technology could be appropriated as is, with but minor modifications for socialism’s use. While we certainly need to remove all industry from production for private profit and use it to meet people’s immediate needs, we can no longer consider that such expropriation of capital’s factory system could be anything more than a temporary means, to be gotten rid of the quicker the better. And we accomplish this, in part, by refusing to allow ourselves, or the society we seek to create, to exalt or fetishize “efficiency” as the guiding ethos of work — not here in the U.S. today, nor in our vision of socialism — however much competition and the falling rate of profit demand it. The quest for efficiency is inseparable from the factory form and the capitalist mode of production which destroyed earlier non-industrial ways of living and which, in Europe, only the Luddites opposed in any semi-organized fashion.

I am not one to romanticize those earlier forms — although, many aspects of communitarian living among, say, the Iroquois and other societies certainly are compelling and radical leftists need to learn from them. I am, however, proposing new responsiblities for radicals today if we are ever to rid ourselves of the insidiousness of capitalist relations of production, which keep reappearing like a multi-headed hydra no matter how many times we slice off one of its heads, because they are “built in” to the industrial form. Just as the trade union struggle and electoral practice, in Rosa Luxemburg’s words, lose their usual effectiveness and cease being means of preparing the working class for the conquest of power once the reforms being sought are considered to be instruments in the direct socialization of the capitalist economy (as opposed to temporary palliatives), we must take care that our fight for reforms in state policies and our attempts to ameliorate the environmental destruction caused by capitalist industry — “stripping from the highly productive capitalist mechanism certain ‘excrescences,’ improving the conditions of work, adding to the factory organization a formal structure of ‘workers’ control,’ and replacing the capitalist mechanisms of accumulation and distribution with socialist planning,” in Braverman’s words — not be substituted for the need for direct challenges to the industrial form of production itself. Chernobyl’s devastation, looking back, was a portent of the even more calamitous events to come but a few years later. Concentrated within that one event was much of what was wrong with the Soviet Union’s belief in the “neutrality” of capitalist science and the desire to appropriate its technology and wield it for its own purposes. (Some would argue that those purposes weren’t socialist anyway, so the question for them is moot.) Revelations of vast uninhabitable areas of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe should at least render problematic the notion attributed to Marx that the forces of production could somehow be conceptually severed from — and in revolution emerge unchanged and victorious over — the capitalistic relations that had come to act as a yoke upon them, without reproducing the entirety of capitalist relations embedded within.

Are “socialist nukes” safer than capitalist ones, as many leftists argue? Can there be any industrial development without it destroying the environment and the quality of life of the working class, even under socialism? If yes, at what point does such development become ecologically destructive?

Many marxists write favorably about the struggle to subordinate nature to human control in order to meet our needs; is that anti-ecological perspective inherent in marxism or is it an avoidable example of the way leftists have interpreted history — and marxism — with capitalist eyes? Failing to understand Big Science, the Idea of “Progress,” Industrialization, and the institutionalization and expansion of factories as potent ideological constructs in themselves and imbued with the logic of capitalism at their core, leads Marxists — like everyone else — to tend to reproduce our own oppression and that of others, and of Nature, even as we fight against it.

NOTES

Harry Braverman. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, Monthly Review Press, 1974. p 73.

The dehumanization of the labor process into fragmentary pieces was intensified under the “tyranny of the clock” and rigid work schedules that are enforced 8-12 hours per day 50 weeks a year, and do not leave time for people to have a life, as Ellen Buff points out in private correspondence, 2004. atomization of work fostered reductionist ways of seeing, which echoed throughout the culture. Radical artists such as Duchamps attempted to reflect and critique on the canvas the rise of reductionist ways of seeing in society at large. (See “Nude Descending a Staircase,” for example.)

Dana Bramel and Ron Friend. “ Hawthorne, the Myth of the Docile Worker, and Class Bias in Psychology.” American Psychologist, Vol. 36, No. 8, August 1981, pp. 867-878.

Ibid. p.871.

Weinstein, James, The Corporate Ideal in the LiberalState 1900-1918.

One commentator, Tadit Anderson, writes to remind us that alternatives within the liberal tradition were squelched and conspicuously forgotten, such as “contributors such as Mary Parker Follett, who advocated the workplace and the community to be based upon an integrative process which did not include varieties of partisanship. Her opus was published in 1918 and was quickly ignored by the Taylorist version of liberalism. In effect she treated the workplace and the community to a commons, thereby such elements as the ‘economy’ would be treated similarly.” (Private correspondence, 2004)

“Every school is a factory of despair,” sang 1960s antiwar troubadour Phil Ochs.

Braverman, op cit. p 10-11.

The legitimization of science has additional ideological benefits: An old family friend, an optometrist, would sign his columns in a local Communist Party newsletter with the initials M.D. after his name. “But your column has nothing to do with medicine — not that even that would matter — since your M.D. is not for medicine,” I'd complain. “Besides, I probably know a helluva lot more about this particular subject than you do, and I don’t have an M.D. So why do you use the credentials? And what does that say about your readers who believe that what you say is more worthy because there's an M.D. after your name?” After a long argument, my optometrist friend granted my point. However, he'd say, “it's more important that people treat what I’m writing seriously. If the M.D. causes them do that (and I do have an M.D., even if it's in optometry), that takes priority.” I felt at the time, and still do today, that that approach fairly typifies the old left's need for validation from credentialed experts, approval from the chairman, and gaining adherents through manipulation. That is one of the reasons why they’d constantly invite bourgeois congress representatives to speak at large anti-war marches from the stage — to enhance the credibility of what the leftists were saying — And, it’s why we in the new left threw rocks at them and drove them off those stages.

V.I. Lenin, “The Immmediate Tasks of the Soviet Government” (1918), Collected Works, vol. 27 ( Moscow, 1965), p 259. As recorded in Braverman, op cit.

Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, Harper & Row, 1962.

Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin, 1973.

V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, in Selected Works, International Publishers, 1967, Vol. 1, p122. See also Mitchel Cohen, “The Shortcomings of Traditional Leftist Strategy,” part of the series on Zen-Marxism, published by the Red Balloon Collective, 1993.

Mitchel Cohen, “Listen Bookchin,” a Red Balloon Collective Pamphlet, 1999.

Mitchel Cohen, “The Politics of World Hunger.” The IMF, for example, intentionally planned the removal of 1/3 rd of the rural peasant population of Haiti in a 1981 document outlining its structural adjustment program for that region.

Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins, Ten Myths of World Hunger.

Joel Griffiths, “Fluoride: Commie Plot or Capitalist Ploy” in Covert Action Quarterly, Fall 1992.

See my series of pamphlets, “Zen-Marxism: Subjective Factors in Devising Revolutionary Strategy,” for a critique of the false dualities, beginning with the forced (and illegitimate) separation of “objective” from “subjective,” that mark capitalist philosophy. Also, Morris Berman’s The Re-Enchantment of the World.

See, however, “Vaccination: A Sacrament of Modern Medicine,” by Richard Moskowitz, in Mothering, Spring 1992 and “Vaccines and Natural Health,” by Neil Z. Miller, in Mothering, Spring 1994, for a balanced approach to this difficult issue.

Howard Brandstein urges interested parties to read Jacque Ellul's seminal work — The Technological Society — which enlarges the analysis of the machine and factory to the technization and drive for efficiency in other sphere's of human activity (eg., policing, accounting, communication, etc.). Also Lewis Mumford  in Technics and Civilization discusses the emergence of mechanical time and its impact on society, work and social relations. Part of Ellul's thesis is that capitalism (as well as socialism) is ultimately subsumed by the drive for technical efficiency. He views this “technical imperative” (i.e., the one best way of doing things) as more powerful than any drive for economic efficiency (i.e., achieving the lowest cost through competition).

Braverman, op cit., p12-13.

See the running debates in Fifth Estate on science, technology and nature and the hidden capitalist premises underlying their developments.

Franklin Rosemont, “Karl Marx and the Iroquois”; also, Mitchel Cohen’s “Beyond Bookchin” — both pamphlets published by the Red Balloon Collective.

program

index of 2006 workshop papers