#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #GERMANY #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) #Germany, #berlin die plattform: Reflections of Humans in Factory Work Throughout Time (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 A guest post by Sascha from the superregional group of die plattform ----

Introduction ---- The factory is seen as the pinnacle of mass production. It
enabled growth, economically and technologically. The Industrial Revolutions in
England and the rest of Europe are understood as a break from humanity's
underdeveloped past. Nevertheless, the climate crisis and the ongoing pandemic
have raised doubts whether factory production is as indispensable as established
in popular conscience, as it is arguably not conducive to sustainability and
public health. Furthermore, what is largely left out of the discourse is
consequences for workers within a plant, except in trade unions of course. While
this concerns well-being, it also concerns what images of workers were produced
when we decided to produce in factories. Following the history of factory
production, from its infancy to modern automation, the following piece shall
examine to which extent factory workers were dehumanized, hegemonized and
culturally molded using work organization on factory grounds in the Western World.

Theoretical Foundation

I will outline my arguments using marxist anthropology. Marxist anthropology
concerns itself with how base and superstructure influence each other. The base
represents everything that is needed to produce, meaning the means of production
and the relations of production (i.e. class relations in capitalism), whereas the
superstructure broadly presents ideology, which more specifically includes, but
is not limited to, aspects like religion, family, law, art and culture. The
reason I chose marxist anthropology as my tool of analysis is simple: Factories
are means of production that are tightly interwoven with work(ers) culture,
capitalism, and images of humans with regards to their labor, and therefore an
example where marxist anthropology excels in analysis. Its limitation to (close
to) capitalist modes of production here presents itself valuable, though it is
worth mentioning that analysing pre-capitalist and pre-market societies present
difficulties for Marxist anthropology (Ruyle 1987: 26). Furthermore, it is
important to mention that the focus on economy as the sole factor influencing
aspects included in the superstructure is class-reductionist, meaning that the
claim is that power structures like the patriarchy are rooted in class instead of
class and gender relations being intersectional.

Definitions

To analyze the factory in the sections following, it is paramount to establish a
common understanding of what a factory is. A factory is understood as a site,
where the means of production and workers alike are centralized to facilitate
mass surveillance of workers through foremen and middle-managers as well as
standardization of production of commodities. This definition is based on the
main factors influencing the emergence of the factory as the primary production
site, which were examined by Szostak (1989) and will also be outlined later on.

Preface: Putting-Out and Past Worker's Relationship to Labor and the Early Capitalist

The Industrial Revolution in England was the event to attribute the first
appearance of factories to. Therefore, it is of essence to set the stage to gain
an understanding why the move to factories was made in the end. Centuries before
the Industrial Revolution in England, the putting-out system was the dominant way
of organizing production. It is characterized by decentralized production
cottages that were provided raw materials by merchants, also known as the early
capitalists. Finished goods were sold back to the merchant, who then resold them.

The means of production were divided in ownership. While tools and machines were
owned by the workers, raw materials were owned by aforementioned merchants. In
this system, workers maintained some autonomy from time-relative production.
While the product had to be produced for a profit, it did not matter whether that
would happen in an 8-hour workday, or stretched throughout days or even weeks.
This in turn allowed ample time to take care of household work or engage in
leisure and community building, as well as to put individual handcraft in the
product. In marxist terms, subsumption was only formal, but not realized until
the emergence of the factory and its machinery (Murray 2004). However, the
existence of the middleman made the process of a social division of workers
possible, where the primacy of production efficiency and profitability would
continually snuff out the social relationships that emerge from production and labor.

Emergence of the Factory: Housing New Technology?

Different ways of organizing production differ in advantages and disadvantages
for surplus-value production they present for capitalists. Henceforth, I will use
the model by Williamson (1980), because it provides a well-discussed base upon
which to discuss the emergence of the factory. Furthermore, the conclusions made
by Szostak (1989) regarding the reasons for the emergence of the factory give the
ground on which I will structure my argument in the following section. In
Williamson, 11 criteria (transport expense, inventories, embezzlement, station
assignment, leadership, contracting, work intensity, equipment utilization, local
shock responsiveness, system responsiveness, local innovation) are presented to
assess different modes of production. How one capitalist weighs each in terms of
profitability is open to interpretation.

When putting-out, embezzlement as well as system responsiveness were prevalent
issues before the rise of the factory (Szostak 1989: 352, 356). It was then of
high importance to eliminate embezzlement as far as possible and to increase the
speed of response to trends, and factories presented a way to both. With the mass
centralization and surveillance of workers as well as the standardization of
production in the factory, embezzlement cases would decrease and system
responsiveness would increase (Szostak 1989: 348). However, the factory did not
show itself as lucrative until several improvements to land and water road
networks were made until the mid-eighteenth century, pertaining to criterion 1,
transport expense .

The reasoning shown here for the emergence of the factory reflects an image of
the worker that is rationalized instead of human. The worker is only valuable in
the amount of profit they can produce for the capitalist. The choice to move to
factories was one to actively encroach on each worker's way to produce,
questioning not only the individual handcraft, but also introducing real time
constraints on them. Subsumption has become real, as wage-labor in the factory
would buy time instead of produce of each worker. Ironically, liberal capitalism,
which tries to promote the self-actualization of the individual through equal
opportunity, has instead homogenized masses of workers to produce surplus-value
for a single individual with access to self-actualization, the capitalist.

The Assembly Line: Simplify, Monotonize, Homogenize

Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" (1936) in one scene comedically presents the
plight of factory work in his time, injecting its themes into popular
consciousness for more than a lifetime with his works. It features many of the
themes that will be discussed in this part: Monotony of factory work, the
authority relationship and the homogenization of workers and their integration
into production rather than the self-directed production of goods and what this
ultimately means for the image and meaning of being a worker in times of Fordism.

The collectivization of the workforce in the factory elaborated earlier only
became more apparent post-WWI. In this age, which Antonio Gramsci coined the term
"Fordism" for, labor processes were rationalized further, simplifying and
eliminating operations in the factory and routinizing, deskilling and
intensifying labor. This was coupled with engineers and managers holding more
top-down control of labor processes in the factory (Antonio & Bonanno 2000: p.
34). In "Seeing Like a State" (1998), James C. Scott writes about this process in
North America as a consequence of "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.[...]An American contribution came from the influential
work of Frederick Taylor, whose minute decomposition of factory labor into
isolable, precise, repetitive motions had begun to revolutionize the organization
of factory work. For the factory manager or engineer, the newly invented assembly
lines permitted the use of unskilled labor and control over not only the pace of
production but the whole labor process. (Scott 1998)

Fordism and its repercussions for images of the factory worker were major. As
engineers and managers devised plans of operation in the factory, workers became
mere cogs of production, not producers themselves. What is meant by this will be
outlined using examples of factory tasks described by Romano and Stone in Part
1.1 of their pamphlet "The American Worker" (1948). In general, tasks assigned to
factory workers were described as monotonous, however physically and mentally
extremely taxing. They mainly served the purpose of maintaining the machines that
did the actual producing of goods, e.g. applying lubricant to steel cutters. To
contrast, the process in which goods were produced were never more simplified
than at this time, but were sped up continuously. As long as the worker was able
to maintain the machine faster, production could continue becoming faster. The
worker then would become continually more absent from production, now being
subject to the assembly line's pace, which was subject to managerial planning.

Not only was autonomy of production completely taken away at this stage, the
Fordist cultural project injected itself into the worker's identity outside of
work. Gramsci (1971: 294-306) explains that Fordist capitalists had a high
interest in the moral and psychological condition of their workers. Therefore,
American Puritanism, in Gramsci's eyes, was a result of cultural molding of the
factory workers to subordinate to capital. The high emphasis on monogamy, female
subordination and repressed sexuality, all of which were supported by Henry Ford,
provided a cultural basis where workers within that culture would be cut out for
factory work (Antonio & Bonanno 2000: 35). The worker was not anymore hegemonized
only in skill and in the nature of their tasks, but also culturally, wrapping
them in the regime of Fordist capitalism.

The Commodification of the Modern Factory Worker: A Case Study

In the 21st century, companies in Asia, Europe and America are continuing towards
automating their factories using robots and other modern technologies. Human
beings often become more and more absent from factories, as seen in the Tesla
factory in Fremont, California (Faciejew 2013: 61). However, in this part, I want
to highlight the anthropological consequences of how Ferrari organizes work in
its plant in Maranello, Italy, as its way of presenting factory workers is
particularly interesting in contrast to Fordist rationalization and the emergence
of the factory overall.

Ferrari, founded in 1929, is a young automobile company in relative terms, and
therefore not front and center when the common person discusses Fordist
rationalization. Throughout its existence, Ferrari aimed at achieving aesthetic
goals for its plant, while also incorporating well-being programs for workers in
the plant. All of this combined served to produce an image of quality in the
product and great worker involvement, which becomes more important when
automation comes in (Faciejew 2013: 60).

The key difference of the Ferrari plant to other automobile plants is that, while
it has incorporated modern technologies into the assembly process, it produces
images of a factory where the worker is co-central with technology, rather than
subordinate to it. However, what is mediated through media presence is not the
reality most workers in the plant live in. While Nouvel's Assembly Lines very
much show the collaborative existence of human-machine, the assembling work there
comprises three days of three weeks of the production process. In most other
parts of the factory compound, automation took over or workers still exist in the
cog-like workings of Fordist rationalization, maintaining machines (Faciejew
2013: 61).

Omitting the centrality of automation and setting the worker in the middle of
producing Ferrari's image is done so deliberately. It serves to contrast the
Ferrari plant from factories of past and present. Where in the mid-eighteenth
century, standardization was preferred over individual handcraft, the Ferrari
plant shows handicraft of skilled engineers in its assembly lines. Where in
Fordist times, the worker was only one of many gears, the Ferrari worker
seemingly cooperates with the machine to manufacture excellence, or so marketing
would suggest. It can be crudely said that, in fact, little has changed in the
anthropology of the factory since post-WW1. It is rather the case that
representations of it in public relation stunts serve to shroud the presence of
total authority, surveillance and the lack of actual individual handcraft.

Conclusions and Implications

Throughout its history, the plant was a tool to maximize surplus-value at the
expense of individuality. Constant presence of the authority relation served to
enforce discipline and to ensure time (equals money or productivity) is not lost.
All of these aspects homogenized and dehumanized the factory worker. Even in, or
precisely because of, neoliberal times, capital has never sought to reverse these
consequences, only hid them to commodify the exact qualities of a manufacturer
the factory serves to eliminate. It is high time to seriously reflect upon our
priorities in humanity, because currently, we are steering towards truly
terrifying prospects. Thinking of workers as nothing more than tools to multiply
surplus-value is arguably only conducive to creating more suffering for them,
rather than to alleviate said suffering.

The question then is, from a purely anthropological perspective, whether the
factory is able to be rehabilitated in a post-capitalist world without the profit
motive, to re-enchant manufacture with individuality, free association and
humanity. Of course I am aware that the more apparent question would be, whether
the factory as a mode of production can ever be sustainable in face of the
climate crisis. It is important to analyze then, how mass production lies at the
intersection of the anthropology of the factory and sustainability, and how that
can be resolved using that analysis, with or without the factory.

Bibliography

Antonio, R. J., & Bonanno, A. (2000). A New Global Capitalism? From "Americanism
and Fordism" to "Americanization-Globalization." American Studies, 41(2/3),
33-77. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40643230

Eugene, E. R. (1987). Rethinking Marxist Anthropology. In David H. & Hanna, L.
(Ed.). Perspectives in U.S. Marxist Anthropology (ed., pp. 24-56). London &
Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Retrieved December 30th, 2021, from
https://home.csulb.edu/~eruyle/published/Rethinking%20Marxist%20Anthropology.pdf.

Faciejew, M. (2013). The Car Factory, Post-Industrialism, and Utopia. Journal of
Architectural Education (1984-), 67(1), 52-63. Retrieved December 21st, 2021,
from http://www.jstor.org/stable/42569999

Gramsci, A. (1929-1935). In Hoare, Q & Smith, G. N. (1971). Selections From the
Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers.

Murray, P. (2004). The Social and Material Transformation of Production by
Capital: Formal and Real Subsumption in Capital, Volume I. In Bellofiore R.,
Taylor N. (Ed.) The Constitution of Capital. Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Retrieved December 27th, 2021,  from https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403938640_9

Scott, James C. (1998). Chapter 3: Authoritarian High Modernism. In S. J., Scott
(Ed.). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
Have Failed. New Haven, CO: Yale University Press. Retrieved January 3rd, 2022,
from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state#toc24

Szostak, R. (1989). The organization of work: The emergence of the factory
revisited. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 11(3), pp.
343-358. Retrieved December 27th, 2021, from
https://doi.org/10.1016/0167-2681(89)90034-6.

Williamson, O. E. (1980). The organization of work a comparative institutional
assessment. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 1(1), pp. 5-38.
Retrieved December 28th, 2021, from https://doi.org/10.1016/0167-2681(80)90050-5

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