Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano is a response to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward.  The two books treat the same issues: industrialization, the meaning of work, human inventiveness, and the ability of that inventiveness to find solutions to human problems, the power of machines to improve production, and the ability, or lack thereof, of productiveness to set people free.  The two books see the solution to these problems within the eventual victory of capitalist productivity over everything – but in the way that this will change society, they are diametrically opposed. I found the general theme of the books, and the various ways in which they viewed that theme, to be so resonant with the other non-fiction books I have read this semester that I think it will be instructive for me to place Vonnegut and Bellamy’s themes in categories suggested by those other books.            Starting the semester with Karl Marx’s Capital, Vol. I, I was particularly struck with the time and effort Marx put in to describing and understanding the relationship of labor, labor power, and the enhancement of value in the manufacturing process.  Marx was particularly careful to explain how labor was the key component of manufacturing, as it was the transformative act – the act that changed raw materials into materials with “use value” which could be sold on the market for more than the value of the materials themselves.  For Marx, it is the transformation accomplished by labor that creates the added value.  Thus, the chief aim of capitalism is to exploit labor such that the wage paid for labor is in effect less than the value of the product of labor.  In this way, capital can increase itself.  This is one of the first and most important themes of both Bellamy and Vonnegut’s works.

Bellamy starts his book with a discussion by his main character, Julian West, of the “labor problem” as the central social ill of his time.  The vast accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, who gained it by exploiting the labor of the majority, was leading to strikes, riots, and a general sense that society was headed for a fall.  When he awakes in the year 2000, though, he discovers that this problem has been solved.

Bellamy suggests that the solution to capital’s exploitation of labor is an inevitable part of the development of capitalism, and human society in general.  Julian West’s guide to the twentieth century, Dr. Leete, who revived him after more than a century in a hypnotism-induced trance, looks at the growth of big capital as a process of consolidation at the end of which lies ultimate socialization of the means of production.  Leete explains that the tendency of companies toward reduction of competition ended in a kind of final merger in which all corporations became one, and came to be controlled by the nation.  The answer to the problem of labor, wealth inequity, and class division, is progress, and the ultimate generation of so much wealth that society can afford to share it all.  This is the result of the productivity of the capitalist manufacturing system itself.        Vonnegut, on the other had, sees a similar end in the process of industrialization and capitalism, but is not so sanguine about it.  In his vision, great corporations are able to increase productivity through the use of machines to such an extent that it is less expensive to support the majority of humans without labor than to have them working.  As in Bellamy’s work, the majority of people come to be supported by the state, and as in Bellamy’s book the primary focus of people comes to be not economic, but national and social, but for Vonnegut these are simply subterfuges and methods of substitution for the emptiness people feel when deprived of work and the opportunity to be creative.

Bellamy, writing only 19 years after the publication of Marx’s Capital, Vol. I, imagines the end of class division – a society based on equality, and, to paraphrase Mars’ famous axiom, production from each according to ability and distribution to each according to need.  Bellamy’s future society needs no money, and does not conduct trade.

Vonnegut sees an amplification of the class divisions of the early industrial revolution.  As he sees it, capitalism and industrialism are processes by which humanity devalues itself.  The first industrial revolution, according to Vonnegut, did away with muscle-powered labor.  The second, in an almost perfect reflection of the extension of Marxist thought provided by Harry Braverman, did away with simple, repetitive mental labor – secretaries, clerks, filing assistants, etc.  The third will do away with complex mental tasks – the work of the managers and engineers who populate the book.

Bellamy seems quite aware of the implications of his idea, and takes the time to make it clear that this new utopia belongs to everyone.  He even finds a place for women, with their own system of contribution to the general well-being of society, and for disabled members of society, who have a part to play in the “invalid corps” – as society is organized on the lines of a military, but set against hunger, poverty, and disease, rather than against national enemies in war.  In this military organization of society, the world of women remains separate from that of men, but women are equal, and choose to marry not for economic well-being, but for companionship and love.

Vonnegut’s women are caricatures of corporate wives in the 1950’s, victims and fellow-travelers in the world of corporate politics and ladder-climbing.  Anita, the wife of Paul Proteus, Vonnegut’s main character, clings to her husbands social position, and to the job and corporate ladder that supply him with that position, his prestige, and money that comes with it.  When he has moral misgivings, she leaves him for the next corporate climber rather than try to understand his difficulties.

In keeping with some of the other themes of the monographs I have read this semester, the role of technology in making life better, or worse, for humans – the theme addressed by Thomas Hughes in American Genesis, is a critical one here.  Hughes’ study was overall a look at the pattern of invention, from the independent inventors of the 19th and early 20th century, like Edison, who were creative, and focused on solving problems to make life better, more efficient, and easier for people, through the capitalization and industrialization of invention, which Hughes calls a conservative process, fundamentally setting out to improve existing processes and devices, rather than to solve new problems in radical ways.  The corporatization focuses on the improvement of productivity, both through the use of machines and through the bending of human activity to fit more closely with the way machines work.  Hughes is particularly interested in “Taylorism” or “Scientific Management” – the process introduced by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1920’s designed to make management of the shop floor more centralized, and to make human parts of the manufacturing process a seamless part of the mechanized flow of production.  Of course, Marx also discusses this theme in Capital, and makes it clear that machines are not designed to make life easier for humans, but instead to increase the value gained from the exploitation of human labor by making humans more efficient and less costly.

One of the key ironies in the way both Bellamy and Vonnegut look at this process of making human labor more productive through machines and organization is that while both see this as the key to their differing ideas of the future, they differ greatly in their attitude toward it.  To some degree the difference is the result of the difference in time period that each was writing.  Bellamy, in 1887, was not likely to expect the kind of thinking machine technology that Vonnegut, in 1954, was able to just see over the technological horizon.

Bellamy’s technology still depends on humans to make it go, and so the need for labor is a kind of ever-lasting given.  With no sense of a possible reduction in the need for workers, this growing efficiency through machines and organizations is a way to free humans to become even more human through education in early life, and leisure after early retirement.  For Bellamy, invention is the creative process by which humans solve the problems they face.  The creation and use of machines and systems to minimize labor is not only good, but part of the inevitable progress toward the utopian future he envisions.  In the same way, then, the inventiveness of people is part of the inevitable move toward the single corporate nation.

Vonnegut sees the inventiveness of humans as a kind of wonderful curse, and the end of labor as the destruction of human dignity and purpose.  Where for Bellamy labor is only the means to gain the freedom and resources to pursue real humanizing activities, for Vonnegut, work is the vital human activity.  Work is the source of the creative impulse, and provides the satisfaction one needs, along with a means of providing for the needs of daily life.  In Player Piano, the favorite place of Vonnegut’s main character, Paul Proteus, is the oldest building on the grounds of the Ilium works – once a part of Thomas Edison’s workshop.  Proteus, like the workers at the end of the book who turn to fixing machines after they destroy them, can’t resist the wonder of designing and building machines.  But he comes to understand that this very process leads to humans designing themselves out of existence.

For Bellamy, people in the future will work from age 21 to age 45, when they can retire and enjoy a life a leisure until the end of their days.  In Vonnegut’s book, the majority of workers have been put out of work by machines, and they all long to go back to work – leisure is not the wonderful end it is made out to be – as Dr. Hayward says to the Shah of Bratpuhr, people no longer have to work, so they can spend time in leisure.  When the shah asks what they do with all this time, Hayward says they “live” – but the irony of that statement is made plain by the statements of the others in the scene.  It is clear that with their leisure time, most of them watch television, or otherwise waste their time in meaningless pursuits.   Thomas Hughes’ book American Genesis suggests that the spirit that drove Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla was akin to the optimism in Bellamy’s characters Leese and West.  Harry Braverman’s book Labor and Monopoly Capital has much more sympathy for Vonnegut’s view, as Braverman makes plain early in the book that work is the hidden, but most important, human pursuit.  Work, Braverman says, defines us.  Bellamy wants to rid the world of work as a contributor to self-identity.  Vonnegut wants to show that endless leisure would lead to an endless hole in the self, and in society.

Ultimately, the primary contrast between Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward and Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano is the way in which each describes the final evolution of the industrial revolution.  In Looking Backward, this evolution is the result of a constant Darwinian-style struggle of capital – what we might call “evolutionary Marxism,” and its result is progress toward a perfected human society, whereas in Player Piano, Vonnegut describes an evolution of technology.  At each stage of the industrial revolution, a large group of laborers is made obsolete.  The final evolution, which is happening as the book progresses, is the obsolescence of all humans, whose lives are becoming pointless, and completely dependent upon machines.  But, the great irony for Vonnegut is that it is human creativity is what led to the invention of machines – the one thing that separates us from the machines, leads to our making the machines and enslaving ourselves to them.

The question remains, at the end of these two books – is the inventiveness of human-kind likely to make the world a utopia, or a living hell?  Can there be a society without class divisions and great disparities in wealth?  Will class conflict become the primary drag on society, or will it open a new world of experience and equality?  I think reading these two books together is a wonderful way to highlight these questions, and multiple possible perspectives on the economic, social, and technological trends upon which they comment.

Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital:  The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974/1998.

Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital was both the most difficult, and the most Marxist, book I have read this semester.  As that reading list includes selections from Karl Marx’ Capital, Vol. I, I have to add that I do not think saying this is an exaggeration.  Braverman, a laborer by experience with an intellectual and socialist bent, intends to document the decline of labor in a number of senses – the reduction of work to the lowest level of skill, and its reduction as much as possible to the status of automated mechanical activity.  But Braverman is also interested in how these reductions tend to cause reduced wages, reduced job satisfaction, and the reintegration of lost craft skills within the machines that do the majority of work in twentieth century industry.  The object of interest is the subjection of all facets of work to the needs of the capitalist.  Braverman’s book in fact follows many of the key themes in Capital but expands upon them to include changes occurring in the 20^th century, and Braverman seems if anything more ardent than Marx about the need for workers to understand these changes and act upon them.  He discusses the failure of unionism, and the concomitant failure of Marxism because it became tied up with unions.  He is fascinated with the increasing use of the worker as automaton.  He is also interested in the way that capital hides the deskilling of labor under a blanket, allowing only minimal glimpses at work and its meaning, even by those who perform it, by literally removing work as a meaningful part of a laborer’s life.

As Marx made so clear, one of the key problems with the relationship of labor to capital is that “[the] technical subordination of the worker to the uniform motion of the instrument of labour…gives rise to a barrack-like discipline…thereby dividing the workers into manual laborers and overseers, into the private soldiers and N.C.O.s of an industrial army,” and that while an individual craftsman makes use of tools, “in the factory, the machine makes use of him.”[1] Braverman takes this idea beyond Marx’s comments, claiming that the process of “deskilling” labor results not just from the use of machines, but from the nature of management in a large corporation.  His primary target here is “Taylorism,” the theory of Scientific Management developed in the United States in the early 20^th Century in which even the movements of workers were scrutinized in order to find the one best system which minimized movement and time on task, but maximized the results – productive work.

Working off of Marx’s idea that work is purposeful, and conceptual as well as transformative of nature, Braverman says that “Labor that transcends mere instinctual activity is thus the force which created humankind, and the force by which humankind created the world as we know it.”[2] Work is the prime creative force that makes us human.  Thus the reduction of work to mere process – the deskilling of work in the industrial factory and the modern corporation, which is what Taylorism aims to do, is also the process of dehumanization.

Braverman asserts that the conceptual function, as well as the coordination function, that belonged to skilled craft workers is transferred to management workers in industrial capitalism.[3] This is an interesting extension of the production process model of labor which is often discussed by Adam Smith and by Marx, and which is a fundamental component of Taylorism – namely that the separation of tasks in industrial capitalism not only separates workers according to function, but also adding managerial workers to the functional process by giving them a separate piece of the puzzle – the conceptual piece.  This certainly would only add to the process of deskilling labor.  Braverman shows this by giving a history of the development of management, and concentrating on the change in the goals of capital from, in line with Marx’s theories in Capital, the goal of purchasing and owning labor completely, “in the same way he bought his raw materials: as a definite quantity of work, completed and embodied in the product” to a preference for the purchase of labor power – the direct hiring of laborers, the control of which gives the ability to wring more value from the labor, particularly through the device of management – a further division of labor that provides a brain to operate the warm bodies on the production floor.[4]

Braverman goes further in his discussion of the division of labor, however, making another very Marxist argument that while a “social division of labor” is common and natural to human societies, the breakdown of specific industrial processes into constituent parts is not a natural process, but one unique to the capitalist mode of production.  He illustrates this with Adam Smith’s famous pin-making example, showing how even simple manufacturing processes can be made more productive through a division of labor into its constituent parts.  He then makes the point that Smith and others make about division of labor: “in a society based upon the purchase and sale of labor power, dividing the craft cheapens individual parts.”  This is thus the goal of capitalism – as Marx outlines in Capital – to increase the value of the product through the creation of excess value by increasing the productivity of workers.  Braverman calls this the “general law of the capitalist division of labor.”[5]

When he directly confronts Taylorism (or Scientific Management), Braverman makes the point that Scientific Management is not concerned with technology, nor is it really scientific, but is simply the application of the needs of capital to the process of controlling work.  It takes as a given the idea that management and labor exist in opposition to each other, and does not attempt to resolve that tension, despite its claim to approach work from a humanistic point of view.  Taylorism, according to Braverman, is only a new way to gain excess labor from the workforce.  Taylor, he says, had two categories into which he slid management practices.  The first he called “ordinary management” – the control of the general conditions of work, and the second, “scientific management” which was the control of every phase of the work process.  Management should, he said, plan out each act in the work process precisely.  One goal was to remove the thinking process from work.  The job of management was to reduce craft knowledge to a set of tasks and rules and time tables, and return it to the worker as a decided plan which only needed to be carried out physically.  This is the deskilling process that modern management in large industrial corporations carry out in the name of improving productivity by reducing the cost of labor.[6]

The results of this division of labor in capitalist society are a persistent and inexorable loss of skill among workers, and, moreover, Braverman says, the loss of craftsmanship and the place in society of the craftsman that went along with it.  Braverman gives the example of the rise of the profession of engineering – engineers, who connect technology–and science in their work – came into existence, he says, because the deskilling of the labor force took that position, and capacity, away from craftsmen, who were in the past the group within society who bridged science and work through their intimate knowledge of their crafts.  This contributes to an acute level of dissatisfaction for workers, and a great loss to society.

The dissatisfaction of workers, primarily because of the increasingly de-humanization of working conditions, has been ameliorated by modern industry, according to Braverman, by the manipulation of the labor force, both through modern personnel techniques that accept labor conditions as a given and profess to help workers adjust to “reality,” and through the use of pay, benefits, and other parts of work that make it desireable,  (Braverman uses an example the institution of the $5 day at Ford Motor Co.) to help workers accept industrial conditions as reality and limit protests and strikes.  This is the primary function of personnel and human resources departments in large corporations.[7]

Along with labor, science has become the most important item employed by capital to create excess value.  Braverman makes some interesting observations while discussing how science began as what can essentially be called invention (the steam engine probably contributed more to science than science did to the steam engine, he says), but became systematically integrated into large industrial firms as a part of the means of production itself.  Science and technology became a commodity that added value to the production process, and therefore were sought after by corporations attempting to increase the value of their capital and products.[8]

Combining his ideas about the tension between management and labor, and the increasing importance of automation and machinery, Braverman then moves into perhaps his most original and most important argument.  Machinery, what Marx called the “instruments of production” are improved to the point where they are no longer controlled by the worker, but instead actually do the work of the worker, and control the worker as if he/she were part of the machine itself.  Moreover, the machines in the twentieth century actually reintegrate the labor process, so that the division of labor, which cheapened work, and deskilled workers, created a mass of low-paid, low-skilled workers who come only to operate machines.  This completes the dehumanization process, because it removes thinking, skills, and even production from the workers, and then reintegrates all of those things within machines, asking the workers only to operate the machines at the pace, and according to the rules, set by management.  There is no more of the humanizing process of work that Marx, and Braverman, say is what defines us as human beings.

I found Braverman’s analysis to be very compelling.  It updates Marx so that his theories, developed in the mid-nineteenth century, can be seen to be applicable to modern industry and work.  His argument that clerks and office workers are new skilled workers, but that there work is being controlled, deskilled, and divided as well, and that the vast majority of workers are thus dissatisfied with their jobs, goes far toward the conclusion that de-humanization is a trend of modern industrial society.  I found here a critique of a number of other works that I have read, including journalistic accounts of labor, and capitalism, that is compelling and useful.

Like Marx, though, I think that Braverman has a blind spot.  He is a proletarian intellectual.  He has no place in his analysis for intellectuals, however.  At one point he mentions the profession of engineering, but really only in passing, and only as an example of the deskilling of crafts.  Academic pursuits, and knowledge-based careers do seem to me to be on the rise over the late part of the Twentieth Century.  However, as the introduction and the preface note, this may not – is probably not – enough to offset the loss of skills and satisfaction in industrial labor.

If Braverman were writing today, I think that he would find the growth of the service sector in the American economy, and the increased economic importance of the financial services industry in particular, to be further proof that the trends he identifies – deskilling of the labor force, increasing domination of the economy by capital, and increasing levels of job-dissatisfaction throughout the United States.

Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital:  The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974/1998.

Marx, Karl. Capital:  A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin ed. 3 vols. Vol. 1. New York: Penguin Books, 1867, 1976. Reprint, 1976.

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[1] Karl Marx, Capital:  A Critique of Political Economy, Penguin ed., 3 vols., vol. 1 (New York: Penguin Books, 1867, 1976; reprint, 1976), 548-9.

[2] Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital:  The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974/1998), 34.

[3] Ibid., 41.

[4] Ibid., 42-47.

[5] Ibid., 52-58.

[6] Ibid., 59-83.

[7] Ibid., 96-104.

[8] Ibid., 114.

Chandler,Alfred D.. Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1962.

Alfred D. Chandler has written a lucid, interesting, and informative work about the history of organization and industry in the United States since the late nineteenth century.  Chandler’s thesis is that in the development of American business, structure (the organization of a business entity in order to carry out its current functions) follows strategy (the long term plan for change in the organization’s activities in order to continue to participate in the market over time.).  In order to make the case that this has historically been so, Chandler provides case studies of four major U.S. Corporations whose organizational innovations were at the forefront of the creation of the modern multi-divisional decentralized corporate structure.  All four, Chandler asserts, became to some degree models for other expanding corporations after World War II as American business spread overseas, and into new product lines and markets.

Chandler begins his history with the context of the changes these four corporations underwent.  In the first chapter, Chandler gives a summary explanation of the development of administrative structure in American business.  Before 1850, he says, American business was usually a family or small shop affair, and little future planning was necessary.  Business usually involved an owner doing both planning and working within the business on daily operations.  After 1850, a few businesses did begin to develop administrative structures, but these structures continued to reflect the operational, rather than strategic needs of the business.

As Chandler warms to his subject, though, he opens up one of the key concepts in his thesis – that the expansion of a business enterprise dictates the need for new structure.  The primary example that Chandler uses here is the development of railroads, whose extension to farther-flung locations required ever more careful coordination of operational activities, and for whom the growing market, defined by the expansion of the American frontier, required strategic planning in order to find profitable routes, and sufficient financing.  This expansion led to the creation by the railroads of an organizational model that included a central administrative office which controlled a number of departments whose responsibilities were divided by function.[1] This centralized departmental structure served large and growing enterprises well  until the end of the first decade of the twentieth century.  At that point, Chandler says growth became a major issue for several of the largest corporations in America.

Chandler also explains that growth can come in a four different ways: growth from continued expansion of the same business with the same type of customers; growth from vertical integration; growth from expansion to overseas markets; and growth from expansion into new product lines.  It is also true that enterprises might be growing in two or more of these ways at once.  Yet the most important, from the perspective of requiring new organizational patterns, is the last – growth from expansion into new product lines.[2] Chander’s goal is to show how this growth led to a new model for American business organization.

The four firms studied by Chandler: du Pont, General Motors, Standard Oil, and Sears, Roebuck and Co. all found that to make their diversified and complex businesses work, and to continue to work into the future, they had to reorganize.  Each seems to have developed a “decentralized, multi-divisional structure” independently of the others, by different paths, and for somewhat different reasons, but ultimately ending up with a similar structure in which the general administrative office is in charge of planning and distributing (particularly financial) resources, and the divisions each work as multi-departmental companies in charge of a specific part of the business, with the divisions created based on the business needs.[3]

The largest section of the book is made up of Chandler’s four case studies.  Among these, he takes care to note differences in enterprise, market, and style.  He begins with the earliest corporation to become decentralized and multi-divisional, du Pont Chemical, and ends with the last, Sears, Roebuck and Co.

Du Pont, specialized in explosives manufacture for sale mostly to the United States Government.  The downturn in this market after World War I, however, forced DuPont to diversify into chemical products for industrial, agricultural, and domestic use among consumers and businesses.  The success of the company in doing this eventually caused so much stress in the central administrative office, which was organized around functional departments before 1921, that the administrators of the company, mostly concerned with daily operational tasks in any case, had little or no ability to understand what was going on over the entire company.  In other words, du Pont’s conscious decision to change its approach to the market through diversification, a new strategy, caused a serious workload problem, particularly for administrators, and this required the development of a new structure – a decentralized multi-divisional organization that allowed central planning and control of resources, while the divisions themselves were able to autonomously work within their own markets at an operational level.  This provided maximum operational efficiency and the best flexibility possible to react to changing market conditions.  As Chandler says, “At du Pont, then, structure followed strategy.”[4]

The change at General Motors from a centralized, departmental structure to a decentralized multi-divisional structure came from the opposite impetus.  General Motors did not require the creation of a set of autonomous divisions to serve a diversifying product line.  Rather, General Motors was already diversified to a point where central control was becoming impossible, and so the reorganization there came from the creation of a general office.[5] The strategy of William C. Durant, who created the General Motors Corporation, was from the beginning big.  He was already by 1908 the largest auto manufacturer in the nation.  That very size left GM difficult to manage because communications were poor, and financing was difficult.  In 1920, GM’s new President, ironically Pierre du Pont, implemented a multi-divisional organization plan created by Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.[6] That plan placed a general office at the center of a vast multi-divisional corporation whose divisions were based on brand and product.  These divisions were each responsible for manufacturing and marketing their own products, and for reporting back to the general office regarding finances, sales, and other key information.[7] In return, the general office would take the information from those reports, and plan market and manufacturing strategy.  Once again, structure followed strategy.

The third enterprise that Chandler discusses is the Standard Oil Corporation (New Jersey), or what he calls “Jersey Standard”.  Here, the fact that the enterprise was primarily a refining company after being required to make major divestments in accord with a Sherman Anti-Trust Act decision by the Supreme Court in 1911 was one of the key issues.  Chandler explains that while Standard Oil continued to be a refiner of oil, staying with basically the same business, expansion of the market as the automobile became popular drove a need to secure downstream resources and upstream distribution – a drive for vertical integration in a growing market.  Thus, the “Jersey Company” grew based on “responses to immediate short-term pressures in the marketing, refining, and producing of oil…” – operational concerns created a tension in administrative work, because the company was moving from crisis to crisis with little or no strategy.[8] In 1925, an inventory crisis made the organizational problem impossible to ignore, and after a series of organizational failures, the Jersey Company became a decentralized, multi-divisional organization, like du Pont and General Motors, though in a much less deliberate fashion.  Still, Chandler’s point is that structure follows strategy – the crisis in administration required better planning, accounting, and resource distribution.  Answering that strategic need with a new organizational structure that fit the growth needs of the company was the solution.

Sear, Roebuck and Co. was again different from the other three companies in Chandler’s study.  First of all, Sears was a mail order company which had decided to expand into over-the-counter retail operations.  Its function was essentially the same, but it was enlarging and decentralizing its distribution network.[9] Early responses to the growth problem led Sears into a hybrid organization, in which half the organization was of the older functional model, and half was based on territory.[10] By 1940, it was clear that a territorially delineated structure of multifunction divisions, linked by a centralized general office in Chicago was the most effective structure.  Sears then went about defining the administrative roles of managers within the central office.[11] Once again, then, structure followed strategy in the case of Sears.

Chandler spends his penultimate chapter comparing these four companies, concluding that while they all realized the need for a new organization after experiencing different kinds of growth, and different types of problems related to that growth, they all also came to organizational change because of the perceptions of effective managers whose work was affected by the difficulties inherent in the older organization systems under the strain of growth.  In the end, despite different product lines and business trajectories, all found that the decentralized, multi-divisional structure was the most efficient organization for dealing with operational realities, while providing information, planning, and financing functions that helped to be flexible and reactive to market realities.

In the end, Chandler wants his readers to recognize a broad arc of business organizational development in U.S. History, beginning with the realities of family and shop-size firms concerned with local, single- or limited-product-line production, and which were primarily operational in organization, sparing little time for strategic adjustment to new market realities.  His arc continues through the development of larger transportation and manufacturing, through the development of railroads and broad distribution networks and the advent of machine manufacturing, through which enterprises needed to become more carefully organized in order to continue to deal effectively with growing size and distance.  The administrators of these second-generation firms were still primarily concerned with operational matters.

Chandler sees a paradigm shift with the development of large firms with centralized functional departmental structures, capable of handling marketing, manufacturing, finance, procurement, and service under a single roof efficiently.  This, too, though, eventually became insufficient for the growth of the largest corporations in American history during the end of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century.  The backups, logjams, and structural problems these firms experienced led them to understand a need for efficient sharing of information and use of that information to efficiently distribute resources and plan for future market moves.  This need could only be answered, by the decentralized multi-divisional structure that the four companies in his study represent.

In all, Chandler’s book is very useful for creating a framework for understanding the development of big business in the United States, particularly over the course of the twentieth century.  The broad arc of business history that he paints does not spend much time with earlier forms of organization, stopping mostly with the statement that these were mostly operationally oriented and spent little time on planning.  The focus on the twentieth century, though, and on big business, does occasionally lead a reader to wonder where all of the other enterprises are in this arc of history.  Never the less, Strategy and Structure is a critical work necessary for anyone wishing to really begin to understand the development of American business.

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[1] Chandler,Alfred D.. Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1962, 22-39.

[2] Ibid., 42-51.

[3] Ibid., 50-51.

[4] Chandler, 112.

[5] Ibid., 113.

[6] Ibid., 114.

[7] Ibid., 149. (Chandler provides numerous organization charts for all four enterprises.  The most useful for understanding GM is on pages 136-137).

[8] Chandler, 177.

[9] Ibid. 225.

[10] Ibid. 261.

[11] Ibid.

Marx, Karl. Capital:  A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin ed. 3 vols. Vol. 1. New York: Penguin Books, 1848, 1976. Reprint, 1976.

For my first project this semester, I read sections of Volume I of Karl Marx’s Capital.  This paper consists of a selection of notes that I have taken on the reading, then edited, along with my reactions to the ideas and evidence presented in the book.  I found this book to be interesting, and not as difficult to read as I expected, but very densely packed with ideas and evidence.  I suspect I’ll be reading and re-reading it for years.  My initial observations seem to me to be somewhat superficial – I found nothing particularly difficult to understand or overly subtle in the points Marx makes, but I was impressed by the insightful observations, and the way in which they can still be applied to the history of labor and industry.  The sections I read include chapter 7: “The Labor Process and the Valorization Process,” Chapter 10: “The Working Day,” chapter 15:  “Machinery and Large Scale Industry,” chapter 26: “Primitive Accumulation,” and chapter 27:  “The Expropriation  of the Agricultural Population from the Land,”

In “Chapter 7:  The Labour Process and the Valorization Process”, Marx tries to relate labor power to its place in the capitalist system by explaining that labor is a commodity –  a process by which raw materials are turned into what Marx calls a “use-value” – a commodity that satisfies some need, and is therefore marketable.[1] The capitalist controls the production because he has purchased the raw materials, and the location of the work, with his capital.  According to Marx, he then goes out and purchases labor on the open market with his capital, as a commodity, but one whose role is to transform the other commodities – the raw materials, into a use-value that he can then sell to increase his capital.[2]

However, Marx in this chapter explains that the key problem here is that the capitalist is not interested in producing just anything, nor is he interested in producing use-values that for his own use.  The interest of the capitalist is to increase his capital by engaging in the production process.  Therefore, he needs to find some way to increase the value of the goods produce.  According to Marx, raw materials have an intrinsic value which cannot be altered, unless the material is itself altered to meet a specific need.  The process of alteration, then, the labor process, is also the only place where value can be added to goods.  However, as the labor process is itself only a commodity, and has, therefore, an intrinsic value – namely, what is required for the laborer to survive, then the capitalist can make no money on this process, unless he finds a way to increase value without increasing cost.  This can be done, according to Marx, by increasing labor productivity without increasing its cost.

Marx says that a laborer can sell his labor power – defined as the potential to effect change in raw materials through the process of work – at market value. The capitalist, though can pay the laborer the cost of subsistence, and if the laborer produces enough goods to return than cost in four hours, the capitalist can insist that he will pay the same amount, but only for six hours’ work.  In this way, the capitalist gets more for his money than the actual cost of the labor power, thus allowing him to realize a profit on the goods produced.

I found this interesting, but rather limited.  It certainly brought home to me some of the realities of labor in Marx’s day.  Obviously, ideas such as extra pay for over time work were not in practice at the time.  It also makes me wonder to what degree modern wages are based on this same principle.

However, it also seems quite limited in its understanding of the production process and the process of the market.  It places all surplus value within the envelope of labor, and gives no account for other market forces such as demand, the relative and changing value of commodities, and the degree to which commodities as raw materials are or are not renewable.  Marx also seems to assume that laborers are only interested in subsistence-level life.  This seems a narrow view, and I wonder to what degree it is informed by the times, and to what degree Marx is assuming a limit to the intelligence or desires of laborers themselves.

In “Chapter 10:  The Working Day”, Marx seems to have several goals.  The first goal is to elaborate on the ideas of the relation between capital and labor that he discussed in Chapter 7.[3]

His longest argument, though, is a historical narrative of the process by which laborers were able to shorten the length of the working day, and how in many cases the legislation that accompanied worker attempts to limit work time actually worked in reverse, giving capitalists legal permission to use workers for certain lengths of time, rather than limiting their rights to equalize their market power with that of workers.  This, he wants to claim, only becomes a struggle when those selling labor on the market come together to demand certain rules in the process of the sale of labor – and groups of capitalists come together to protect their own interests – what Marx calls, “a struggle between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labor, i.e. the working class.”[4]

The history Marx gives begins much earlier than the Industrial Revolution, and seemed to me to be the foundational arguments for the historical dialectic that Marx and Engels discuss in the Communist Manifesto.  He begins with a brief description of the abuses of laborers by pre-industrial systems, and makes a connection to his theory of the valorization of capital by showing how in Medieval Europe, and Russia, by example, aristocrats essentially accomplished the same over exploitation of labor power by providing serfs and peasants on their farms with contracts and laws that required huge amounts of work, and allowed the workers only the time necessary to subsist.  By holding on to the means of production – the raw materials and place, and tools, of production, these landlords and aristocrats were able to command tremendous extra labor with the potential threat of removing all means of production.

However, the critical factor in making labor into the commodity that he sees in his industrial era is money.  Money, capital, is the means by which labor and other commodities are purchased, but, as Marx explains, they are purchased by the capitalist not for themselves, and not even for the use-value of the goods they produce, but because the capitalist believes he can sell that use-value for more money – what Marx calls “exchange value”.  He says in this chapter that so long as a political economy works to produce use-value, and not exchange value, the horrifying drive for surplus labor will not arise.[5] I disagree.  It seems that there is plenty of evidence of horrific overexploitation of laborers in Europe’s middle ages.  However, I see what Marx is driving at here – he wants to show that the primary difference between a commodity economy and a capitalist economy is the form of exchange, and when we apply money to the process of exchange it is possible to see changes in value for commodities that might otherwise always operate in the market based on their intrinsic value.  This is apparently Marx’s definition of capitalism.  While it has its flaws, it seems to me to be a good place to begin.  In fact, Marx seems to be somewhat cognizant of my own objection above in that he also mentions that in the non-exchange economies, overexploitation of surplus labor did occur in the mining of precious metals – gold and silver – which were the monetary medium of exchange at the time, and so prefigured, or imitated, capital.

This historical narrative stretches as Marx gets into his stride and begins discussing the early 19th century legislation in England meant to reduce the working day for laborers.  He goes into dramatic detail, providing some useful and interesting facts and figures about the difficulties of laborers, child labor time statistics, and even interviews with laborers and capitalists of the time regarding their thinking about the length of the working day.  His primary point, particularly with his discussion of the English Factory Act of 1833, is that the legal limiting of the working day to 12 hours was interpreted by factory owners as both an obstacle to be got round, and a legal permission to require work for 12 hours.  This is well above the limits to the working day established even as early as the 14th century.[6]

Along with his evidence of child labor, and exceedingly long labor hours even for adults, and his acid castigation of the arguments presented by capitalists, Marx surprised me by claiming that because this is a collective problem, individual capitalists were as much captured by the system as individual laborers were.  He says on page 382, “Under free competition, the immanent laws  of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him.”[7]

In Chapter 15:  Machinery and Large Scale Industry, Marx elaborates on some of the labor and mechanization themes from his earlier chapters.  He explains how the application of machines to large scale manufacturing is really a process of increasing labor productivity by replacing laborers with machines.

Marx begins this chapter with an idea that surprised me, and yet made sense.  He says that the aim of machinery is not to “[lighten] the day’s toil of any human being,” but that “machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and, by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the other part, the part he gives to the capitalist for nothing.”[8] From the point of view given in chapters 7 and 10, with the idea that capital gains only through the exploitation of surplus labor, this would seem to be the obvious view of the purpose of machinery.

What Marx does next I also found interesting.  He takes issue with the definition of the word “Machine” because the technical definition which identifies a machine as a complex tool, and in which a machine is considered to be a tool powered by other than human hands, he says, are both insufficient in that they do not take history into account.  Marx chooses to replace these definitions with one that both suits the Industrial Revolution, and his own argument:  “The machine,” he says, ” is a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operations as the worker formerly did with similar tools.”[9] I found this interesting not only because it redefines machines in a way that I am not familiar with, but because it seems to call up such historical phenomena as the Luddite machine breakers of the period before and during Marx’s writing of Capital.  I was again surprised by the degree to which this book is of its time, as well as the degree to which it is relevant to understanding capitalism in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

In the same way, I am very interested in Marx’s view that the steam engine did not constitute the Industrial Revolution, but the machines that required the steam engine as motive power did.  In other words, for Marx, the Industrial Revolution was not about machinery and power per se, but instead about the revolutions in productivity that machines and the application of motive power to them could create.  This reflects my own view, but is so well put in this case that ideas I have had about the nature of industry and capitalism are clarified by it.  In fact, I get a distinct impression that every history I have ever read of the Industrial Revolution is primarily informed by Marx’s view of it.  If this is the case, nearly all that Americans learn about the Industrial Revolution must be to some degree Marxist history.  I have for a long time been aware that Marx’s influence here was heavy, but this makes me recognize that his views are the prevalent ones, even today, in textbooks and general histories.

Perhaps what surprised me most about this chapter is Marx’s discussion of the effects of massive automation.  As he says, “[as] soon as a machine executes, without man’s help, all the movements required to elaborate the raw material, and needs only supplementary assistance from the worker, we have an automatic system of machinery, capable of constant improvement in its details.”[10] This seems like only a few steps away from 20^th century idea of “Scientific Management” – the Ford Motor Co style of production in which the machinery, rather than the workers, dictates how workers go about their work – the workers become a part of the machine.

In his discussion of examples of large scale manufacturing, Marx seems less prescient, and much more impressed simply with the scale of the factories he is describint, so it seems that he did not make the leap himself to the idea of worker as part of the machine, but instead rested with the idea of workers becoming superfluous.  Still, the short intellectual distance from Marx’s description to the ideas of Scientific Management impressed me very much.

In Chapter 26, Marx finally comes around to answering a question that I have often thought of myself.  I am not fully satisfied with Marx’s answer, but it is useful.  Marx here points out the central problem that seems so vexing about the growth of capital and industry – namely, that the production of surplus value requires surplus value to begin with as investment capital.  This means that in some way prior to the advent of capitalism, as Marx has described it, there must have been some spare capital accumulation already occurring.  Marx calls this “Primitive Accumulation.”[11]

I was put off by Marx’s discussion about what he calls the fairy tale that “primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology.”[12] He discusses the idea of the existence of an economic Adam and Eve – early people who were frugal, and early people who were not.  Quite rightly, I think, he dismisses this as a fairy tale, told by those who have wealth in order to explain themselves.  However, he goes on to give an explanation that is not much more satsifying – he divides even the earliest societies into groups who own the means of production – the resources – and those who own and sell their labor but are “free from…any means of production of their own.”[13] While I still think that this is within the context of the historical place and time that Marx was writing, during which much less was known about early human societies, it is disappointing as a set of assumptions with no evidence or explanation – no more clear than the ideas of the State of Nature set forward in the previous century by John Locke and Thomas Hobbes.  This seems really to be an extension of his ideas backward in time to support their scientific reality, but they rest on a claim that is not scientific at all.  This is quite different from the earlier sections of the book that I read, where nearly every statement had evidence behind it, almost in a journalistic fashion.

Perhaps my own discontent here comes from the fact that there is much more knowledge about the transition not only from agriculture to industry, but from pre-agricultural to agricultural societies, and where Marx is content to assume that agricultural societies show that humans have always shown the division between labor and the means of production that he is interested in, today we have reason to believe that such a division of labor was not necessarily the case – that this is not a human State of Nature.  This reaction is, on my part, somewhat unhistorical, since I cannot ask of the historical Marx an understanding of history that was not yet available to anyone in his time.  Still, it does speak to the viability of at least some of his ideas.  I think it is a valid critique of the theory, if not of the historian.

I was, though, most interested to read “Chapter 27:  The Expropriation  of the Agricultural Population from the Land,” as this was the link to social class in the historical dialectic that I have always been curious about.  Marx’s inclusion of peasants, and even of wage laborers, in the class of “free peasant propietors” – in effect, if not in feudal legal terms, real landholders who made a living from the working of their own soil – was quite a surprise for me.  This realization will force me to rethink my own understanding of the process of the historical dialectic and the creation of the industrial working class.  Marx seems to make a distinction here between what he calls “absolute ownership” – which is a kind of de-facto possession and use of land, and legal land ownership, which rested with landlords and the upper class.  More than I have ever understood, then, for Marx, it is labor for another who possesses all the means of productioon, rather than for oneself, that constitutes membership in the working class.[14]

Marx here showed me how very important the process of enclosure was, beginning in the 15th century.  As I mentioned earlier in these notes, it strikes me now how very important Marx’s interpretation of these events, and even his choice of the evidence, has been in the writing of the history of industry and capital since.  Still, I had thought of enclosure and subsidiary event, hastening the growth of the working class, but not playing the central role that Marx gives it, along with the expropriation of Church property during the Reformation.  The connection, as Marx makes it, seems to clearly support his argument of the creation of a laboring class through the process of expropriation of the means of production.  This is much more convincing than the previous chapter.  I can be more easily convinced that these events could create a class of people who no longer control any means of production, and are therefore forced to sell their labor in order to subsist.

In general, having read only portions of Capital, vol. I, I understand much more clearly the arguments Marx made, and am far more capable both of seeing how those arguments are reified or reversed in more recent historiography, and in analyzing the way capital and labor are intertwined throughout history.  I have always wanted to read this book, and I must say, despite numerous critiques I have, it did not disappoint.

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[1] Karl Marx, Capital:  A Critique of Political Economy, Penguin ed., 3 vols., vol. 1 (New York: Penguin Books, 1848, 1976; reprint, 1976), 340.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 340.

[4] Ibid., 344.

[5] Ibid., 345.

[6] Ibid., 388.

[7]

[8] Marx, Capital:  A Critique of Political Economy, 492.

[9] Ibid., 495.

[10] Ibid., 503.

[11] Ibid., 874.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid., 877-81.

Brody, David. Steelworkers in America:  The Nonunion Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960.

David Brody’s book Steelworkers in America: the Nonunion Era is a detailed, well-researched history of the relationship between the growth of technology and power in steel mills in the United States and their effect upon labor and labor unions in the steel industry in the United States.  It is braudelian in sweep and intent, well-organized, and grounded in the theoretical bedrock of Marx and Harry Braverman. The book is so well written that one can easily forgive the “one damned thing after another” tendency that it has..

Brody has crafted his book according to a kind of wave pattern that he perceives in the development of labor conditions and the union movement in steel corporations in the United States between 1890 and 1921.  In Brody’s account, the labor situation always moves according to the waves of economic boom and bust, the degree and intensity of competition among steel mills, and the availability of labor, particularly in the unskilled ranks.

Brody begins with a description of the steel industry in the United States in the late 19^th century.  The theme of this first chapter is the idea that the holy grail of business success was efficiency.  By providing details about the sizes, populations of workers, production statistics, corporate earnings, and improvements in technology and organization, Brody hopes to show the degree to which steel executives including Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan pursued that efficiency.

In chapter two, Brody shows how the steel barons saw labor as only one more area where efficiency could be achieved through mechanization and organization.  He also describes here how the use of technology, another area where efficiency was pursued, had a direct effect on the efficiency of labor.  One of his primary supports in this is a tremendous amount of primary source material concerning mechanization rates at steel mills throughout the United States, correlated with labor dismissals in the specific jobs affected by this new machinery.

Establishing the link between mechanization and efficiency through worker replacement, Brody describes the way in which the use of new technology tended to reduce the importance of skilled workers in steel mills more than that of unskilled, hence low-cost, labor. One effect of the mechanization of steel production was thus that the steel industry was able to destroy the effectiveness of craft unions, whose power was based on control of skilled labor.  One other primary reason that this was possible, according to Brody, was the power of the steel corporations, which were so much larger and better organized and financed than the unions were.

In the following three chapters, Brody discusses how the steel mills went about stabilizing the labor pool. His thesis here is that there were three elements to big steel’s control over labor.  The first was the skilled workers themselves.  The threat of becoming obsolete through technology allowed steel manufacturers to both reduce general wage levels, and institute an attitude of loyalty to the company through the potential promise of stability in a newly unstable world.  The chief irony being, of course, that the instability in skilled work was a creation of the mills to which the skilled workers were now assigning their loyalty.

The second leg of stability for steel mills Brody identifies as a continuous stream of immigrant labor, which provided a docile unskilled workforce without union tendencies or connections to mentors and protectors in the skilled labor pool.  These unskilled laborers were then promised the possibility of a rise within the labor system, and some did become skilled workers and even foremen, thereby justifying the entry into steel through unskilled ranks.  Coincidentally, the fact of their foreignness served to alienate them from the skilled workers, mostly English-speaking, and provide a barrier to inclusive unionization of the entire workforce.

The last leg of the stability tripod that Brody gives is the interest of the steel towns themselves.  From small one-mill towns to the large centers of steel production like Pittsburgh, steel was so large a part of the economic, political, and social organization of the community that strikes and labor unrest were often seen, sometimes with the help of the steel corporations, as contributing to instability.  The interests of local business coincided with the interests of the steel mills to keep the workers at work, and increasingly after 1900, Brody shows that church leaders and politicians also came to identify stability, and their organizations’ interests, with those of the steel mills over labor.

In the last, and most dramatic, half of the book,  Brody takes the reader through a whipsaw in the fortunes of steel labor.  In 1909, U.S. Steel Corporation made public its commitment to an open-shop structure, repudiating its earlier willingness to deal with unions.  This created a backlash in labor generally, and led to renewed, and somewhat successful attempts to organize steel workers, including the unskilled ranks.  This movement, though was ultimately little more than a revival of the union movement through recognition that big steel did harbor the goal of eliminating the influence of unions altogether.

Brody, once again looking at the issue for the steel corporations of labor stability, makes it clear that the corporations by 1909 began to institute a kind of big-brother attitude toward workers, making attempts from within the industry at improving wages and working conditions.  This was a result not of the revival of the labor organizing movement, but of the new stability in the steel market created by the arrival of the massive trust U.S. Steel corporation.  The trust, through management of competition was able to maintain prices within a specific range, and thus to at least superficially provide workers with some respect in return for their loyalty and effort.

By 1914, the steel corporations, according to Brody, had eliminated the effectiveness of labor unions, and had created a stable pool of labor that they could control, in the same way that they had gained control over access to raw materials and to the finishing trades.  But this stability was interrupted by the First World War.  The demands for production increased just as the war caused the loss of the first leg of big steel’s labor stability program – the continuous stream of unskilled labor provided by Eastern European immigrants.  These had to be replaced with African American labor recruited from the Southern states, and to some degree with laborers from Mexico.

The need to maintain levels of skilled workers, though, as industry across the United States increased production, and to meet the requirements of government orders meant that the industry had to accept unions as a means of labor management.  This was helped by government labor relations methods that legitimized unions and made them partners in a three-way economic triangle.

Such an increase in power during the war encouraged the A.F.L. to press its demands at war’s end, when steel corporations made attempts to restore the old pre-war balance and once again eliminate unionism from the calculation of labor and resources.  However, the lack of government support, combined with a post-war political climate that linked unions to communism eventually spelled the end of the Great Strike of 1919, and big steel was, until the Great Depression, able to restore its control of labor based on a somewhat modified version of the three-legged stability system employed before 1914.

Brody’s book is dramatic, well-researched, detailed, and chronological in its approach, all of which make it easy to follow, and all of which tend to garner sympathy for the trials of steel workers in this period.  His theoretical base comes largely from Marx, who claimed that machines were not created to make life easier, but to make work more efficient, and from Braverman, who suggested that the process of industrial growth in the mass-manufacturing period involves the deskilling of labor to make it less expensive and more easily controlled by management.

But Steelworkers in America is not a theoretical history.  It is a history of labor, based in events which are corroborated by strong research in primary sources.  Brody is telling a story here.  It is one of the most literary histories I have read, and, with Brody’s skill as a writer, is not only informative and useful, but a page-turner as well.  It is easy to see why this book may have generated some controversy when it was published.  It not only tells the story, but leads the reader to take sides in the narrative, though Brody self-consciously avoids any overt statements of position.

Gorn, Elliott J. Mother Jones : The Most Dangerous Woman in America. 1st ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.

Elliot Gorn’s monograph Mother Jones:  The Most Dangerous Woman in America rescues from obscurity a period and a persona critical to the development of labor, labor unions, capitalism, and politics in Twentieth Century America.  Gorn brings back to life an iconic figure whose connection to the magazine that bears her name:  Mother Jones, is all but lost with the mists of time and contemporary political wrangling.  He gives us a human being who was moved by personal loss, success, and commitment to ideals – a person from among the masses who found fame by moving the working class in the United States.  Along the line, Gorn also gives an overview of the American labor movement in general from the late Nineteenth Century through the First World War.  The book is an easy and informative read, and employs an interesting strategy in that it is less a biography of Mary “Mother” Jones than a history of the American Labor movement between 1893 and 1919 with Mother Jones as guide and protagonist.  This strategy provides Gorn the opportunity to look carefully at a very complex set of social problems and events, but through a wide-angle lens, rather than focus on a towering figure such as Eugene Debs.

Gorn begins in a way that instantly captured my attention by playing to my sensibilities as a historian.  He makes an attempt to tell us about Mary Jones’ early life in Ireland, Canada, and the United States, but admits almost immediately that  there is little or no evidence on which to base a very in-depth story.  This is emphasized by the fact that Gorn, despite extensive research in Ireland as well as the U.S. and Canada is unable to find enough information to give us much more than the six pages he complains is Mary’s own contribution to the question in her own autobiography.  He is thus stuck giving background, and making broad brush sweeps for three chapters while he attempts to give us some sense of the world a working class girl from Cork, Ireland, might have seen and experienced in the place of her birth, then as a young woman in Toronto and in Chicago.  We, as Gorn, are reduced to making guesses about what drove this woman to become the leading labor agitator that she undoubtedly was.

The fact that she did become a leading labor agitator in the United States is the irony that Gorn seizes, explaining, with some reason, that while she never saw herself as a public person worth writing about when she was Mary Jones, after the deaths of her husband and children, and her adoption of the name “Mother Jones” sometime after her journey in support of Coxey’s Army in 1893, she took on the persona of a labor leader – of the “mother” of all laborers, who would help them to find a fair exchange for their labor.

The persona of “Mother” Jones is really the object of this book, and its subject the struggles of American Labor in the first decades of the Twentieth Century.  Because Mary Jones, in her persona of the mother of laborers and the labor movement, had dealings with so many different groups – the UMW, and WFM, the American Socialist Party, and Populist politicians as well as President Woodrow Wilson, and capitalist John D. Rockefeller, Jr.,  Gorn is able to effectively use the experiences of Mother Jones as the narrative thread that allows him to talk about the coal miners’ strikes in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Colorado between 1901 and 1906, and about the ups and downs of the American Socialist Party and the labor movement in general from the 1893 march of  Coxey’s Army to the end of the First World War.  The real genius of the work is that it is able to avoid concentrating narrowly on the big names of labor and radical politics, such as Eugene Debs, and instead use Mother Jones as the narrative driver.  This allows him to get at the ground work in the labor movement, because national figure though she was, she was an organizer first and foremost – a pragmatic but rational leader in the trenches – so Gorn can use her story to narrate American Labor history in a more grass-roots sort of way.  A story that weaves between the East Coast bituminous coal mines, the ore and coal mines of Colorado, and political conventions in Chicago, along with labor union strategy meetings and trials of organizers would be too disconnected a mass of data for a readable book without such a thread.

Gorn’s book is useful.  Placing Mother Jones at the center of the labor movement of the early twentieth century allows him to illuminate a very complex network of politics, leaders, and differing groups of laborers and issues that are not easily discussed in context, but make little sense if separated from each other.  One of the most illuminating sections of the book was the section on the “Children’s Crusade” of Mother Jones.  As I read it, I expected Gorn to complete a moral rampage against the institution – not that I have any sympathy at all for employers of children, but the story has been told many times.  Instead, Gorn was able to discuss the situation from the point of view of Mother Jones as a labor strategist, and as a member of the working class and as an organizer for the UMW.  These three roles, Gorn makes clear, often complimented each other, but more often than one might expect they were in conflict, as well.  Mother Jones’ concern for child laborers makes much sense when we understand her, as Gorn does, as a mother who had lost her own biological children.  Yet Gorn also shows us the “Mother” Jones whose persona included all laborers as her “children” willing to exploit the exploitation of children in factories for gains for all of labor in general.  As an organizer for the UMW, and a labor activist in general, her goals were limited (in the case of the girl textile workers in Pennsylvania, only a small rise in wages, not emancipation from labor altogether, as their parents apparently needed the income) and compromised with the perceived needs of the union and of the adult laborers.  Her view of child labor as being in competition with adult wages was also a very pragmatic viewpoint.  Her brilliant use of the children in her march from Pennsylvania to New York City and ultimate attempt to see President Roosevelt, punctuated by an effective if offensive caging of children at Coney Island to make a point about their labor conditions shows that to reach her goal, drastic and exploitative propaganda was not beyond her either.  The immense complexity of labor issues in the United States in the early twentieth century comes through perhaps most clearly in this section of the book.

In his discussion of Mother Jones’ brief respite from labor organizing to become a speaker for the Socialist Party of  America, Gorn shows the party in all its division, diversity, and complexity.  He explains the Progressive Era, and the role that the Socialist Party played as a kind of catch-all for radicals who were not satisfied with the minor reform approach of Roosevelt and the Progressives.  This made the Socialist Party a populist group in itself, and it came to include dissenters from rural areas, miners, factory laborers, middle class business owners and professionals, intellectuals, and many others who shared only a few major points of interest, the largest of which was an anti-corporate agenda.  This hodgepodge made the Socialist Party both reflective of America in its diversity, and extremely hard to organize and direct.   The very difficulty of doing this eventually led Mother Jones to leave the party and eschew political reform for what she considered to be most important – economic reform.  Gorn describes this in a way that provides insight into American society of the period as well.  He shows that while socialist theory assumed that the interests of workers and of the party would be the same, in fact, the party’s emphasis on political reform, and its encompassing of so many diverse groups, meant that it was often more politically radical, and economically less effective, than the union movement, and than the laborers needed it to be.  Mother Jones’ opinions here – that labor organizing is more effective, and solves the main problem, which is the low wages and poor living conditions of laborers, that politics involves too much compromise and works too slowly – become synechdoche for the larger set of opinions of American laborers, who seemed, Gorn says, to be more interested in improving living conditions than in politics.

One interesting bit of evidence that Gorn gives here is his explication of Mother Jones’ opinions on women’s suffrage.  Initially in support of it, Gorn notes that her persona appealed to a particular part of the working class – families – as a social conservative, while at the same time she was an economic and political radical.  She wanted economic reform, and saw women in pragmatic ways as dragging down wages in the labor market, and as poorly treated.  Her goal was to build strong families, and remove women from the horror and low pay of the work place by improving the social standing and income of their husbands.  Her persona as “mother” did not allow her to recognize the difficulties of single women in the workforce.  Being Mother Jones did require that she see the difficulties of households that required double income from parents simply for survival.  For Mother Jones, then, for women to gain the vote became almost irrelevant.  Progress, she thought, was made in labor disputes and corporate negotiations, not through voting, and women needed to be most concerned with supporting their families by operating the domestic side of life.

Gorn finishes his book with a description of the changes wrought by World War I.  The national security emergency that the war brought on forced the Socialists to compromise their views, as they did in Europe, and support the war and nationalism.  It also brought an end to radical social comment because it seemed to threaten the nation and the social fabric that allowed the United States to participate in the war.  The war also brought increased wages and increases in economic output in the United States, raising the standard of living for most Americans in a way that even labor agitation had not been able to.  These things eventually stole the thunder from Mother Jones, the Unions, and the labor movement in general.

In all, Gorn’s book provides us with a fascinating look at a character who was at the center of working class problems and politics during the first 25 years of the Twentieth Century.  The character provides Gorn with a lens on the issues and events that is, because of her own working class background and connections, very close to the events on the ground during this period.  For these reasons, this is a very useful book.  It not only details labor-related events’ of the period well, but provides context and a complex look at the maze of connections between people, events, and ideas in the United States at the time.  Still, as a general history, Gorn does not seem to have found much new.  The narrative of the labor movement here seems to be the same as the broad sweep defined by earlier historians – just more detailed, and through a different lens.

Hughes, Thomas P. American Genesis:  A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989, 2004.

Thomas Hughes’ book American Genesis is a foundational work in the area of American Technological history.  Hughes’ primary thesis is that the United States is a nation of inventors and system builders, rather than a nation of business.  America is the original “modern technological nation.”[1] For Hughes, the business of America is not business, but invention of systems for control of the natural and human world.  Hughes hopes to look at the work of inventors in three major stages of American History: the era of independent inventors, from 1870 to the First World War; the era of the scientists, from World War I to the Great Depression and World War II, and the era of government supported invention beginning in World War II and running to the counter-culture era of the 1960’s.[2] The goal, ultimately, is to take an academic approach to the history of American inventiveness and to dig deeper than the hagiography so commonly found in literature on the subject.  Hughes wants to know what the inventors have in common with each other in terms of method, choice of problem, and sources of funding.  To some degree, Hughes seems to hope to explain why, as he says, America has been the most inventive nation in history through this work.

The book is remarkably disciplined in its approach and organization.  Hughes has given a relatively simple thesis, and supported it with numerous generalities about the state of science and invention in the industrializing West, in order to put American inventiveness in the context of world culture.  His assertion that Americans are the most inventive nation on earth seems at first to be a very subjective statement, but he does provide some examples to support the idea.  The distribution of chapters and their content is, though, well done, easy to read, and helps the reader to follow Hughes argument easily.  The book is also written well, and is very interesting.  It is one of the few academic books that seem well suited for the trade market as well.

The first two chapters are maybe the most fascinating of all for readers used to the vast collection of hagiography on American inventors.    Hughes’ academic approach does not concentrate on the genius of these people, but rather looks for similarities in method, and in choice of problems to solve, and links those to the ever-present problem of finding funds to support their work.  He sees this period as the “American genesis” – launching the United States on the trajectory of great inventiveness he wants to claim as its historical legacy.  Still, he does not make that claim based on un-measurable claims of intellectual brilliance.  Instead, he explains, and then takes on, the measure of success that most of these inventors used themselves – counting patents.  Hughes provides some amazing statistics in this regard.  Edison, for example, produced more than 1000 patents over his inventive lifespan.

In these first chapters Hughes delves into what these inventors did and finds patterns.  They often worked in scientific style using experimentation.  They uniformly conducted research into the problem and earlier attempted solutions.  They rarely worked alone, but instead almost always had assistants who were craftsmen and could turn their ideas into models and real prototypes.  Finally, most had private laboratories, libraries, and large inventories of equipment so that whatever might be needed in the heat of experiment was easily found.

Chapter two is specifically about the way in which the inventors chose the problems they were going to work on.  Here, Hughes tries to make the point that they were always attempting to solve problems that were already identified and the subject of study by others.  They also studied these problems intently, often combing through former patent applications, studying prior proposed solutions deeply to try to identify their weak points, then choosing to work on them.  But, the problems were inevitably big ones.  For the most part, independent inventors like Edison, Sperry, and Tesla were not interested in improving systems that already worked, but in creating new inventions that were generative of such systems.  The first Hughes takes pains to identify as “innovation” – the improvement and distribution of a new solution to a problem, whereas the second Hughes calls “invention” and defines as the creation of a new solution to a major problem.

In Chapter three, Hughes identifies the military industrial complex as existing long before World War II.  In fact, he pushes it back to the turn of the twentieth century, and notes that in the search for funding and practical use of their inventions, even such lionized inventors as the Wright Brothers hoped that the military might be the first and most important purchaser of airplanes.  Others, such as Maxim, and even Edison and Tesla identified the U.S. Military as the most likely entity to be interested in the practical applications of many of their inventions, and often lobbied hard to get the military to see the utility of inventions.  After 1911, this lobbying began to pay off as the Navy began to fund testing of inventions intended for its use.[3]

This leads Hughes into the era of World War I, and the beginning of the era of scientist inventors.  Hughes paraphrases Raymond Aron in The Century of Total War in introducing this new era of inventions by remembering World War I as a war of technological surprises.[4] Concerns about American preparedness for war led the United States to look to its inventors to help with innovation as well.[5] To do this, Edison was recruited (he practically asked for the job) to head a “Naval Consulting Board.”  Edison conceived of this board’s responsibilities as helping to modernize the United States military by preparing it to use labor saving machines in the “factory of death” that he conceived the modern battlefield to be.[6] In the end, the creation of this board, and Edison’s exclusion from it of academic scientists led to a wartime competition between the independent inventors and the scientists to determine who was more the source of innovation.[7]

In Chapter four, Hughes returns to his separation of “invention” from “innovation”, and makes the case that because the independents’ stock in trade was invention of new systems to solve new problems, they became less important in the postwar world, where the need of the government and manufacturers was for new designs to improve systems already in operation.  This conservative approach to invention, what Hughes calls “innovation” was exactly what the academic scientists were good at.  In addition, the profits brought by improvements in existing systems became the battleground for inventors claiming patents on their improvements, or control of patents that improved basic systems they had built.  The legal and business implications of invention and patent became more byzantine, requiring more organization.  In addition, often the improvement of a patented system brought more profit than the original system as invented.  Thus inventors came to require more organization, and more capital.

Hughes locates the beginning of corporate invention in Bell Telephone’s establishment in 1894 of an engineering department, which was responsible for improving systems, but eventually became the company’s research and development arm.[8] Discussing AT&T, General Electric Corp., and du Pont, Hughes comes to the conclusion that the major changes in the invention landscape do not include the complete loss of place for the independent inventor.  Instead, corporate laboratories prove to be good at “routinizing invention” – providing large sums of money, and large numbers of minds, for concentration on innovation in existing systems.  Corporations like du Pont, found this when they attempted to develop new technologies in the dyestuffs industry internally, but overinvestment and lack of return eventually forced them to follow  the AT&T pattern by acquiring smaller companies that already had the knowledge and patents to allow them to move forward with diversification plans.[9] The upshot of this chapter is evidence of the current assumption that while big business can and should do research and development, only the independent inventor (called, today, an ‘entrepreneur’, combining business and technological invention in a single term) is nimble enough to come up with the really new ideas.[10]

In his fifth and sixth chapters, Hughes elaborates on the idea, discussed in the introduction as a part of his thesis, that invention in the United States has not been limited to machines, or in mechanical and electrical solutions to problems.  Instead, Hughes wants to think of invention as having to with the invention of systems that ultimately come to create and control a kind of built environment that is separate from and in control of nature.  In other words, inventions are only parts of ever-larger systems, and the American genius has been to invent these systems.  To show how this works, Hughes first discusses Taylorism, or “scientific management” – the idea that humans should be a part of the manufacturing process, rather than apart from it, making humans, in a way, part of the machinery.  This is the source of the title of the chapter: “The System Must Come First” – the idea being that in the past, production and technology existed for the service of people, but in the modern invented world, the people exist for the system.  These systems include manufacturing, such as the system for Midwestern power distribution created by Samuel Insull, including the systematic way of understanding load and profit maximization, and the system for automobile manufacture created by Henry Ford at his giant River Rouge plant.[11] This service of people to the system, and the ever-increasing size and integration of systems in society – is the essence of American modernism for Hughes.  That essence of modernism is what, he claims, is of interest to the Soviet Union, and to Weimar Germany, when they began adopting, with mixed success, the manufacturing processes, scientific management, and integration of industrial systems of the United States after World War I.

In the seventh chapter, Hughes claims that the invention of systems, industrial, social, economic, and political, in the United States was a cultural transformation, and that this transformation was better recognized from outside the United States than by those taking part in it.  Americans saw the transformation as technological and industrial, but Europeans came to see it as cultural.[12] Hughes supports this point by discussing the futurism of people like Louis Mumford, whose predictions of a “neotechnic” society where future technology and manufacturing processes would exist in small, de-centralized factories operated by highly skilled technicians amounted to a prediction in change of culture characterized by a retreat from the massive centralized factories and cities and an expansion into better lifestyles, less population congestion, and better, more efficient use of communications technology and natural resources.[13] Hughes also locates cultural change in the connection of art to the invented technology of the day, celebrating the order and precision of the systems, from mechanical to social, of inventive America.  Art celebrated inventions, and inventions and innovations became art.[14]

In Chapter eight, Hughes takes on the third phase of his thesis, discussion the era of government supported invention.  The key difference here from the support of government in the era of the two world wars is that, beginning with the Great Depression, government harnesses its support of invention and innovation not only to military technology, but also to civilian uses, and not only to mechanical innovation, but also to social engineering.  The point of the entire chapter can be captured in the way Hughes uses the Tennessee Valley Authority to represent the New Deal.  The Tennessee Valley Authority is shown to be a model of technical innovation, but at the same time an effort in social engineering, used to put people to work, re-build the economy of a large local area, and transform the political and social, as well as economic and technical, climate of the nation.[15] In many ways, this chapter gives us a microcosmic view of continuation of the cultural change Hughes discussed in his previous chapter.

As Chapter eight ends, appropriately, with the Manhattan project – the design and construction of the most destructive weapon ever made, Chapter nine begins with the assertion than since World War II, Americans have come to increasingly distrust technology, industry, and system-building.[16] Here, Hughes brings attention to the perception, exemplified by Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring, for example, that over-enthusiasm for technological change and development has caused us to destroy, or lose touch with, many parts of the natural world and the past which we may not be able to reclaim.  Returning to Mumford, this time Hughes tells us that he came to see the scientific and technical world as a “sterile wasteland.”[17] Jacques Ellul, says Hughes, came to see modern humans as selling themselves as slaves for a plethora of goods and services.[18] In the end, though, Hughes sees modern humans as unable to wean ourselves from technology, and perhaps at the edge of a new fascination with it.

I found this book fascinating, and Hughes’ organization lends itself well to his thesis.  There are two weak points which I think deserve some attention, though.  First is Hughes’ claim that the United States is the most inventive nation in history.  By some of his criteria, including number of patents granted, and perhaps sheer number of inventors, this estimation may work.  But it is such an un-provable proposition that it almost smacks of American exceptionalism.  For such a well-organized and well-researched book, and one that claims to turn the discussion of inventors into an academic discourse, this seems a somewhat unhelpful claim to make.  Second, it seems, looking over Hughes’ timeline, that the three stages he wants to claim in the history of American inventiveness really occurred almost simultaneously, or at least overlap each other to a degree that makes the claim that they are successive stages somewhat difficult to support.

In all, however, this book seems to me to rank with those of Thomas Kuhn, as seminal in the way it looks at the history of a society and at the history of a phenomenon – the process and effect of invention and inventiveness.  The book is well worth reading, and the more one reads, I suspect, the more one will find.

Hughes, Thomas P. American Genesis:  A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989, 2004.

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[1] Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis:  A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989, 2004), 3.

[2] Ibid., 5-11.

[3] Ibid., 99.

[4] Ibid., 115.

[5] Ibid., 117.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., 121.

[8] Ibid., 151.

[9] Ibid., 182.

[10] Ibid., 182-83.

[11] Ibid., 226-43.

[12] Ibid., 295.

[13] Ibid., 302.

[14] Ibid., 324-52.

[15] Ibid., 359-81.

[16] Ibid., 443.

[17] Ibid., 448.

[18] Ibid., 458.  Hughes here is paraphrasing Ellul, who was likening modern humans to the biblical figure Esau.