By Kevin A. Carson
The
American economy after the Civil War became increasingly dominated by large
organizations. I’ve written in The Freeman before about the role of the
government in the growth of the centralized corporate economy: the railroad
land grants and subsidies, which tipped the balance toward large manufacturing
firms serving a national market (“The Distorting Effects of Transportation Subsidies,” November 2010),
and the patent system, which was a primary tool of consolidation and
cartelization in a number of industries (“How ‘Intellectual Property’ Impedes
Competition,” October 2009, tinyurl.com/lqzehv)
These
giant corporations were followed by large government agencies whose mission was
to support and stabilize the corporate economy, and then by large bureaucratic
universities, centralized school systems, and assorted “helping professionals”
to process the “human resources” the corporations and State fed on. These
interlocking bureaucracies required a large managerial class to administer
them.
According
to Rakesh Khurana of the Harvard Business School (in From Higher Aims to Hired Hands), the
first corporation managers came from an industrial engineering background and
saw their job as doing for the entire organization what they’d previously done
for production on the shop floor. The managerial revolution in the large
corporation, Khurana writes, was in essence an attempt to apply the engineer’s
approach (standardizing and rationalizing tools, processes, and systems) to the
organization as a system.
And
according to Yehouda Shenhav (Manufacturing Rationality: The Engineering
Foundations of the Managerial Revolution), Progressivism was the
ideology of the managers and engineers who administered the large
organizations; political action was a matter of applying the same principles
they used to rationalize their organizations to society as a whole. Shenhav
writes (quoting Robert Wiebe):
Since
the difference between the physical, social, and human realms was blurred by
acts of translation, society itself was conceptualized and treated as a
technical system. As such, society and organizations could, and should, be
engineered as machines that are constantly being perfected. Hence, the
management of organizations (and society at large) was seen to fall within the
province of engineers. Social, cultural, and political issues . . . could be
framed and analyzed as “systems” and “subsystems” to be solved by technical
means. . .
During
this period, “only the professional administrator, the doctor, the social
worker, the architect, the economist, could show the way.” In turn,
professional control became more elaborate. It involved measurement and
prediction and the development of professional techniques for guiding events to
predictable outcomes. The experts “devised rudimentary government budgets;
introduced central, audited purchasing; and rationalized the structure of
offices.” This type of control was not only characteristic of professionals in
large corporate systems. It characterized social movements,the management of
schools, roads, towns, and political systems.
The
managerialist ethos reflected in Progressivism emphasized transcending class
and ideological divisions through the application of disinterested expertise.
Christopher Lasch (The New Radicalism in America) wrote:
In
Shenhav’s account this apolitical ethos grew out of engineers’ self-perception:
“American management theory was presented as a scientific technique
administered for the good of society as a whole without relation to politics.”
Frederick Taylor, whose managerial approach was a microcosm of Progressivism,
saw bureaucracy as “a solution to ideological cleavages, as an engineering
remedy to the war between the classes.” Both Progressives and industrial
engineers “were horrified at the possibility of ‘class warfare’” and saw
“efficiency” as a means to “social harmony, making each workman’s interest the
same as that of his employers.”
The
implications, as James Scott put it in Seeing Like a
State (about which
much more below), were quite authoritarian. Only a select class of technocrats
with “the scientific knowledge to discern and create this superior social
order” were qualified to make decisions. In all aspects of life, policy was to
be a matter of expertise, with the goal of removing as many questions as
possible from the realm of public political debate to that of administration by
properly qualified authorities. Politics, Scott writes, “can only frustrate the
social solutions devised with scientific tools adequate to their analysis.” As
aNew
Republic editorial
put it, “the business of politics has become too complex to be left to the
pretentious misunderstandings of the benevolent amateur.”
It’s
true that Progressivism shaded into the anti-capitalist left and included some
genuinely anti-business rhetoric on its left-wing fringe. But the mainstream of
Progressivism saw the triumph of the great trusts over competitive enterprise
as a victory for economic rationalization and efficiency—and the guarantee of
stable, reasonable profits to the trusts through the use of political power as
a good thing.
In
the end the more utopian or socialistic Progressives found they’d become
“useful idiots.” Their desire to regiment and manage was given free rein mainly
when it coincided with the needs of the corporatist economy created by
Rockefeller and Morgan. These needs were for what Gabriel Kolko (The Triumph of
Conservatism) called “political capitalism,” the guiding theme of
Progressive-era legislation. Political capitalism aimed to give corporate
leadership “the ability, on the basis of politically stabilized and secured
means, to plan future economic action on the basis of fairly calculable
expectations” and to obtain “the organization of the economy and the larger
political and social spheres in a manner that will allow corporations to
function in a predictable and secure environment permitting reasonable profits
over the long run.”
Mainstream
Progressivism, far from embracing a left-wing vision of class struggle, saw
class conflict as a form of irrationality that could be transcended by
expertise. To quote Shenhav again:
Labor
unrest and other political disagreements of the period were treated by
mechanical engineers as simply a particular case of machine uncertainty to be
dealt with in much the same manner as they had so successfully dealt with
technical uncertainty. Whatever disrupted the smooth running of the
organizational machine was viewed and constructed as a problem of uncertainty.
As
Hilaire Belloc said (The Servile State) of its Fabian counterparts in Britain,
the mainline of the Progressive movement quickly accommodated itself to the
impossibility of expropriating big business or the plutocratic fortunes and
found that it could be quite comfortable as a junior partner to the plutocracy,
directing its lust for regimentation against the working class:
Let
laws exist which make the proper housing, feeding, clothing, and recreation of
the proletarian mass be incumbent upon the possessing class, and the observance
of such rules be imposed, by inspection and punishment, upon those whom he [the
Fabian] pretends to benefit, and all that he really cares for will be achieved.
As
Scott put it, the managerial classes’ virtually unbounded planning instincts
were directed mostly downward:
Every
nook and cranny of the social order might be improved upon: personal hygiene,
diet, child rearing, housing, posture, recreation, family structure, and, most
infamously, the genetic inheritance of the population. The working poor were
often the first subjects of scientific social planning. . . . Subpopulations
found wanting in ways that were potentially threatening—such as indigents,
vagabonds, the mentally ill, and criminals—might be made the objects of the
most intensive social engineering.
Progressivism
was a branch of what Scott called the “high modernist” ideology, which
“envisioned a sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in
order to improve the human condition.” High modernism carries with it an
aesthetic sensibility in which the rationally organized community, farm, or
factory was one that “looked regimented and orderly in a geometrical sense,”
along with an affinity for gigantism and centralization reflected in “huge
dams, centralized communication and transportation hubs, large factories and
farms, and grid cities. . . .” If you’ve read H. G. Wells’s “Utopias” or looked
at Albert Speer’s architecture, you get the idea.
High
modernism was scientistic, not scientific, based on, writes Scott, a
“muscle-bound . . . version of the beliefs in scientific and technological
progress” of the Enlightenment, centering on “a supreme self-confidence about
continued linear progress . . . , the expansion of knowledge, the expansion of
production, the rational design of social order, the growing satisfaction of
human needs, and, not least, an increasing control over nature (including human
nature) commensurate with scientific understanding of natural laws.” The high priesthood
of this ideology was precisely the same as Progressivism’s social base:
“planners, engineers, architects, scientists, and technicians [high modernism]
celebrated as the designers of the new order.”
One
aspect of Scott’s analysis of high modernism, his use of the concept of metis, is especially relevant to us
here. Scott’s book, more than any other I can think of, should be read as a
companion to Hayek’s discussion of what’s variously called distributed, tacit,
or idiosyncratic knowledge in “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” (As Hayek put
it, this is the knowledge of circumstances necessary to make a decision that
exists “solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete . . . knowledge which all
the separate individuals possess.”)
Scott
distinguished metis from techne,
which is a body of universal knowledge deducible from first principles. Metis,
in contrast, is (largely irreducible) knowledge acquired from practical
experience, concerning the particular, the variable, and the local, and
involving a “feel” for the unique aspects of situations obtained over a
prolonged period.
High
modernism tended to see metis as an enemy and sought to supplant it
by central schemes of planning and control, whether at the level of society as
a whole through State social engineering or at the level of the firm by
Taylorist managers.
High
modernism, Scott writes, placed remarkably “little confidence . . . in the
skills, intelligence, and experience of ordinary people.” The dispersed, local
knowledge of the general population was, at best, to be patronized as
prescientific and purified of its partial or local character by codifying it
into a set of universal rules that could in turn be reduced to a verbal formula
and transmitted as knowledge by the priesthood.
What
we know as Taylorism is one facet of the larger high modernist project in this
regard. One feature of high modernism, Scott notes, was “a narrow and
materialist ‘productivism’ [which] treated human labor as a mechanical system
which could be decomposed into energy transfers, motion, and the physics of
work,” so that work could be simplified into “isolated problems of mechanical
efficiencies” and brought under scientific control. Taylorism, in particular,
attempted a “minute decomposition of factory labor into isolable, precise,
repetitive motions.” Taylor’s goal, in his own words, was for management to
“assume . . . the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge
which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying,
tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, formulae. . . . Thus
all of the planning which under the old system was done by the workmen, must .
. . be done by management in accordance with the law of science.”
The
idea was that understanding and decision-making should be divorced from the
performance of tasks. The managerial caste determines “best practices” and
breaks tasks down into the most efficient possible set of simple sub-processes,
and workers perform the tasks as instructed without the intervention of
critical thought.
But
by its nature, Scott says, high modernism is reductionist or “schematic” and
“always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order.”
Progressivism, as a high modernist ideology, makes no allowances for hidden knowledge.
In
the case of Taylorism, this means that the suppression of metis sacrifices the
distributed, job-related knowledge possessed by workers whose consideration is
indispensable to any adequate governance of the production process. Taylorist
management can no more render the production process amenable to central
control without the dispersed knowledge of its workers than a central planning
office can render a national economy transparent to its understanding and
control.
According
to David Noble (Forces of Production), large-scale computer
numeric-controlled (CNC) machine tools were introduced in mass-production
industry (first and most heavily in the military-industrial complex, mind you)
as a way of supplanting metis with centralized control by managers and
engineers, and of overcoming the knowledge rents inherent in distributed
knowledge. The CNC tools were intended to shift the balance of power upward by
putting production under the control of engineers and deskilling master
machinists on the shop floor.
Unfortunately
for this design, CNC machinery did not eliminate the need for metis. As Noble pointed out, management
quickly found out that the only thing the machines could produce
“automatically,” without ongoing worker intervention and concrete judgment, was
scrap. When workers withheld their metis on a “work-to-rule” strategy, scrap
rates went through the roof.
(Ironically,
today we’re in the early stages of the shift of a great deal of manufacturing
capability from mass-production industry to small job-shops—with small-scale
CNC tools, in the latter, operated by skilled craftsmen.)
So
it seems metis or distributed knowledge, in the end, is one of those stubborn
traits of human action that outlasts all attempts to supersede it.
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