High Consumption Utopia

High Consumption Utopia

Positioning the Industrial Engineering in the Political Spectrum

Yüksel Çamaş

The argument around the private property rights dates as far back as antiquity to Plato’s era. From Plato’s "Republic" to Aristotle’s "Politics," from More’s "Utopia" to Locke’s "Two Treatises of Government," from Adam Smith’s "Wealth of Nations" to Marx and Engels’ "The Communist Manifesto," the private property and the ownership over the resources and the means of production have been the focal point for various economical ideas, analysis and discussions.

Thomas More, in a fictitious way, dreamed about a communist society based on a communal property system, and Marx promised that dream of propertyless utopia as a developed communism to his followers, only to surprise them later with a utopian nightmare instead. Adam Smith, on the other hand, talked about an "invisible hand" that would bring prosperity to the whole society if people could trade freely to promote their selfish individual gains and accumulate more private property. His surprise for his disciples is probably that thing called the "global free market" we live in today, which for many, is much more colorful of a nightmare than that of Marx’s.

After the Industrial Revolution, the clashes between these ideas advocating a communal property system and its opponent advocating the private ownership rights intensified more than ever due to the increased number of workers supporting an expanding mass production system. The advocates of the communal property system argued that the private property, especially the private ownership over the resources and the means of production, was causing the exploitation of workers (non-possessors) at the hands of the possessors through the capitalist employment and wage-slavery.

Introduction of specialized machinery in the factories and new manufacturing techniques also created a technological paranoia among the work force which felt that they have been systematically deskilled, dehumanized, mechanized and alienated while loosing the control over their work to those who actually own the means of production.

As explained by Enteman, the Marxist view has been that "through the institution of private property, capitalists make money without working and accumulate that money to be used to extend their hegemony over more workers [1]". Marx himself stated that "the capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property [2]." Although Marx believed that the Industrial Revolution provided some advantages of mass production, at the same time he also thought that it served mainly to the benefit of capitalists by exaggerating the ever-worsening conditions of the workers and by increasingly alienating them from the result of their works [3]. Therefore, for many Marxists, maximization of profit in capitalist manufacturing environments is equivalent to increasing the amount of private property that goes directly into capitalist pockets, who later use that accumulated private property to tighten their domination over the work force.

After the Industrial Revolution, a mechanical engineer called Frederick W. Taylor proposed a new way to organize factories and shop floors with what he called the "Scientific Management" [4] and his proposal was like a revolution itself with tremendous social implications. John Ralston Saul, a Canadian thinker, claims that Taylor designed and explained his reorganization of the factories "as part of a social revolution, which rejected both the pessimistic view of the class struggle and the optimistic view of such things as profit sharing. [5]" Saul also argues that "Taylor believed his system would produce a conflict free, high consumption utopia based on mass production. Subjection to machines would destroy man’s natural tendency towards evil. A reign of technocrats would replace the corrupt and inefficient political elites. Individual choice would be submerged beneath systems and discouraged by cash benefits. Depersonalization of production would be the key to success. [6]" Taylor’s revolutionary Scientific Management later came to be known as "Taylorism" and its political echoes have still been heard today.

Due to its successful implementations early in the twentieth-century, Marxists generally consider Taylor’s Scientific Management as a system that increases the profit, and consequently the private property, for the capitalists. They also consider it as a dehumanizing system, which exploits, deskills and alienates the work force. An Italian Marxist, Antonio Negri, states that Taylorism reorganized the labor force during the second phase of the large-scale industry period that encompassed an era from World War I to the late sixties, making it an abstract labor force with respect to the industrial activity to which it is attached, causing the labor force to be dequalified and extremely alienated [7].

Critique of Taylorism does not belong to the Marxist camp only. Saul, for example, also argues that Taylor’s "Scientific Management saw men and women as mechanisms to be managed along with machines [8]" calling it as "falsely scientific Taylorist model of the mechanistic human [9]." Being a critique of Marxism as well as a critique of the global free market economy, Saul’s bashing of Taylor is considerably gentle in nature compared to that of the Marxian camp where such criticism went as far beyond as calling it a "bloody Taylorism [10]" with the notion that it played a major role in the advancement of the capitalist system. But this Marxist unsympathetic analysis fails to acknowledge the fact that Communist industries also made use of Taylorism during the twentieth-century.

In 1917, Lenin said that "the whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory with equality of work and equality of pay [11]." Seeing its successes in the capitalist societies, Lenin resorted to Taylorism in order to accomplish his plans of converting Russia into a big single factory, which of course came with a starving work force. "Lenin structured his economic reforms on his version of Scientific Management," states Saul, and he quotes Lenin as saying that "we must organize in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out and adapt it to our purposes [12]." Even the first Soviet five-year plan was prepared with the help of Taylorist advisers coming from the United States, and apparently, both Trotsky and Stalin made use of Taylor’s methods, too [13].

Saul goes further by suggesting that the "two-thirds of Soviet industry was built by Americans [14]." It appears that Taylorism did not work well within communism as it did in the West and as Saul claims "the business consultant descendants of Taylor are being invited back to the shattered Soviet Union to advise on how to undo the mess for which their approach is in good part responsible. [15]"

Coincidentally, the main character behind all these criticism, Fredrick W. Taylor, happens to be one of the important pioneers of the Industrial Engineering discipline. According to the Handbook of Industrial Engineering, "the generally accepted beginnings of the Industrial Engineering are found in the work of Frederick W. Taylor [16]". The same handbook also cites other names, which in one way or another, influenced the Industrial Revolution and the pioneers of the Industrial Engineering discipline. Included among those influential figures are Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, and John Stuart Mills [17].

Its origin and historical development have proven that the profession of Industrial Engineering is designed to serve a high consumption utopia called "Capitalism" and its functions contradict with Marx’s version of a propertyless utopia where the optimum lot size is always zero and every other variable related to manufacturing is set by the leaders of a tyrannical Communist Party.

February 2000

References:

[1] Enteman, Willard F., "Managerialism - The Emergence of a New Ideology," The University of Wisconsin Press, 1993, pg. 79

[2] Marx, Karl, "Capital," Oxford University Press, 1995, pg. 380

[3] Enteman, Willard F., "Managerialism - The Emergence of a New Ideology," The University of Wisconsin Press, 1993, pg. 79

[4] Taylor, Frederick Winslow, "The Principles of Scientific Management," New York, 1911

[5] Saul, John Ralston, "Voltaire’s Bastards - The Dictatorship of Reason In The West," Penguin Books, 1992, pg. 119

[6] Ibid. pg. 119

[7] Makdisi S., Casarino C., Karl R.E., "Marxism Beyond Marxism," Routledge, London, 1996, pg. 155

[8] Saul, John Ralston, "The Unconscious Civilization," Anansi Press, 1995, pg. 143

[9] Ibid. pg. 160

[10] Makdisi S., Casarino C., Karl R.E., "Marxism Beyond Marxism," Routledge, London, 1996, pg. 197 & 204

[11] Hayek, F.A., "The Road To Serfdom," University of Chicago Press, 1944, pg. 133

[12] Saul, John Ralston, "Voltaire’s Bastards - The Dictatorship of Reason In The West," Penguin Books, 1992, pg. 120.

[13] Ibid. pg. 120

[14] Ibid. pg. 120

[15] Ibid. pg. 120

[16] Nadler, Gerald, "The Role and Scope of Industrial Engineering" published in the "Handbook of Industrial Engineering," Edited by Salvendy, G., John Wiley & Sons, 1992, pg. 8

[17] Ibid. pg. 8

The author, Yüksel Çamaş, is a graduate (86) of the Industrial Engineering Department of Middle East Technical University and can be reached at ycamas@yahoo.com .

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