Scientific management

And he talked about something.

He talked about, they call it Taylorism.

It's doing the bare minimum.

Not the bare minimum.

Back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, there was this concept of scientific management, coined by Frederick Winslow Taylor, who only focused on worker efficiency and productivity.

Now, Taylor wasn't the first bootlicking, anti-worker, pro-productivity guy that ever existed, but he did make a lot of the practices that we see today very relevant.

In fact, a lot of this bossware is considered a form of digital Taylorism, which is based on maximizing efficiency by reducing the skill needed by workers so that we all just become basically factory workers.

You do this one portion all day every day to become more efficient so that you don't have to change gears or have to learn new processes because not only would that slow down your productivity, it would be really hard to replace you if you could do two jobs.

So the goal here is quite literally to create cogs in a machine.

But by the time you get to the Industrial Revolution, we were still a model from the Prussians.

And this idea of Taylorism that really drives the entire revolution.

And we go from like voluntary happy-go-lucky education to this is a machine.

We have...

And how we will deal with the questions of scale and centralization I think are really crucial things that any socialist movement that wants to go beyond the redistributive questions will have to have to really seriously engage with and I think all the past attempts of socialism, especially in the Soviet Union, uh, I think they were very unconcerned with questions of, well, they would be too nice to say they were unconcerned with questions of centralizations.

They were, they were actually deeply in love with, uh, centralization and, um, As you know from my writing, I think Taylorism and that particular way of articulating a mode of centralizing control through managerial means, through centralizing knowledge, that is something that I think all the Bolsheviks were deeply in love with.

And it showed in the economy that they built, and that aspect would not have been different if Lenin had lived another 20 or 30 years, because Lenin was a great fan of Taylorism.

And Taylorism is precisely about this other form of abstraction in which you can produce abstraction through control, make people more replaceable, and thereby precisely not get people out of this question of do they relate to society and to other people already through this abstracted numerical monetary form.

So I think that you cannot love Taylorism and be opposed to the dual nature of labor, the abstract, the process of abstraction.

I think that is the problem that we will have to hopefully seriously grapple with.

I think the reason why the Marxists, earlier generations of Marxists, didn't worry about this problem that you're identifying is that they were raised on the conception that the concentration and centralization of capital will provide the material conditions for the supersession of capitalism and the establishment of socialism.

They had studied Henry Ford.

They had studied Taylor, Frederick Taylor, if you're familiar, Taylorism of the kind of scientific management.

And so before the war, they actually had been studying how to bring scientific thinking to their work.

And they really embraced actually this statistical thinking about understanding variation and using statistical process control.

Because data is always going to be a tool of power.

When the work process moved from craftspeople to Taylorism to Fordism, that was a way of using collected data to shape and control workers.

When you look at, you know, in Nazism, you know, the ability to collect and hold data on people was a key way that power was executed, that fascism was executed.

And so when you get to this point where data is so granular, it's about, you know, what do you like? What do you think? What do you do? What do you say in your private time? what is your healthcare data, what is your housing data, what is your education data, can all be held in such a centralized way, that's always going to be vulnerable.

If by seamlessly you mean stopping the film dead in its tracks so a character can deliver a monologue about the proper way to uprate a lathe? Look, I understand the historical context.

I know the Bolsheviks were obsessed with Taylorism and modernizing industry, trying to create the new Soviet man who was both an intellectual and an efficient laborer.

I get it.

I understand why the director included it.