What Do Bosses Do?

tags

Capitalism Labour

The capitalist role of "integrator" emerged not, as is often assumed, because it was efficient, but because it was a way to centralize power. In fact it is markedly less efficient.

Notes

ultimate line of defense is that the plurality of capitalist hierarchies is preferable to a single socialist hierarchy.

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Rather than providing more output for the same inputs, these innovations in work organization were introduced so that the capitalist got himself a larger share of the pie at the expense of the worker, and it is only the subsequent growth in the size of the pie that has obscured the class interest which was at the root of these innovations.

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a search not for a technologically superior organization of work, but for an organization which guaranteed to the entrepreneur an essential role in the production process, as integrator of the separate efforts

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origin and success of the factory lay not in technological superiority, but in the substitution of the capitalist’s for the worker’s control of the work process and the quantity of output, in the change in the workman’s choice from one of how much to work and produce, based on his relative preferences for leisure and goods, to one of whether or not to work at all, which of course is hardly much of a choice.

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What distinguished precapitalist from capitalist hierarchy was first that the man at the top was, like the man at the bottom, a producer. The master worked along with his apprentice

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the hierarchy was linear rather than pyramidal.

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generally sold a product, not his labor,

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Saving o’ time implies separation of tasks and diircitioi of acti~ty, not specialization.

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choice does not, however, seem really to lie between stupidity and barbarity, but between the workman whose span of control is wide enough that he sees how each operation fits into the whole and the workman confined to a small number of repetitive tasks.

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the of were mysteries pin-making relatively quickly learned, and that the increase in potential dexterity afforded by minute division of tasks was quickly exhausted.

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without specialization, the capitalist had no essential role to play in the production process.

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this tragedy proved only that the British had made themselves essential as mediators, not that there was any inherent need for British mediation

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To glean rewards from organizing, one had to become a capitalist putter-outer!

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To learn the trade, he went to work for a &dquo;master&dquo; sandal maker. This worthy systematically taught him all there was to know about making sandals–except how to buy the leather.

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