Welcome to the machine
- The Industrial Revolution
- The Mechanization of Work
- Replacing people with machines
- The bounty of the machines
- Treating people as machines
- The division of labour
- The soul of man under capitalism
Recommended Readings/Viewings
Key concepts, people, etc
- Industrial Revolution
When did it happen; how did it affect how most people worked?
- Ned Ludd and the Luddites
Textile workers who were put out of jobs when machine weaving became common
- Frederick Winslow Taylor
The founder of Scientific Management
- Scientific Management
The attempt to use study and scientific analysis to make human workers' maximally efficient (like machines)
- Division of Labour
The capitalist-industrialist method of dividing work processes into small micro-jobs, each of which can be done by a comparatively unskilled and interchangeable human labourer
Karl Marx suggested that this ruined the worker's sense of meaning in their work and created alientation, competition, etc
Psychologist Stanley Milgram suggested that the lack of responsibility the typical worker feels helped make collaboration in the Nazi holocaust seem "normal"
- Alienation
The feeling a typical worker under the Division of Labour has that they are disconnected from the full meaning of the work they are doing, and hence their likely emotional detachment from what they are actually doing 8-16 hours a day
References and Resources
References
- Davis, Angela (1981) Women, Race and Class. New York: Random House. [Chapter 13 excerpt]
- Giedion, Siegfried (1949) Mechanization Takes Command. New York: Norton, 1969.
- Harari, Yuval Noah (2018) 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. London: Jonathan Cape.
- Marx, Karl (1844) "The Wages of Labour."
- Montgomery, David (1987) The Fall of the House of Labour. Cambridge.
- Mumford, Lewis (1970) The Myth of the Machine. The Pentagon of Power. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.