Emancipation By Machine; W. A. Buck

EMANCIPATION BY MACHINE t'J William Alvadore Buck ROBOT, rabbit, wreck, slave of the machine! How many unflattering epithets have been applied in modern times to the factory worker, the "poor wretch" who contributes essential manpower to industry's "dark, Satanic mills." The anathema hurled at the factory, the machine, and quantity production started long before Samuel Butler described Erehwon (spell it backwards), the land where machines were forbidden and a long prison term was the penalty for constructing as tiny a machine as a watch. The scare story is still current around the world, nour ished by the Kremlin, that soon Americanization will set in all over and every worker will become a slave on the assembly line, while his wine or beer will be turned into soda pop. Mass production, according to some sel£ anointed egg heads, is the worst and final blow to man's dignity and creative life. Such is the line the Soviets preach wherever it looks good, even while building mass production in the homeland as fast as they can.

This is fancy stuff in the same package with sea serMr. Buck is a freelance journalist, editor, reporter, and author. He has written for numerous magazines, including Partners, where this article was first published in November 1958. 190 EMANCIPATION BY MACHINE 191 pents and the Loch Ness monster, as all of us should know; and one day as I stepped from a union headquar ters into the dazzle of New York's Broadway, it seemed to me that this monster could and should be crushed. All right, let's do so here and now-shredding as we go, themes by Thorstein Veblen and advanced by Chap lin's film, Modern Times. To begin with, we may ask, exactly how many Ameri cans work at what is thought of as a typical mass-pro duction job-where the operation is repetitive and broken down into simple, constituent motions, amounting to machine drudgery-whether on the assembly line or else where? Noone, I found, has ever counted them. I there fore started working down from a Bureau of Labor Sta tistics figure for a recent year.

That year, there were 13,174,000 production workers employed in the land. I subtracted figures for those in dustries, such as lumbering, where narrowly repetitive operations do not exist. I found many stray figures that helped. In a Brooklyn tool plant, for example, 25 of 156 employees worked at "robot" jobs; in an auto assembly plant of 1,800 only 1,068 actually worked on the line. After several hours of diligence, I reduced the total figure to 2,500,000. It cannot be far wrong, but to confuse doubters, let us call it 3 million. I was as surprised as probably you are. That particular year, there were 66 million employed in our nation, this "land of mass production," where everybody soon will be serving a machine. From this it is clear that only one in 21 held down what we think of as 192 WILLIAM ALVADORE BUCK a mass-production job. Would it not be more polite, then, to call us a nation of "craftsmen, foremen, and kindred workers" -since the Bureau that same year placed 8,825, 000 in that classification? Or a nation of "professional, technical, and artistic workers," whose figure was 6,445, OOO? Or of "managers, officials, and proprietors" -6, 648,000? Or, nearest of all, a nation of college people, considering that today some 20 million of us have gradu ated or at least managed to shy through from a year to three years of college work?

Where Are Our ((Robots"? Now, let's take after that word "robot." The three million include few who ache to resign, few miserable wretches, and many happy fellows. Psychologists tell us that many people are so constructed that assembly-line work is precisely their isle of content, and these are not always the least intelligent. Certainly there are three million in our population who can be well-satisfied on the line or in another such job; and doubtless, in this land of opportunity and movement, these are by and large the very people who are working there as "robots" -more or less. I once watched the assembly line at a Caterpillar Tractor plant, and it seemed to me that this was a rather gay place. The "Satanic mill" belonged on another planet; here, by contrast, was light and dramatic ac tivity. No one was in a great lather. One man on the line remarked, "Oh, we gabble a lot and have a good time."

EMANCIPATION BY MACHINE 193 A man in Personnel told me, "Most of the men on the line are there because they want to be, I have no doubt. Maybe all. They say you can get into the swing of it." I know the name of a young milling-machine hand in a tool plant who turns out 15,000 small parts a week. It would drive me into dementia, a deadly job. But this fellow slips his brain into neutral, so to speak, snaps on the radio at his bench, and. there is his valley of content ment, his green pasture. He has been there for years, though he has been offered a transfer. He owns a bigger and slicker convertible than any officer of the company. Few men are fastened to the assembly line with chains, chains of iron, gold, or duty, according to the sentiment at Plant X, the auto assembly plant studied by Charles Walker and Robert Guest of Yale and reported in their book, The Man on the Assembly Line. Men do know how to move. Up or out. The authors of the study noted that the quit rate for the line was higher than for other departments.

It is true that the Horatio Alger Thruway from file clerk to president is not as open as it once was. To cre ate a modern factory, organize its teamwork, and run its production requires much education, high ability, and special training. But a booming industry is always starved for talent; hence, most companies offer their employees training opportunities and any lad with a wee drap of ambition will find himself moving without straining a button. The three million include few who repeat one opera tion day after long day, as did Charlie Chaplin in 194 WILLIAM ALVADORE BUCK Modern Times. Walker and Guest found that only 32 per cent of the men on the line at Plant X performed a single operation. Moreover, there were some, like the repairmen, who were highly skilled. Peter Drucker-one of capitalism's deep, scientific worriers on this personnel subject-has said that monotony is not· a problem in a modern plant. He also has written that, even on the line, the American factory furnishes the worker with "status and function" to an astonishing degree.

The truth is, the "rabble theory"-the theory which energizes all totalitarianism and which still appears alive elsewhere in the world-is rare in the American front office today. Long ago, the production boss liked to talk of the factory hand as a part of the machine: "Give him enough money to get drunk on Saturday night, and no responsibility, and there you have the whole book of industrial relations." Such arrogance, we know now, is folly, triple-crowned. The wage-fighting buccaneer of business is no longer admired. The early communists never dreamed that this change of heart and under standing could happen. But it has happened--and affected all of us from housewife to mine foreman, from jockey to newsland's copyreader. That is why Marx's egregious proletariolatry appears so idiotic, so antique, in American eyes. A man can speak up in the factory as o~ any other job, and the most exalted ears will hear-sometimes. A worker for gre~tCadillac or Ford is a man of dignity and substance and can pose with a man's proper self-esteem as he spins genial yarns over a Hamtramck bar. Some EMANCIPATION BY MACHINE 195 actually exaggerate the pressure on the assembly line and brag that they enjoy the excitement of keeping up the pace. The last thing the "poor wretch" asks for is your pity-except on income tax day. He bears no more kin ship to the peasant or proletarian of Soviet myth than he does to one of Khrushchev's gorillas.

A Backward Look at the Guilds We can find a useful comparison here if we match our manufacturing times against the great time of the guilds. Some utopiates talk as though the workers of olden times were all sculptors of Gothic cathedrals or talented silver smiths and argue that the modern age has degenerated these great artists into the poor robot who can accom plish little more, between sweats, than swallow a mug of beer in a toast to Walter Reuther. Somehow, we must find our way back to those golden days of yore, they urge. But who, in truth, were these guildsmen? When the reek of the Middle Ages began to clear from men's minds, nearly all Europe was agricultural and feudal; the com mon man was a slave, owned as much by his land as by his lord. A few commoners worked for the lords directly, and for once in history, the wage and servant problems were under control. In the year 1300 A.D., for example, a maid at Forncett Manor in England received a 100 per cent boost in wages, from one shilling to two shillings a year. Clearly, the lord of Forncett did not want to bur den the soul of his vassal with too much purchasing power.

196 WILLIAM ALVADORE BUCK After the world failed to end in the year 1000 A.D., as all Christendom expected, the upsetting thought entered some rebel heads that a Christian might own himself. A flight to freedom began and continued for centuries. The cities grew by a process of natural selection. The run aways were, no doubt, the less homeloving and churchly, but by no means country riffraff. On the contrary, as Lewis Mumford wrote, "The Medieval city gathered to it self the more skilled, the more adventurous-probably the more intelligent-part of the rural population." These, the distinctly successful types, formed the guilds. In Queen Elizabeth's time, we know that a large number of the guild apprentices in London were younger sons of the country nobles. There never were many guildsmen. Monopolistic Practices As the guilds rolled into their great days, the ordinary Tom and Jerry had no more chance to get into the organization than into the Duke's iron pants. Even the journeyman who had completed his apprenticeship waited long for his chair in the almighty lodge and often never made it. The guilds' ruthless control over wages, competition, apprenticeships, and prices make our ideas of monopoly today look like galloping socialism. The guilds had power. Sometimes they chivied the king or queen into passing. laws which decreed exactly what guild-manufactured garments people in this or that class must wear!

While the guilds perfected their legal squeeze on the EMANCIPATION BY MACHINE 197 pocketbook of the citizen, feudal society fell apart under the pressure of new ideas and a new agriculture. Former serfs flocked to the towns by the thousands, many driven from the land by the "enclosures" and the demand for wool from Holland. A truly Oriental destitution became the normal life for myriad folk. A quarter of the city people of Europe were casuals and beggars;hal£ of the citizens of Paris were no better than that. Begging was an accepted way of life. The most brutal police action could not control piracy and crime. Before science and industrialism changed the earth, smells of vast burden lurked in city ways and dirty death flowed in the open sewer that was the street. For centuries bands of outcast syphilitics roamed Europe in despair and rags, criminals and beg gars without a choice. It was considered a nice pastime, when the guildsmen had their power, to slip a couple of hard-boiled eggs into your pocket and go to watch the public torture of criminals. There were 200 capital crimes in English law. Even as late as the nineteenth century, women and children labored in English coal mines, naked as Hottentots. The guilds had perished be fore that-in the eighteenth century-in a rolling boil of public hatred.

The simple fact is, the factory system-and later, mass production-abolished far more human drudgery than they created. Dragging an oar in a trireme, chopping cotton, carrying the hod, keeping an overstuffed Vic torian house clean, loading coal by bucket or barrow, plowing with your wife in the ox-yoke, and many an198 WILLIAM ALVADORE BUCK other old unhappy burden has been lifted from man's shoulders by the machine. The factory has created in credible abundance and has lessened the problem that was never to be completely solved-poverty. When Aris totle, poking fun at liberal ideas, stated that men would be able to free slaves "when the shuttle wove by itself," he knew what was possible and what was not. But what would Aristotle today think of nylon stockings, not only on the limbs of queens and court ladies but also on the weaver and her daughter as well! We do the impossible today and slavery has vanished from the civilized world.

In many ways the machine has made all of us free men. It has done more than that. For where do the children of today's counterparts of the old guildsmen go for their apprentice training-along with many a son of the shanty and many a son of the manor? To college, of course! In deed, we have not changed the guildsman into a faceless robot; we are changing him into a doctor, a flight engi neer, a research chemist, a lawyer, a teacher-and, some times a second fiddle in a symphony or a third baseman for the "Giants." I'm sure that none but a mass-produc tion economy could give 20 million citizens a freshman's dink to wear for a while. Nor could any less productive system provide for 6,448,000 in the professional, artistic, technical, etcetera, category. Those who quarrel with American materialism from far away and little ken should stare at this figure and let its significance really sink in. For it shows, as specifically contrasted with the guildsman's craft accomplishment, a shift of desire and fulfillment from material production EMANCIPATION BY MACHINE 199 to the direct promotion of the art of living. A Gothic cathedral is a great achievement in man's aspirations, but it is not greater than an electronic brain, a.philharmonic orchestra, or a well-baby clinic. Certainly, following Abou Ben Adhem, we can love our fellow man with enormously greater capability than society could manage in the days when Queen Elizabeth decreed that everyone in a certain station in life must wear a beaver hat, and beggars were licensed and assigned territories by law.

As all of us surmise, automation soon will take over the great share of the drudgery involved in mass produc tion. As this development progresses, the worker tends to become more and more a skilled supervisor of produc tion. Being human, the worker of tomorrow will have problems to contend with. But they will not be problems of slavery-such as Karl Marx envisioned in his fatuous Mumbo Jumbo. Most likely-in America, at least-they will be the problems of a physical freedom that seems too boundless. The American worker's spiritual emanci pation-what he does with his improving health and leisure-will be strictly up to him. If this be slavery, let Pravda make the most of it. Our machines show no tendency to become our mas ters; on the contrary, their developing role is to take over human drudgery as our good and faithful servants.