People :
Author : Cornelius Castoriadis
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[27] This following part will be published in the next issue of S. ou B.
[28] The present “Supreme Soviet,” of course.
[29] The expression is to be found in part 3 of Engels’s Anti-Dühring. [T/E: The French phrase is “en connaissance de cause.” Castoriadis refers to a passage in section 2 of this third part, pp. 309–10, of the edition we are using (trans. Emile Burns, ed. C. P. Dutt [New York: International Publishers, 1939]). This edition translates the phrase in question merely as “with complete understanding.”]
[30] A few years ago a certain “philosopher” could seriously ask how one could even discuss Stalin’s decisions, since one did not know the real facts upon which he alone could base them. (J.-P. Sartre, “Les Communistes et la Paix,” in Les Temps Modernes, 81, 84–85, and 101 [July and October-November 1952, April 1954]; trans. Martha H. Fletcher, The Communists and the Peace [New York: George Braziller, 1968].)
[31] Lenin took the opportunity, in State and Revolution, to defend the idea of direct democracy against the reformists of his day who contemptuously called it “primitive democracy.”
[32] On this feature of working life, see Paul Romano, “L’Ouvrier amerieain,” in S. ou B., 5–6 (March 1950), pp. 129–32 [T/E: “Life in the Factory,” in The American Worker (1947; reprinted, Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1972), pp. 37–39], and R. Berthier, “Une Experience d’organization ouvriere,” in 5. ou B., 20 (December 1956), pp. 29–31.
[33] The great contribution of the American group that publishes Correspondence has been to resume the analysis of the crisis of society from the standpoint of production and to apply it to the conditions of our age. See their texts, translated and published in S. ou B.: Paul Romano’s “L’Ouvrier americain” (nos. 1 to 5–6 [March 1949 to March 1950]) and “La Reconstruction de la société” (nos. 7–8 [August 1951 and January 1952]) [T/E: see “Life in the Factory” and “The Reconstruction of Society,” in The American Worker). In France, it is Philippe Guillaume who has revived this way of looking at things (see his article, “Machinisme et proletariat,” in no. 7 [August 1951 ] of this review). I am indebted to him, directly or indirectly, for several ideas used in the present text.
[34] K. Marx, Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1967), vol. 3, p. 820.
[35] Daniel Mothe’s text, “L’Usine et la gestion ouvrière,” also in this issue [S. ou B., 22 (July 1957), pp. 75 ff.] already is one de facto response — coming from the factory itself — to the concrete problem of shop-floor workers’ management and that of how to organize work. In referring to this text, we are considering here only the problems of the factory as a whole.
[36] In J. A. C. Brown’s The Social Psychology of Industry (London: Penguin, 1954), there is a striking contrast between the devastating analysis the author makes of present capitalist production and the only “conclusions” he can draw, which are pious exhortations to management that it should “do better,” “democratize itself,” etc. Let it not be said, however, that an “industrial sociologist” takes no position, that he merely describes facts and does not suggest norms. Advising the managerial apparatus to “do better” is itself a taking of a position, one that has been shown here to be completely Utopian.
[37] See the Twentieth Congress texts analyzed by Claude Lefort in “Le Totalitarisme sans Staline,” S. ou B., 19 (July 1956), in particular, pp. 59–62 [now in Elements, pp. 166 ff.; T/E: 1979 ed., pp. 203 ff.].
[38] See Mothe, “L’Usine et la gestion ouvrière.”
[39] On the extreme overstaffing of “nonproductive” departments in today’s factories, see G. Vivier, “La Vie en usine,” 6.” ou B., 12 (August 1953), pp. 39–41. Vivier estimates that in the business he describes, “without a rational reorganization of these departments, 30% of the employes already arc redundant” (emphasis in the original).
[40] See Mothe, “L’Usine et la gestion ouvrière.”
[41] Ibid.
[42] Bureaucratic “planning” as carried out in Russia and the Eastern European countries proves nothing, one way or the other. It is just as irrational and just as anarchic and wasteful as the capitalist “market” — though in different ways. The waste is both “external” (the wrong decisions being Blade) and “internal” (brought about by the resistance of the workers) to the production process. Lor further details, see PRAB.
[43] The field is in constant expansion. The starting points remain, however, Leontief’s The Structure of American Economy, 1919–1939: An Empirical Application of Equilibrium Analysis (1951; reprinted, Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1976), and the essays by Leontief et al., Studies in the Structure of the American Economy: Theoretical and Empirical Explorations in Input-Output Analysis (1953; reprinted, Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1976).
[44] Tjalling Koopmans, Activity Analysis of Production and Allocation (1951; reprinted, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972).
[45] The 1955 Nantes strikes took place around an anti-hierarchical demand for a uniform increase for everyone. The Hungarian workers’ councils demanded the abolition of norms and severe limitations on hierarchy. What inadvertently is said in official Russian proclamations indicates that a permanent struggle against hierarchy is taking place in the factories of that country. See PRAB.
[46] For a detailed discussion of the problem of hierarchy, see RPR, section 5, and DC, in S. ou B., 13 (January 1954), pp. 67–69.
[47] On the structure of a large insurance company undergoing rapid “industrialization,” both technically as well as socially and politically, see the articles by Henri Collet (“La Greve aux A.G.-Vie,” in S. ou B., 7 [August 1951], pp. 103–10) and R. Berthier (“Une Experience d’organization ouvriere: Le Conseil du personnel des A.G.-Vie,” in S. ou B., 20 [December 1957], pp. 1–64). On the same process taking place within the United States, where “tertiary” sectors are being merged, see C. Wright Mills, White Collar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951, esp. pp. 192–98). In order to take stock of the significance of the changes that are expected to occur in these areas, we must remember that the industrialization of office and “service” work (and, ultimately, the industrialization of “intellectual” work) is still in its infancy. Cf. N. Wiener, Cybernetics (New York: Wiley, 1948), pp. 37–38. In an entirely different sector, that of theater and film, it is interesting to compare the ideas expounded in this article with the multiple (economic, political, work-management) role the Revolutionary Workers’ Committee of this sector played during the Hungarian Revolution. See “Les Artistes du theater et du cinema pendant la revolution hongroise,” in S. ou B., 20 (December 1957), pp. 96–104.
[48] See section 2 of Chapter 1 of State and Revolution.
[49] See Chapter 4 (“Technique and the State”) of Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, trans. J. Wilkinson, intro. Robert K. Merton (New York: Knopf, 1964). In spite of his fundamentally incorrect outlook, Ellul has the merit of analyzing some of these key aspects of the reality of the modern State, aspects that are blithely ignored by most sociologists and political writers — whether “Marxist” or not.
[50] This is Ellul’s point of view, as expressed in The Technological Society. Ellul concludes that “it is futile to try to put a halt to this process or to grasp a hold of it and guide it.” For him, technique is only the self-developing process of enslavement taking place independently of any social context. [T/E: I have translated Castoriadis’s quotation of Ellul.]
[51] See C. Wright Mills White Collar, pp. 347–48, and The Power Elite [New York: Oxford University Press, 1956], pp. 134 ff., 145 ff., etc.) for an illustration of the total lack of any relationship between “technical” capacities of any kind, on the one hand, and current industrial management or political leadership groups, on the other.
[52] “Plato defined the limits of the size of the city as the number of people who could hear the voice of a single orator: today those limits do not define a city but a civilization. Wherever neo-technic instruments exist and a common language is used there are now the elements of almost as close a political unity as that which once was possible in the tiniest cities of Attica. The possibilitie for good and evil here are immense” (Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization [New York-Hil court, Brace, 1934], p. 241).
[53] 7905, trans. Anya Bostock (New York: Vintage, 1971), p. 109.
[54] The events in Poland have furnished yet another confirmation of the idea that the Party can not be a governmental organ (see “La Révolution prolétarienne contre la bureaucratic” in S. on B
[55] See “Critique of the Gotha Program.”
[56] In CS II.
[57] See RPB, in SB 1, pp. 286–310 [T/E: see “The Proletarian Revolution against the Bureaucracy,” this volume, starting with the section entitled “Working-Class Resistance: Ultimate Cause of the Failure of the ‘Plan,’” and ending with the first half of “The Political Evolution of De-Stalinization”].
[58] Concerning the problem of remunerating labor in a socialist society: CS I, pp. 12–15 [T/E: reprinted in CS, pp. 83–87, and included in PSW 1 as the second section of CS I, “Marxism and the Idea of the Autonomy of the Proletariat”]; apropos of the very nature of work and of the “reduction of the workday” as a solution to the problem of alienation: CS II, pp. 14–22 [T/E: reprinted in CS, pp. 123–37, and included in this volume as section 4 of CS II, “Socialism Is the Transformation of Work”].
[59] See the critique of this conception in CS II, pp. 14–22 [T/E: see preceding note].
[60] T/E: Castoriadis uses the phrase “une seule bonne méthode” followed by the English phrase “the one best way” within quotation marks and in parentheses.
[61] With the addition of various other factors, like the percentages allotted for “taking account of unforeseen possibilities” — which in fact can be assessed only empirically and arbitrarily and which thereby ruin the alleged “rationality” of the rest.
[62] We are talking about scientific management insofar as it applies to the problems of output by human beings. As production engineers, the Taylorists were able to play a positive role in a host of domains concerning the material rationalization of production — and sometimes also the rationalization of human motion by making known to others the most economical methods, as picked up from individual workers.
[63] Thus a strike breaks out in an enterprise following an average 20 percent reduction in time allowances in the assembly shop. Among other issues, the shop stewards brought up the fact that “components were now supplied in bulk, whereas previously they had been sorted and laid out in a carrier; moreover, frequent stoppages were caused by bad supply arrangements at assembly points, which penalized workers paid on an output basis” (R. J. Jouffret, “Description of Two Cases in Which Human Relations in Industry Were Impaired by the Efficient Use of Time Study in Determining Production Bonuses,” in Human Relations in Industry [Paris: European Productivity Agency, 1956], p. 202). Such situations exist everywhere.
[64] Jouffret, ibid., p. 201. The times noted are adjusted to the “normal (performance) rates” and “rest coefficients,” which can be based only upon the time-study engineers’ estimations.
[65] Here we have one of the “findings” of the famous Hawthorne factory experiments conducted in the United States from 1924 to 1927 under the direction of Elton Mayo: “It was found that the more intelligent the girl, the greater was the number of variations (in her movements).” J. A. C. Brown, The Social Psychology of Industry (London: Penguin, 1956), p. 72.
[66] The “objective-scientific” measurability of labor-time aimed at by Taylorism “extends right into the workers’ ‘soul’: even his psychological attributes are separated from his total personality and placed in opposition to it so as to facilitate their integration into specialized rational systems and their reduction to statistically viable concepts.... In consequence of the rationalization of the work-processes, the human qualities and idiosyncrasies appear increasingly as mere sources of errors (G. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971], p. 88.)
[67] See the summary of this critique in J. A. C. Brown, The Social Psychology of Industry, chapters 1 and 3. Speaking of Taylorism, Alain Touraine writes (L’Evolution du travail ouvrier aux usines Renault [Paris: CNRS, 1955], p. 115): “Since Taylor, personnel administrators have striven to stop (the workers) from ‘loafing,’ but Taylor’s pseudoscientific and purely coercive methods today are condemned; the importance of human relations, of communications, of informal organization, i.e., of social adjustment [T/E: Touraine places the English phrase ‘social adjustment’ in parentheses and in italics, following the phrase ‘integration sociale’] of the worker into the enterprise, has become the principal theme of American Personnel Management.” [T/E: “Personnel Management” appears in English.] But what value is there in condemning Taylor when it is well known that the great majority of French businesses pay workers on an output basis, using time-motion studies (R. J- Jouffret, “Description,” p. 200)? In fact, as we shall see, management has responded to the bankruptcy of Taylorism with more and not with less coercion. As for “human relations,” we will come to it later.
[68] The first person to experience this struggle obviously was Taylor himself. Speaking of the first years of his career, when he himself applied his method in factories, he wrote, “I was a great deal older than I am now, what with the worry, meanness, and contemptibleness of the whole damn thing. It’s a horrid life for any man to live not being able to look any workman in the face without seeing hostility there, and a feeling that every man around you is your virtual enemy” (cited by J. A. C. Brown, ‘The Social Psychology of Industry, p. 14). See a description of the workers’ attitude toward time-study men in Georges Vivier, “La Vie en usine,” Socialisme ou Barbarie, 12 (August 1953), pp. 38 and 40, Daniel Mothe, “L’Usine et la gestion ouvière,” ibid., 22 (July 1957), pp. 90–92 [partially reproduced in Journal d’un ouvrier (Paris: Minuit, 1959]; Paul Romano, “L’Ouvrier americain,” ibid., 2 (May 1949), pp. 84–85 [T/E: “Life in the Factory,” in Romano and Stone, The American Worker (1947; reprinted, Detroit, Bewick Editions, 1972), p. 9]: “When the time-study men are about, the worker will find a multitude of reasons for shutting the machine down.” The systematic slowdown of work performed in front of the time-study men is a universal rule. When time studies are done, the workers switch to lower speeds and slower “feeds” than the ones they will use later on; “operators deemed it necessary to embellish the timing performance with movements ... that could be dropped instanter with the departure of the time-study man” (Donald Roy, “Efficiency and ‘The Fix,”’ American Journal of Sociology, 60 [November 1954], pp. 255–66).
[69] R. J. Jouffret, “Description,” p. 201. The idea that the workers “should normally” accept revisions in the hotted times is all the more astonishing since the author himself shows that the revision that provoked the conflict ended up stealing from the workers at least 10 percent of their time and since he concludes his study by saying that in this firm “the lack of confidence felt by the workers in the procedure of the Methods Department proved to be largely justified as a result of the joint survey subsequent to the dispute.”
[70] See “Stakhanovisme et mouchardage dans les usines tchécoslovaques,” by V. W. in Socialisme ou Barbarie, 3 (July 1949), pp. 82–87, and Guillaume’s short report, “La Destakhanovisation en Pologne,” ibid., 19 (July 1956), pp. 144–45.
[71] Testimony gathered by us from factory workers.
[72] R. J. Jouffret, “Description,” p. 201–2.
[73] Donald Roy, “Quota Restriction and Goldbricking in a Machine Shop,” American Journal of Sociology, 57 (March 1952), pp. 427–42. It should be noted that the entire analysis of the “Hawthorne experiment” made by the Elton Mayo school is based on the assumption that workers in the shops studied had no “rational reason” for restricting their output and that it therefore was necessary to find “nonlogical” motives for their behavior. Roy remarks in this regard: “John Mills, onetime research engineer in telephony and for five years engaged in personnel work for Bell Telephone Company, has recently indicated the possibility that there were factors in the bank-wiring room situation which the Mayo group failed to detect: ‘Reward is supposed to be in direct proportion to production. Well, I remember the first time I ever got behind that fiction. I was visiting the Western Electric Company, which had a reputation of never cutting a piece rate. It never did; if some manufacturing process was found to pay more than seemed right for the class of labor employed on it — if, in other words, the rate-setters had misjudged — that particular part was referred to the engineers for redesign, and then a new rate was set on the new part. Workers, in other words, were paid as a class, they were supposed to make about so much a week with their best efforts and, of course, less for less competent efforts’ (The Engineer in Society [New York: Van Nosirand, 1946], p. 93).” (Quoted by Roy, “Quota Restriction,” p. 431.) Let us add that the Mayo research group literally lived in the shop in question for five years and that it claimed to be studying reality without any pre-established theoretical schema, without any “preconceived ideas.” This is what allowed them to rediscover in reality their unconscious ideas (for example, that management is always logical, and that, if the workers oppose management, it can only be for “nonlogical” reasons) and to ignore facts as massive as those mentioned by Mills.
[74] On conflicts over quality control, see Mothe’s article, “L’Usine et la gestion ouvrière,” in 5. ou B., 22 (July 1957), particularly p. 103. “To succeed in ‘earning a living’ (i.e., in not exceeding your time allotments), one has to cut corners on quality, eliminate an operation here and there. In the factory, this currently is called ‘sabotage’” (G. Vivier, Socialisme ou Barbarie, 14 [April 1954], p. 57). This cutting of corners is the “streamlining” [T/E: the word appears italicized and in English in the original] of American factory parlance; cf. Roy, “Efficiency and the ‘Fix,’” p. 257. On the contradictions, the resort to empirical methods, and the proliferation of piecework-related supervisory services, see Touraine, L’Evolution, pp. 169–70. Touraine concludes that ultimately “the unwieldiness of supervisory controls poses the question of returning to self-control,” i.e., quality control over pieces by the semiskilled workers who manufacture them. It is not difficult to see that such an apparently minuscule change is impossible without a total overthrow of the structure of the factory, of wages, of the relations between the worker and his work.
[75] Roy, “Efficiency and the ‘Fix.’”
[76] These are what Anglo-Saxon sociologists call “informal groups” or “primary groups.” [T/E: In the original, Castoriadis gives the French translation of these two phrases. We have retained throughout his phrase, “elementary groups,” to distinguish his analysis from that of these “Anglo-Saxon sociologists.”]
[77] We shall see later that the divergence between the workers’ spontaneous organization and the factory’s official organization is, from a certain point of view, the condensed expression of all the conflicts and of all the contradictions of the capitalist enterprise.
[78] The study of elementary groups goes back to Charles H. Cooley (Human Nature and the Social Order [1902; reprinted, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1983]). Its application to industrial sociology is tied to the works of Elton Mayo and his school. See, in particular, Elton Mayo, The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization (1945; reprinted, Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1977).
[79] Mayo, Social Problems, Chapter 2, “The Rabble Hypothesis and Its Corollary, the State Absolute.”
[80] T/E: Castoriadis uses the English phrase “rabble hypothesis” in italics, followed by the French phrase “postulat de la horde.” What we have translated as “the molecular hypothesis” is what he calls the “postulat moléculaire.”
[81] Remark by Philippe Guillaume.
[82] Unless, once again, such “recognition” [reconnoiter] means inviting management to utilize its “acquaintances [connaissances]” in such groups in order to worm its way into them, the better to combat them. Contemporary American literature and cinema offer many examples of this type of utilization: Thus in the film Blackboard Jungle, an elementary group is broken up by discrediting the “ringleader” in the eyes of its members.
[83] We are thinking in particular of Mayo, but the same can be said of all of industrial sociology. Thus Brown, in his excellent synthesis of industrial sociology already cited, persistently recapitulates the criticisms developed by several writers in this regard against Mayo and emphasizes that elementary groups have their own logic, in no way “inferior” to management’s logic, but he remains unable to get himself out of the contradiction as thus stated. And for good reason, for the only way out is workers’ management — obviously an “unscientific” idea for a sociologist.
[84] See the extraordinarily vivid description of this informal organization in the Renault factories by Mothe, “L’Usine et la gestion ouvrière,” in particular pp. 81–90, 101–2, and 106–10.
[85] An informal organization also exists, of course, at higher echelons in the management apparatus — but, as will be seen later, it obeys another type of logic than that of an informal organization of executants.
[86] See a description of this kind of cooperation in Mothe’s “L’Usine,” as well as the long quotations from Roy that we provide later.
[87] Of course, it is not a matter here of separate time periods, but of simultaneous facets, of logical moments in the process of organizing production.
[88] See in this regard Mothe’s long exposition in “L’Usine”; likewise those of Vivier (Socialisme ou Barbarie, 12 [August 1953], pp. 46–47, 14 [April 1954], pp. 56–57) and of Paul Romano (ibid., 2 [May 1949], pp. 89–91 [T/E: 1972 American edition, pp. 12–14].)
[89] Cf. N. Wiener, Cybernetics (New York: Wiley, 1948), pp. 172–73.
[90] “After each model change, the supervisors frenetically run through the factory trying to get the plans and machinery which have been studied for months in the offices to work normally. At this moment the foreman is boss; he puts the workers where he wants, he breaks up old groups, he asserts his authority. It is the moment of greatest disorganization in the factory. For precisely this reason few Detroit autoworkers will buy a new car immediately after the model changes. They leave this lemon to people who don’t work in a factory and therefore don’t know any better. It is only when the workers are able to reestablish a certain amount of order in production that things go smoothly. The foreman has been put in charge of a group of workers and he is told what he should make them do. The organization he brings about is always bad. The assembly line goes too quickly or else there is only a single man where there should be two. The workers explain that to him, but he has his orders and cannot make any changes based on what the workers say. The men therefore are obliged to take the situation in hand themselves. They screw up the work so that the assembly line has to be stopped. Finally, after this situation has gone on for some time, management wises up, production is adjusted, and the cars produced are worth the price of purchase” (The American Civilization, monotyped text produced by the American group from Detroit, Correspondence, p. 47; [T/E: despite a long search, no copy of this text has been found; we therefore have retranslated Castoriadis’s French back into English.])
[91] See Mothe, “L’Usine,” p. 88.
[92] See RPB, in SB 1, pp. 279–81 [T/E: see “The Proletarian Revolution against the Bureaucracy,” this volume, the third unnumbered subsection of the section entitled “Bureaucratic Planning”].
[93] For example, every form of psychoanalysis worthy of the name is based on the idea that the freedom of the subject is at one and the same time the end and the means of the therapeutic process — and every utilization of psychoanalysis by industrial sociology is based on the manipulation of the subject, both as means and as ultimate end.
[94] In the Renault factories, the percentage of “monthly salaried workers” went from 6.5 of the total in 1919 to 11.7 in 1930, 17.8 in 1937, and 20.2 in January 1954 (Touraine, L’Evolution, pp 164–65). On the development of offices in American industry, see C. Wright Mills, White Collar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 65–70.
[95] In this regard, the analysis of the attitude of these strata, as furnished by C. Wright Mills in the final chapters of his White Collar, has the following shortcomings:[1] It mixes disparate categories of “white-collar proletarians” whose situations and outlooks differ fundamentally; and[2] it does not take into account the dynamic of their situation. In particular, illusions about “status” will not outlive for long the real conditions that once had nourished them. The phenomenon of the industrialization of office work obviously is of decisive importance in this regard. Cf. R. Berthier’s excellent analysis, “Une Experience d’organization ouvriere,” in 5. ou B., 20 (December 1956), pp. 6 ff.
[96] At an entirely different level, this phenomenon of “duplicating” the bureaucratic structure that blankets all of society with a more exclusive managing organ, the Party (which unsuccessfully tries to be the authoritative seat of reunification and thereby also tends to render the State’s entire bureaucratic apparatus useless) has been brought to light by Claude Lefort, starting off from the speeches of the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. See, in 5. ou B., 19 (July 1956), his article “Le Totalitarisme sans Staline,” in particular pp. 45 ff. [now in Elements, pp. 166 ff.; T/E: 1979 ed., pp. 203 ff.]. Let us add that in duplicating the structure of the State bureaucracy, the Party is obliged to reproduce it within its own ranks, creating specialized commissions, etc. That is to say, this is no solution to the problem, by near or by far.
[97] On the necessary incompetence of managers within the present system, see C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), especially pp. 138–46 as concerns managers of industry, pp. 205–24 as concerns military leaders, and the final chapter of the book.
[98] See the articles by Romano, Vivier, and Mothe already cited. Noting the relatively small number of “suggestions” from workers that are aimed at improving production, Touraine writes: “How is this relative failure to be explained? In the first place by remembrance of the past. The worker, used to seeing his suggestions and his initiatives turned back against him when the time-study men are called in, abandons his former mistrust only slowly” (L’Evolulion, p. 121). “To abandon slowly” is a euphemism: The figures cited by Touraine refer to the period 1945–47. What has happened since then has not prompted the workers to abandon their mistrust. Quite the contrary.
[99] The types, formulas, and names for “wages based on output” are innumerable. But as far as we are concerned here, only the general meaning [contenu] of these formulas matters: The worker’s wage is, within ample limits, a function of the quantity of production provided.
[100] One of the workers in the shop where Roy worked said to him, “Don’t you know that if I turned in $1.50 an hour on these pump bodies tonight, the whole God-damned Methods Department would be down here tomorrow! And they’d retime this job so quick it would make your head swim! And when they’d retime it, they’d cut the price in half?”
[101] Roy, in his articles cited earlier.
[102] Roy describes at length an epic struggle in such a case between the four best workers in the shop and the time-study men, a struggle that lasted nine months and only came to an end when the workers won. This outcome makes one think — just as Mothe’s remarks (“L’Usine,” pp. 91–92) do — that the great majority of jobs are “stinkers” at the outset and that it is the workers’ struggle against the time allotments that progressively transforms them into “gravy jobs.”
[103] This third option, very likely applied as soon as the conditions for it are given, corresponds exactly to the concept of “maximization of profits in the long run” recently discovered by bourgeois economists as the principle that ought to guide the decision making of capitalist entrepreneurs.
[104] Let us recall that the stomach ulcer is the occupational illness of the foreman.
{1} This text — of which the first part, a sort of programmatic introduction, was published in July 1955 in S. ou B., no. 17, and whose second part was devoted to a discussion of the problems of a socialist society, in issue no. 22 (July 1957) — continued with an analysis of the proletariat’s political struggles, a critique of the overall organization of capitalist society, and an analysis of the crisis of contemporary culture. Events (May 1958, the scission within the S. ou B. group) interrupted its elaboration and publication. Parts of the first draft have been used in the writing of PO I, MRCM/MCR, and MTR/MRT. [T/E: The first two texts are included in this volume; the third is to be found in IIS.]
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