WHAT IS MASS PRODUCTION?
FIVE main techniques, or
methods, of production have been used in Britain in the last 500
years. They are as follows:
1. Handicraft
This is the simplest method of wealth
production, in which a man works on materials with a tool, and
produces whole articles, such as tables and chairs. Finger skill is
essential in this method, and proficiency is termed craftsmanship.
William Morris is the best known student and advocate of this method
in recent years.
2. Manufacture
In this method, a number of workers are
concentrated in a single workshop, and though each works on material
with a tool, he does only a limited number of operations; he
specialises and becomes a cog in a manufacturing process, for the
manufacturing method consists essentially of a process of which all
the working parts are human being. This is the type of mass
production described and criticised by Adam Smith and his teacher,
Ferguson.
3. Power-driven Machinery
This is the method of the Mechanical
Era which started with the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth
century. Here man is a machine-minder, looking after a machine which
consists of a power unit, a transmission mechanism and a working
tool. The physical exertions of the man are replaced by a power unit,
while the transmission mechanism controls the tool in place of his
fingers. There has been some controversy in the past as to whether
the transmission mechanism, which eliminates finger skill, is more
basic than the power unit, which replaces human energy. But the
development of each went hand in hand with the other in capitalist
society, because the existence of a crude engine made the need of a
transmission mechanism clear and vice versa.
In the mechanical era,
handicraftsmanship is replaced as much as possible by machinery, and
the craftsman of this era is the mechanic or engineer. This work can
be just as interesting as handicraft work, though now a large
proportion of the workers are relegated to monotonous machine
operating.
This is the method of production
analysed, and vividly laid bare by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
4. The Belt System
This is essentially the manufacturing
method streamlined by using power to drive a conveyor belt, which
carries the object under construction from worker to worker, each of
whom merely repeats a few simple actions on each object as it passes
him. The Chicago stockvards of the late 19th century, in which a pig
was carried along on an overhead convevor. is a rudimentary example
of this rnethod, but it came of age in 1913, when Ford introduced it
into motor car production. The belt can easilv be speeded up, and to
keep the v"+ers rra>«ive. thugs have been employed, of —hiah
me Pirhertorj Agency of Chicago is an
example. Some of Upton Sinclair's
novels, for example "The Flivver King", describes this
method of wealth production.
The conveyor belt system may be
regarded as a special case of the general analysis called Time and
Motion Study, which is the science of treating man as a cog in an
industrial machine. Such refinements increase man's slavery to
machinery, in contrast to the introduction of machinery to eliminate
toil.
5. Automatically Controlled Machinery
Once this type of machine has been set
up, it will continue to perform certain operations as long as power
and raw materials are supplied to it, testing the products, and if
necessary readjusting itself, to continue producing products within
the desired tolerance. An example of a very rudimentary control
system is the thermostat on a home refrigerator, which switches the
motor of the cooling mechanism on or off to regulate the temperature
as desired.
This method of production is based on
an understanding of the science of electricity, just as the
power-driven machinery is based on mechanical science. Crude
autocontrols can be hydromechanical, but only with the simplicity of
electrical devices does it come into its own. We already understand
enough of electronics to use thermionic (radio) valves and photocells
to make most of the present-day productive processes automatic,
though as yet such devices have only been applied to a few industrial
processes. But guided missiles are being provided with these
electronic controls, and there is no fundamental difference in
controlling a homing anti-aircraft rocket and an industrial process.
Still the best non-technical exposition
of the science and social implications of automatic controls is The
Human Use of Human Beings, by Norbert Wiener, a leading research
worker
in this field, which he terms
Cybernetics.
* * *
From this classification the following
points of interest emerge:
3.The term Mass Production could be
applied to all but one (handicraft) of these methods.
4.All five methods are in use in the
world to-day.
5.The Belt System is the Manufacturing
Method of the Machine Age.
6.Productive processes have been
simplified so that each man does merely a few simple manipulations,
and then a device is constructed to perform these manipulations more
systemically (because it is cheaper), needing man then only for
maintenance and adjustment. The first half of this ' cycle' make man
a servant to the "Iron Master", while the latter half tends
to make him redundant to the productive processes, or in other words.
liberates him from the necessity of toil.
7.It is necessary to understand current
natural science to discuss such subjects as the relevance of mass
production to a socialist society in a useful way, because production
then will use the knowledge
of nature available to make life a joy,
not merely continue to use the methods
that were suitable for capitalist
society.
We must use the past as a guide, not a
master, because if life is to be a
great
adventure, it can hardly be a
mere
reflection of mankind's sordid past.
Socialism
Amongst other obstacles to
describing
socialist society, is the fact that we
know only
the potentialities of our present-day
knowledge
of nature at best. We are able to
describe
socialist productive methods as they
could be
to-morrow, but are largely ignorant
of the
techniques that may be available even
in the
near future. Here we break the
vicious circle
by considering a few aspects of
socialism as it
could be technically to-morrow. We
need a
set of reasons why socialism should
have certain
features, not a romantic description
served on
a golden platter of elegant literary
style, as
given so ably by William Morris in News
from
Nowhere.
The potentiality of productive
techniques to-day is such that automatically-controlled machines
could perform a number of necessary, but tedious or irksome tasks,
and much of the apparatus could be drastically simplified. Already in
the search for robust circuit components for aircraft, rockets and
tanks, etc., a new crystal rectifier has been developed to
replace the complex vacuum thermionic
valve for rectification. In fact, new technical devices need be
neither ugly or crude—that is only the -imprint of capitalist
society, which injects a mad rush into present-day research,
producing merely cheap appartus to serve the needs of capital, not
humanity. Scientists, like other people, will be much happier
producing elegant, aesthetically satisfying devices.
As a specific example consider the
question of illumination. The writer submits that electric lighting
(supplied by filament bulbs, fluorescent strip-lights or some similar
device) driven by a generator (which could be a housetop windmill or
solar energy absorber, coupled with storage batteries) would be
preferable to an oil lamp, and why not mass produce such devices,
using automatically-controlled machinery?
In the field of materials, plastics
have become notorious as cheap substitutes, and so possibly some
people would suggest that socialist society will have no use for
them, forgetting that they must be judged on their intrinsic
properties and not on their usage in capitalist society.. In a
socialist society, shoddy goods will not be produced, and tools will
not be discarded when they wear out or break, but the material will
be reprocessed and so " dirty work ", such as mining, will
be minimised. In these conditions, the large group of plastics which
arc readily remoulded on heating—the thermoplastics—are likely to
be very useful.
Speed
Although speed does not strictly fall
within the scope of this article, the following points should be
noted. Certain natural phenomena, such as hurricanes, necessitate
prompt, swift actions if people are not to be maimed and lives lost.
Possibly in the not so distant future, weather may be controlled by
some leisurely automatic process. But at the moment the only
experiments on controlling weather— cloud seeding with dry ice and
other materials to produce rain—need all the speed of modern
devices, such as aircraft, and have (if any) a very modest success.
Therefore, the only defence to-day is provided by aircraft
reconnaissance, coupled with radio warning services, and the
introduction of socialism will not alter that. Similarly, while
accidents will be less frequent in a socialist society, medical
emergency services will still need prompt, rapid transport. To
summarise, in a socialist society speed will be used to save life,
not to destroy it.
In conclusion, I must add that I know
that many discoveries to-day merely make more toil, but I suggest
that is a characteristic of capitalist society, not the intrinsic
nature of the discoveries. Once scientists are given the chance to
build machines for a happy world, they will not fail; in fact, I
submit that only then will craftsmanship escape from the bondage of
handicraftsmanship,
ROBERTUS.
