David F. Noble - Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation

FORCES OF PRODUCTION

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION

DAVID F. NOBLE

WITH A NEW PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR

Transaction Publishers

New Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.)

Copyright 2011 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

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This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2010043113
ISBN: 978-1-4128-1828-5
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Noble, David F.
Forces of production : a social history of industrial automation / David F. Noble;
with a new preface by the author.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4128-1828-5
1. Machine-tools--Numerical control--Social aspects--United States. 2. Au
tomation--Social aspects--United States. 3. Technology--Social aspects--United
States. I. Title.

TJ1189.N63 2011
303.483--dc22

2010043113

Preface to the Transaction Edition

All history is present history, Benedetto Croce noted, in that it is always seen through the lens of the moment of its writing. This book was conceived in the mid-seventies at a moment quite different from today. At that time the labor movement was suffused with a vitality and vision borne of rank and file insurgencies and unprecedented collaboration between trade unions and academics and intellectuals, including a generation of young scientists and engineers attuned to the interests of working people and the potential of alternative technologies. This fertile ferment produced bold and innovative responses to the intensifying challenges of computer-based industrial automation (described in the epilogue of this book). The book itself was such a response, intended as contribution to the labor movement. It aimed to illuminate the possibilities latent in the new technologies advantageous to workers and their unions by demonstrating in detail and in the concrete how technology is a political construct and, hence, subject to fundamental reconfiguration given changes in the relative power of the parties involved in its design and deployment. In theoretical terms, the study was intended to demonstrate how mute forces of production reflect in their very construction the social relations that produced them. The underlying message is that durable alternative designs and uses of technology presuppose significant alterations of the social relations. Alternative technologies do not in themselves determine changes in social relations but rather reflect such changes. At that particular moment, such changes appeared to be at hand given the energy and expansive outlook of the labor movement.

Alas, that moment did not last long. By the time this book was completed its promise had utterly vanished, in the wake of an economic recession and corporate political consolidation that signaled the demise of the labor movement, on the one hand, and an unprecedented rush toward computer-based automation, on the other. In 1982, Time Magazine named the Computer as its man of the year. Two years later I was fired both by MIT for writing this book and by the Smithsonian Institutionto which I had been temporarily seconded as curator of automation and laborfor organizing an exhibit on industrial automation partly based upon this book. Before too long the book itself went out of print, the coupled worlds of academia and publishing now faithfully reflecting a decidedly different moment, a moment that was soberly chronicled in my subsequent book Progress without People.

Preface

This is not a book about American technology but about American society. The focus here is upon things but the real concern is with people, with the social relations which bind and divide them, with the shared dreams and delusions which inspire and blind them. For this is the substrate from which all of our technology emerges, the power and promise which give it shape and meaning. For some reason, this seemingly self-evident truth has been lost to modern Americans, who have come to believe instead that their technology shapes them rather than the other way around. Our culture objectifies technology and sets it apart and above human affairs. Here technology has come to be viewed as an autonomous process, having a life of its own which proceeds automatically, and almost naturally, along a singular path. Supposedly self-defining and independent of social power and purpose, technology appears to be an external force impinging upon society, as it were, from outside, determining events to which people must forever adjust.

In a society such as ours, which long ago abandoned social purpose to the automatic mechanism of the market, and attributed to things a supremacy over people ("things are in the saddle, and ride mankind," wrote Emerson), technology has readily assumed its fantastic appearance as the subject of the story. And, as such, it has served at once as convenient scapegoat and universal panaceaa deterministic device of our own making with which to disarm critics, divert attention, depoliticize debate, and dismiss discussion of the fundamental antagonisms and inequities that continue to haunt America.

Confronted with the unexpected and unaccepted unravelling of their short-lived empire, Americans are now clinging to their epic myths of national identity and destiny, hoping for yet another revival. And central to these myths is a collective fantasy of technological transcendence. Whatever the question, technology has typically been the ever-ready American answer, identified at once as the cause of the nation's problems and the surest solution to them. Technology has been feared as a threat to pastoral innocence and extolled as the core of republican virtue. It has been assailed as the harbinger of unemployment and social disintegration, and touted as the creator of jobs and the key to prosperity and social stability. It has been condemned as the cause of environmental decay, yet heralded as the only guarantor of ecological integrity. It has been denounced as the handmaiden of exploitation and tyranny, and championed as the vehicle of emancipation and greater democracy. It has been targeted as the silent cause of war, and acclaimed as the preserver of peace. And it has been reviled as the modern enslaver of mankind, and worshipped as the supreme expression of mankind's freedom and power.