Protocols of Production: Alienation, Precarity, and Scientific Management

• In Event: Capitalism in Flux: Flexible Work and Digitalization

Abstract

This paper offers a new account of the factory system within modern political theories of management by focusing on the factory’s role as both a fundamental infrastructure of production and a system of political rule in capitalist societies. The central theoretical contribution of this paper lies in the relevance of what I call the “factory model” to understanding the contemporary capitalist labor process and, in particular, its applicability to digital production today. I contend that the constitutive element of the factory model cannot be reduced to technological innovations in mass production. Instead, I argue that the factory denotes a valorization process based on protocols of control, discipline, fragmentation, standardization, and efficiency as a political technology in and of itself. These protocols have been an integral part of manufacturing since the seventeenth century, across cottages, workhouses, manufactories, mines, and plantations long before the steam engine came to vogue as the central legislating authority of production. The industrial factory system therefore aggregated and perfected these protocols with the aid of mechanical and automated technologies, but it did not invent them.

In order to illustrate this claim, I compare Jeremy Bentham’s plan for a system of poor-houses in "Pauper Management" (1798) with Frederick Taylor’s theory of scientific management in "Shop Management" (1903) and "Principles of Scientific Management" (1911). Bentham’s and Taylor’s contributions to the factory model were not technological but what I call “protocological.” As media theorist Alexander Galloway notes, a protocol is a distributed management system based on a set of rules that “outline specific technical standards” and allow “control to exist within a heterogeneous material milieu.” In a factory, the set of rules are the surface of the protocols of production. Beneath these protocols lies the scientific reasoning as to why these rules were chosen; above them we find an implementation mechanism, or the technical means through which these rules will be applied and the material technology that will run, execute, or enact the protocol’s demands. For both Bentham and Taylor, the factory’s protocols of production denote a system of political rule over people and things whose end is, as Bentham put it, “the extraction of labour, to as great a value as may be.” This protocological aspect of the factory model is what remains constant across the factory’s variegated historical iterations since the early modern period. Despite their differences, Bentham’s and Taylor’s theories of scientific management converge on a key principle of the factory model, namely, that its operation is based on protocols of production centered on two reinforcing and mutually-constitutive disciplinary strategies: 1) the rational fragmentation of the labor process, on the one hand, and 2) the elimination of judgment from work on the other. Combined, these strategies allow for the implementation of a scientific system of management, control, and production that results in the heightened alienation of workers from their work while furthering structural patterns of precarity in the workforce.

I conclude by arguing that the latest iteration of the factory model within the digital fold through crowdwork platforms, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, does away with the central constraint of the industrial factory: fixed space. This is the key constraint that Bentham and Taylor had to work around: whatever innovation they brought to scientific management, they could not do away with the fact that workers had to be organized in one place. Today’s digital and fissured workplace lifts that constraint in such a way that the organizational format they espoused can be more perfectly aligned with their shared goal of valorization. In short, the digital factory uses networked technology to fine-tune the factory’s protocols of production by delegating the fragmentation of the labor process and the elimination of judgment from work to algorithms, thus perfecting capital’s tool of impersonal domination in production.

Author

• Lucas G. Pinheiro, Bard College