BOOKS

'SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT AND THE UNIONS—1900-1932. A HISTORICAL By_ Milton J. Nadworny Harvard University Press. Cambridge, 'THE POLICE AND THE PEOPLEFRENCH POPULAR PROTEST 1789-1820° Oxford University Press 1970. 393 pages. £4 By 1919, the AFL leadership was calling on the Federal government to subsidize research into the means of increasing productivity. Leading time-andmotion consultants were being asked to contribute to union magazines.

Gompers, who in 1911 had THE FRENCH Revolution of 1789 was a bourgeois revolution.

It resulted in the destruction of the aristocratic, feudal ruling class, and guaranteed the upper middle-class merchants and capitalists that even after the restoration of the monarchy in 1815, their interests would be at the centre of government policy-making.

Yet all leading Marxists have recognized that a study of the class alignments in the Revolution, especially of the rise and fall of the popular, 'sans-culotte' movement, is of great importance to those who are fighting for the proletarian revolution toTrotsky used many parallels from the French Revolution to describe the situation in RusSia atter. '9I7, and in particular the rise of Stalinism, which he saw as comparable to the 'Thermidorian reaction' of the upper middle class against the sans-culotte movement in 1794, to culminate in Napoleon Bonaparte's dictatorship 1799-1814.

Though the French Revolution occurred at an earlier epoch and under different impulses from the Russian Revolution, it illustrates the complexity of the conflict between class forces in any period of revolutionary upheaval.

The revolutionary middle class in France was so successful in shattering the old apparatus of aristocratic rule that it found itself out in front of a popular movement prepared to go to still greater lengths in the pursuit of 'liberty, equality and fraternity': in other words seeking to transform equality from an abstraction into an economic reality.

For a short period, as the outbreak of European war and the threat counter-revolution faced the new bourgeois regime with almost insurmountable difficulties, the middle class was obliged to compromise.

Men from the working class were granted responsible jobs in the administration; popular political societies and newspapers flourished; in Paris the affairs of the 48 new, Sections were managed by democratically-elected committees, and public assemblies, open to all citizens, were summoned several times a week.

But the reaction after July (Thermidor) 1794 was savage.

Already, at the threshold of the 19th century, the French capitalist class demonstrated decisively that it was prepared STALINISM IN BRITAIN TROTSKYIST ANALYSIS New Pare Publicatio 86A Clapham High S... SW Plica 34s po

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Massachusetts 1955 designated scientific management standing event of the year. The as a method of getting the most favourable comments of business out of the worker before send- journals like "Factory" "The ng him to the junk pile, in 192( Wall Street Journal", and "Iron lorite consultants to edit a book or the New or were than was combining with leading Tay. Trade Review" on production methods.

Other union leaders began impressive aura of the occasion.' playing a leading part in effi- Robert Fechner of the InterFrench Revolution to exchange the political 'liberty and equality' of 1789 for Napoleon's dictatorship, if the lower classes of society presumed liberty, " take advantage" of class economic and social supreCobb's book concentrates mainly on this crucial period in the 1790s, but he makes no attempt to draw the lessons which link it with later working-class struggles.

On the contrary, Cobb is a very conscious opponent Marxism and, indeed, of historical 'synthesis' in any form.

'No one is likely to accuse me of writing history that is either comparative or scientific, or of seeking to establish general laws,' he boasts in the Introduction.

JUSTIOUT Head of the hosiery workers' union Gustave Geiges often appeared at Taylor Society meetings and eventually submitted proposals to the employers which included joint supervision of time-and-motion studies and recommendations that workers tend two knitting machines instead of one.

The seal of approval was finally placed on scientific management when William Green, successor to the deceased Samuel Gompers as AFI President, delivered the major address at a joint meeting of the Taylor Society and the management division of the Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Green urged co-operation between workers and industrial engineers • and advocated high wages and low production costs.

'Labour,' he said, 'stands ready and willing to do its part.

Nadworny comments:

"The Society. was greatly pleased with Green's speech, which was hailed as the out"New Republic", added to the To the reader who actually wishes to learn anything about the popular movement in the Revolution, Cobb's book appears poorly planned, sketchily written, and at the same time, overloaded with a mass of undigested documentary evidence.

But the reader is not to criticize the author on these grounds; for Cobb assures us repeatedly that only 'chaotic' writing can accurately portray the 'chaos' of history!

•My main concern throughout has been to allow people to speak for themselves and to allow as much licence as possible to individual behaviour and to popular habit', he explains.

'I am writing about people, not about movements' This quotation reveals very clearly that behind Cobb's pseudo-objectivism, and his constant belabouring of the obvious point that some generalizations can be over-simplified to the point of distortion, like the timeworn prejudices of the conservative historian: individualism, and contempt for the role of the working class.

Far from being averse to generalizations, Cobb produces many extremely crude ones which happen to fit in with his own preconceptions.

For example, on the reliability of the country policeman's reports to his superiors, 'he is both too unimaginative and too honourable to invent'.

Or this, on viloence:

'Several heads and headless bodies cry out endlessly against the Revolution and all its works'.

Or this:

"The history of popular protest is generally also that of failure, disenchantment and ultimate hopelessness' (!)

His denigration of the political wing of the sans-culottes (who were rough and ready people • •• not political theorists') is perhaps the most serious distortion into which Cobb's prejudices lead him.

He mentions Babeuf, one of the most advanced exponents of 'practical equality' (i.e. an early form of socialism), merely order to demonstrate that his followers were not the numerical majority of the sans-culottes in Paris, and that the sansculottes movement did not contain the numerical majority of the lower-class population of France.

Starting the obvious to Green:

I am sure we are all glad to know the official spokesman for the American Trade Union Movement is creating such favourable impression among business men because such a course cannot fail to reflect itself in many beneficial ways for the welfare of the workers.' The left wing of the trade union movement attacked what was going on as class collaboration, and, in May 1929, a meetCharlotte, N Carolina, was postponed because the southern textile workers were striking against efficiency systems-particularly against the Bedaux system.

With the Wall St crash and the depression years the conneration schemes crached ton suited the employers.

employers were not the men to tems.

operation under capitalism. point that the sans-culottes could not have led a successful socialist revolution, Cobb leads his readers on to accept that the sans-culotte movement was more or less politically insignificant!

The briefest glimpse of the world outside Cobb's prized 'regional' surveys—-of the British workers' reaction to the popular triumphs of the 1790s, or the inspiration derived from these triumphs, and the lessons learnt from the Thermidorian reaction by Marxists and other political working-class leaders throughout the following century - reveals the utter falsity of such a conclusion.

It is not surprising to find that Cobb's only useful contribution to the study of the French Revolution is a negative one.

The sans-culottes were not the social equivalent of the 19th century industrial proletariat: they included craftsmen, journeymen, shop-keepers, small traders, and small peasants as well as a minority of factory workers, and consequently their political and economic theories were, in many respects, regional and backwardlooking.

Moreover the sans-culotte movement undoubtedly was linked with the non-political forms of popular protest which occurred earlier and later (e.g. food riots, and desertions from the army, especially after 1795).

Cobb's description of the Thermidorian reaction is perhaps the best section of the book, since it demonstrates the bitter antagonism which the sans-culotte movement had aroused in a government dominated by "farmers, prominent tradesmen and heads of commercial and industrial concerns'.

Such governments, after 1795, produced a police more repressive (because more efficient) than that of the ancien régime, to deal with the sans-culottes80,000 to 90,000 sans-culottes were soon arrested and many deported.

Nearly 2,000 political murders occurred 1795, during 'White Terror' tolerated by the judicial authorities.

All government Acts which had been passed as a concession to the sans-culottes were rescinded. Popular organizations and societies were suppressed, and sans-culottes were dismissed from administrative posts, having first been disarmed.

Most significant of appears to be weak and in no position to fight back, managements do not attempt to hide their plans and "Taylorism', scientific management or the Bedaux system openly appear on the scene to further establish unemployment.

In times when the working class is strong, the name is changed and the union leaders are called in to do the work in the name of 'workers' participation in management'.

In both cases the system comes under the strongest state patronage, and so is made into a politiweapon of the capitalist class.

For a while, in Britain, participation has been in vogue, though only because it is seen by the government and the empioyers as a preparaton Ior amnlarsan s-appeared on the scene to deny tory of United States capitalism. class point of view, the long battle the sans-culottes to establish fixed maximum prices (i.e. to defend the consumer against the producer), was ended by the lifting of all price restric. tions. In consequence, 1795 was a year of famine for the common people.

Why should the middle class have so ruthlessly suppressed the sans-culotte movement, if it did don ee restheir portion political Cobb fails to answer this question, which surely unanswerable.

The Thermidorian government which came to power after the execution of Robespierre was less preoccupied with the weaknesses and theoretical limitations of the sans-culottes than with the fact that, although they did not represent a unified industrial proletariat, they did already represent rival economic interest group.

The large producers came down heavily on the small producers and the urban consumers because they needed to uphold economic "freedom' (i.e. laissez-faire capitalist competition) in the face of a collective attempt by the poorer sections of society to defend their own interests.

Cobb may sneer at the idea of 'comparative' history of popular movements, claiming that 'popular history ... can be studied with profit only in very limited, regional terms'.

Yet the weight of the evidence in his own book goes overwhelmingly against this conclusion. The Marxist, who studies movements in their development, is the last person to look for exact parallels in the past.

But, in studying the French Revolution, he does not attempt to shed all his knowledge of later working-class movements, because to do so would be to wrench the events of the Revolution completely out of their historical context.

He is thus able to understand the sans-culotte movement, not as a futile gesture to be described with 'compassion', but as the upsurge, in a more powerful form than in any earlier bourgeois revolution, of the oppresed classes which were eventually to challenge the bourgeoisie itself, once the industral proletariat became differentiated in its development from this mass, and therefore able to lead it.