IG Farben - Lenin - new capitalism - Nazis!

[Teufelsdröckh]

The following is from today's Progressive Review (Mar. 15), by Sam Smith.
<http://prorev.com/fastnews.htm>
-------------------------------------------------------
Father of the New World Order: Frederick Winslow Taylor

The multinational sweatshop is the most recent variation on one of the
most important and little discussed themes of the 20th century: the
human as a machine, the result of a culture of modernity that Erich
Fromm said was "attracted to all that is mechanical and inclined against
all that is alive."

One of the main intellectual spirits behind this was Frederick Winslow
Taylor, who sought to improve production through "scientific management"
of workers, including time and motion studies as well as
performance-based pay. Taylor was actually trying to correct some of the
evils of early sweatshops including poor working conditions. Yet it was
not long before Taylor's theories were transformed into manuals that
stated, for example, that a secretary should be able to open and close a
file drawer exactly 25 times a minute and open a folder in .04 minutes.

Taylor not only had a huge impact on American industrialists such as
Henry Ford, but he was part of the inspiration for the Harvard Business
School and its case study approach. Peter Drucker ranks Taylor with
Darwin and Freud as the top thinkers of modernity. Ford he dismisses as
just someone who knew how to use Taylor's principles.

Not long after this death in 1915, Taylor's ideas found their way to
Nazi Germany. The concentration camp has been described as an extreme
example of Taylorism at work. Richard Rubenstein, writing in "The
Cunning of History," notes that "I.G. Farben's decision to locate at
Auschwitz was based upon the very same criteria by which contemporary
multinational corporations relocate their plants in utter indifference
to the social consequences of such moves." Among those enthralled with
Taylorism was Albert Speer. John Ralston Saul credits the efficiency
expert's ideas with helping Germany hold out against superior Allied
forces later in the war.

But Taylor had other fans as well, including Lenin, who learned about
Taylorism while in exile. He returned to Russia determined to "Taylorize
Communism." Saul writes: "The First Five Year Plan was written largely
by American Taylorists and directly or indirectly they built some
two-thirds of Soviet industry. The collapse of the Soviet Union was thus
in many ways the collapse of Scientific Management."

But the ironies continued: "The Russian government immediately hired a
Harvard professor of economics, Dr. Jefrey Sachs, to help them out of
the crisis. His methods -- filled with complete abstract systems -- were
strangely reminiscent of Taylor's . . . These brilliant financial and
structural reforms lacked only one element: a recognition that several
hundred million people live in Russia, that they must east every day. Or
at least every second day."
-------------------------------------------------------