In the past, Biden said, the US invested in big transportation projects — like the national railroad system, civil aviation and the Interstate Highway System — even when there didn’t seem to be money for it.

And indeed it did. Large-scale transportation infrastructure has been central to the rise of the American corporate economy. And investment in infrastructure has always been an important part of American political agendas that served big business interests. The Federalists and Whigs supported subsidized transportation infrastructure — “internal improvements” — for promoting commerce. The Transcontinental Railroad and the rest of the centralized nationwide system of trunk lines was made possible by enormous land grants and other subsidies; and that system, according to Alfred Chandler, was what enabled big national manufacturing corporations for the first time to produce for nationwide wholesale and retail networks. The American civil aviation system is almost entirely a creature of the state; the airport infrastructure was built at taxpayer expense, and the postwar ascendancy of jumbo jets was made possible only by Truman’s heavy bomber program, which made them feasible by fully utilizing the expensive dies needed to produce them.  The Interstate Highway program — supervised by former GM chief Charlie Wilson — made possible the centralization of food processing and retail, and in particular the big box stores’ “warehouses on wheels” distribution model. It also promoted the creation of urban freeway systems and the other concomitants of the car culture and suburban real estate boom.

And don’t forget the role that large-scale hydroelectric dams have played in the growth of American agribusiness, like providing cheap irrigation water to the big California operations.

These gigantic infrastructure projects have served two major roles. First, by absorbing massive quantities of otherwise idle surplus capital and creating the basis for entirely new industries, they serve as one of the “counteracting tendencies to the falling direct rate of profit” that Marx described in volume 3 of Capital. As Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy wrote in Monopoly Capital, the state remedies the crisis of surplus capital by taxing it and then investing it directly. Such infrastructure also amounts to what James O’Connor, in Fiscal Crisis of the State, described as socializing the operating costs of big business in order to render capital artificially profitable.

So if you enjoy living in a society dominated by big business, you should love infrastructure as much as Biden does.

Of course “intellectual property” — Biden’s other hobbyhorse — also played a central role in the rise of American corporate capitalism. According to leftist economic historian David Noble, American industrial cartels depended heavily on the exchange and pooling of patents. AT&T had its origins in the Bell Patent Association, and by the time the original Bell patents expired Bell labs had hedged them in with a whole host of patents on secondary aspects of telephony in order to lock AT&T indefinitely into control of the market. Westinghouse and GE created a stable consumer appliances industry by pooling their patents. The US chemical industry was able to get big only after the WWI Justice Department seized German chemical patents and distributed them to the American players. And RCA was created by pooling the patents of five major radio companies.

Both of these dependencies — infrastructure and “intellectual property” — apply to the new Green/Progressive Capitalist coalition in spades. The key players in this new industrial model see it as another “social structure of accumulation” or “Kondratiev long-wave,” which will once again provide a generation-long investment sink for surplus capital and subsidize the profitability of a whole cluster of new industries. This model is celebrated in economist Paul Romer’s “New Growth Theory,” and fronted by so-called “patriotic billionaires” (I pause to vomit) like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates along with Bono. It’s heavily centered on new, “green” technologies and other forms of high tech, and even more so on the use of “intellectual property” to enclose the new technologies as a source of rent. The early proponents of the “Information Super-Highway”  in the late ’80s and early ’90s — Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, Bill Gates — envisioned the Internet as a glorified cable TV system of static corporate websites, walled gardens and one-way streaming of proprietary content. Fortunately the more horizontal, hyperlinked World Wide Web forestalled this. Today, likewise, the same coalition hopes to enclose solar and wind power, energy-efficient technologies and mass transit infrastructure and milk profits off it by interposing themselves as gatekeepers between the technologies of abundance and the consumer. Even if Tim Berners Lee prevented the creation of a totally enclosed Web, the entertainment industry is still doing its best to promote a unidirectional model of streaming proprietary content.

It’s telling that Biden chides us for not having “across the board… the single most sophisticated infrastructure in the world” because new smart infrastructures are the other main component of the Progressive Capitalist model. GE’s hope for enclosing the distributed micromanufacturing revolution as a proprietary, walled-garden “Internet of Things” depends on a high-speed Internet and smart power grid. Warren Buffet’s wind farms, likewise, are only profitable if a taxpayer-funded smart grid exists to transport their power to urban markets.

Biden himself is an enthusiast for high-speed rail. High-speed rail is basically a subsidized yuppie boondoggle for business travelers who, in a rationally organized world, would be telecommunicating — if their jobs existed in the first place. It’s especially sad because it diverts investment from ordinary rail — like freight rail — which would be far more cost-effective. For the cost of providing Amtrak service to the northeastern corridor, or building high-speed rail between LA, Sacramento and the Bay, it would be possible to expand existing bottlenecks in the national rail system and replace some 80% of long-haul trucking with freight rail shipping. And local light commuter rail systems, using existing infrastructure, would be a far more rational investment than building new regional infrastructure for business travel.

Sadly, many on the Left who should know better are taken in by greenwashed corporate capitalism’s claims to be a genuine alternative. Writers for the Solidarity Economy Network — many of whose activities I support, and which I regard as an enormously promising umbrella organization of valuable alternative economy organizations — frequently show indications of having bought in to the kind of “Progressive Capitalism” that seeks to coopt and enclose them as a source of profit. These manifestations include hopes to “save Detroit” — a fundamentally pathological product of mid-20th century mass-production industrial gigantism — by converting the legacy auto industry to producing buses or high-speed trains (For example, the SEN website reproduced a story from Shanghai Daily under the title “Why It Matters If You Have a Green Industrial Policy vs. a Military-Industrial Policy,” Oct. 22). No, it really doesn’t — except to the rival coalitions of corporate pigs competing for taxpayer money.

Don’t be deceived. “Progressive Capitalism” is a counterfeit of genuine distributed, open-source, cooperative and commons-based economics — an attempt to put new wine in old bottles, and appropriate the technologies and possibilities of the successor society as a source of vitality for a dying system. When you see Rachel Maddow standing in front of a giant dam on one of her PSAs, or Joe Biden conjuring up the ghosts of FDR and Charlie Wilson, remember that no one capitalist political party is the servant of corporate capital. They all are.

It’s not about being governed or not, it’s about who is going to do the governing. Who would we want to sit on the Iron Throne if not a “specialist?” Someone who wouldn’t be driven by politico-ideological passions, but by the “industrial values” Veblen cherished. Someone to oil up the gears of this great machinery that is society.

That is all hogwash, of course, because when we talk about politics, we talk about ideology — about prioritizing, about choosing one collective goal as preferable to another. However, there are no macro social ends, at least not apart from a sum of individual goals or as a mere metaphor. Which is also the reason why it isn’t possible to put public management under the control of experts, because the very definition of what constitutes “public management” is an ideological question subject to political negotiation and resistance.

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È neanche una delle ideologie più recenti: Thorstein Veblen parlava di una tecnocrazia formata da ingegneri già negli anni venti. Veblen, nel suo famoso The Engineers and the Price System parla degli ingegneri (i “tecnici”) come di una classe di persone in grado di promuovere i principi della “gestione scientifica” rivolta alla produzione, opposti ad un sistema di mercato in cui i prezzi fungono da segnale. Veblen non vedeva niente di strano in un’organizzazione corporativa, che lui voleva far assurgere a modello universale e fondamento della società, eliminando le limitazioni tecniche di quelli che lui chiamava “valori industriali”. A loro volta, questi ultimi erano dipendevano dall’efficienza produttiva e non avevano niente a che vedere con gli incentivi del mercato; anzi, vi si opponevano.

Veblen promosse le sue idee riguardo l’industria e la tecnologia come punto di partenza di quella società basata su una produzione di massa da lui immaginata. Questa società, e i suoi valori, avrebbe dovuto far nascere, tramite i lavoratori dell’industria, una nuova forma di democrazia, gestita in maniera innovativa in modo da promuovere l’efficienza, la conoscenza tecnica e l’amministrazione della cosa pubblica. Ovvero una macchina perfettamente calibrata per il dominio e il controllo della società.

Questo ideale distopico riuscì a trovare adepti. Nel corso del ventesimo subì poche modifiche, perlopiù ad opera di progressisti come Joseph Schumpeter e John Kenneth Galbraith. Oggi ne sentiamo parlare soprattutto per bocca dei politici, che pensano di parlare con la voce dell’innovazione quando sostengono la necessità di mettere specialisti in posizioni di governo. È anche una comoda ideologia per un gran numero di burocrati perché non mette in dubbio l’esistenza di un dato incarico di governo, ma semplicemente si chiede chi dovrebbe ricoprirlo. La questione non è se un governo è necessario o meno, ma chi andrà a governare. Chi vorremmo sul Trono di Ferro se non uno “specialista”? Qualcuno che non si lasci trascinare da passioni politico-ideologiche, ma da quei “valori industriali” vagheggiati da Veblen. Qualcuno che olii gli ingranaggi di quel grande macchinario che è la società.

Certo sono tutte sciocchezze, perché quando parliamo di politica parliamo di ideologia, di priorità, della scelta di un obiettivo collettivo piuttosto che di un altro. Ma non ci sono fini sociali, a meno che non si consideri la somma dei singoli obiettivi individuali in senso puramente metaforico. Che poi è la ragione per cui non è possibile affidare la gestione della cosa pubblica al controllo degli esperti, perché la definizione stessa di “gestione della cosa pubblica” è una questione ideologica soggetta a negoziati politici e opposizioni.

Non è possibile rimuovere l’ideologia dal governo perché il governo stesso è un’ideologia: l’ideologia del potere, del controllo e della soppressione della dissidenza. L’ideologia della conformità, della dimensione macro-sociale, della società intesa come astrazione, mai riconducibile alle sue componenti individuali.

Governare, lungi dall’essere un’attività senza ideologie e programmi, consiste nel cucire assieme i programma della maggioranza all’interno di una gerarchia. Non c’è da meravigliarsi se il movimento anarchico tende storicamente verso rapporti orizzontali e la creazione del consenso come strategia che consenta di evitare la nascita di maggioranze e di strutture burocratiche di potere. Questa idea di un rapporto orizzontale ha l’obiettivo di mitigare gli effetti di particolari ideologie quando queste vengono applicate alla collettività. Al contrario una tecnocrazia, con il suo tentativo di razionalizzare i processi, ricorda un dispotismo illuminato. Certo è positivo che un processo socialmente desiderabile debba essere efficiente e consenta un risparmio di risorse, ma prima dobbiamo sapere quali sono i processi socialmente desiderabili. E non lo sappiamo.

È molto ironico il fatto che i politici di lungo corso siano i più grandi (e forse i più cinici) proponenti del credo tecnocratico. Lo stesso Aecio Neves, nonostante i suoi richiami all’amministrazione tecnocratica, è specializzato in una sola cosa: la poltrona. È stato direttore di una grossa banca pubblica, segretario alla presidenza, deputato, governatore e senatore.

Forse Aecio Neves oggi è un fantoccio della retorica che lui stesso ha messo su; un ostaggio. Perché Aecio Neves non è mai stato un tecnico; il tecnico è quello che realizza i suoi programmi politici.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

And it isn’t one of the youngest ideologies: Thorstein Veblen talked about his technocracy of engineers in the 1920s. Veblen, in his well-known The Engineers and the Price System described engineers (“technicians”) as the class capable of promoting the principles of “scientific management” for production — as opposed to a system of market production with effective price signaling. Veblen didn’t have any problems with the corporate organization and intended to universalize its model as the foundation of society, eliminating technical limitations to what he termed “industrial values,” which were connected to productive efficiency (and had nothing to do with, and indeed were opposed to, market incentives).

Veblen championed his ideas on industry and technique as the starting point of the mass production society he envisioned. That society and its values would give rise, through industrial workers, to a new democracy with a new management style that promoted efficiency, technical knowledge and administration. That is, a machine perfectly adjusted to the control and regulation of society.

This dystopian ideal was able to find adherents and modify itself slightly during the 20th century, especially in the works of managerial progressives such as Joseph Schumpeter and John Kenneth Galbraith. Nowadays, we hear it from politicians who may think they speak with the voice of innovation when they say that specialists should fill government positions. It’s also a convenient ideology for a number of bureaucrats because it doesn’t ask whether such government positions should exist at all, but only who should fill them. It’s not about being governed or not, it’s about who is going to do the governing. Who would we want to sit on the Iron Throne if not a “specialist?” Someone who wouldn’t be driven by politico-ideological passions, but by the “industrial values” Veblen cherished. Someone to oil up the gears of this great machinery that is society.

That is all hogwash, of course, because when we talk about politics, we talk about ideology — about prioritizing, about choosing one collective goal as preferable to another. However, there are no macro social ends, at least not apart from a sum of individual goals or as a mere metaphor. Which is also the reason why it isn’t possible to put public management under the control of experts, because the very definition of what constitutes “public management” is an ideological question subject to political negotiation and resistance.

It’s impossible to remove ideology from government because government is an ideology: The ideology of power, control and suppression of dissidence. The ideology of conformity, of the macro-social, of the idea of society as an abstraction, never reducible to its individual components.

Governing, far from an activity without ideology and plans, is the stitching of majority plans within hierarchy. It’s no wonder that anarchist movements have historically tended to horizontalism and consensus-building as strategies to avoid the formation of majorities and bureaucratic power structures. These ideas of horizontalism are intended to mitigate the effects of particular ideologies when applied to the collective. In contrast, technocracy looks like a form of enlightened despotism with its attempt to rationalize processes. Of course, it’s a positive thing that socially desirable processes should be efficient and demand less resources — but we must first know which ones are the socially desirable processes. They’re not a given.

It’s somewhat ironic that lifelong politicians are the biggest (and maybe the most cynical) proponents of the technocratic creed. Aecio Neves himself, despite his claims of technical prowess in administration, is a specialist in one thing only: Getting positions in the government. He’s been the director of a large state bank, secretary of the presidency, deputy, governor, senator.

It may be the case that Aecio Neves nowadays is a puppet of the narrative he’s built for himself, replicating it as a hostage of his own rhetoric. Because Aecio has never been a technician; the technicians are the arms that execute his political plans.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Elezioni e Ideologia Tecnocratica.

In a recent survey of the big Wall Street political donors who usually back the GOP, most of the big money people responded to the prospect of a Jeb Bush vs. Hillary Clinton contest by saying “Meh. Either way’s fine.” But if Jeb decides not to run and Chris Christie doesn’t recover from Bridgegate, the financial industry will probably back Clinton in preference to the loose cannons of the Tea Party. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who held Clinton fundraisers in 2008, would reportedly be “very happy” with either Bush or Clinton.

And frankly, it’s hard to see why Wall Street would object to an establishment Democrat at all. Clinton, in a closed speech to Goldman Sachs executives last year, told them exactly what they wanted to hear. Democratic administrations are just as prone as Republicans — at least! — to packing cabinets with Goldman Sachs and Citigroup alumni. And while they talk a good game, in practice the “progressive” wing of the party is about the same. Senator Elizabeth Warren, leader of the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” recently expressed grave concern over the number of Obama administration appointees from Citigroup — right before voting to confirm Goldman Sachs veteran Stanley Fischer’s appointment to the Federal Reserve. See, Warren may rubber-stamp Wall Street control of government policy just like a DFC Democrat — but she feels really, really guilty about it.

Meanwhile, Bill Scher at The Week (“Ralph Nader wants liberals to back Rand Paul. Don’t do it,” May 1, 2014) sees corporate CEOs as much more congenial allies for liberals than libertarian civil liberties activists (he warns against Nader’s call to “side with government-hating libertarians over government-accepting corporations”). In contrast to Nader’s stated goal of “dismantling the Corporate State,” Scher argues that liberalism achieved its quiet victories through the 20th century with “some degree of corporate support,” and that the “coalition to nurture” for liberals in the future is “the CEOs.”

See, business loves the stability and certainty that comes with a state-regulated economy, along with the reassurance “that they will remain profitable.” One item in particular that makes both liberals’ and corporate CEOs’ hearts go pitty-pat is “investment in infrastructure”: the Interstate Highway System and the giant Army Corps of Engineers dams that Rachel Maddow talks about in her “great things” TV spots. Of course big business likes to “fund infrastructure.” Heavily subsidized, high-volume transportation infrastructure was what centralized the American economy in the 20th century under the control of a few dozen oligopoly corporations, and enabled big box retailers to destroy Main Street.

So if you’re looking for an “anti-corporate” party in American politics, there isn’t one.

The American economy after the Civil War became increasingly dominated by large organizations. I’ve written in The Freeman before about the role of the government in the growth of the centralized corporate economy: the railroad land grants and subsidies, which tipped the balance toward large manufacturing firms serving a national market (“The Distorting Effects of Transportation Subsidies,” November 2010), and the patent system, which was a primary tool of consolidation and cartelization in a number of industries (“How ‘Intellectual Property’ Impedes Competition,” October 2009, tinyurl.com/lqzehv)

These giant corporations were followed by large government agencies whose mission was to support and stabilize the corporate economy, and then by large bureaucratic universities, centralized school systems, and assorted “helping professionals” to process the “human resources” the corporations and State fed on. These interlocking bureaucracies required a large managerial class to administer them.

According to Rakesh Khurana of the Harvard Business School (in From Higher Aims to Hired Hands), the first corporation managers came from an industrial engineering background and saw their job as doing for the entire organization what they’d previously done for production on the shop floor. The managerial revolution in the large corporation, Khurana writes, was in essence an attempt to apply the engineer’s approach (standardizing and rationalizing tools, processes, and systems) to the organization as a system.

And according to Yehouda Shenhav (Manufacturing Rationality: The Engineering Foundations of the Managerial Revolution), Progressivism was the ideology of the managers and engineers who administered the large organizations; political action was a matter of applying the same principles they used to rationalize their organizations to society as a whole. Shenhav writes (quoting Robert Wiebe):

Since the difference between the physical, social, and human realms was blurred by acts of translation, society itself was conceptualized and treated as a technical system. As such, society and organizations could, and should, be engineered as machines that are constantly being perfected. Hence, the management of organizations (and society at large) was seen to fall within the province of engineers. Social, cultural, and political issues . . . could be framed and analyzed as “systems” and “subsystems” to be solved by technical means. . .

During this period, “only the professional administrator, the doctor, the social worker, the architect, the economist, could show the way.” In turn, professional control became more elaborate. It involved measurement and prediction and the development of professional techniques for guiding events to predictable outcomes. The experts “devised rudimentary government budgets; introduced central, audited purchasing; and rationalized the structure of offices.” This type of control was not only characteristic of professionals in large corporate systems. It characterized social movements,the management of schools, roads, towns, and political systems.

The managerialist ethos reflected in Progressivism emphasized transcending class and ideological divisions through the application of disinterested expertise. Christopher Lasch (The New Radicalism in America) wrote:

For the new radicals, conflict itself, rather than injustice or inequality, was the evil to be eradicated. Accordingly, they proposed to reform society . . . by means of social engineering on the part of disinterested experts who could see the problem whole and who could see it essentially as a problem of resources . . . the proper application and conservation of which were the work of enlightened administration.

In Shenhav’s account this apolitical ethos grew out of engineers’ self-perception: “American management theory was presented as a scientific technique administered for the good of society as a whole without relation to politics.” Frederick Taylor, whose managerial approach was a microcosm of Progressivism, saw bureaucracy as “a solution to ideological cleavages, as an engineering remedy to the war between the classes.” Both Progressives and industrial engineers “were horrified at the possibility of ‘class warfare’” and saw “efficiency” as a means to “social harmony, making each workman’s interest the same as that of his employers.”

The implications, as James Scott put it in Seeing Like a State (about which much more below), were quite authoritarian. Only a select class of technocrats with “the scientific knowledge to discern and create this superior social order” were qualified to make decisions. In all aspects of life, policy was to be a matter of expertise, with the goal of removing as many questions as possible from the realm of public political debate to that of administration by properly qualified authorities. Politics, Scott writes, “can only frustrate the social solutions devised with scientific tools adequate to their analysis.” As a New Republic editorial put it, “the business of politics has become too complex to be left to the pretentious misunderstandings of the benevolent amateur.”

It’s true that Progressivism shaded into the anti-capitalist left and included some genuinely anti-business rhetoric on its left-wing fringe. But the mainstream of Progressivism saw the triumph of the great trusts over competitive enterprise as a victory for economic rationalization and efficiency—and the guarantee of stable, reasonable profits to the trusts through the use of political power as a good thing.

In the end the more utopian or socialistic Progressives found they’d become “useful idiots.” Their desire to regiment and manage was given free rein mainly when it coincided with the needs of the corporatist economy created by Rockefeller and Morgan. These needs were for what Gabriel Kolko (The Triumph of Conservatism) called “political capitalism,” the guiding theme of Progressive-era legislation. Political capitalism aimed to give corporate leadership “the ability, on the basis of politically stabilized and secured means, to plan future economic action on the basis of fairly calculable expectations” and to obtain “the organization of the economy and the larger political and social spheres in a manner that will allow corporations to function in a predictable and secure environment permitting reasonable profits over the long run.”

Mainstream Progressivism, far from embracing a left-wing vision of class struggle, saw class conflict as a form of irrationality that could be transcended by expertise. To quote Shenhav again:

Labor unrest and other political disagreements of the period were treated by mechanical engineers as simply a particular case of machine uncertainty to be dealt with in much the same manner as they had so successfully dealt with technical uncertainty. Whatever disrupted the smooth running of the organizational machine was viewed and constructed as a problem of uncertainty.

As Hilaire Belloc said (The Servile State) of its Fabian counterparts in Britain, the mainline of the Progressive movement quickly accommodated itself to the impossibility of expropriating big business or the plutocratic fortunes and found that it could be quite comfortable as a junior partner to the plutocracy, directing its lust for regimentation against the working class:

Let laws exist which make the proper housing, feeding, clothing, and recreation of the proletarian mass be incumbent upon the possessing class, and the observance of such rules be imposed, by inspection and punishment, upon those whom he [the Fabian] pretends to benefit, and all that he really cares for will be achieved.

As Scott put it, the managerial classes’ virtually unbounded planning instincts were directed mostly downward:

Every nook and cranny of the social order might be improved upon: personal hygiene, diet, child rearing, housing, posture, recreation, family structure, and, most infamously, the genetic inheritance of the population. The working poor were often the first subjects of scientific social planning. . . . Subpopulations found wanting in ways that were potentially threatening—such as indigents, vagabonds, the mentally ill, and criminals—might be made the objects of the most intensive social engineering.

Progressivism was a branch of what Scott called the “high modernist” ideology, which “envisioned a sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition.” High modernism carries with it an aesthetic sensibility in which the rationally organized community, farm, or factory was one that “looked regimented and orderly in a geometrical sense,” along with an affinity for gigantism and centralization reflected in “huge dams, centralized communication and transportation hubs, large factories and farms, and grid cities. . . .” If you’ve read H. G. Wells’s “Utopias” or looked at Albert Speer’s architecture, you get the idea.

High modernism was scientistic, not scientific, based on, writes Scott, a “muscle-bound . . . version of the beliefs in scientific and technological progress” of the Enlightenment, centering on “a supreme self-confidence about continued linear progress . . . , the expansion of knowledge, the expansion of production, the rational design of social order, the growing satisfaction of human needs, and, not least, an increasing control over nature (including human nature) commensurate with scientific understanding of natural laws.” The high priesthood of this ideology was precisely the same as Progressivism’s social base: “planners, engineers, architects, scientists, and technicians [high modernism] celebrated as the designers of the new order.”

One aspect of Scott’s analysis of high modernism, his use of the concept of metis, is especially relevant to us here. Scott’s book, more than any other I can think of, should be read as a companion to Hayek’s discussion of what’s variously called distributed, tacit, or idiosyncratic knowledge in “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” (As Hayek put it, this is the knowledge of circumstances necessary to make a decision that exists “solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete . . . knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”)

Scott distinguished metis from techne, which is a body of universal knowledge deducible from first principles. Metis, in contrast, is (largely irreducible) knowledge acquired from practical experience, concerning the particular, the variable, and the local, and involving a “feel” for the unique aspects of situations obtained over a prolonged period.

High modernism tended to see metis as an enemy and sought to supplant it by central schemes of planning and control, whether at the level of society as a whole through State social engineering or at the level of the firm by Taylorist managers.

High modernism, Scott writes, placed remarkably “little confidence . . . in the skills, intelligence, and experience of ordinary people.” The dispersed, local knowledge of the general population was, at best, to be patronized as prescientific and purified of its partial or local character by codifying it into a set of universal rules that could in turn be reduced to a verbal formula and transmitted as knowledge by the priesthood.

What we know as Taylorism is one facet of the larger high modernist project in this regard. One feature of high modernism, Scott notes, was “a narrow and materialist ‘productivism’ [which] treated human labor as a mechanical system which could be decomposed into energy transfers, motion, and the physics of work,” so that work could be simplified into “isolated problems of mechanical efficiencies” and brought under scientific control. Taylorism, in particular, attempted a “minute decomposition of factory labor into isolable, precise, repetitive motions.” Taylor’s goal, in his own words, was for management to “assume . . . the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, formulae. . . . Thus all of the planning which under the old system was done by the workmen, must . . . be done by management in accordance with the law of science.”

The idea was that understanding and decision-making should be divorced from the performance of tasks. The managerial caste determines “best practices” and breaks tasks down into the most efficient possible set of simple sub-processes, and workers perform the tasks as instructed without the intervention of critical thought.

But by its nature, Scott says, high modernism is reductionist or “schematic” and “always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order.” Progressivism, as a high modernist ideology, makes no allowances for hidden knowledge.

In the case of Taylorism, this means that the suppression of metis sacrifices the distributed, job-related knowledge possessed by workers whose consideration is indispensable to any adequate governance of the production process. Taylorist management can no more render the production process amenable to central control without the dispersed knowledge of its workers than a central planning office can render a national economy transparent to its understanding and control.

According to David Noble (Forces of Production), large-scale computer numeric-controlled (CNC) machine tools were introduced in mass-production industry (first and most heavily in the military-industrial complex, mind you) as a way of supplanting metis with centralized control by managers and engineers, and of overcoming the knowledge rents inherent in distributed knowledge. The CNC tools were intended to shift the balance of power upward by putting production under the control of engineers and deskilling master machinists on the shop floor.

Unfortunately for this design, CNC machinery did not eliminate the need for metis. As Noble pointed out, management quickly found out that the only thing the machines could produce “automatically,” without ongoing worker intervention and concrete judgment, was scrap. When workers withheld their metis on a “work-to-rule” strategy, scrap rates went through the roof.

(Ironically, today we’re in the early stages of the shift of a great deal of manufacturing capability from mass-production industry to small job-shops—with small-scale CNC tools, in the latter, operated by skilled craftsmen.)

So it seems metis or distributed knowledge, in the end, is one of those stubborn traits of human action that outlasts all attempts to supersede it.