ABSTRACT
Control over production processes depends on a secure grasp of production-related skills and knowledge. As long as shop floor workers have a better understanding of how things are produced than managers, managers will find it difficult or impossible to impose their will on them. Even in the industrialized countries of Western Europe and North America, managerial control over production was imposed relatively late (in most industries not before the early twentieth century) and only against stiff worker resistance. Deskilling – the process by which management wrested control over skills from the hands of workers and fragmented complex operations into simple tasks that could be performed by unskilled labor – has been studied in much detail for the West (Braverman 1974).1 Little work, however, has been done on deskilling under socialism. There is no reason to assume that deskilling does not take place in socialist countries. Lenin’s enthusiasm for Taylorist “scientific management” is well known (Bailes 1977; Scoville 2001), and Chinese leaders shared Lenin’s vision of rapid, state-led industrialization and his disdain for historically rooted institutions – the guilds, kinship groups, and networks of artisans that controlled much of the “technostructure” in pre-revolutionary industry. Socialist China, like the Soviet Union, was what James Scott has called a “high modernist” regime: aggressively anti-traditional, obsessed with order and control, and possessed of an almost religious belief in the necessity and rationality of state planning (Scott 1998; Kirby 2000). Both countries started from low levels of mechanization and pursued industrialization at breakneck speed, leading to a much sharper clash between proto-industrial, artisanal production structures and centralized industry than in Western Europe, North America, or Japan.
