On the whole this article is a fine specimen of Marxist propaganda slandering anyone who thinks differently and independently and therefore is able to solve the problems that one faces in life inventively. And this is one of the things that H. Ford and J.V. Stalin have in common. The historic myth claims that H. Ford and J.V. Stalin are very different people and the only thing that unites them is that they were contemporaries. Actually they are united by something else: in the dominating cultural tradition their aspirations and deeds are in the same way deliberately either buried in oblivion or obscured by lies. And believing those lies and myths results in misunderstanding their visions and doings equally by those who admires both of them and those who slight or hate them.
In order to understand the place they hold in history and the momentum their aspirations and deeds had in regard to the future one must turn to their own sayings. And if this is done we shall get a chance to experience a globalization of a totally different nature, of the kind that only parasites can oppose to.
4. A Campaign for What: for Capitalism?
Or for Socialism?
4.1. Humanism in Deed and in Word
Let us turn to the book by H. Ford “My Life and Work”[11] which was published in the USA in 1922 and first came out in Russian translation in the USSR as early as 1924. Let us start by dealing with the simplest issue of «humanizing labor» keeping in mind that H. Ford himself was not a «Fordist» in the very same way that Marx was not a «Marxist» and Muhammad was not a «Mohammedan».
In other words Ford’s own creative approach to life and business distinguishes him from many others who imitated him in introducing assembly line, «scientific methods» of organizing labor, etc. But they did not understand that what Ford did was inspired by a true concern about improving the life of common people by the means available to him and not by a hypocritical wish of a self-seeking financier to present himself as a humanist, reformer and «benefactor».
The proportion of disabled people among healthy people in a society and their actual way of life are universally recognized indicators, which tell how «humanistic» this society and labor in this society are. Henry Ford writes the following about this problem that is becoming more and more actual as medicine is becoming more and more capable of forcing a human soul to live in a maimed or ill body:
«We have always with us the maimed and the halt. There is a most generous disposition to regard all of these people who are physically incapacitated for labor as a charge on society and to support them by charity. There are cases where I imagine that the support must be by charity — as, for instance, an idiot. But those cases are extraordinarily rare, and we have found it possible, among the great number of different tasks that must be performed somewhere in the company, to find an opening for almost any one and on the basis of production. The blind man or cripple can, in the particular place to which he is assigned, perform just as much work and receive exactly the same pay as a wholly able-bodied man would. We do not prefer cripples — but we have demonstrated that they can earn full wages.
It would be quite outside the spirit of what we are trying to do, to take on men because they were crippled, pay them a lower wage, and be content with a lower output. That might be directly helping the men but it would not be helping them in the best way. The best way is always the way by which they can be put on a productive par with able-bodied men. I believe that there is very little occasion for charity in this world — that is, charity in the sense of making gifts. Most certainly business and charity cannot be combined; the purpose of a factory is to produce, and it ill serves the community in general unless it does produce to the utmost of its capacity. We are too ready to assume without investigation that the full possession of faculties is a condition requisite to the best performance of all jobs. To discover just what was the real situation, I had all of the different jobs in the factory classified to the kind of machine and work — whether the physical labor involved was light, medium, or heavy; whether it were a wet or a dry job, and if not, with what kind of fluid; whether it were clean or dirty; near an oven or a furnace; the condition of the air; whether one or both hands had to be used; whether the employee stood or sat down at his work; whether it was noisy or quiet; whether it required accuracy; whether the light was natural or artificial; the number of pieces that had to be handled per hour; the weight of the material handled; and the description of the strain upon the worker. It turned out at the time of the inquiry that there were then 7,882 different jobs in the factory. Of these, 949 were classified as heavy work requiring strong, able-bodied, and practically physically perfect men; 3,338 required men of ordinary physical development and strength. The remaining 3,595 jobs were disclosed as requiring no physical exertion and could be performed by the slightest, weakest sort of men. In fact, most of them could be satisfactorily filled by women or older children. The lightest jobs were again classified to discover how many of them required the use of full faculties, and we found that 670 could be filled by legless men, 2,637 by one-legged men, 2 by armless men, 715 by one-armed men, and 10 by blind men. Therefore, out of 7,882 kinds of jobs, 4,034 — although some of them required strength — did not require full physical capacity. That is, developed industry can provide wage work for a higher average of standard[12] men than are ordinarily included in any normal community. If the jobs in any one industry or, say, any one factory, were analyzed as ours have been analyzed, the proportion might be very different, yet I am quite sure that if work is sufficiently subdivided — subdivided to the point of highest economy — there will be no dearth of places in which the physically incapacitated can do a man’s job and get a man’s wage. It is economically most wasteful to accept crippled men as charges and then to teach them trivial tasks like the weaving of baskets or some other form of unremunerative hand labor, in the hope, not of aiding them to make a living, but of preventing despondency.
When a man is taken on by the Employment Department, the theory is to put him into a job suited to his condition. If he is already at work and he does not seem able to perform the work, or if he does not like his work, he is given a transfer card, which he takes up to the transfer department, and after an examination he is tried out in some other work more suited to his condition or disposition. Those who are below the ordinary physical standards are just as good workers, rightly placed, as those who are above. For instance, a blind man was assigned to the stock department to count bolts and nuts for shipment to branch establishments. Two other able-bodied men were already employed on this work. In two days the foreman sent a note to the transfer department releasing the able-bodied men because the blind man was able to do not only his own work but also the work that had formerly been done by the sound men.
This salvage can be carried further. It is usually taken for granted that when a man is injured lie is simply out of the running and should be paid an allowance. But there is always a period of convalescence, especially in fracture cases, where the man is strong enough to work, and, indeed, by that time usually anxious to work, for the largest possible accident allowance can never be as great as a man’s wage. If it were, then a business would simply have an additional tax put upon it, and that tax would show up in the cost of the product. There would be less buying of the product and therefore less work for somebody. That is an inevitable sequence that must always be borne in mind.