Control Science

A thrilling intellectual and economic history of workplace control from the birth of capitalism to the modern tech giants.

What are the rules that govern our workday? Who made these rules? And how do these rules dominate the rest of our lives? From Caribbean plantations in the 17th century to Amazon warehouses today, the powerful have constantly developed new techniques to control workers– and new justifications for doing so. Ideas of control they perfected on the factory floor have expanded to dictate our personal lives, political rights, national policy, and global economy.

Seventeenth-century intellectuals like William Petty and John Locke argued human beings were selfish machines who have to be controlled for our own good. A century later, Jeremy and Samuel Bentham tried to do exactly that with their infamous Panopticon prison workshop. When 19th-century Japanese elites imported European factory technologies, they developed new theories of political control to justify using them. After World War II, the General Electric Corporation created an internal propaganda department to fight unions, then pitched that propaganda to the country by training an actor: future President Ronald Reagan. Billionaires today dream of extending the algorithmic control of Amazon warehouses to every part of our world and lives.

Blending intellectual, economic, and labor history, Control Science is a thrilling and lucid work of history that reveals how common sense about work, the economy, and human nature were fabricated– not discovered– in order to help us challenge them now.Introduction: A “Science of Liberty”

1: “It is our misery and ruin thus to be improved”
Calculated Extraction, 1623-1697

2: “In order to love mankind, it is necessary to lower your expectations”
Labor Control and Psychological Egoism, 1690-1783

3: “Machines that cannot err”
Mechanized Labor and the Panopticon, 1770-1810

4: “They will be compelled of themselves to work for you”
Political Economy in Antebellum America, 1800-1865

5: “The whole world appears despicable”
Competitive Evolution and Japanese Industrialization, 1854-1905

6: “In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first”
Scientific Management and “Free Enterprise,” 1880-1945

7: “A Fantastic Fairyland”
Factory Discipline and the Postwar Right, 1946-1967

8: “The interdependent world we have tried to build”
Multinationals, Macroeconomics, and the Road to Reagan, 1967-1980

9: “Economics represents the actual world”
Popular Economics, 1981-2009

10: “No Space to Be Human”
Dreams of Exit, 2009-2024

Conclusion: There is an alternativeHenry Snow is a labor historian who has taught at Colby College and the University of Connecticut. They publish the newsletter Another Way.