Deming and Communism

[mark.wilcox@durham.ac.uk]

Dear all
The debate on Communism is very interesting and a topic that I have tried to research in the past.
To get a different perspective one should go back to Marx's original work and particularly his perspective on Labour Process Theory (LPT).  

LPT has three features labour, materials and tools/technology.  These three features interact in the nature of work. In a pre-capitalist epoch the worker would own the tools and material and make them work on his behalf.  In a capitalist system, these features are all commodities and more importantly the tools and technology are used to control the worker's output with the potential to deskill etc. (see Braverman:1974 for a full version of this argument. 

Marx's analysis of the labour process in capitalist system is that the workers becae alienated from the product/service and the process of making the product or service.  In other words special causes affect the labour process. The special causes are the need to make surplus value (profit) out of the labour process.

WED clearly recognised that workers were alienated, but unlike Marx he didnt blame capitalism -he blamed the managers who designed the system.  In other words, for his interpretation he used a different theory to Marx.  So we have two competing causal theories to explain worker alienation. Observers of WED wrongly assumed that because he was criticising managers he was a communist.  This is a non-sequitor.

To put this into perspective we should ask why WED's ideas were not taken up in the USA in the 1950s - and why the people he spoke to in Japan liked what he said.  I think some of the people he met in Japan in the 1950s may have been more sympathetic to communism.

Regards
Mark

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