Scientific management pioneers openly dehumanized manual laborers as interchangeable with animals

Evidence

This phrase, whose revealing “tactlessness” instantly attracted the attention of commentators, occurs on p. 40 of Frederick Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), where the author writes: “This work [pig-iron handling] is so crude and elementary in its nature that the writer firmly believes that it would be possible to train an intelligent gorilla so as to become a more efficient pig-iron handler than any man could be.” — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2434

Categorization

• XREF: Connects forward to Fordism, Taylorism, and how bureaucratic/managerial rationality constructs the worker as mechanized body — a mechanism the Islamophobia toolkit will need when analyzing racialized labor regimes.