Scientific management reduced the laborer to a beast of burden to be trained.

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.” Frederick Taylor (1856 1915) was an American engineer and pioneer of scientific management. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2434

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Islamophobia toolkit: Taylor’s dehumanized ‘intelligent gorilla’ is an early managerial instance of the racialized/dehumanized Other this volume studies under Orientalism and representation.
• SHARE: A pinpointed tidbit — Taylor literally proposing an ‘intelligent gorilla’ as the ideal pig-iron handler — for anyone working on Fordism, Taylorism, or the dehumanization of labor.
• CANDY: The founding text of scientific management claims a trained ape could outwork any man at pig-iron handling.