Over the past four centuries, owners have sought to wrest control of the labor process away from the workers in plantations, factories, and warehouse. Ideas about labor management, dressed up as a science, have often failed on the shop floor, but they have served a broader purpose. Labor historian Henry Snow interrogates how theories of discipline and management — from the Bentham brothers’ panopticon to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s ideas of labor optimization to General Electric’s propaganda campaign featuring actor Ronald Reagan — have perennially reinforced the notion that there is no alternative to capitalism.
Henry Snow, Control Science: How Management Made the Modern World Verso, 2026