[p2p-research] mass production and p2p production, was ecovillage and communities

[Kevin Carson]

On 9/13/09, Franz Nahrada <f.nahrada at reflex.at> wrote:

>  I think its a no - go to negate the advantages of mass production in many
>  cases.  For me this means being as ideologically blindened to a complex
>  and divers reality as our our opponents of the industrialist faction. I
>  even had a discussion with Marcin Jakubowski on this issue, and we agreed
>  that to a certain point that villages will never ever be able to make
>  everything they need. You might know that Marcins ambition in this field
>  goes much higher than I think is reasonable as balance between village and
>  city, but even from his point of view (includig steel furnace per village)
>  cooperative factories are a reality that you cannot totally deny.

I'm not a tech guy at all, but based on my layman's reading of a lot
of industrial history I think it's important to stress that the
boundary between "mass production" and small-scale craft production is
extremely permeable.

Factory production, as such, is not necessarily mass production by any means.

A great deal of factory production, and a rapidly increasing share of
it, uses what are essentially craft methods (the use of
general-purpose tools that can be quickly switched from one product to
another), that are scalable to a wide range.  The Toyota Production
System is, in many ways, a sort of Craft Production 2.0, even though
it takes place in a factory.  And it's even more true of the small
factories of the Third Italy.

It's interesting that some of the most productivity-enhancing
innovations of mass production could also have been used almost as
well in craft production.  For example, Henry Ford was able to
introduce fully interchangeable parts only when machining technology
made it possible to cut hardened steel, so there was no longer a need
for fitters (who accounted for the overwhelming bulk of labor time,
turning even Ford's "factory"  production into glorified custom
building).  But the full realization of the principle of
interchangeable parts could be taken advantage of just as well in a
craft shop like those of Emilia-Romagna, and was in fact a
prerequisite of the kind of modular design that open hardware relies
so heavily on.  In fact it was the adoption of machinery that could
cut hardened steel, and the elimination of fitters, that introduced
most of the labor-time efficiencies of the Model T, before Ford even
introduced the assembly line.  And Taichi Ohno's radical reduction in
setup time removed the other barrier to craft production.  So for a
very wide range of products, technological advances have made it
possible for even fairly small shops to be "factories."


-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html