The Modern Science of Training

Abstract

The modern science of training is based on a contrived principle of organization. This principle has been derived out of capital’s struggle to contain (objectify) the antagonistic subject, identified in the previous chapter, within the institutional framework of bourgeois society. Unable to explain the underlying dynamic (the law of value) in, through and against which this overwhelming subjectivity develops, the first social engineers of this most modern science (such as Luther, Calvin, Smith, Ricardo, Bentham, Taylor, Ford…) were reduced to pragmatic and precarious formulae (theology, natural law, political economy, Utilitarianism, marginalist economics, sociology, psychology…), as they sought to eradicate contingency (class struggle) within the presumed natural clockwork mechanical order, described by the traditional (Newtonian) laws of motion (energy) and inertia (resistance). This science, developed in its most complete form in 1948 when what was previously regarded as inertia was understood as energy, made its first formal appearance in 1814 with the Act repealing the previous training doctrine, the Elizabethan Statutes of Artificers, 1563.