In a simple style, but with great attention to detail, the author describes the inter- and intra-occupational shifts which have taken place in twentieth-century American capitalism and the capital movements which they mirror. Moreover, in two key respects, the work represents a genuine and substantive advance. In the first place, Braverman takes as his starting-point capitalist production rather than income distribution and demand, and focuses within this on the capitalist labour-process. Secondly, he combines rigorous theoretical analysis with vehement and eloquent indictment of the effects of the capitalist labour-process on the working class—a reintroduction of the critical and demystificatory element long absent from Marxist political economy. The last person to have written anything of substance on the labour-process was Marx himself.
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In a simple style, but with great attention to detail, the author describes the inter- and intra-occupational shifts which have taken place in twentieth-century American capitalism and the capital movements which they mirror. Moreover, in two key respects, the work represents a genuine and substantive advance. In the first place, Braverman takes as his starting-point capitalist production rather than income distribution and demand, and focuses within this on the capitalist labour-process.
Secondly, he combines rigorous theoretical analysis with vehement and eloquent indictment of the effects of the capitalist labour-process on the working class—a reintroduction of the critical and demystificatory element long absent from Marxist political economy. The last person to have written anything of substance on the labour-process was Marx himself. It is, therefore, worth enquiring why this topic should have emerged so suddenly from relative obscurity.
Many writers have noted the shift in focus of Marxist theory since the late sixties, away from philosophical concerns and towards the more classical preoccupations of an active Marxism. Labour and Monopoly Capital is without doubt a major representative of that trend.
And this background clearly had a significant influence on his book. He was aware of this himself, and in the Introduction discusses the stimuli which impelled him to re-open theoretical discussion on this long neglected topic.
He argues that the seemingly exhaustive treatment of the subject in Capital , coupled with the more immediate problems presented to Marxism by the events of the early twentieth century, led to a lack of analysis of changes in the labour-process. This blind spot, according to Braverman, developed into a more serious error in the form of an increasing acceptance by Marxists of the specific form of labour-process developed by capitalism.
The tremendous increase in scientific intricacy and productivity of the labour-process in the early part of the century led the Marxists of the Second International to see the modern factory system as an inevitable if perfectible form of its organization. Later, the situation facing the new Soviet state and its need to develop industrial production led the cpsu to borrow from and imitate the most developed examples of the capitalist labour process in order to catch up with the capitalist world in preparation for the building of socialism.
Now, Braverman is correct to point out that little analysis of the labour-process has been done since Capital ; the compulsory recapitulation of Marx in most current work on the topic testifies to this. He also has good cause to draw attention to the uncritical attitude of Second- and Third-International Marxists to the capitalist labour-process, and the effects this had on their ideas on socialist production. However, this is not a mere isolated error—it forms an integral part of a whole traditional Marxist orthodoxy.
And the role accorded to the labour-process and technology in this Marxist tradition is, in fact, better understood in terms of the connection it posited between forces and relations of production. The Bolshevik assertion of the socialist character of the revolution involved recognition of the complex inter-relationship between the international dimension of the productive forces and the existence of individual nation states.
Thus, at a theoretical level, there was a partial re-assembly of the non-mechanical conceptualization of the relationship between forces and relations of production that had been present in the work of Marx, but distorted in the Marxism of the Second International.
A corollary of the mechanistic view of forces and relations of production had been a granting of complete primacy to the material means of production within the forces of production.
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century is a book about the economics and sociology of work under monopoly capitalism by the political economist Harry Braverman. Building on Monopoly Capital by Paul A. Intended as a direct assault on management of blue-collar labor under capitalism, [3] Braverman's book started what came to be called, using Braverman's phraseology, " the labor process debate ". It also outlined workers' resistance to such managerial strategies. Specifically, Braverman subjected Frederick Winslow Taylor to intense critique, describing Taylor's strident pronouncements on management's attitudes to workers as the "explicit verbalization of the capitalist mode of production". He argued that, in the present day, the 'successors to Taylor are to be found in engineering and work design, and in top management'. Braverman instead argued that these 'practitioners of " human relations " and " industrial psychology "' have supplemented Taylor's influence by forming 'the maintenance crew for the human machinery'.
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'Labour and Monopoly Capital'
We'd like to understand how you use our websites in order to improve them. Register your interest. The appearance of this landmark sociological volume renewed interest among historians and sociologists in industrial sociology, a field contained within the sociology of work. Specifically, LPT examines how employees work, the skills utilized in the work process, the control of work, how employees are remunerated for their work and employee resistance to managerial control. In a nutshell, Braverman argued in Labor and Monopoly Capital that the implementation of scientific management or Taylorism, named after Frederick Winslow Taylor resulted in the deskilling and routinization of tasks performed by blue-collar workers in factories as well as those completed by lower-level white-collar workers employed in offices.
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Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century
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