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Labor and Monopoly Capital Harry Braverman

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Labor and Monopoly Capital Harry Braverman Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century Harry Braverman 25th Anniversary Edition Foreword by Paul M. Sweezy New Introduction by John Bellamy Foster (@ Monthly Review Press New York Acknowledgments To the following, for pennission to reproduce short passages from the works named: Oxford University Press, from White Collar by C. Wright Mills, copyright © 1951 by Oxford University Press; Division ofResearch ofHarvard Business School, from Automation and Management by James Bright, copy­ right © 1958 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; University of Minnesota Press, from The Sociology o/Work by Theodore Caplow, copyright © 1954 by the University ofMinnesota; Harvard Business Review, from "Does Automation Raise Skill Requirements?" by James Bright, July-August 1958, copyright © 1958 by the President and Fellows ofHarvard College; Columbia University Press, from Women and Work in America by Robert W. Smuts, New Edition Copyright © 1998 by Monthly Review Press copyright © 1959 by Columbia University Press; Public Affairs Press, from © 1974 by Harry Braverman Automation in the Office by Ida R. Hoos. All Rights Reserved Library ~f Congress Cataloging-tn-Publication Data Bravennan, Harry. Labor and monopoly capital: the degradation ofwork in the twentieth century / by Harry Bravennan ; foreword by Paul M. Sweezy : new introduction by John Bellamy Foster. - 25th anniversary ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-85345-940-1 (pbk.) 1. Labor History-20 cent century. 6. Working class- History-20th century. I. Title. HD4851.B66 331 '.09'04-dc21 98-46497 CIP Monthly Review Press 122 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 Manufactured in Canada 1098765 Contents New Introduction by John Bellamy Foster IX Foreword by Paul M. Sweezy xxv Introduction 3 Part 1: Labor and Management 1 Labor and Labor Power 31 2 The Origins of Management 41 3 The Division of Labor 49 4 Scientific Management 59 5 The Primary Effects of Scientific Management 86 6 The Habituation of the Worker to the Capitalist Mode of Production 96 Part 11: Science and Mechanization 7 The Scientific-Technical Revolution 107 8 The Scientific-Technical Revolution and the Worker 117 9 Machinery 127 10 Further Effects ofManagement and Technology on the Distribution ofLabor 163 Part 111: Monopoly Capital 11 Surplus Value and Surplus Labor 175 12 The Modem Corporation 179 13 The Universal Market 188 14 The Role ofthe State 197 Part IV: The Growing Working-Class Occupations Introduction to the New Edition 15 Clerical Workers 203 John Bellamy Foster 16 Service Occupations and Retail Trade 248 Part V: The Working Class 17 The Structure of the Working Class and Its Reserve Annies 261 Work, in today's society, is a mystery. No other realm ofsocial existence is so 18 The "Middle Layers" ofEmployment 279 obscured in mist, so zealously concealed from view ("no admittance except on 19 Productive and Unproductive Labor 284 business") by the prevailing ideology. Within so-called popular culture-the 20 A Final Note on Skill 294 world ofTV and films, commodities and advertising-consumption occupies center stage, while the more fundamental reality of work recedes into the Appendix 1: Two Comments 311 background, seldom depicted in any detail, and then usually in romanticized Appendix 2: The Degradation of Work forms. The harsh experiences of those forced to earn their living by endless the Twentieth Century 316 conformity to boring machine-regulated routines, divorced from their own creative potential--all in the name ofefficiency and profits----seem always just Index 326 beyond the eye of the camera, forever out of sight. In social science, the situation is hardly better. The dismal performance of legions of orthodox economists and sociologists in the area of work is testi­ mony to the dominance of ideological imperatives within mainstream social science, despite its scientific pretensions. There is no other realm requiring as much concealment to permit the continued dominance of capitalist relations of production. What must remain impenetrable is not so much the stultifYing character of modem working life: that is hard to deny in a time when the neologism "McJob" has entered the language to describe a form of employ­ ment experienced by millions. The secret is the prevailing social order's systematic tendency to create unsatisfYing work. Orthodox economists have consistently steered clear ofissues ofproduc­ tion and the organization of work, viewing these from the distant standpoint of the exigencies of the market (the buying and selling of"factors ofproduc­ tion"). They almost never engage directly with the realm of production in which capital and labor struggle over the control of working time and the appropriation of surplus product-issues discretely left to those concerned with the everyday practical realities of business and management. As the heterodox economist Robert Heilbroner has written, "The actual social process ofproduction-the flesh and blood act ofwork, the relationships of sub- and superordination by which work is organized and controlled--are almost strangers to the conventional economist.,,1 Sociologists, it is true, have analyzed occupational reality, looking for signs of alienation. But sociology, like economics, has usually been divorced from any real understanding of the way in which working life is objectively ---r x Labor and Monopoly Capital New Introduction xi organized around the division oflabor and profitability. All too often academic picked up a B.A. at the New School for Social Research. In 1967, he became investigators have assumed that the essence ofworking life is to be discovered director of Monthly Review Press, a position he held until his death on simply in the subjective responses of "scientifically selected samples" of August 2, 1976. workers to carefully constructed questionnaires. Even radical theorists, famil­ This unique background as a socialist intellectual who had been a worker iar with the results of such economic and sociological research but lacking and an activist within the productive core of world industry, one who rose by direct experience oftheir own with the capitalist labor process, have frequently dint ofhis political struggles and intellectual brilliance to executive positions fallen prey to illusions generated in this way, as Paul Sweezy eloquently within two important presses, gave Braverman unique qualifications to take explains in his foreword to the present volume. on the difficult task ofstripping the veil away from the capitalist labor process. When it was published in 1974, Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Braverman's Marxist training gave him the intellectual and political compass Capital: The Degradation ofWork in the Twentieth Century immediately stood for his perceptive analysis of the entire history of managerial literature, out among twentieth-century studies in the degree to which it penetrated the ulminating in an investigation of work under monopoly capital--the eco­ hidden abode ofthe workplace, providing the first clear, critical understanding nomic and social regime dominated by the giant corporation.3 He wrote with in more than a century ofthe labor process as a whole within capitalist society. a sophisticated understanding of Marx's dialectical method and with a clarity It thus opened the way to the flood ofradical investigations ofthe labor process rarely equaled in modern social science, and he dealt with a fundamental realm that followed. Braverman's success, where so many others had failed, was not of everyday existence--the very foundation of wealth and power in modern simply fortuitous. Much of the basis for his achievement is to be found in his society, long lost behind a veil of obscurity. Labor and Monopoly Capital personal background. Braverman was born on December 9,1920, in New York City, the son of immediately inspired tens of thousands of readers, liberating them from Morris Braverman, a shoeworker, and Sarah Wolf Braverman. Caught up in enslavement to the conventional wisdom. Based on this single treatise, Braver­ the fervent radical intellectual spirit of the Depression years, he aspired to a man is now renowned worldwide as one of the great social scientists of the college education and emolled at Brooklyn College, only to be forced to twentieth century: a legendary figure who arose from the depths ofproduction terminate his schooling within a year due to the hard economic times. to combat "the great god Capital," armed only with what he had learned while ning in 1937, Braverman apprenticed at the Brooklyn Naval Shipyard, where working with his own two hands and through his struggles as an organic he began as a coppersmith, branched out into pipefitting, and eventually intellectual, a human embodiment ofthe unification oftheory and practice. supervised a team of eighteen to twenty workers at refitting pipes of docked It is a measure ofthe tremendous influence exerted by Harry Braverman ships. Drafted near the end of the war in 1945, he was sent by the Army to and successive radical labor process analysts that only a quarter-century after Cheyenne, Wyoming, where as a sergeant he taught and supervised locomotive the publication of Labor and Monopoly Capital it is difficult to recall the pipe fitting. In 1947, he and his wife Miriam settled in Youngstown, Ohio, absolute confidence with which the orthodox view of work relations was where he worked in steel layout and fitting at Republic Steel (where he was espoused in the early post-Second World War years.4 At that time the preemi­ fired at the instigation ofthe FBI), William B. Pollock Co., and Owen nent interpretation of work in modern society was the one presented by Clark Structural SteeL2 Kerr, John Dunlop, and others in a book entitled Industrialism and Industrial From his teenage years in Brooklyn on, Braverman had identified with Man (1960). These authors provided a description ofindustrial society that can socialism, participating first in the Young People's Socialist League and later be summarized as follows: in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), as part ofa small but vibrant Trotskyist Industrialization has displaced capitalism.
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