Appendix 2
The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century
The following talk, given by Harry Braverman in the spring of 1975 at the West Virginia Institute of Technology, is his last known recorded presentation before his death on August 2, 1976. It was slightly edited for posthumous publication by Monthly Review in 1982 (vol. 34., no. 1).
My topic this evening is the “degradation of work in the twentieth century," and there is one firm generalization with which we may beginthat is, that humanity is a working species. Our relationship with nature is not merely one of food-gathering or seeking shelter in the crevices provided ready-made by nature. Rather humanity takes the materials provided by nature and alters them into objects more useful to itself. Humanity works in order to live, to provide itself with the means and provisions of life. Thus even though men and women often have occasion to complain of work as a constraint laid upon the species, there is never any doubt that work as a species characteristic is as natural to human life as grazing or hunting are to other species. But it would be the greatest of all possible mistakes to take any simple truisms of this sort, whether in the form of Biblical laments or biological and evolutionary constraints, as the direct basis for an analysis of work in modern society. Between biology and sociology, civilization—with all of its social relations and institutions intervenes. In capitalist society, which is the society in which we live, work is organized in institutions that have long since separated us from simple production for our own use and indeed have as a basis for their activity something very different from any kind of production for use.
The purpose of a capitalist enterprise, as we know it, is to use the surplus that may be extracted from the process of production. Thus while humans work to provide for their needs, in capitalist society nobody works who does not at the same time provide for the needs of capital. It is only by creating a surplus for the corporations that we obtain permission to create necessities for ourselves. In capitalist society this is rule number one, or if you like you might call it Catch-22. Whatever you call it, it is the underlying law of the system.
Now it's true that there have been other forms in which ruling groups extracted a surplus for themselves from the working population. In slave societies the masters directly appropriated the labor of others. In feudal societies the rulers took from the produce of others what they themselves required under rules that obligated the peasantry to surrender to the manorial lord a portion of their product or of their labor. Thus it has been said of feudalism that the nobility defended all, the clergy prayed for all, and the commoners fed all. But in capitalist society the manner in which a surplus is extracted is very special and has had during the past two hundred years the most extraordinary consequences. The foremost of these is that the capitalists have taken into their own hands the direct control over all processes of labor and production; and this in itself constitutes an enormous change from anything that has existed in previous societies. In previous societies the work of artisans or of that immense mass of the population then engaged in crop or animal husbandry as farmers, peasants, and serfs was as a rule conducted autonomously. So far as the direct processes of labor are concerned, the artisans or peasants worked according to traditional methods generally under their own control. It is only under capitalist conditions that the masters take over the entire process, repeatedly reshape and reorganize it to suit their own needs, and parcel it out as tasks to workers for whom the process as a whole is now lost.
Labor that has been subjected to these conditions is sometimes referred to as alienated labor. Now this is a vague phrase, and its vagueness has increased with its popularity. Indeed, we may suspect that its present popularity in official sociology and popular journalism is dependent upon its vagueness. In their usage its connection with the specific conditions of capitalist social relations and capitalist production has all but disappeared, and alienated labor is understood to mean merely the worker who suffers from a feeling of distress, a malaise, a bellyache about his or her work. But the term may still be useful if its significant content is restored and clearly understood.
It must be understood first of all in accordance with the prime definition of the verb to alienate, that is, to transfer ownership to another. The ownership of the tools and instruments of production is in capitalist society alienated, that is, transferred to others. The ownership of the product is alienated in the same sense. The same applies to the ownership of the proceeds from the sale of the product, and finally the process of production too is alienated. It too is transferred to alien control and becomes the property of others. In the end, everything about the productive process becomes alien to the worker in the sense that everything is outside his or her interests, claim, and controlthe wage becomes the sole equity of the worker in the job.
Thus in capitalist society production is carried on in an atmosphere of hostility or indifference by a mass of workers who have lost all stake in or concern for the process, and this in turn makes necessary certain extraordinary means of control and management. It is thus that management for the first time comes into existence and is brought into the world by capitalist society. This necessitates ever more extraordinary means of control and management as well as an ever more alienating reorganization of the work of production, so that we have here an alienation which feeds on itself and becomes ever deeper until it emerges as a profound antagonism between those who work and those who manage them. In this situation it is not at all surprising that work is seen as a curse—what is surprising is only that it is tolerated at all. The manner in which this step-by-step alienation of the process of production from the worker has developed historically is too large a subject to be dealt with in any short presentation. Suffice it to say that it existed only in exceptional instances in ancient and medieval societies; that it grew rapidly in the workshops of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries during the rise of early capitalism, that it became generalized in the workshops and factories of the nineteenth century, and that it has become virtually universal in the factories, mills, warehouses, offices, farms, wholesale and retail establishments, hospitals, offices of public administration, and even to some extent in the schools of the twentieth century in the countries of fully developed capitalism.
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