4 Labor and Monopoly Capital
myself attempting a study of the development of the capitalist mode of production during the past hundred years.
The literature which presents and interprets technical and management trends for the general reader exists primarily in two forms: journalism and social science. In the course of a fairly extensive reading of this literature, I was particularly struck by the vagueness, generality of wording, and on occasion egregious errors of description of the concrete matters under discussion. It seemed to me that many widely accepted conclusions were based on little genuine information, and represented either simplifications or outright misreadings of a complex reality. Since much of what appears here will challenge this conventional picture of work and the working population, I feel that I owe the reader an account of my own background insofar as it plays a role in this book. For although I spent on this study the largest part of my spare time during more than four years, my interest in many of the subjects discussed in it dates from many years earlier.
I began my working life by serving a four-year apprenticeship in the coppersmith's trade, and worked at this trade for a total of seven years. These seven years were spent in a naval shipyard, a type of industrial enterprise which, at that time, was probably the most complete product of two centuries of industrial revolution. Almost all the mechanic crafts which had arisen in the course of these centuries (some of which, like my own, were rooted in the handicrafts of classical antiquity and earlier) were practiced in such a shipyard in close association with each other. Because of this propinquity and the interlocking processes practiced by the crafts, and also because of the gathering together of apprentices of all crafts in a trade school for semi-weekly sessions, I learned not only my own trade but gained a concrete understanding of most of the others.
The extremely limited nature of employment in my trade, and its rapid decline with the substitution of new processes and materials for the traditional modes of copper working, made it difficult for me to continue to work as a coppersmith when I moved to other parts of the country or from job to job. But because the trade of working copper provided a foundation in the elements of a number of other crafts, I was always able to find employment in other trades, such as pipefitting, sheetmetal work, and layout, and I did work of these sorts for another seven years: in a railroad repair shop, in sheetmetal shops, and especially in two plants which fabricated heavy steel plate and structural steel into equipment for the basic steel industry, including blast furnaces.
This background of craftsmanship may lead some readers to conclude, after they have read this book, that I have been influenced by a sentimental attachment to the outworn conditions of now archaic modes of labor. I have been conscious of this possibility, but I have tried not to let any of my conclusions flow from such a romanticism, and on the whole I do not believe that this criticism would be warranted. It is true that I enjoyed, and still enjoy, working as a craftsman, but since I grew up during the years of rapid change in the mechanic crafts, I was always conscious of the inexorable march of science-based technological change; moreover, in my reflections upon this subject and in the many discussions among craftsmen debating the “old" and the “new" in which I took part, I was always a modernizer. I believed then, and still believe now, that the transformation of labor processes from their basis in tradition to their basis in science is not only inevitable but necessary for the progress of the human race and for its emancipation from hunger and other forms of need. More important, throughout those years I was an activist in the socialist movement, and I had assimilated the Marxist view which is hostile not to science and technology as such, but only to the manner in which these are used as weapons of domination in the creation, perpetuation, and deepening of a gulf between classes in society.
I had the opportunity of seeing at first hand, during those years, not only the transformation of industrial processes but the manner in which these processes are reorganized; how the worker, systematically robbed of a craft heritage, is given little or nothing to take its place. Like all craftsmen, even the most inarticulate, I always resented this, and as I reread these pages, I find in them a sense not only of social outrage, which was intended, but also perhaps of personal affront. If this is so, it is, as I say, unintended, but I do not think it does any harm. However, I repeat that I hope no one draws from this the conclusion that my views are shaped by nostalgia for an age that cannot be recaptured. Rather, my views about work are governed by nostalgia for an age that has not yet come into being, in which, for the worker, the craft satisfaction that arises from conscious and purposeful mastery of the labor process will be combined with the marvels of science and the ingenuity of engineering, an age in which everyone will be able to benefit, in some degree, from this combination.
In later years, I was able to gain first-hand experience of some of the most typical office processes of our times, again at the moment when they were beginning to undergo rapid changes. Some years of experience in socialist journalism led eventually to my employment in book publishing as an editor, and this in turn led to more than a dozen years as an operating executive in two publishing houses. Here I was able to see, and in fact design, some of the administrative processes involved in modern marketing, distributing, accounting, and book production routines; and this experience twice included the transition from conventional to computerized office systems. I would not pretend that this background is as extensive as that of many others who have worked for longer periods of time in larger organizations, but at least it does enable me to understand, in some detail and concreteness, the principles by which labor processes are organized in modern offices.
Introduction
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