8 Labor and Monopoly Capital
effect upon the labor movement as a whole. The unionized working class, intimidated by the scale and complexity of capitalist production, and weakened in its original revolutionary impetus by the gains afforded by the rapid increase of productivity, increasingly lost the will and ambition to wrest control of production from capitalist hands and turned ever more to bargaining over labor's share in the product. This labor movement formed the immediate environment of Marxism; and Marxists were, in varying degrees, compelled to adapt themselves to it.
The adaptation took various forms, many of which can now be seen as ideologically destructive. The working philosophy of Marxism, as distinguished from its holiday pronouncements, focused increasingly not upon the profound inner nature of capitalism and the worker's position within it, but upon its various conjunctural effects and crises. In particular, the critique of the mode of production gave way to the critique of capitalism as a mode of distribution. Impressed, perhaps even overawed, by the immense productivity of the labor process, baffled by its increasing scientific intricacy, participating in the struggles of workers for improvements in wages, hours, and conditions, Marxists adapted to the view of the modern factory as an inevitable if perfectible form of the organization of the labor process. In the Social Democracy, the pre-World-War-I socialist movement, the evolution of unions and Marxist parties went hand in hand, as part of the close association between the two and their joint drift toward a thoroughly nonrevolutionary outlook.
The revival of revolutionary Marxism in the Communist movement after the Russian Revolution arrested the drift toward reformism in many other fields but seems only to have exacerbated it in this respect. The Soviet Communists had taken power, in a turn of history unexpected by classical Marxism, in a barely capitalist country where, except in a few industrial centers, technology, production, and even mere organized and disciplined labor processes were weak. The Soviet Union faced catastrophe unless it could develop production and replace the ingrained traditions of the Russian peasantry with systematic habits of social labor. In this situation, the respect and even admiration of Marxists for the scientific technology, the production system, and the organized and regularized labor processes of developed capitalism was if anything heightened. If the old Social Democracy tended to view the capitalist mode of production as an immensely powerful and successful enterprise with which it was necessary to compromise, the Communists tended to view it with equal awe as a source from which it was necessary to learn and borrow, and which would have to be imitated if the Soviet Union were to catch up with capitalism and lay the foundations for socialism.
We need only recall that Lenin himself repeatedly urged the study of Frederick W. Taylor's “scientific management," with an eye toward utilizing it in Soviet industry. The Taylor system, he said, "like all capitalist progress, is a combination of the refined brutality of bourgeois exploitation and a number of the greatest scientific achievements in the field of analyzing mechanical motions during work, the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the elaboration of correct methods of work, the introduction of the best system of accounting and control, etc. The Soviet Republic must at all costs adopt all that is valuable in the achievements of science and technology in this field. The possibility of building socialism depends exactly upon our success in combining the Soviet power and the Soviet Organization of administration with the up-to-date achievements of capitalism. We must organize in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out and adapt it to our ends." In practice, Soviet industrialization imitated the capitalist model; and as industrialization advanced the structure lost its provisional character and the Soviet Union settled down to an organization of labor differing only in details from that of the capitalist countries, so that the Soviet working population bears all the stigmata of the Western working classes. In the process, the ideological effect was felt throughout world Marxism: the technology of capitalism, which Marx had treated with cautious reserve, and the organization and administration of labor, which he had treated with passionate hostility, became relatively acceptable. Now the revolution against capitalism was increasingly conceived as a matter of stripping from the highly productive capitalist mechanism certain “excrescences,"improving the conditions of work, adding to the factory organization a formal structure of "workers' control," and replacing the capitalist mechanisms of accumulation and distribution with socialist planning.
At any rate and whatever the precise factors at work, the critique of the capitalist mode of production, originally the most trenchant weapon of Marxism, gradually lost its cutting edge as the Marxist analysis ofthe class structure of society failed to keep pace with the rapid process of change. It has now become a commonplace to assert that Marxism was adequate only for the definition of the “industrial proletariat," and that with the relative shrinkage of that proletariat in size and social weight, Marxism, at least in this respect, has become “outmoded." As a result of this uncorrected obsolescence, Marxism became weakest at the very point where it had originally been strongest.
During the past decade there has been a renewal of interest on the Left in work processes and the ways in which they are organized. This may be attributed to a number of causes. The headlong rush of capital accumulation which has proceeded relatively without check since World War II in Western Europe, the United States, and Japan has removed from the center of radical attention those notions of the imminent “breakdown" and “collapse" of the capitalist system which dominated radical thought during the decades following World War I. The bankruptcy of Soviet Communist ideology has opened the way for a neo-Marxism which has attempted fresh approaches to the problems of capitalism and socialism. In particular, the discussions of the organization of labor in Cuba in the mid-sixties, and the Cultural Revolution in China shortly thereafter, went beyond the preoccupation with the equalitarian distribution of the products of social labor and brought to the fore the idea of a revolution in the organization of social production. And finally, the new wave of radicalism of the 1960s was animated by its own peculiar and in some ways unprecedented concerns. Since the discontents of youth, intellectuals, feminists, ghetto populations, etc., were produced not by the “breakdown" of capitalism but by capitalism functioning at the top of its form, so to speak, working at its most rapid and energetic pace, the focus of rebellion was now somewhat different from that of the past. At least in part, dissatisfaction centered not so much on capitalism's inability to provide work as on the work it provides, not on the collapse of its productive processes but on the appalling effects of these processes at their most “successful." It is not that the pressures of poverty, unemployment, and want have been eliminatedfar from it——but rather that these have been supplemented by a discontent which cannot be touched by providing more prosperity and jobs because these are the very things that produced this discontent in the first place.
Introduction
9