Braverman is also criticized for paying too little attention to the subjective side of work and workers' own struggles. As a former working-class activist, Braverman obviously did not undervalue the issue of workers’ consciousness. On the contrary, he believed that “the value of any analysis of the composition and social trends within the working population can only lie in precisely how well it helps us to answer questions about class consciousness." Marxism, he held, is after all “a theory of revolution and thus a tool of combat."32In Labor and Monopoly Capital itself, however, he imposed, as any careful author will do, certain limitations on his own research. Workers' political sensibilities, trade union organization, working-class parties, socialist strategy, and comparable issues lay beyond the designated scope of Labor and Monopoly Capital.
Nonetheless, Labor and Monopoly Capital, far from avoiding the question of class struggle, actually deepens our appreciation of the struggle between classes. Like Marx, Braverman considered class related above all to the process of exploitation, to the way in which the surplus product is extracted from the direct producer. Class struggle does not simply occur within the wider public sphere in which classes become self-conscious and operate as political actors, but also in daily life, within the labor process itself, where control over production, as measured in units of time as small as ten-thousandths of a second (or even smaller), is bitterly contested. Case study after case study has shown that Braverman's analysis illuminates the class struggle at a deeper, more intensive level—a level seldom comprehended by intellectuals but well known to workers.
Others claim, in opposition to Braverman, that Taylorism was a passing managerial strategy, later replaced by Fordism, bureaucratic control, “humanistic" control, or what have you. No doubt there have been important modifications in managerial practice since the time of Taylor.33 Management is quite willing to use more elaborate work rules, credentialism, and so on, to further divide the workers and centralize control. And “worker participation" schemes will be used up to a point ifthey do not contradict the real centralization of authority within management or the final object oflowering labor costs. But a good case can nonetheless be made that Taylor's principles of scientific management remain “the explicit verbalization of the capitalist mode of production."All these other strategies are therefore mere modifications of the tendency toward the polarization of working conditions under monopoly capitalismthat is, the degradation of work for the vast majority and the upgrading of work for a relative few. Braverman, indeed, anticipated the farce of "Quality Work Circles" when he wrote, referring to comparable reforms, "They represent a style of management rather than a genuine change in the position of the worker. They are characterized by a studied pretense of worker participation,’a gracious liberality in allowing the worker to adjust a machine, replace a light bulb, move from one fractional job to another, and to have the illusion of making decisions by choosing among fixed and limited alternatives designed by a management which deliberately leaves insignificant matters open to choice."34
There is enormous pressure to conform to the orthodox view of work, which, though rendered hollow by Braverman's analysis, still remains dominant since it suits the needs of the dominant interests in society. The same John Dunlop who co-authored Industrialism and Industrial Man with Clark Kerr and others went on to become U.S. Secretary ofLabor (1975-1976) and, more recently, chair of the Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations of the U.S. Department of Labor and the Department of Commerce. In its May 1994 report, the Dunlop Commission concluded, "Some technological changes require more skilled workers. Others downgrade existing skills. The current consensus is that the former predominates, so that technology has raised the demand for skills, responsibility, and knowledge."3 In the face of this kind of ongoing official obfuscation, Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital remains a truly revolutionary work—as revolutionary today as it was when it was first published a quarter-century ago.
Notes
XX
Labor and Monopoly Capital
New Introduction xxi