{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title":"Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0853459401","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","uuid":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title":"Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century","normalized_title":"laborandmonopolycapitalthedegradationofworkinthetwentiethcentury","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0853459401","isbns":["0853459401"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Labor%20and%20Monopoly%20Capital%20The%20Degradation%20of%20Work%20in%20the%20Twentieth%20Century","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/search"},"page":{"printed_page":107,"pdf_page":66,"physical_index":66,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"df620105bb88b309118a1f967c2981635e0e66656eb206cc616c10dab3b8c54d"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"The Scientific-Technical Revolution\n\nConsidered from a technical point of view, all production depends upon the physical, chemical, and biological properties of materials and the processes which can be based upon them. Management, in its activities as an organizer of labor, does not deal directly with this aspect of production; it merely provides the formal structure for the production process. But the process is not complete without its content, which is a matter of technique. This technique, as has been noted, is at first that of skill, of craft, and later assumes an increasingly scientific character as knowledge of natural laws grows and displaces the scrappy knowledge and fixed tradition of craftsmanship. The transformation of labor from a basis of skill to a basis of science may thus be said to incorporate a content supplied by a scientific and engineering revolution within a form supplied by the rigorous division and subdivision of labor favored by capitalist management.\n\nWith the rise of modern industry, Marx wrote, the “varied, apparently unconnected, and petrified forms of the industrial processes now resolved themselves into so many conscious and systematic applications of natural science to the attainment of given useful effects.\"¹ But, like many of Marx's most illuminating observations, this was in his own day more an anticipatory and prophetic insight than a description of reality. The age of“conscious and systematic applications of natural science\" had barely announced its arrival when these words were published in 1867. The last two decades of the nineteenth century form a watershed marking so great a change in the role of science in production that the contrastdespite similarities which connect both periods of capitalism—can hardly be exaggerated.\n\nScience is the last—and after labor the most important——social property to be turned into an adjunct of capital. The story of its conversion from the province of amateurs, “philosophers,\" tinkerers, and seekers after knowledge to its present highly organized and lavishly financed state is largely the story of its incorporation into the capitalist firm and subsidiary organizations. At first science costs the capitalist nothing, since he merely exploits the accumulated knowledge of the physical sciences, but later the capitalist systematically organizes and harnesses science, paying for scientific education, research, laboratories, etc., out of the huge surplus social product which either belongs directly to him or which the capitalist class as a whole controls in the form of tax revenues. A formerly relatively free-floating social endéavor is integrated into production and the market.\n\nChapter 7\n\n107","previous_page":null,"next_page":null}