{"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":11,"pdf_page":18,"physical_index":18,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"cfb6f8369b8becb60e9288c751681d7df801a01cb5183c712f11bc66f2bea3af"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"Technology and Society\n\nIn this book, we will be concerned entirely with the development of the processes of production, and of labor processes in general, in capitalist society. The question at once arises as to the place of the countries of the Soviet bloc in relation to this analysis. I have already briefly indicated my view that the organization of labor in the Soviet Union (to which I refer for convenience in the singular although its characteristics are to be found in all the countries of the Soviet bloc and, in some degree, in all countries where capitalist property relations have been overthrown) differs little from the organization of labor in capitalist countries. Commenting on this aspect ofSoviet life, Georges Friedmann the French sociologist and long-time student of the anatomy of work, wrote:\n\n. . . it appears that planned economies of the Soviet type, including those of the peoples’ democracies of Eastern Europe, and more and more of communist China,\\* contain large sectors in which technical progress has multiplied the number of simplified jobs . . . and has thus started, and is developing, that separation between planning and execution which seems to be in our day a common denominator linking all industrial societies together, however differ-2   \nent their populations and structures.\n\nAn American sociologist reports that “Soviet economists and social scientists I met in Moscow . . . insisted that job satisfaction studies are irrelevant in a society in which the workers own the means of production.\"3 At the same time, a growing body of Westernized sociological and management literature in the Soviet Union seeks to make explicit the debt of Soviet society to capitalist industrial practice.\\* This debt need hardly be demonstrated, since the descriptive and apologetic literature of Soviet society, while it presents claims of superiority to capitalist practice in terms of worker “ownership\" of the means of production, health and safety practices, rational planning, and the like, does not claim substantial differences in terms of the organization and division of labor.\n\nThe similarity of Soviet and traditional capitalist practice strongly encourages the conclusion that there is no other way in which modern industry can be organized. And this conclusion had already been sufficiently encouraged by the tendency of modern social science to accept all that is real as necessary, all that exists as inevitable, and thus the present mode of production as eternal. In its most complete form, this view appears as a veritable technological determinism: the attributes of modern society are seen as issuing directly from smokestacks, machine tools, and computers. We are, as a result, presented with the theory of a societas ex machina, not only a “determinism\" but a despotism of the machine. In a book by four social scientists (among them Clark Kerr), we read: “Industrialization in any country displays many of the same features. Industrializing countries are more nearly like each other, however varied they may be, than they are like commercial or agricultural or hunting and fishing economies. . . . One of the central traits is the inevitable and eternal separation of industrial men into managers and the managed.\" This leaves nothing to the imagination. The antagonistic relations of production are not only inevitable, but, we are told in almost religious language, eternal.\\*\\*\n\nThe problem which this presents is obviously an important one for a work such as this, but it is doubtful that it can be illuminated or solved by vaulting\n\n10 Labor and Monopoly Capital\n\nIntroduction\n\n11\n\n\\* See, for example, a recent influential volume called Organization and Management: A Sociological Analysis of Western Theories. The author adopts as his formal framework Lenin's attitude toward Taylorism (which condemned its use in \"bourgeois exploitation\" but urged that it be studied and everything of value adopted). Bearing this convenient warrant, he makes the expected condemnations in a perfunctory way, but the total spirit of the book is one of absorption in Western management theory and fascination with its administrative and manipulative aspects. Thus he adopts not just the spirit but the language, and Marx's investigation of capitalist society becomes for the enthusiastic author “a splendid example of a systems analysis,\"while Marx himself, “in creating dialectical materialism also laid the foundations of systems analysis.\"4\n\n\\*\\* In a polemic against anarchism called “On Authority,\" Frederick Engels wrote in 1873: “If man, by dint ofhis knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the forces of nature, the latter avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him, in so far as he employs them, to a veritable despotism independent of all social organization. Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry\n\n\\* This was written during the 1950s, before China's break with the Soviet Union and before the Cultural Revolution.","previous_page":null,"next_page":null}