{"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":143,"pdf_page":84,"physical_index":84,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"b4134d54ea5235458d079a49b58c0335cf32206ccbdd9c043471a906be33c5cb"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"The most advanced methods of science and rational calculation in the hands of a social system that is at odds with human needs produce nothing but irrationality; the more advanced the science and the more rational the calculations, the more swiftly and calamitously is this irrationality engendered. Like Captain Ahab, the capitalist can say, “All my means are sane, my motives and object mad.\"\n\nThe drive for increased productivity inheres in each capitalist firm by virtue of its purpose as an organization for the expansion of capital; it is moreover enforced upon laggards by the threats of national and international competition. In this setting, the development of technology takes the form of a headlong rush in which social effects are largely disregarded, priorities are set only by the criteria of profitability, and the equitable spread, reasonable assimilation, and selective appropriation of the fruits of science, considered from the social point of view, remain the visions of helpless idealists.\\* Each advance in productivity shrinks the number of truly productive workers, enlarges the number of workers who are available to be utilized in the struggles between corporations over the distribution of the surplus, expands the use of labor in wasteful employment or no employment at all, and gives to all society the form of an inverted pyramid resting upon an ever narrower base of useful labor. Yet no matter how rapidly productivity may grow, no matter how miraculous the contributions of science to this development, no satisfactory level can ever be attained. Thus, a century after the beginning of the scientifictechnical revolution and almost two centuries after the Industrial Revolution, the problem for capitalism which towers over all others, and which takes the form of a crisis threatening survival itself, remains: more productivity. In Business Week we read: \"Five years of inflation, recession, and uncertain recovery have forced the men who manage U.S. business and the men who make U.S. economic policy to a painful conclusion: Somehow the nation must make a quantum jump in efficiency. It must get more output from its men and machines.\"24 The very “efficiency” which produced the crises is here seen as the only answer to it. The machine which, working at top speed, threatens to fly apart is to be preserved from that threat by running it even faster. Each capitalist nation will further degrade its own working population and social life in an attempt to save a social system which, like the very planets in their orbits, will fall to its destruction if it slows in its velocity. Here we have the reductio ad absurdum of capitalist efficiency, and the expression in concrete terms of the insoluble contradiction that exists between the development of the means of production and the social relations of production that characterize capitalism.\n\nIn pursuit of this “solution,\" industry, trade, and offices rationalize, mechanize, innovate, and revolutionize the labor process to a truly astonishing degree. The methods used are as various as the resources of science itself. And since these resources are so vast, where they cannot accomplish a large saving of labor by a revolution in production they achieve the same effect by a degradation of the product.\n\nThe construction industry, for example, divides its efforts between the destruction of sound buildings and their replacement with shoddy structures whose total life span will not equal the useful life remaining to the demolished buildings. This industry, which because of the nature of its processes is still largely in the era of hand craftsmanship supplemented by powered hand tools, the lowest level of mechanization, makes continual and determined efforts to climb out of this disadvantageous position. It favors new materials, especially plastics, painting and plastering with spray guns (a single spray plasterer keeps a number of workers busy smoothing), and the pre-assembly of as many elements as possible on a factory basis (a carpenter can install six to ten prefabricated door assemblies, pre-hung in the frames with hardware already in place, in the time it takes to hang a single door by conventional methods; and in the process becomes a doorhanger and ceases to be a carpenter). The trend of dwelling construction is best exemplified by the rapidly growing “mobile home\" segment of the industry. The “mobile home\" is a mass-produced factory product; of the three parties involved—the workers, the manufacturers, and the residents—only the middle one has any advantage to show from the transaction. Yet mobile homes are spreading over the landscape triumphantly, and one may easily predict for them a still greater future because of the high degree of “efficiency\" with which they allocate labor and capital.\n\nA quarter-century ago, Siegfried Giedion described the transformation of the crusty, wholesome loaf of bread into a “product\" with the “resiliency of a rubber sponge.\"25 But the production process for the manufacture of this bread is a triumph of the factory arts. Continuous mixing, reduction of brew fermentation time, dough which is metered, extruded, divided, and panned to the accuracy of a gram in the pound, conveyorized baking and automatic depanning, cooling, slicing, wrapping, and labelling have effectively rid the bakery of the troublesome and unprofitable arts of the baker, and have replaced the baker himself with engineers on the one hand and factory operatives on the other. The speed with which the operation is conducted is a marvel of efficiency, and, apart from its effects on the worker, if only it were not necessary for the people to consume the “product\" the whole thing could be considered a resounding success.\n\n142 Labor and Monopoly Capital\n\nMachinery\n\n143\n\n\\* The occasional dream that flickers in the minds of those who have assimilated the capitalist way of looking at all problems is quickly extinguished by “practical\" considerations. Thus Alfred Marshall, early in the present epoch: “In fact, if all the world were a single people, with one purpose and that the highest, it might be well to put some check on this rapid supersession of human skill; even at the expense of delaying the increase of material comforts and luxuries. But Britain can exist only by obtaining her necessary supplies of food and raw products in return for the exportation of manufactures: and her hold on external markets can be maintained only by her use of the most effective processes known.\"23 The impulse to view society from a human standpoint, “a single people, with one purpose and that the highest,\" does Marshall credit, but he can entertain it no longer than is necessary to dismiss it from the standpoint of British capitalism, whose single impulse, and that the lowest, requires first of all the sacrifice of the British people.","previous_page":null,"next_page":null}