{"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":15,"pdf_page":20,"physical_index":20,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"8d99eba73564b41f9cff7865d256ddede3977a4a4d8ff81b39a85b7374932d06"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"Marx in almost all his historical writing, and while there is no question that he gave primacy to the forces of production in the long sweep of history, the idea that this primacy could be used in a formulistic way in the analysis of history on a day-to-day basis would never have entered his mind.\\*\n\nThose who know Marx's historical method only from a few scattered aphorisms would do well to study Capital in order to see how the relationship between capital as a social form and the capitalist mode of production as a technical organization is treated. Within the historical and analytical limits of capitalism, according to Marx's analysis, technology, instead of simply producing social relations, is produced by the social relation represented by capital. The capitalist mode of production is traced by Marx from its beginnings, when it “is hardly to be distinguished, in its earliest stages, from the handicraft trades of the guilds, otherwise than by the greater number of workmen simultaneously employed by one and the same individual capital,\"1o through domestic industry, the manufacturing division of labor, machinery and modern industry, and the factory system, in which the capitalist mode of production is at last fully created and the inherent social form of labor under capitalism “for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality.\"1 From this point of view, the first volume of Capital may be considered a massive essay on how the commodity form, in an adequate social and technological setting, matures into the form of capital, and how the social form of capital, driven to incessant accumulation as the condition for its own existence, completely transforms technology.\\*\\*\n\nIn this analysis the conditions of the oft-quoted aphorism are reversed. If Marx was not in the least embarrassed by this interchange of roles between social forms on the one side and material production processes on the other, but on the contrary moved comfortably among them, it was because—apart from his genius at dialectic—he never took a formulistic view of history, never played with bare and hapless correlatives, “one-to-one relationships,\" and other foolish attempts to master history by means of violent simplifications. Social determinacy does not have the fixity of a chemical reaction, but is a historic process. The concrete and determinate forms of society are indeed “determined\" rather than accidental, but this is the determinacy of the threadby-thread weaving of the fabric of history, not the imposition of external formulas.\n\nThe relevance of these observations for the subject matter of this book is simply this: As the reader will have already understood, it will be argued here that the “mode of production\" we see around us, the manner in which labor processes are organized and carried out, is the “product\" of the social relations we know as capitalist. But the shape of our society, the shape of any given society, is not an instantaneous creation of“laws\" which generate that society on the spot and before our eyes. Every society is a moment in the historical process, and can be grasped only as part of that process. Capitalism, a social form, when it exists in time, space, population, and history, weaves a web of myriad threads; the conditions of its existence form a complex network each of which presupposes many others. It is because of this solid and tangible existence, this concrete form produced by history, no part of which may be changed by artificial suppositions without doing violence to its true mode of existence—it is precisely because of this that it appears to us as “natural,\" “inevitable,\" and “eternal.” And it is only in this sense, as a fabric woven over centuries, that we may say that capitalism “produced\" the present capitalist mode of production. This is a far cry from a ready-made formula which enables us to “deduce\" from a given state of technology a given mode of social organization.\n\nWhat is said of capitalism may also be said of “socialism,\" which does not yet exist anywhere in the classic Marxist sense. The Soviet Union had a revolution, but a revolution under specific social conditions, and almost all of its subsequent history combines progress in technology and production with a retreat from its original revolutionary objectives. This special combination requires its own very specific analysis. In Soviet society, we have the first phenomenal form of an epoch of transition which may well last for centuries and will undoubtedly exhibit many contradictory, complex, and transitional forms. Whatever view one takes of Soviet industrialization, one cannot conscientiously interpret its history, even in its earliest and most revolutionary period, as an attempt to organize labor processes in a way fundamentally different from those of capitalism—and thus as an attempt that came to grief on the rocks of Clark Kerr's eternal verities. One would be hard put to demonstrate that any of the successive Soviet leaderships has ever claimed that such an attempt should be made at this stage of Soviet history.\\* (Here there is an enormous distinction between Soviet and recent Chinese programmatic literature; Khrushchev ridiculed the Chinese plan of incorporating the building of communism into the very process of industrialization as trying to “eat soup with an awl.\" His wit was engaging within the limits of an orthodox Communist conception that dates back, in some respects, to Lenin and before, but his remark is not half so funny now that the Chinese have made their remarkable conception clearer.)\n\n14 Labor and Monopoly Capital\n\nIntroduction\n\n15\n\n\\* In his “Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy,\" uncompleted and never published by Marx and described by Kautsky as “a fragmentary sketch of a treatise that was to have served as an introduction to his main work,\" Marx set down for himself eight paragraphs as “notes on the points to be mentioned here and not to be omitted.\" The fifth reads: “The dialectics of the conceptions productive force (means of production) and relation of production, dialectics whose limits are to be determined and which does not do away with the concrete difference.\" His elaboration of this theme would have been of considerable interest in this connection.\n\n\\*\\* The rediscovery of Marx by bourgeois social science in recent years has brought Marx friends who are almost as little help as his enemies. Thus William L. Zwerman, in a recent book on technology and “organization theory,\" summarizes the Marxian view as follows: \"Marxians presuppose the primacy of industrial technology, treating social relationships (in the first instance the individual organization itself) as secondary, i.e., superstructures.12 This he then attempts to apply to the capitalist firm, precisely the arena in which it has little relevance and in fact where the terms of this relationship\n\nare reversed. In this effort, he resembles a neo-Darwinian attempting to apply to a given social evolution those biological terms which in that context no longer apply. Within the capitalist firm it is the social forms that dominate technology, rather than the other way around.","previous_page":null,"next_page":null}