{"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":"156 / 157","pdf_page":91,"physical_index":91,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"05bca9987709a407dc4ddae021ba57dc234b8f5f1a6a2af7d9014b4e04b821ae"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"Those who have tried to see in continuous-process industry (as it is organized in the capitalist mode of production) the method, at last discovered, whereby the worker is restored to his human birthright, but who at the same time are aware of the low pay and undemanding duties in these occupations, wrestle with the dilemma to no avail. Thus Joan Woodward:\n\nThe main problem in this type of industry appeared to be establishing the occupational status of the plant operators; these men, although often highly skilled, were not formally recognized as skilled outside their own firm. The traditional differentiation between the skilled and the semi-skilled worker does not allow for a situation in which the manual and motor elements of skill have been taken out of the main production task, while the conceptual and perceptual elements remain.\n\nThe skill of a plant operator is of the perceptual and conceptual kind in that over a period of time he has to learn to absorb a great deal of information and to act on it continuously. But, this skill not being recognized formally, the plant operator has to be recruited as a semi-skilled worker at a comparatively low rate of pay. Several firms felt that this created difficulties for them, as in the competitive labour situation of the area it was very difficult to find and keep men of sufficiently high calibre at this low figure. A job in which the emphasis is laid more on the intellectual elements of skill, and which calls for articulation in both speech and writing, can attract only those with the minimum educational 46 qualifications.\n\nHere we are told that the chemical process operator is not formally credited with a high degree of skill because the nature of that skill is chiefly intellectual, conceptual, requires education, etc. But in capitalist society, it is these very elements which are always accorded a higher degree of recognition than manual skills; why not in this case? We are further told that this problem exists only outside the firm; within the firm the skill is presumably recognized and appreciated. But despite this, “the plant operator has to be recruited as a semi-skilled worker at a comparatively low rate of pay.\" The exact nature of the constraint is not specified, and so we must take leave to doubt it. Is not the matter better understood as being exactly what it seems, without resort to convoluted theorizing? Those who, unlike Joan Woodward, are not even aware of the low pay, the low “occupational status,\" and the limited training of the chemical operator in their ignorance manage much more smoothly the feat of seeing him as the worker who now controls entire factories, needs much \"technical knowledge,\" and represents a reversal of the trend of modern industry.\n\nConsidered only in their physical aspect, machines are nothing but developed instruments of production whereby humankind increases the effectiveness of its labor. Just as in producing a simple tool the worker fashions, preparatory to the direct production process itself, an aid for that process, in the same way the production of modern means of production, no matter how complex or developed, represents the expenditure of labor time not for the direct making of the product but for the making of instruments to help in the making of the product or service. This past labor, incorporated into instruments ofproduction, imparts its value to the product piecemeal, as it is used up in productionsa fact which the capitalist recognizes in the depreciation allowance.\n\nOnce labor has been embodied in instruments of production and enters the further processes of labor to play its role there, it may be called, following Marx, dead labor, to distinguish it from the living labor which takes part directly in production. Now, as a material process, production which makes use of tools, instruments, machinery, buildings, etc. is an ordinary and easily comprehensible activity: living labor making use of its own past stored-up labor to carry on production. As such a purely physical process, its terms are as clear as the relation between the first axes or potter's wheels and the men and women who used them.\n\nBut within the framework of capitalist social relations, all this is reversed The means of production become the property of the capitalist, and thus past or dead labor takes the form of capital. The purely physical relationship assumes the social form given to it by capitalism and itself begins to be altered. The ideal toward which capitalism strives is the domination of dead labor over living labor. In the beginning this ideal is seldom realized, but as capitalism develops machinery and makes use of its every suitable technical peculiarity for its own ends, it brings into being this system of the domination of living by dead labor not just as an allegorical expression, not just as the domination of wealth over poverty, of employer over employed, or of capital over labor in the sense of financial or power relationships, but as a physical fact. And this is brought about, as we have seen, by the incessant drive to enlarge and perfect machinery on the one hand, and to diminish the worker on the other. The expression Marx gave to this process at a time when it was just beginning cannot be improved upon even from the present vantage point of another century of its further development:\n\nEvery kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman. But it is only in the factory system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality. By means of its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the labourer, during the labour-process, in the shape of capital, of dead labour, that dominates, and pumps dry, living labour-power. The separation of the intellectual powers of production from the manual labour, and the conversion of those powers into the might of capital over labour, is, as we have already shown, finally completed by modern industry erected on the foundation of machinery. The special skill of each individual insignificant factory operative vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity before the science, the gigantic physical forces, and the mass of labour that are embodied in the factory mechanism and, together with that mechanism, constitute the power of the “master.”47\n\n156\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nMachinery\n\n157","previous_page":90,"next_page":92}