{"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":"198 / 199","pdf_page":112,"physical_index":112,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"dc594211fd45fff8c66981bd37b46cf308d78dc81f5a28f32a05d30e7b747370"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"2. The internationalization of capitalwith respect to markets, materials, and investments—rapidly created a situation of economic competition which brought in its wake military clashes among capitalist countries. At the same time the spread of revolutionary movements in the countries dominated by foreign capital gave to all capitalist countries an interest in policing the world structure of imperialism. In this situation, the traditional concept of a peacetime military establishment supplemented by war mobilization in time of need eventually gave way, because of the unremitting crisis nature of military needs, to a permanent war mobilization as the ordinary posture. This meshed with the need for a government guarantee of“effective demand,\" and provided a form of absorption of the economic surplus acceptable to the capitalist class.\\* Like other aspects of monopoly capitalism, this one too was pioneered by Germany (during the Nazi era in the 1930s) and has been practiced on a grand scale by the United States since World War II.\n\n3. Within capitalist nations, poverty and insecurity have become more or less permanent features of social life, and have grown beyond the ability of private philanthropies to cope with them. Since these and other sources of discontent are concentrated in great cities and, if allowed to persist without amelioration, threaten the very existence of the social structure, the government intervenes to sustain life and relieve insecurity. Characteristically, the disputes within the capitalist class over this issue, including disagreements over the scale, scope, and auspices of the welfare measures to be adopted, offer an arena for political agitation which engages the working population as well, and offers a substitute for the revolutionary movements which would soon gain ground if the rulers followed a more traditional laissez-faire course.\n\n4. With the rapid urbanization of society, and the acceleration of the pace of economic and social life, the need for other government-provided services has increased and the number and variety of these has thereby multiplied. Foremost among these services is education, which has assumed a much enlarged role in the era of monopoly capitalism. The place of educational services in catering to the occupational needs of capitalist society will be treated in a later section of this book, but here we must mention another important function of the educational structure: with the disappearance of farm and small-town life as the major arenas of child-rearing, the responsibility for the care and socialization of children has become increasingly institutionalized. The minimum requirements for “functioning\" in a modern urban environment—both as workers and as consumers—are imparted to children in an institutional setting rather than in the family or the community. At the same time, what the child must learn is no longer adaptation to the slow round of seasonal labor in an immediately natural environment, but rather adaptation to a speedy and intricate social machinery which is not adjusted to social humanity in general, let alone to the individual, but dictates the rounds of production, consumption, survival, and amusement. Whatever the formal educational content of the curriculum, it is in this respect not so much what the child learns that is important as what he or she becomes wise to. In school, the child and the adolescent practice what they will later be called upon to do as adults: the conformity to routines, the manner in which they will be expected to snatch from the fast-moving machinery their needs and wants.\\*\n\nThe school system which provides this as well as other forms of training is only one of the services which are necessarily expanded in the industrialization and urbanization of society and in the specifically capitalist form taken by these transformations. Public health, postal, and many other government functions are similarly expanded by the needs of an intricate and delicately balanced social structure which has no means of social coordination or planning other than the internal corporate planning of the monopolies that provide the skeletal structure of the economy. And many of these “services,\" such as prisons, police, and “social work,\" expand extraordinarily because of the embittered and antagonistic social life of the cities.\n\n198\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nThe Role of the State\n\n199\n\n\\* This is a way oflife that has seldom been expressed more exactly than by Veblen: “. . . the consumer,' as the denizens of these machine-made communities are called, is required to conform to this network of standardisations in his demand and uses of them. . . . To take effectual advantage of what is offered as the wheels of routine go round, in the way of work and play, livelihood and recreation, he must know by facile habituation what is going on and how and in what quantities and at what price and where and when, and for the best effect he must adapt his movements with skilled exactitude and a cool mechanical insight to the nicely balanced moving equilibrium of the mechanical processes engaged. To live—not to say at ease—under the exigencies of this machinemade routine requires a measure of consistent training in the mechanical apprehension of things. The mere mechanics of conformity to the schedule of living implies a degree of trained insight and facile strategy in all manner of quantitative adjustments and adaptations, particularly at the larger centres of population, where the routine is more comprehensive and elaborate.\"3\n\n\\* Business Week once explained this as follows: “There's a tremendous social and economic difference between welfare pump priming and military pump priming. . . . Military spending doesn't really alter the structure of the economy. It goes through the regular channels. As far as a business man is concerned, a munitions order from the government is much like an order from a private customer.\" Spending for public works and public welfare, on the other hand, “makes new channels of its own. It creates new institutions. It redistributes income. It shifts demand from one industry to another. It changes the whole economic pattern. . . .\"2","previous_page":111,"next_page":113}