{"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":"264 / 265","pdf_page":145,"physical_index":145,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"4d69aff2128404071ebd3ddf5a7a52507d2beab6b91a7de7a6d0d4dc6fb3a4f0"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"It takes but a moment's reflection to see that the new mass working-class occupations tend to grow, not in contradiction to the speedy mechanization and “automation\" of industry, but in harmony with it. As a result of this mechanization, the numbers of workers required by the manufacturing, mining, transportation, communications, public utilities, and even to some extent construction industries are held down and do not increase as rapidly as their material products, so that the labor requirements of these industries, measured as a proportion of the total employed population, are held in check. Thus the scientific-technological revolution possesses, in the long run, this trait: that with its spread, the proportion of the population connected with scientifically and technologically advanced industry, even if only in the form of helots, eventually shrinks. The fastest growing industrial and occupational sectors in the “automated” age tend, therefore, in the long run to be those labor-intensive areas which have not yet been or cannot be subjected to high technology.\n\nThe masses of labor sloughed off by the rapid mechanization of industry (and this includes not just those who lose their jobs, but, much more important numerically, those who keep coming into the employment market at a time when traditional opportunities for industrial employment are shrinking) furnish the labor supply for the clerical, service, and sales fields. The mechanization of industry produces a relative surplus of population available for employment at the lower pay rates that characterize these new mass occupations. In other words, as capital moves into new fields in search of profitable investment, the laws of capital accumulation in the older fields operate to bring into existence the “labor force\" required by capital in its new incarnations. This process was given its classic formulation by Marx in the chapter of the first volume of Capital called “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation,\" in the section in which he describes the continuous formation in capitalist production, after it emerges from its “childhood,\" of a “relative surplus-population.\" We have already extracted a portion of this passage in Chapter 11, but since Marx's description of the movement of capital and labor in the nineteenth century is extraordinarily helpful for understanding our present theme, and since the matter can hardly be given a more forceful and precise formulation, it bears quotation here at greater length:\n\nBut if a surplus labouring population is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus-population becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost, Independently of the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation. With accumulation, and the development of the productiveness of labour that accompanies it, the power of sudden expansion of capital grows also; it grows, not merely because the elasticity of the capital already functioning increases, not merely because the absolute wealth of society expands, of which capital only forms an elastic part, not merely because credit, under every special stimulus, at once places an unusual part of this wealth at the disposal of production in the form of additional capital; it grows, also, because the technical conditions of the process of production themselves—machinery, means of transport, &c.—now admit of the rapidest transformation of masses of surplus-product into additional means of production. The mass of social wealth, overflowing with the advance of accumulation, and transformable into additional capital, thrusts itself frantically into old branches of production, whose market suddenly expands, or into newly formed branches, such as railways, &c., the need for which grows out of the development of the old ones. In all such cases, there must be the possibility of throwing great masses of men suddenly on the decisive points without injury to the scale of production in other spheres. Overpopulation supplies these masses. . . . This increase is effected by the simple process that constantly “sets free\" a part of the labourers; by methods which lessen the number of labourers employed in proportion to the increased production. The whole form of the movement of modern industry depends, therefore, upon the constant transformation of a part of the labouring population into unemployed or half-employed hands.\n\nThose industries and labor processes subjected to mechanization release masses of labor for exploitation in other, generally less mechanized, areas of capital accumulation. With the repeated manifestations of this cycle, labor tends to pile up in the industries and occupations which are less susceptible to engineered improvements in labor productivity. Wage rates in these “new\" industries and occupations are held down by the continuous availability of the relative surplus population created by the steadily increasing productivity of labor in the machine occupations. This in turn encourages the investment of capital in forms of the labor process which require masses of low-wage hand labor. As a result, we see in capitalist industry a secular trend to accumulate labor in those portions of industry and trade which are least affected by the scientific-technical revolution: service work, sales and other forms of marketing, clerical work insofar as it has not yet been mechanized, etc. The paradox that the most rapidly growing mass occupations in an era of scientifictechnical revolution are those which have least to do with science and technology need not surprise us. The purpose of machinery is not to increase but to decrease the number of workers attached to it. Thus it is by no means illogical that with the development of science and technology, the numbers of those cheaply available for dancing attendance upon capital in all of its least mechanized functional forms continues to increase at a rapid pace.\n\n264\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nThe Structure of the Working Class\n\n265","previous_page":144,"next_page":146}