{"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":"280 / 281","pdf_page":153,"physical_index":153,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"e4a06ef6afba292d3a56eb6d982db9b0d7a3704787265a60dc65349b80255243"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"The purchase and sale of labor power is the classic form for the creation and continued existence of the working class. Insofar as the working class is concerned, this form embodies social relations of production, the relations of subordination to authority and exploitation. We must now consider the possibility of the same form being made to conceal, embody, and express other relations of production. To take a most extreme example, the fact that the operating executives of a giant corporation are employed by that corporation, and in that capacity do not own its plants and bank accounts, is merely the form given to capitalist rule in modern society. These operating executives, by virtue of their high managerial positions, personal investment portfolios, independent power of decision, place in the hierarchy of the labor process, position in the community of capitalists at large, etc., etc., are the rulers of industry, act “professionally\" for capital, and are themselves part of the class that personifies capital and employs labor. Their formal attribute of being part of the same payroll as the production workers, clerks, and porters of the corporation no more robs them of the powers of decision and command over the others in the enterprise than does the fact that the general, like the private, wears the military uniform, or the pope and cardinal pronounce the same liturgy as the parish priest. The form of hired employment gives expression to two totally different realities: in one case, capital hires a “labor force\" whose duty it is to work, under external direction, to increase capital; in the other, by a process of selection within the capitalist class and chiefly from its own ranks, capital chooses a management staff to represent it on the spot, and in representing it to supervise and organize the labors of the working population.\n\nThus far the difference is clear, but between these two extremes there is a range of intermediate categories, sharing the characteristics of worker on the one side and manager on the other in varying degrees. The gradations of position in the line of management may be seen chiefly in terms of authority, while gradations in staff positions are indicated by the levels of technical expertise. Since the authority and expertise of the middle ranks in the capitalist corporation represent an unavoidable delegation of responsibility, the position of such functionaries may best be judged by their relation to the power and wealth that commands them from above, and to the mass of labor beneath them which they in turn help to control, command, and organize. Their pay level is significant because beyond a certain point it, like the pay of the commanders of the corporation, clearly represents not just the exchange of their labor power for money—a commodity exchange—but a share in the surplus produced in the corporation, and thus is intended to attach them to the success or failure of the corporation and give them a “management stake,\" even if a small one, The same is true insofar as they share in a recognized guarantee of employment, in the semi-independence of their mode of labor within the production process, in authority over the labor of others, the right to hire and fire, and the other prerogatives of command.\n\nJudged by these and similar standards, the middle levels of administrative and technical employment clearly encompass a broad range of types. The engineering heads who design the production process merge into management at the top, and the hierarchy that stretches beneath them terminates in large drafting and design rooms which have been organized, in many instances, on the same principles as the factory or office production line, and are staffed by serried ranks of detail workers whose pay scales, if they are better than those of factory operatives or clerical workers, are perhaps not so good as those of craftsmen, and who dispose oflittle more working independence and authority than the production worker. In between are the subalterns and noncommissioned officers of the industrial army, the foremen, the petty “managers\" of all sorts, the technical specialists who retain, if not authority, at least a tenuous working independence. And outside the corporations proper, in governmental, educational, and health establishments, these gradations are reproduced in forms peculiar to the work processes carried on in each of these areas.\n\nAmong these intermediate groupings are parceled out the bits of specialized knowledge and delegated authority without which the machinery of production, distribution, and administration would cease to operate. Each of the groupings serves as the recruiting ground for those above, up to and including top management. Their conditions of employment are affected by the need of top management to have within its orbit buffer layers, responsive and “loyal\" subordinates, transmission agents for the exercise of control and the collection of information, so that management does not confront unaided a hostile or indifferent mass. These conditions are affected, moreover, by the privileged market position which specialized and technically trained labor possesses in the earlier phase of its development, at a time when the supply of such labor is only in the process of catching up with the needs of capital accumulation. All in all, therefore, those in this area of capitalist employment enjoy, in greater or lesser degree depending upon their specific place in the hierarchy, the privileges of exemption from the worst features of the proletarian situation, including, as a rule, significantly higher scales of pay.\n\nIf we are to call this a “new middle class,\" however, as many have done, we must do so with certain reservations. The old middle class occupied that position by virtue of its place outside the polar class structure; it possessed the attributes of neither capitalist nor worker; it played no direct role in the capital accumulation process, whether on one side or the other. This “new middle class,\" by contrast, occupies its intermediate position not because it is outsíde the process of increasing capital, but because, as part of this process, it takes its characteristics from both sides. Not only does it receive its petty share in the prerogatives and rewards of capital, but it also bears the mark of the proletarian condition. For these employees the social form taken by their work, their true place in the relations of production, their fundamental condition of subordination as so much hired labor, increasingly makes itself felt, especially in the mass occupations that are part of this stratum. We may cite here particularly the mass employments of draftsmen and technicians, engineers and accountants, nurses and teachers, and the multiplying ranks of supervisors, foremen, and petty managers. First, these become part of a mass labor market that assumes the characteristics of all labor markets, including the necessary existence of a reserve army of unemployed exercising a downward pressure on pay levels.\\* And second, capital, as soon as it disposes of a mass of labor in any specialtya mass adequate in size to repay the application of its principles of the technical division of labor and hierarchical control over execution by means of a firm grasp on the links of conception—subjects that specialty to some of the forms of “rationalization\" characteristic of the capitalist mode of production.\n\n280\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nThe \"Middle Layers\" of Employment\n\n281","previous_page":152,"next_page":154}