{"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":"282 / 283","pdf_page":154,"physical_index":154,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"5ef7b16365a75441d11b3dc718ef143df57d0d30885c3245999e6f5e868f5a8e"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"In such occupations, the proletarian form begins to assert itself and to impress itself upon the consciousness of these employees. Feeling the insecurities of their role as sellers of labor power and the frustrations of a controlled and mechanically organized workplace, they begin, despite their remaining privileges, to know those symptoms of dissociation which are popularly called “alienation\" and which the working class has lived with for so long that they have become part of its second nature.\n\nIn the chapter devoted to clerical labor, we have already described the manner in which an intermediate stratum was enlarged into a mass of working-class employment, and in the process divested of all its privileges and intermediate characteristics. It is not necessary to anticipate here a similar evolution of the specialized and lower-managerial employees in any near-term future. But it should be recognized that the difficulties experienced by those who, in the period before World War I, attempted to arrive at a “definition\" of the class position of clerical employees are somewhat the same as the difficulties one must today confront in defining the intermediate strata of modern employment. These difficulties arise, in the last analysis, from the fact that classes, the class structure, the social structure as a whole, are not fixed entities but rather ongoing processes, rich in change, transition, variation, and incapable of being encapsulated in formulas, no matter how analytically proper such formulas may be.\\* The analysis of this process requires an understanding of the internal relations and connections which serve as its motive power, so that its direction as a process may be understood. Only secondarily does the problem arise of“defining\" the place of particular elements in the process, and this problem cannot always be solved neatly and definitively, nor, it should be added, does science require that it must be so solved.\n\nNotes\n\n282\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nThe \"Middle Layers\" of Employment\n\n283\n\n\\* The first major instance of this came with the Depression of the 1930s, but in the rapid surge of capital accumulation and the transformation of industry that began with the Second World War this tendency was overcome. By the end of the 1960s, however, rising rates of unemployment among “professionals\" of various kinds once more brought home to them that they were not the free agents they thought they were, who deigned to “associate themselves\" with one or another corporation, but truly part of a labor market, hired and fired like those beneath them.\n\n\\* E. P. Thompson writes: “There is today an ever-present temptation to suppose that class is a thing. This was not Marx's meaning, in his own historical writing, yet the error vitiates much latter-day ‘Marxist' writing. ‘It,' the working class, is assumed to have a real existence, which can be defined almost mathematicallyso many men who stand in a certain relation to the means of production. . . .\n\n\"If we remember that class is a relationship, and not a thing, we cannot think in this way.\"1","previous_page":153,"next_page":155}