{"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":318,"pdf_page":172,"physical_index":172,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"006fa2435a5ae6f293b7a8f741c16f38499f3019ec800d03027bf00fe9263bb5"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"Now once capitalists take control of the process of production, they seek out every means whereby the output of the worker will be increased so that an ever larger surplus may remain with them. At first this was accomplished by prolonging the working day, but in more recent times intensive methods have replaced extensive ones. This means the reduction of the labor time required in the production process, and it means also the cheapening of labor power. How is labor power cheapened? There are a variety of ways. By far the most important in modern production is the breakdown of complex processes into simple tasks that are performed by workers whose knowledge is virtually nil, whose so-called training is brief, and who may thereby be treated as interchangeable parts. In this way the requirements of production are satisfied not through small pools of highly skilled labor in each craft but by labor of the simplest sort. The consequence is that for most jobs the whole of society becomes a labor pool upon which to draw, and this helps to keep the value of labor power at the level of subsistence for the individual or below the level of subsistence for the family.\n\nIn speaking in this way about the capitalists or the corporate organization of capitalism it is not my intention to assault them personally as conscienceless or to malign them. Taken as a class they are no doubt, like all of us, only what society makes of them. But this is precisely the point—we must deal not with the capitalist as a person but with the way the capitalist mode of production operates and the conduct it enforces upon the capitalists themselves. After Henry Ford introduced the moving conveyor (between 1912 and 1914) as the means of sub-assembly and final assembly of automobiles, none of the hundreds of automobile firms then in existence could hope to continue long in business without adopting this process. From the moment the first food-retailing organization adopted self-service methods of shelving and checking out commodities in its stores, no food-retailing organization could hope to prosper or perhaps even to survive without these methods. Or, to take as an instance a process that is just now getting underway, every office manager now understands that since the means have become available to segregate secretarial work in specialized production units connected to executive offices by modern telephonic and recording equipment, no office employing a large number of scattered secretaries can long afford to neglect this innovation; and many are beginning to reorganize secretarial work as the office equivalent of factory production work.\n\nThus the tendency of the capitalist mode of production from its earliest days some 200 or 250 years ago to the present, when this tendency has become a headlong rush, is the incessant breakdown of labor processes into simplified operations taught to workers as tasks. This leads to the conversion of the greatest possible mass of labor into work of the most elementary form, labor from which all conceptual elements have been removed and along with them most of the skill, knowledge, and understanding of production processes. Thus the more complex the process becomes, the less the worker understands. The more science is incorporated into technology, the less science the worker possesses; and the more machinery that has been developed as an aid to labor, the more labor becomes a servant of machinery.\n\nAlthough there is a general impression, which is fostered by official academic and journalistic opinion, that all of this is happening because of the rise of scientific technology and the development of machinery, this process of degradation of work is not really dependent upon technology at all. It will be remembered that this mode of the organization of labor arose in the workshops of early capitalism at a time when modern technology did not exist. One need only read Adam Smith's description of the division of labor in pin manufacture to see that the key to the matter is the organization of labor. In modern industry the worst examples of the division of labor are still found chiefly in those processes which exist in the gap left open by technology, those things which cannot be mechanized or cannot be economically mechanized by the capitalists at the prevailing rates of pay. Let us just remind ourselves that one of the most abominable forms of labor, the one in fact that is often mistakenly taken as an instance of the horrors of modern machinery, the assembly line, is just such a case—it has little or nothing to do with machinery since it is a hand process of the crudest sort, its technological feature being merely a primitive device for hauling the work past the worker. Even this device is dispensable, and dispensed with, in the case of smaller and lighter units of production which can be pushed along the work tables to the next station. As a rule, however, the powered endless belt or chain conveyor is favored by management not just as an aid to labor, but chiefly because it enables management to control the pace of production.\n\nAppendix 2 319\n\n318\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital","previous_page":null,"next_page":null}