{"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":7,"pdf_page":16,"physical_index":16,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"cbf7257b0ff0b5a0a83e14f0c5ec830e2021e3c7cae2f9c69e04607f78762225"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"6 Labor and Monopoly Capital\n\nAs the reader will see in the appropriate chapters, I have tried to put this experience to some use in this book. I have also had the benefit of many conversations—with friends, acquaintances, strangers met at social gatherings or while traveling—about their work (and it may be that some of them, if they chance to read this, will now understand why I was curious to the point of rudeness). But while this occupational and conversational background has been useful, I must emphasize that nothing in this book relies upon personal experience or reminiscences, and that I have in the formal sense included almost no factual materials for which I could not give a reference which can be checked independently by the reader, as is proper in any scientific work.\n\nThroughout the period of study and composition, I discussed the ideas that were taking shape in my mind with a number of friends, and I want to thank them here for their interest and patience. The manuscript was also read in draft by friends, associates, and otherwise interested persons, and I must thank them all for valuable suggestions which improved the clarity of presentation of a sometimes complex subject matter, and saved me from some blunders of conception and expression. In particular, I must acknowledge my debt to Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, who were especially helpful in starting me on a number of tracks which I might otherwise have neglected, and in suggesting readings which I might otherwise have missed; but I would like also to add that my chief debt to them, and one which I feel most keenly, is the force of their example as Marxists attempting a grasp of modern social reality. My acknowledgments to writers whose work had a special value will be found in the text, footnotes, and reference notes. The intellectual influence under which this work was composed is that of Marx and, as the reader will see, little that has been written by any Marxists since Marx plays a direct role in those portions of this book concerned with the labor process, for reasons which I must now try to explain.\n\nThe central place in the first volume of Marx's Capital is occupied by the labor process as it takes place under the control of capital, and the subtitle describes it accurately as a “critical analysis of capitalist production.\"In this volume, the only part of his projected study of capitalism that he was able to realize fully, Marx shows how the processes of production are, in capitalist society, incessantly transformed under the impetus of the principal driving force of that society, the accumulation of capital. For the working population, this transformation manifests itself, first, as a continuous change in the labor processes of each branch of industry, and second, as a redistribution of labor among occupations and industries.\n\nMarx completed this work in the mid-1860s. During the past century this very same dynamic has been far more powerful than the manifestations of it which Marx witnessed in his own lifetime and upon which he based his critical analysis of capitalist production. Yet the extraordinary fact is that Marxists have added little to his body of work in this respect. Neither the changes in productive processes throughout this century of capitalism and monopoly capitalism, nor the changes in the occupational and industrial structure of the working population have been subjected to any comprehensive Marxist analysis since Marx's death. It is for this reason that I cannot, as I have already said, attribute to any Marxists other than Marx himself a strong intellectual influence upon this study: there simply is no continuing body of work in the Marxist tradition dealing with the capitalist mode of production in the manner in which Marx treated it in the first volume of Capital. Since the reasons for this are bound to be of interest, we must ask why this is so.\n\nThe answer probably begins with the extraordinary thoroughness and prescience with which Marx performed his task. He subjected labor processes, and their development in the factory system, to the most knowledgeable and systematic study they have ever received. So well did he understand the tendencies of the capitalist mode of production, and so accurately did he generalize from the as yet meager instances of his own time, that in the decades immediately after he completed his work Marx's analysis seemed adequate to each special problem of the labor process, and remarkably faithful to the overall movement of production. It may thus have been, in the beginning, the very prophetic strength of Marx's analysis that contributed to the dormancy of this subject among Marxists. The development of the factory system seemed to bear out Marx in every particular, and to render superfluous any attempt to repeat what he had already accomplished. It is true that by the early part of the twentieth century the increase in commercial, administrative, and technical labor seemed to cut across Marx's bipolar class structure and introduce a complicating element, and this occasioned a discussion in the Second International and especially in its German section. But the discussion was abortive, in part because the tendencies had not yet ripened sufficiently, and it faded away without conclusive results even while the substance of the problem increased in scope.\n\nMeanwhile, the cataclysmic events of this centurytwo world wars, fascism, the successive disintegrations and restabilizations of capitalist economies in the aftermaths of wars and in the Great Depression, and revolutions both proletarian and nationalist—dominated the analytical work of Marxism. The front of this violent stage was taken and held by monopoly, militarism, imperialism, nationalism, the “crisis\" or “breakdown\" tendencies of the capitalist system, revolutionary strategy, and the problems of the transition from capitalism to socialism.\n\nThe extraordinary development of scientific technology, of the productivity of labor, and to some extent of the customary levels of working-class consumption during this century have had, as has often been noted, a profound\n\nIntroduction\n\n7","previous_page":null,"next_page":null}