{"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":"xXV","pdf_page":11,"physical_index":11,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"efd966f76abf7f9b1b1e044d6e5005efa0272c0043cbe5ced75678ff58354bc2"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"Foreword to the Original Edition\n\nby Paul M. Sweezy\n\nIn the Introduction to our book Monopoly Capital, published in 1966, Paul Baran and I wrote that the approach we had adopted was not calculated to give a complete picture of the form of society under study. We continued:\n\nAnd we are particularly conscious of the fact that this approach, as we have used it, has resulted in almost total neglect of a subject which occupies a central place in Marx's study of capitalism: the labor process. We stress the crucial role of technological change in the development of monopoly capitalism but make no attempt to inquire systematically into the consequences which the particular kinds of technological change characteristic of the monopoly capitalist period have had for the nature of work, the composition (and differentiation) of the working class, the psychology of workers, the forms of working-class organization and struggle, and so on. These are all obviously important subjects which would have to be dealt with in any comprehensive study of monopoly capitalism.\n\nNow at last, in Harry Braverman's work published nearly a decade later, we have a serious, and in my judgment solidly successful, effort to fill a large part of this gap. It would be hard to describe this effort more accurately or concisely than as “an attempt to inquire systematically into the consequences which the particular kinds of technological change characteristic of the monopoly capitalist period have had for the nature of work [and] the composition (and differentiation) of the working class.\" Harry Braverman, however, does not attempt to pursue the inquiry into what may be called the subjective aspects of the development of the working class under monopoly capitalism. That task remains to be tackled. Whoever undertakes it will find in the present work a firm and indispensable foundation on which to build.\n\nI want to make quite clear that the reason Baran and I did not ourselves attempt in any way to fill this gap was not only the approach we adopted. A more fundamental reason was that we lacked the necessary qualifications. A genius like Marx could analyze the labor process under capitalism without ever having been immediately involved in it, and do so with unmatched brilliance and insight. For lesser mortals, direct experience is a sine qua non, as the dismal record of various academic “experts\" and “authorities\" in this area so eloquently testifies. Baran and I lacked this crucially important direct experience, and if we had ventured into the subject we would in all probability have been taken in by many of the myths and fallacies so energetically promoted by capitalism's ideologists. There is, after all, no subject on which it is so important (for capitalism) that the truth should be hidden. As evidence of this gullibility I will cite only one instance—our swallowing whole the myth of a tremendous decline during the last half century of the percentage of the labor force which is unskilled (see Monopoly Capital, p. 267). Harry Braverman has had a wealth of direct experience—he summarizes it briefly in his Introduction—and is therefore admirably equipped to combat and expose the distortions and lies of capitalism's apologists. Nowhere is this done more crushingly than in the eloquent final chapter where the myth of the increasingly skilled labor force is destroyed once and for all.\n\nxxiv Labor and Monopoly Capital\n\nxXV","previous_page":10,"next_page":12}