{"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":"xi","pdf_page":4,"physical_index":4,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"44f55d54305f95f3b85668ed73d78d98f9ba56c40140dd35414f7d4b3199642b"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"When it was published in 1974, Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century immediately stood out among twentieth-century studies in the degree to which it penetrated the hidden abode of the workplace, providing the first clear, critical understanding in more than a century of the labor process as a whole within capitalist society. It thus opened the way to the flood of radical investigations ofthe labor process that followed. Braverman's success, where so many others had failed, was not simply fortuitous. Much of the basis for his achievement is to be found in his personal background.\n\nBraverman was born on December 9, 1920, in New York City, the son of Morris Braverman, a shoeworker, and Sarah Wolf Braverman. Caught up in the fervent radical intellectual spirit of the Depression years, he aspired to a college education and enrolled at Brooklyn College, only to be forced to terminate his schooling within a year due to the hard economic times. Beginning in 1937, Braverman apprenticed at the Brooklyn Naval Shipyard, where he began as a coppersmith, branched out into pipefitting, and eventually supervised a team of eighteen to twenty workers at refitting pipes of docked ships. Drafted near the end of the war in 1945, he was sent by the Army to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where as a sergeant he taught and supervised locomotive pipefitting. In 1947, he and his wife Miriam settled in Youngstown, Ohio, where he worked in steel layout and fitting at Republic Steel (where he was quickly fired at the instigation of the FBI), William B. Pollock Co., and Owen Structural Steel.²\n\nFrom his teenage years in Brooklyn on, Braverman had identified with socialism, participating first in the Young People's Socialist League and later in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), as part of a small but vibrant Trotskyist movement. During the 1940s and early 1950s, he wrote frequently for various SWP publications under a party name, Harry Frankel. But in 1953, Braverman broke with the SWP and left his job in the steel industry to establish, along with Bert Cochran, a new independent periodical, The American Socialist which lasted until 1960. Braverman's editorial experience on The American Socialist opened the way to a new career from 1960 to 1967 as editor and later vice president and general manager at Grove Press, where he was credited with publishing The Autobiography of Malcolm X. During his Grove years, he picked up a B.A. at the New School for Social Research. In 1967, he became director of Monthly Review Press, a position he held until his death on August 2, 1976.\n\nThis unique background as a socialist intellectual who had been a worker and an activist within the productive core of world industry, one who rose by dint of his political struggles and intellectual brilliance to executive positions within two important presses, gave Braverman unique qualifications to take on the difficult task of stripping the veil away from the capitalist labor process. Braverman's Marxist training gave him the intellectual and political compass for his perceptive analysis of the entire history of managerial literature, culminating in an investigation of work under monopoly capitalthe economic and social regime dominated by the giant corporation.3 He wrote with a sophisticated understanding of Marx's dialectical method and with a clarity rarely equaled in modern social science, and he dealt with a fundamental realm of everyday existence—the very foundation of wealth and power in modern society, long lost behind a veil of obscurity. Labor and Monopoly Capital immediately inspired tens of thousands of readers, liberating them from enslavement to the conventional wisdom. Based on this single treatise, Braverman is now renowned worldwide as one of the great social scientists of the twentieth century: a legendary figure who arose from the depths of production to combat “the great god Capital,\" armed only with what he had learned while working with his own two hands and through his struggles as an organic intellectual, a human embodiment of the unification of theory and practice.\n\nIt is a measure of the tremendous influence exerted by Harry Braverman and successive radical labor process analysts that only a quarter-century after the publication of Labor and Monopoly Capital it is difficult to recall the absolute confidence with which the orthodox view of work relations was espoused in the early post-Second World War years.ª At that time the preeminent interpretation of work in modern society was the one presented by Clark Kerr, John Dunlop, and others in a book entitled Industrialism and Industrial Man (1960). These authors provided a description of industrial society that can be summarized as follows:\n\n(1) Industrialization has displaced capitalism\n\n(2) New technology requires rising levels of skill and responsibility.\n\n(3) A growing proportion of technological and managerial personnel is transforming class relations.\n\n(4) New wealth and leisure mean increased well-being rather than increased misery.\n\n(5) There is a decline of overt protest.\n\n(6) A larger role is assumed by enterprise managers and humanistic professionals, who constitute the “vanguard\" of the future.\n\nx Labor and Monopoly Capital\n\nNew Introduction\n\nxi","previous_page":3,"next_page":5}