{"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":"xii / xiii","pdf_page":5,"physical_index":5,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"d37fadb136d01886d1459f20a6f3ccb5f470681693ab9778a9bc5ca3f4726bec"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"(7) The state is omnipresent and modern industry demands bureaucratization.\n\n(8) Classes are eternal.\n\n(9) There are many roads to industrialism.\n\n(10) Industrialism is pluralistic, and power is diffuse.\n\n\"One of the central traits\" of industrial society, declared Kerr and his co-authors, “is the inevitable and eternal separation of industrial men into managers and the managed\" (emphasis added).5\n\nIn this orthodox view, technological changes in the organization of production are socially neutral. As sociologist Robert Blauner argued in his influential study Alienation and Freedom (1964), technological change is shaped by three factors: the state of scientific and mechanical processes, the nature of the product, and the engineering and economic resources specific to particular firms. Class and other forms of social conflict were either overlooked or excluded as factors by Blauner, like most conventional analysts of work.\n\nJob dissatisfaction was not entirely ignored in the orthodox view of work relations, but it was seen as diminishing and in no way contradicting the reality of increasing skill levels, more humanistic management, and the diffusion of power and responsibility. “Alienation,\" Blauner wrote, “has traveled a course that could be charted on a graph by means of an inverted U-curve.\" It reached its height, he suggested, with the assembly-line industries ofthe early twentieth century. But as more and more industries have become automated, alienation has diminished“thus the inverted U.\" Moreover, “the average worker,\" his readers were told, “is able to make an adjustment to a job which, from the standpoint of an intellectual, appears to be the epitome of tedium.\" Because of this, “empirical studies show that the majority of industrial workers are satisfied with their work and with their jobs.\" (The “empirical studies\" consisted of numerous questionnaires collected for various industries by sociologists and business organizations concerned with the issue of overt job dissatisfaction.)°\n\nThose who claimed that alienation was fading as a social problem, however, found this position difficult to maintain consistently. Blauner wrote, somewhat tortuously, that, “The typical worker in modern industrial society is probably satisfied and self-estranged.\"7 Indeed, it is here that the orthodox academic approach ran into trouble as alienation became a hot issue in the 1960s and 1970s. A special task force selected by the secretary of health, education, and welfare declared in its 1973 report, Work in America, that “Significant numbers of American workers are dissatisfied by the quality of their working lives. As a result, the productivity of the worker is low—as measured by absenteeism, turnover rates, wildcat strikes, sabotage, poor-quality products, and a reluctance by workers to commit themselves to their work tasks.\" One job design consultant quoted in the New York Times explained the increase in active job dissatisfaction this way: “We may have created too many dumb jobs for the number of dumb people to fill them.\"8\n\nFor Braverman, all of this was simply illustrative of the contradiction at the heart of the orthodox approach to work and occupations. As he explained in the opening pages of Labor and Monopoly Capital:\n\nThe more I read in the formal and informal literature of occupations, the more I became aware of a contradiction that marks much of the current writing in this area. On the one hand, it is emphasized that modern work, as a result of the scientific-technical revolution and “automation,\" requires ever higher levels of education, training, the greater exercise of intelligence and mental effort in general. At the same time, a mounting dissatisfaction with the conditions of industrial and office labor appears to contradict this view. For it is also said—sometimes by the same people who at other times support the first view—that work has become increasingly subdivided into petty operations that fail to sustain the interest or engage the capacities of humans with current levels of education; that these petty operations demand ever less skill and training; and that the modern trend of work by its “mindlessness\" and “bureaucratization\" is “alienating\" ever larger sections of the working population.\n\nIn the process of investigating this contradiction, Braverman turned the prevailing assumptions concerning the work process upside down, putting the orthodox position on the defensive within the social sciences and humanities. For the last quarter-century, the terms of the debate have been defined not by the orthodox conception of work, but by Braverman's critique. A generation of historians stimulated by E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1964) to explore labor history from radically new perspectives drew heavily upon Braverman in the 1970s. In sociology, an entire body of literature inspired by Braverman arose, now known familiarly as “the labor process debate.\"In Britain, social scientists spoke of “Bravermania.\" One measure of Braverman's lasting influence is that for the period 1976-1980 the Social Science Citations Index lists around 500 citations to Labor and Monopoly Capital, and for 1992-1996 the level was practically identical.1º\n\nIn more recent, more conservative times, of course, the orthodox view of work has begun to reassert itself, but not with the same confidence with which it was espoused before Braverman. Instead the form that much of this takes is a steady attempt to chip away at Bravermaninsisting that he emphasized \"deskilling\" unduly and neglected “reskilling,\" asserting that he did not pay attention to the subjective side of work and workers’ struggles, stressing the growth of humanistic management techniques that supposedly qualify Braverman's conclusions, and arguing that Taylorism (which Braverman analyzed so devastatingly) was merely one stage, now bypassed, in worker-management relations.\n\nxii\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nNew Introduction\n\nxiii","previous_page":4,"next_page":6}