{"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":"xiv / XV","pdf_page":6,"physical_index":6,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"2098abad4880c1e44f1387dfa0142f2d106c6c2fb89dc1eaac24e3d5077f34b2"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"In order to evaluate these criticisms, it is necessary first to take a close look at the development of Braverman's argument, which arose out of the earlier critique of the capitalist division of labor by Marx. Kerr, Dunlop, and their collaborators in Industrialism and Industrial Man had introduced their own conception of work in industrial society as a refutation of “the Marxist interpretation\" of capitalist development which pointed to the “degradation of the industrial worker.\"“An interpretation of the industrialization process developed during the early stages of the first instance of industrialization,\" they wrote, “is not likely to be appropriate or applicable after a century of experience.\" From their point of view, standard for the establishment, Marx was simply wrong in envisaging “greater intensity of work, the destruction of hierarchy of specialized workmen in pre-industrial society and the leveling of skill, a minor number of skilled labor, engineers, and managers, and the use of women and children for a growing number of unskilled tending and feeding jobs.\"12\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital, however, refuted this by means of an updated analysis corroborating Marx's conclusion that the reduction of the vast quantity of workers to a homogeneous grouping of “interchangeable parts,\" mere appendages to machines requiring little on-the-job training, was one of the fundamental tendencies of capitalist development. Like Marx, Braverman began with the distinction between labor and labor power. When hired for a particular job, the worker sells “not an agreed amount of labor, but the power to labor over an agreed period of time\" for a wage. Humans bring to work the “infinitely malleable character of human labor.\" But once workers driven by necessity have “been forced to sell their labor power to another,\" Braverman observed, “the workers also surrender their interest in the labor process, which has now been ‘alienated.' The labor process has become the responsibility of the capitalist. . . . It thus becomes essential for the capitalist that control over the labor process pass from the hands ofthe worker into his own. This transition presents itself in history as the progressive alienation of the process of production from the worker; to the capitalist, it presents itself as the problem of management.\"Hence, under capitalism management is war by other means, sharing “from the first the characterization which Clausewitz assigned to war; it is movement in a resistant medium because it involves the control of refractory masses.\"13\n\nThe advantages arising from the division of labor have traditionally been conceived in the terms introduced by Adam Smith in the opening pages of The Wealth of Nations (1776), according to which savings in labor are obtained through the maximization of learning acquired by doing.14 Each individual worker theoretically becomes more adept at a given task when the work is subdivided, with each worker responsible for a single operation. In Smith's famous example of pin manufacture, “one man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, . . . and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands.\" Increased dexterity on the part of the individual worker, the saving in labor time through the elimination of the time previously spent going from task to task, and the ease with which this division oflabor facilitated the introduction of machinery: all were considered by Smith to be advantages obtained by the master manufacturer through the division of labor. For Smith, this kind of detailed division of labor was a mere matter of technical efficiency; the promotion of job-specific work skills led in each and every case to “a proportionate increase of the productive powers of labour.\"15\n\nYet there was considerable ambiguity in Smith's description. The extreme form of the division of labor he depicted could more readily be seen as embodying the reduction of skillin any meaningful sense, beyond mere dexterity—rather than its enhancement. Thus, further along in The Wealth of Nations, Smith painted an entirely different picture ofthe effects of the division of labor in capitalist society:\n\nIn the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. 16\n\nIndeed, the Industrial Revolution that arose in the late eighteenth century at around the time Smith completed The Wealth of Nations resulted in the degradation, not enhancement, of human labor. The classical liberal theorists of management, Charles Babbage and Andrew Ure, writing a half-century after Smith, understood the division of labor in a way that sharply contradicted Smith's earlier assumption of skill enhancement through job specialization. It was obvious to Babbage and Ure that the detailed division of labor within the factory meant for the vast majority of workers not so much the creation of job-specific work skills as the breaking down of previous skills—a process that could only be justified by the greater profits it brought to employers.\n\nDeliberately choosing the very same example of pin-making as Smith, Babbage argued in On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832) that the “the most important and influential cause\" of the division of labor under capitalism was to be found in the minimization of job-specific knowledge on the part of the worker. “By dividing the work to be performed into different processes each requiring different degrees of skill or of force,\"Babbage wrote, the owner \"can purchase exactly that precise quantity of both which is necessary for each process; whereas, if the whole work were executed by one workman, that person must possess sufficient skill to perform the most difficult, and sufficient strength to execute the most laborious, of the operations into which the art is divided.\"18 Given that the higher the worker's skill level, the higher the wages that had to be paid, this process of systematic deskilling by breaking down work tasks into simpler components had the effect, Babbage argued, of cheapening labor.\n\nxiv\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nNew Introduction\n\nXV","previous_page":5,"next_page":7}