Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century

Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century

Harry Braverman

25th Anniversary Edition

Foreword by Paul M. Sweezy

New Introduction by John Bellamy Foster

Monthly Review Press New York

New Edition Copyright © 1998 by Monthly Review Press Copyright © 1974 by Harry Braverman All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Braverman, Harry. Labor and monopoly capital : the degradation of work in the twentieth century / by Harry Braverman ; foreword by Paul M. Sweezy : new introduction by John Bellamy Foster. —— 25th anniversary ed. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-85345-940-1 (pbk.) 1. Labor History—20 century. 2. CapitalismHistory20th century. 6. Working classHistory—20th century. I. Title. HD4851.B66 331'.09'04dc21 98-46497

Monthly Review Press 122 West 27th Street New York NY 10001

Manufactured in Canada 1098765

Acknowledgments

To the following, for permission to reproduce short passages from the works named: Oxford University Press, from White Collar by C. Wright Mills, copyright © 1951 by Oxford University Press; Division of Research ofHarvard Business School, from Automation and Management by James Bright, copyright © 1958 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; University of Minnesota Press, from The Sociology of Work by Theodore Caplow, copyright © 1954 by the University ofMinnesota; Harvard Business Review, from "Does Automation Raise Skill Requirements?" by James Bright, July-August 1958, copyright © 1958 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; Columbia University Press, from Women and Work in America by Robert W. Smuts, copyright © 1959 by Columbia University Press; Public Affairs Press, from Automation in the Office by Ida R. Hoos.

Contents

New Introduction by John Bellamy Foster ix
Foreword by Paul M. Sweezy XXV
Introduction 3
Part I: Labor and Management
1 Labor and Labor Power 31
2 The Origins of Management 41
3 The Division of Labor 49
4 Scientific Management 59
5 The Primary Effects of Scientific Management 86
6 The Habituation of the Worker
to the Capitalist Mode of Production 96
Part II: Science and Mechanization
7 The Scientific-Technical Revolution 107
8 The Scientific-Technical Revolution
and the Worker 117
9 Machinery 127
10 Further Effects of Management and Technology
on the Distribution of Labor 163
Part III: Monopoly Capital
11 Surplus Value and Surplus Labor 175
12 The Modern Corporation 179
13 The Universal Market 188
14 The Role of the State 197
Part IV: The Growing Working-Class Occupations
15 Clerical Workers 203
16 Service Occupations and Retail Trade 248
Part V: The Working Class
17 The Structure of the Working Class and
Its Reserve Armies 261
18 The “Middle Layers" of Employment 279
19 Productive and Unproductive Labor 284
20 A Final Note on Skill 294
Appendix 1: Two Comments 311
Appendix 2: The Degradation of Work
in the Twentieth Century 316
Index 326

Introduction to the New Edition John Bellamy Foster

Work, in today's society, is a mystery. No other realm of social existence is so obscured in mist, so zealously concealed from view (“no admittance except on business") by the prevailing ideology. Within so-called popular culture—the world of TV and films, commodities and advertising—consumption occupies center stage, while the more fundamental reality of work recedes into the background, seldom depicted in any detail, and then usually in romanticized forms. The harsh experiences of those forced to earn their living by endless conformity to boring machine-regulated routines, divorced from their own creative potential—all in the name of efficiency and profits—seem always just beyond the eye of the camera, forever out of sight.

In social science, the situation is hardly better. The dismal performance of legions of orthodox economists and sociologists in the area of work is testimony to the dominance of ideological imperatives within mainstream social science, despite its scientific pretensions. There is no other realm requiring as much concealment to permit the continued dominance of capitalist relations of production. What must remain impenetrable is not so much the stultifying character of modern working life: that is hard to deny in a time when the neologism “McJob" has entered the language to describe a form of employment experienced by millions. The secret is the prevailing social order's systematic tendency to create unsatisfying work.

Orthodox economists have consistently steered clear of issues of production and the organization of work, viewing these from the distant standpoint of the exigencies of the market (the buying and selling of“factors of production"). They almost never engage directly with the realm of production itself, in which capital and labor struggle over the control of working time and the appropriation of surplus productissues discretely left to those concerned with the everyday practical realities of business and management. As the heterodox economist Robert Heilbroner has written, “The actual social process of production—the flesh and blood act of work, the relationships of sub- and superordination by which work is organized and controlledare almost strangers to the conventional economist."

Sociologists, it is true, have analyzed occupational reality, looking for signs of alienation. But sociology, like economics, has usually been divorced from any real understanding of the way in which working life is objectively organized around the division of labor and profitability. All too often academic investigators have assumed that the essence of working life is to be discovered simply in the subjective responses of “scientifically selected samples" of workers to carefully constructed questionnaires. Even radical theorists, familiar with the results of such economic and sociological research but lacking direct experience of their own with the capitalist labor process, have frequently fallen prey to illusions generated in this way, as Paul Sweezy eloquently explains in his foreword to the present volume.

ix

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.

Braverman 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

From 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.

This 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.

It 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:

(1) Industrialization has displaced capitalism

(2) New technology requires rising levels of skill and responsibility.

(3) A growing proportion of technological and managerial personnel is transforming class relations.

(4) New wealth and leisure mean increased well-being rather than increased misery.

(5) There is a decline of overt protest.

(6) A larger role is assumed by enterprise managers and humanistic professionals, who constitute the “vanguard" of the future.

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(7) The state is omnipresent and modern industry demands bureaucratization.

(8) Classes are eternal.

(9) There are many roads to industrialism.

(10) Industrialism is pluralistic, and power is diffuse.

"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

In 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.

Job 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.)°

Those 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

For 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:

The 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.

In 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

In 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.

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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

Labor 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

The 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

Yet 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:

In 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

Indeed, 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.

Deliberately 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.

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Ure identified the same overall tendency toward diminishing skill requirements for the great bulk of workers in his Philosophy of Manufactures (1835). Ure explained that “the division, or rather adaptation of labour to the different talents of men, is little thought of in factory employment": with the introduction of machinery, processes formerly conducted by “the cunning workman, who is prone to irregularities of many kinds" are placed under the “charge of a peculiar mechanism, so self-regulating, that a child may superintend it." The whole tendency of manufacturing industry, according to Ure, was, if not “to supersede human labour altogether," at least “to diminish its cost, by substituting the industry of women and children for that of men; or that of ordinary labourers, for trained artisans. ,>19

These criticisms of the Smithian theory of the division of labor by the early proponents of capitalist management were subsequently incorporated by Marx into his critique of capitalist political economy, in which he argued that the key to understanding the development of the detailed division of labor under capitalism was to be found not in Smith's learning by doing, demanding ever greater technical specialization as a means of enhancing the skill levels of workers, but in the opposite principle enunciated by Babbage and Ure in the early nineteenth century: reducing labor costs through the systematic degradation of human labor.20 “Babbage's principle," Braverman wrote, "eventually becomes the underlying force governing all forms of work in capitalist society, no matter in what setting or at what hierarchical level."1

While these tendencies of the capitalist division of labor were already evident in the nineteenth century, it was not until the maturation of monopoly capitalism in the twentieth century that they came to be applied systematically. The development of the division of labor, as Adam Smith observed, was dependent on the extent of the market and the scale of production. Its full development was therefore impracticable for the small family firm that still predominated in the nineteenth century. With the rise of the giant corporation in the late nineteenth century, however, all of this changed. It is in this context that one has to understand the rise to prominence of Frederick Winslow Taylor and scientific management, or Taylorism, in the early twentieth century.

Taylorism was summarized by Braverman in the form of three distinct principles: “dissociation of the labor process from the skills of the workers, “separation of conception from execution," and “use of this monopoly over knowledge to control each step ofthe labor process and its mode of execution." Although Taylor claimed wage increases were integral to his system, so too were reduced employers’ labor costs, to be accomplished by eliminating jobs and saving labor time. “Taylor," Braverman wrote, “understood the Babbage principle better than anyone of his time, and it was always uppermost in his calculations. . . . In his early book, Shop Management, he said frankly that the full possibilities’ of his system ‘will not have been realized until almost all of the machines in the shop are run by men who are of smaller calibre and attainments, and who are therefore cheaper than those required under the old system.' 22 In the end, thus, the Babbage principle and Taylor's scientific management led to the same result. Taylor's distinctive contribution was to articulate a full-scale managerial imperative for increased job control, to be implemented primarily through deskilling. Hence, within Taylorism, Braverman maintained, "lies a theory which is nothing less than the explicit verbalization of the capitalist mode of production."23

The essential elements of the capitalist division of labor, Marx and Braverman each insisted, could be analyzed prior to the consideration of machinery. Taylor likewise abstracted from machinery in his analysis of scientific management. Once labor has been simplified, the substitution of machines for labor becomes increasingly possible. Moreover, in carrying out such substitutions, management is at least as interested in the capacity of certain types of machinery to centralize their control over the labor process as it is in the productivity of labor. The particular production technology introduced into the work process under capitalism is therefore designed to maximize managerial control. Capitalism is characterized by “the incessant drive to enlarge and perfect machinery on the one hand, and to diminish the worker on the other."24

There was, however, nothing inevitable about such a process, according to Braverman. The development of modern technology itself often reunified processes that had previously been divided by the division of labor, completely undermining Adam Smith's original justification for the detailed division of labor, and generating the possibility of creating a more rewarding work environment for socialized labor. Ironically, the best illustration of this was to be found in the further evolution of the very pin manufacturing process that Smith had originally discussed. Pins, as Braverman pointed out, were no longer produced by workers divided into discrete tasks. Rather,

The entire process is re-unified in a single machine which transforms great coils of wire into millions of pins each day already papered and ready for sale Now go back and read Adam Smith's arguments for the division of labor, arguments having to do with the dexterity gained in the constant application to one operation of a hand process over and over again and so on. You will notice that this modern technology has made a complete hash of these arguments. Not one remains with any force today. The re-unified process in which the execution of all the steps is built into the working mechanism of a single machine would seem now to render it suitable for a collective of associated producers, none of whom need spend all of their lives at any single function and all of whom can participate in the engineering, design, improvement, repair and operation of these ever more productive machines. Such a system would entail no loss of production, and it would represent the re-unification of the craft in 25 a body of workers far superior to the old craftsworkers.

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If such radical possibilities were not realized, it was due not to the technical requirements of modern machine production and engineering but rather to the economic mandates of the capitalist system. For Braverman, the essence of the development of labor under capitalism lay in the fact that “a structure is given to all labor processes that at its extremes polarizes those whose time is infinitely valuable and those whose time is worth almost nothing. This might even be called the general law of the capitalist division of labor. 26

Since some subsequent commentators have reduced Braverman's contribution to a fairly simplistic conception of generalized deskilling, it is vital to recognize that Braverman did not argue that the average level of skill in society would decline as a result of the further development of the division of labor under capitalism. Instead, he insisted,

Since, with the development of technology and the application to it of the fundamental sciences, the labor processes of society have come to embody a greater amount of scientific knowledge, clearly the “average" scientific, technical, and in that sense “skill" content of these labor processes is much greater now than in the past. But this is nothing but a tautology. The question is precisely whether the scientific and “educated" content of labor tends toward averaging, or, on the contrary, toward polarization. . . . The mass of the workers gain nothing from the fact that the decline in their command over the labor process is more than compensated for by the increasing command on the part of managers and engineers. On the contrary, not only does their skill fall in an absolute sense (in that they lose craft and traditional abilities without gaining new abilities adequate to compensate the loss), but it falls even more in a relative sense. The more science is incorporated into the labor process, the less the worker understands of the process; the more sophisticated an intellectual product the machine becomes, the less control and comprehension of the 27
machine the worker has.

Braverman's analysis, then, is not simply about “deskilling" in some generalized, abstract sense, divorced from capitalist exploitation and accumulation.

It is worth noting that Braverman himself did not employ that term, writing instead of “the destruction of craftsmanship" and maintaining that “the capitalist mode of production systematically destroys all-round skills where they exist."28 Although “deskilling" may be a useful shorthand designation for this theory, the term has often been invoked mistakenly, as an all-encompassing notion obviating any need for a reconstruction of the whole of Braverman's argument. Braverman was primarily concerned with the degradation of work as it affected the working class, not the entire society. His real subject, as he emphasized on the opening page of his book, was “the structure of the working class, and the manner in which it had changed." He was concerned with uncovering the primary relationships of workers to the means of production under monopoly capitalism. Much of his analysis was therefore directed at the changing occupational characteristics of the working class, including the rise of service work (made possible by the development of“the universal market"), the transformation of clerical work, and so forth. Indeed, Labor and Monopoly Capital was greeted on its appearance as making “a major contribution, perhaps unbeknownst to its author, to feminist analysis" as a result ofits portrait of the shift in clerical work from a predominantly male to a predominantly female occupation.29

Labor and Monopoly Capital has inspired an enormous and continuing body of research on the labor process in capitalist society. Much of this research, usually taking the form of specific case studies, has verified Braverman's conclusions. Not only has it been shown that struggles over job control are the central feature of work under capitalism, but also that to a considerable extent the labor of most workers has been degraded. A statistical assessment first published in The American Journal of Sociology, for example, showed that “there was a systematic tendency for those positions with relatively little control over their labor processes to expand during the 1960s and for those positions with high levels of autonomy to decline." The advent of "lean production" on an increasingly global scale in the 1980s and 1990s has further accelerated this tendency towards the degradation of work for most workers.3º

Needless to say, proponents of the orthodox view of work still dispute these conclusions. Braverman is often criticized for oversimplifying the direction of change and for ignoring the “reskilling" that accompanies deskilling. Such arguments, however, miss the point. The main question is whether there is a general tendency toward the deskilling of most workers. Has there been a polarization of working conditions, with the greatest number of workers occupying positions that are less and less skilled? As a general tendency, resulting from the managerial imperatives of capitalism, this may be modified by other tendencies and forces. But as a general trend it nonetheless exists; and as the central imperative of management, it is always present. It derives its force not from any mere technical imperative but from the unending quest for profitability, which requires as its basis a continual reduction in unit wage costs, the relative cheapening of labor.31

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Braverman is also criticized for paying too little attention to the subjective side of work and workers' own struggles. As a former working-class activist, Braverman obviously did not undervalue the issue of workers’ consciousness. On the contrary, he believed that “the value of any analysis of the composition and social trends within the working population can only lie in precisely how well it helps us to answer questions about class consciousness." Marxism, he held, is after all “a theory of revolution and thus a tool of combat."32In Labor and Monopoly Capital itself, however, he imposed, as any careful author will do, certain limitations on his own research. Workers' political sensibilities, trade union organization, working-class parties, socialist strategy, and comparable issues lay beyond the designated scope of Labor and Monopoly Capital.

Nonetheless, Labor and Monopoly Capital, far from avoiding the question of class struggle, actually deepens our appreciation of the struggle between classes. Like Marx, Braverman considered class related above all to the process of exploitation, to the way in which the surplus product is extracted from the direct producer. Class struggle does not simply occur within the wider public sphere in which classes become self-conscious and operate as political actors, but also in daily life, within the labor process itself, where control over production, as measured in units of time as small as ten-thousandths of a second (or even smaller), is bitterly contested. Case study after case study has shown that Braverman's analysis illuminates the class struggle at a deeper, more intensive level—a level seldom comprehended by intellectuals but well known to workers.

Others claim, in opposition to Braverman, that Taylorism was a passing managerial strategy, later replaced by Fordism, bureaucratic control, “humanistic" control, or what have you. No doubt there have been important modifications in managerial practice since the time of Taylor.33 Management is quite willing to use more elaborate work rules, credentialism, and so on, to further divide the workers and centralize control. And “worker participation" schemes will be used up to a point ifthey do not contradict the real centralization of authority within management or the final object oflowering labor costs. But a good case can nonetheless be made that Taylor's principles of scientific management remain “the explicit verbalization of the capitalist mode of production."All these other strategies are therefore mere modifications of the tendency toward the polarization of working conditions under monopoly capitalismthat is, the degradation of work for the vast majority and the upgrading of work for a relative few. Braverman, indeed, anticipated the farce of "Quality Work Circles" when he wrote, referring to comparable reforms, "They represent a style of management rather than a genuine change in the position of the worker. They are characterized by a studied pretense of worker participation,’a gracious liberality in allowing the worker to adjust a machine, replace a light bulb, move from one fractional job to another, and to have the illusion of making decisions by choosing among fixed and limited alternatives designed by a management which deliberately leaves insignificant matters open to choice."34

There is enormous pressure to conform to the orthodox view of work, which, though rendered hollow by Braverman's analysis, still remains dominant since it suits the needs of the dominant interests in society. The same John Dunlop who co-authored Industrialism and Industrial Man with Clark Kerr and others went on to become U.S. Secretary ofLabor (1975-1976) and, more recently, chair of the Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations of the U.S. Department of Labor and the Department of Commerce. In its May 1994 report, the Dunlop Commission concluded, "Some technological changes require more skilled workers. Others downgrade existing skills. The current consensus is that the former predominates, so that technology has raised the demand for skills, responsibility, and knowledge."3 In the face of this kind of ongoing official obfuscation, Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital remains a truly revolutionary work—as revolutionary today as it was when it was first published a quarter-century ago.

Notes

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Labor and Monopoly Capital

New Introduction xxi