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

contribute to the analysis of race in the United States. Many radical students studied under him, and his work took a more progressive form through his advocacy of the “internal colonialism" thesis. See, for example, Robert Blauner, Racial Oppression in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).

1. Blauner, Alienation and Freedom, 29.

1. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 21-25. (All page references to Labor and Monopoly Capital are to the present edition.)

1. Ibid., 3.

1. Ibid., 734.

1. Braverman, “The Degradation of Work," appendix 2 to this edition, 320.

1. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 57-58.

1. Ibid., 294-95.

xxii

Labor and Monopoly Capital

New Introduction

xxiii

Foreword to the Original Edition

by Paul M. Sweezy

In 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:

And 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.

Now 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.

I 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.

xxiv Labor and Monopoly Capital

xXV

But it is not only direct experience that is needed for the scientific study of the labor process under monopoly capitalism. Equally important is a thorough mastery of Marx's pioneering work in this field and of his dialectical method. Harry Braverman has this too, and it is the combination of practical experience and theoretical acumen—a combination excluded almost by definition from our academic social sciences—which has enabled him to produce a contribution of surpassing importance to the understanding of the society we live in.

Everyone who reads this book will benefit from it. But those who will benefit particularly are the ones who read it along with Volume I of Capital, and especially Part IV (“The Production of Relative Surplus Value"), for it is here that the analysis of the labor process under capitalism was first put on a genuinely scientific foundation. All the essential concepts and tools were provided by Marx, and indeed he used them to such good effect that for a long time his followers took it for granted that nothing new needed to be added in this field of investigation. As far as theory is concerned, they were right. But of course the outward manifestations of capitalism, though not its inner nature, have undergone tremendous changes in the last century. Capital accumulation has assumed new organizational forms; it has invaded old branches of the economy and flowed into many new ones. What needed to be done was to apply Marx's theory to the new methods and occupations invented or created by capital in its restless expansion. This is the task Harry Braverman has set himself. In terms of theory, as he would be the first to say, there is very little that is new in this book. In terms of knowledge gained from the creative application of theory, there is an enormous amount that is new, and much of it in direct contradiction to what capitalist ideology has succeeded in establishing as the society's conventional wisdom.

I hasten to add, and here again I am sure Harry Braverman would be the first to agree, that in important respects the function of this work is to pose rather than answer questions, to open (or re-open) lines of inquiry which have been neglected and which cry out for research and elaboration. There is hardly an occupation or other aspect of the labor process which would not repay a great deal more detailed historical and analytical investigation than are accorded to it in this broad survey. In this sense, Harry Braverman's book is to be considered an invitation and a challenge to a younger generation of Marxist economists and sociologists to get on with the urgent task of destroying bourgeois ideology and putting in its place an honest picture of the social reality within which we are forced to live.\*

I must conclude these remarks with a confession: for me reading this book has been an emotional experience, somewhat similar, I suppose, to that which millions of readers of Volume I of Capital have been through. The sad, horrible, heart-breaking way the vast majority of my fellow countrymen and women, as well as their counterparts in most of the rest of the world, are obliged to spend their working lives is seared into my consciousness in an excruciating and unforgettable way. And when I think of all the talent and energy which daily go into devising ways and means of making their torment worse, all in the name of efficiency and productivity but really for the greater glory of the great god Capital, my wonder at humanity's ability to create such a monstrous system is surpassed only by amazement at its willingness to tolerate the continuance of an arrangement so obviously destructive of the well-being and happiness of human beings. If the same effort, or only half of it, were devoted to making work the joyous and creative activity it can be, what a wonderful world this could be.

But first of all must come widespread popular understanding of what capitalism really is, and why its seeming necessity and inevitability are in reality only ideological fig leaves to hide the naked self-interest of a tiny minority. This book, I am convinced, can make a vital contribution to that much-needed enlightenment.

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Labor and Monopoly Capital

Foreword xxvii

\* In this connection let me call attention to Chapter 17 (“The Structure of the Working Class and Its Reserve Armies"), where the thesis is put forward that Marx's "General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," according to which the advance of capitalism is characterized by the amassing of wealth at one pole and of deprivation and misery at the other, far from being the egregious fallacy which bourgeois social science has long held it to be, has in fact turned out to be one of the best founded of all Marx's insights into the capitalist system. How much more coherent and useful the voluminous literature of recent years on poverty and related questions would be if it had started from this solid foundation!

Labor and Monopoly Capital

Denn die einen sind im Dunkeln

Und die andern sind im Licht

Und man siehet die im Lichte

Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht.\*

—Bertolt Brecht

(To the tune of Mack the Knife)

\* Some there are who live in darkness / While the others live in light / We see those who live in daylight / Those in darkness, out of sight.

Introduction

This book first took shape in my mind as little more than a study of occupational shifts in the United States. I was interested in the structure of the working class, and the manner in which it had changed. That portion of the population employed in manufacturing and associated industries—the so-called industrial working class—had apparently been shrinking for some time, if not in absolute numbers at any rate in relative terms. Since the details of this process, especially its historical turning points and the shape of the new employment that was taking the place of the old, were not clear to me, I undertook to find out more about them. And since, as I soon discovered, these things had not yet been clarified in any comprehensive fashion, I decided that there was a need for a more substantial historical description and analysis of the process of occupational change than had yet been presented in print.

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 saidsometimes even by the same people who at other times support the first viewthat 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. As generalizations, these two views cannot easily be harmonized. On the other hand, I was not able to find in the vast literature any attempt to reconcile them by careful specification of the manner in which various occupations have evolved, perhaps in contrast to one another.

Thus my interests began to broaden to include the evolution of labor processes within occupations as well as the shifts of labor among occupations. And as both these varieties of change became gradually clearer in my mind, I was led into the search for the causes, the dynamic underlying the incessant transformation of work in the modern era. In particular, this led me to include in my investigation the evolution of management as well as of technology, of the modern corporation as well as of changes in social life. Before long I found

3

4 Labor and Monopoly Capital

myself attempting a study of the development of the capitalist mode of production during the past hundred years.

The literature which presents and interprets technical and management trends for the general reader exists primarily in two forms: journalism and social science. In the course of a fairly extensive reading of this literature, I was particularly struck by the vagueness, generality of wording, and on occasion egregious errors of description of the concrete matters under discussion. It seemed to me that many widely accepted conclusions were based on little genuine information, and represented either simplifications or outright misreadings of a complex reality. Since much of what appears here will challenge this conventional picture of work and the working population, I feel that I owe the reader an account of my own background insofar as it plays a role in this book. For although I spent on this study the largest part of my spare time during more than four years, my interest in many of the subjects discussed in it dates from many years earlier.

I began my working life by serving a four-year apprenticeship in the coppersmith's trade, and worked at this trade for a total of seven years. These seven years were spent in a naval shipyard, a type of industrial enterprise which, at that time, was probably the most complete product of two centuries of industrial revolution. Almost all the mechanic crafts which had arisen in the course of these centuries (some of which, like my own, were rooted in the handicrafts of classical antiquity and earlier) were practiced in such a shipyard in close association with each other. Because of this propinquity and the interlocking processes practiced by the crafts, and also because of the gathering together of apprentices of all crafts in a trade school for semi-weekly sessions, I learned not only my own trade but gained a concrete understanding of most of the others.

The extremely limited nature of employment in my trade, and its rapid decline with the substitution of new processes and materials for the traditional modes of copper working, made it difficult for me to continue to work as a coppersmith when I moved to other parts of the country or from job to job. But because the trade of working copper provided a foundation in the elements of a number of other crafts, I was always able to find employment in other trades, such as pipefitting, sheetmetal work, and layout, and I did work of these sorts for another seven years: in a railroad repair shop, in sheetmetal shops, and especially in two plants which fabricated heavy steel plate and structural steel into equipment for the basic steel industry, including blast furnaces.

This background of craftsmanship may lead some readers to conclude, after they have read this book, that I have been influenced by a sentimental attachment to the outworn conditions of now archaic modes of labor. I have been conscious of this possibility, but I have tried not to let any of my conclusions flow from such a romanticism, and on the whole I do not believe that this criticism would be warranted. It is true that I enjoyed, and still enjoy, working as a craftsman, but since I grew up during the years of rapid change in the mechanic crafts, I was always conscious of the inexorable march of science-based technological change; moreover, in my reflections upon this subject and in the many discussions among craftsmen debating the “old" and the “new" in which I took part, I was always a modernizer. I believed then, and still believe now, that the transformation of labor processes from their basis in tradition to their basis in science is not only inevitable but necessary for the progress of the human race and for its emancipation from hunger and other forms of need. More important, throughout those years I was an activist in the socialist movement, and I had assimilated the Marxist view which is hostile not to science and technology as such, but only to the manner in which these are used as weapons of domination in the creation, perpetuation, and deepening of a gulf between classes in society.

I had the opportunity of seeing at first hand, during those years, not only the transformation of industrial processes but the manner in which these processes are reorganized; how the worker, systematically robbed of a craft heritage, is given little or nothing to take its place. Like all craftsmen, even the most inarticulate, I always resented this, and as I reread these pages, I find in them a sense not only of social outrage, which was intended, but also perhaps of personal affront. If this is so, it is, as I say, unintended, but I do not think it does any harm. However, I repeat that I hope no one draws from this the conclusion that my views are shaped by nostalgia for an age that cannot be recaptured. Rather, my views about work are governed by nostalgia for an age that has not yet come into being, in which, for the worker, the craft satisfaction that arises from conscious and purposeful mastery of the labor process will be combined with the marvels of science and the ingenuity of engineering, an age in which everyone will be able to benefit, in some degree, from this combination.

In later years, I was able to gain first-hand experience of some of the most typical office processes of our times, again at the moment when they were beginning to undergo rapid changes. Some years of experience in socialist journalism led eventually to my employment in book publishing as an editor, and this in turn led to more than a dozen years as an operating executive in two publishing houses. Here I was able to see, and in fact design, some of the administrative processes involved in modern marketing, distributing, accounting, and book production routines; and this experience twice included the transition from conventional to computerized office systems. I would not pretend that this background is as extensive as that of many others who have worked for longer periods of time in larger organizations, but at least it does enable me to understand, in some detail and concreteness, the principles by which labor processes are organized in modern offices.

Introduction

5

6 Labor and Monopoly Capital

As the reader will see in the appropriate chapters, I have tried to put this experience to some use in this book. I have also had the benefit of many conversations—with friends, acquaintances, strangers met at social gatherings or while traveling—about their work (and it may be that some of them, if they chance to read this, will now understand why I was curious to the point of rudeness). But while this occupational and conversational background has been useful, I must emphasize that nothing in this book relies upon personal experience or reminiscences, and that I have in the formal sense included almost no factual materials for which I could not give a reference which can be checked independently by the reader, as is proper in any scientific work.

Throughout the period of study and composition, I discussed the ideas that were taking shape in my mind with a number of friends, and I want to thank them here for their interest and patience. The manuscript was also read in draft by friends, associates, and otherwise interested persons, and I must thank them all for valuable suggestions which improved the clarity of presentation of a sometimes complex subject matter, and saved me from some blunders of conception and expression. In particular, I must acknowledge my debt to Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, who were especially helpful in starting me on a number of tracks which I might otherwise have neglected, and in suggesting readings which I might otherwise have missed; but I would like also to add that my chief debt to them, and one which I feel most keenly, is the force of their example as Marxists attempting a grasp of modern social reality. My acknowledgments to writers whose work had a special value will be found in the text, footnotes, and reference notes. The intellectual influence under which this work was composed is that of Marx and, as the reader will see, little that has been written by any Marxists since Marx plays a direct role in those portions of this book concerned with the labor process, for reasons which I must now try to explain.

The central place in the first volume of Marx's Capital is occupied by the labor process as it takes place under the control of capital, and the subtitle describes it accurately as a “critical analysis of capitalist production."In this volume, the only part of his projected study of capitalism that he was able to realize fully, Marx shows how the processes of production are, in capitalist society, incessantly transformed under the impetus of the principal driving force of that society, the accumulation of capital. For the working population, this transformation manifests itself, first, as a continuous change in the labor processes of each branch of industry, and second, as a redistribution of labor among occupations and industries.

Marx completed this work in the mid-1860s. During the past century this very same dynamic has been far more powerful than the manifestations of it which Marx witnessed in his own lifetime and upon which he based his critical analysis of capitalist production. Yet the extraordinary fact is that Marxists have added little to his body of work in this respect. Neither the changes in productive processes throughout this century of capitalism and monopoly capitalism, nor the changes in the occupational and industrial structure of the working population have been subjected to any comprehensive Marxist analysis since Marx's death. It is for this reason that I cannot, as I have already said, attribute to any Marxists other than Marx himself a strong intellectual influence upon this study: there simply is no continuing body of work in the Marxist tradition dealing with the capitalist mode of production in the manner in which Marx treated it in the first volume of Capital. Since the reasons for this are bound to be of interest, we must ask why this is so.

The answer probably begins with the extraordinary thoroughness and prescience with which Marx performed his task. He subjected labor processes, and their development in the factory system, to the most knowledgeable and systematic study they have ever received. So well did he understand the tendencies of the capitalist mode of production, and so accurately did he generalize from the as yet meager instances of his own time, that in the decades immediately after he completed his work Marx's analysis seemed adequate to each special problem of the labor process, and remarkably faithful to the overall movement of production. It may thus have been, in the beginning, the very prophetic strength of Marx's analysis that contributed to the dormancy of this subject among Marxists. The development of the factory system seemed to bear out Marx in every particular, and to render superfluous any attempt to repeat what he had already accomplished. It is true that by the early part of the twentieth century the increase in commercial, administrative, and technical labor seemed to cut across Marx's bipolar class structure and introduce a complicating element, and this occasioned a discussion in the Second International and especially in its German section. But the discussion was abortive, in part because the tendencies had not yet ripened sufficiently, and it faded away without conclusive results even while the substance of the problem increased in scope.

Meanwhile, the cataclysmic events of this centurytwo world wars, fascism, the successive disintegrations and restabilizations of capitalist economies in the aftermaths of wars and in the Great Depression, and revolutions both proletarian and nationalist—dominated the analytical work of Marxism. The front of this violent stage was taken and held by monopoly, militarism, imperialism, nationalism, the “crisis" or “breakdown" tendencies of the capitalist system, revolutionary strategy, and the problems of the transition from capitalism to socialism.

The extraordinary development of scientific technology, of the productivity of labor, and to some extent of the customary levels of working-class consumption during this century have had, as has often been noted, a profound

Introduction

7

8 Labor and Monopoly Capital

effect upon the labor movement as a whole. The unionized working class, intimidated by the scale and complexity of capitalist production, and weakened in its original revolutionary impetus by the gains afforded by the rapid increase of productivity, increasingly lost the will and ambition to wrest control of production from capitalist hands and turned ever more to bargaining over labor's share in the product. This labor movement formed the immediate environment of Marxism; and Marxists were, in varying degrees, compelled to adapt themselves to it.

The adaptation took various forms, many of which can now be seen as ideologically destructive. The working philosophy of Marxism, as distinguished from its holiday pronouncements, focused increasingly not upon the profound inner nature of capitalism and the worker's position within it, but upon its various conjunctural effects and crises. In particular, the critique of the mode of production gave way to the critique of capitalism as a mode of distribution. Impressed, perhaps even overawed, by the immense productivity of the labor process, baffled by its increasing scientific intricacy, participating in the struggles of workers for improvements in wages, hours, and conditions, Marxists adapted to the view of the modern factory as an inevitable if perfectible form of the organization of the labor process. In the Social Democracy, the pre-World-War-I socialist movement, the evolution of unions and Marxist parties went hand in hand, as part of the close association between the two and their joint drift toward a thoroughly nonrevolutionary outlook.

The revival of revolutionary Marxism in the Communist movement after the Russian Revolution arrested the drift toward reformism in many other fields but seems only to have exacerbated it in this respect. The Soviet Communists had taken power, in a turn of history unexpected by classical Marxism, in a barely capitalist country where, except in a few industrial centers, technology, production, and even mere organized and disciplined labor processes were weak. The Soviet Union faced catastrophe unless it could develop production and replace the ingrained traditions of the Russian peasantry with systematic habits of social labor. In this situation, the respect and even admiration of Marxists for the scientific technology, the production system, and the organized and regularized labor processes of developed capitalism was if anything heightened. If the old Social Democracy tended to view the capitalist mode of production as an immensely powerful and successful enterprise with which it was necessary to compromise, the Communists tended to view it with equal awe as a source from which it was necessary to learn and borrow, and which would have to be imitated if the Soviet Union were to catch up with capitalism and lay the foundations for socialism.

We need only recall that Lenin himself repeatedly urged the study of Frederick W. Taylor's “scientific management," with an eye toward utilizing it in Soviet industry. The Taylor system, he said, "like all capitalist progress, is a combination of the refined brutality of bourgeois exploitation and a number of the greatest scientific achievements in the field of analyzing mechanical motions during work, the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the elaboration of correct methods of work, the introduction of the best system of accounting and control, etc. The Soviet Republic must at all costs adopt all that is valuable in the achievements of science and technology in this field. The possibility of building socialism depends exactly upon our success in combining the Soviet power and the Soviet Organization of administration with the up-to-date achievements of capitalism. We must organize in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out and adapt it to our ends." In practice, Soviet industrialization imitated the capitalist model; and as industrialization advanced the structure lost its provisional character and the Soviet Union settled down to an organization of labor differing only in details from that of the capitalist countries, so that the Soviet working population bears all the stigmata of the Western working classes. In the process, the ideological effect was felt throughout world Marxism: the technology of capitalism, which Marx had treated with cautious reserve, and the organization and administration of labor, which he had treated with passionate hostility, became relatively acceptable. Now the revolution against capitalism was increasingly conceived as a matter of stripping from the highly productive capitalist mechanism certain “excrescences,"improving the conditions of work, adding to the factory organization a formal structure of "workers' control," and replacing the capitalist mechanisms of accumulation and distribution with socialist planning.

At any rate and whatever the precise factors at work, the critique of the capitalist mode of production, originally the most trenchant weapon of Marxism, gradually lost its cutting edge as the Marxist analysis ofthe class structure of society failed to keep pace with the rapid process of change. It has now become a commonplace to assert that Marxism was adequate only for the definition of the “industrial proletariat," and that with the relative shrinkage of that proletariat in size and social weight, Marxism, at least in this respect, has become “outmoded." As a result of this uncorrected obsolescence, Marxism became weakest at the very point where it had originally been strongest.

During the past decade there has been a renewal of interest on the Left in work processes and the ways in which they are organized. This may be attributed to a number of causes. The headlong rush of capital accumulation which has proceeded relatively without check since World War II in Western Europe, the United States, and Japan has removed from the center of radical attention those notions of the imminent “breakdown" and “collapse" of the capitalist system which dominated radical thought during the decades following World War I. The bankruptcy of Soviet Communist ideology has opened the way for a neo-Marxism which has attempted fresh approaches to the problems of capitalism and socialism. In particular, the discussions of the organization of labor in Cuba in the mid-sixties, and the Cultural Revolution in China shortly thereafter, went beyond the preoccupation with the equalitarian distribution of the products of social labor and brought to the fore the idea of a revolution in the organization of social production. And finally, the new wave of radicalism of the 1960s was animated by its own peculiar and in some ways unprecedented concerns. Since the discontents of youth, intellectuals, feminists, ghetto populations, etc., were produced not by the “breakdown" of capitalism but by capitalism functioning at the top of its form, so to speak, working at its most rapid and energetic pace, the focus of rebellion was now somewhat different from that of the past. At least in part, dissatisfaction centered not so much on capitalism's inability to provide work as on the work it provides, not on the collapse of its productive processes but on the appalling effects of these processes at their most “successful." It is not that the pressures of poverty, unemployment, and want have been eliminatedfar from it——but rather that these have been supplemented by a discontent which cannot be touched by providing more prosperity and jobs because these are the very things that produced this discontent in the first place.

Introduction

9

Technology and Society

In this book, we will be concerned entirely with the development of the processes of production, and of labor processes in general, in capitalist society. The question at once arises as to the place of the countries of the Soviet bloc in relation to this analysis. I have already briefly indicated my view that the organization of labor in the Soviet Union (to which I refer for convenience in the singular although its characteristics are to be found in all the countries of the Soviet bloc and, in some degree, in all countries where capitalist property relations have been overthrown) differs little from the organization of labor in capitalist countries. Commenting on this aspect ofSoviet life, Georges Friedmann the French sociologist and long-time student of the anatomy of work, wrote:

. . . it appears that planned economies of the Soviet type, including those of the peoples’ democracies of Eastern Europe, and more and more of communist China,\* contain large sectors in which technical progress has multiplied the number of simplified jobs . . . and has thus started, and is developing, that separation between planning and execution which seems to be in our day a common denominator linking all industrial societies together, however differ-2
ent their populations and structures.

An American sociologist reports that “Soviet economists and social scientists I met in Moscow . . . insisted that job satisfaction studies are irrelevant in a society in which the workers own the means of production."3 At the same time, a growing body of Westernized sociological and management literature in the Soviet Union seeks to make explicit the debt of Soviet society to capitalist industrial practice.\* This debt need hardly be demonstrated, since the descriptive and apologetic literature of Soviet society, while it presents claims of superiority to capitalist practice in terms of worker “ownership" of the means of production, health and safety practices, rational planning, and the like, does not claim substantial differences in terms of the organization and division of labor.

The similarity of Soviet and traditional capitalist practice strongly encourages the conclusion that there is no other way in which modern industry can be organized. And this conclusion had already been sufficiently encouraged by the tendency of modern social science to accept all that is real as necessary, all that exists as inevitable, and thus the present mode of production as eternal. In its most complete form, this view appears as a veritable technological determinism: the attributes of modern society are seen as issuing directly from smokestacks, machine tools, and computers. We are, as a result, presented with the theory of a societas ex machina, not only a “determinism" but a despotism of the machine. In a book by four social scientists (among them Clark Kerr), we read: “Industrialization in any country displays many of the same features. Industrializing countries are more nearly like each other, however varied they may be, than they are like commercial or agricultural or hunting and fishing economies. . . . One of the central traits is the inevitable and eternal separation of industrial men into managers and the managed." This leaves nothing to the imagination. The antagonistic relations of production are not only inevitable, but, we are told in almost religious language, eternal.\*\*

The problem which this presents is obviously an important one for a work such as this, but it is doubtful that it can be illuminated or solved by vaulting

10 Labor and Monopoly Capital

Introduction

11

\* See, for example, a recent influential volume called Organization and Management: A Sociological Analysis of Western Theories. The author adopts as his formal framework Lenin's attitude toward Taylorism (which condemned its use in "bourgeois exploitation" but urged that it be studied and everything of value adopted). Bearing this convenient warrant, he makes the expected condemnations in a perfunctory way, but the total spirit of the book is one of absorption in Western management theory and fascination with its administrative and manipulative aspects. Thus he adopts not just the spirit but the language, and Marx's investigation of capitalist society becomes for the enthusiastic author “a splendid example of a systems analysis,"while Marx himself, “in creating dialectical materialism also laid the foundations of systems analysis."4

\*\* In a polemic against anarchism called “On Authority," Frederick Engels wrote in 1873: “If man, by dint ofhis knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the forces of nature, the latter avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him, in so far as he employs them, to a veritable despotism independent of all social organization. Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry

\* This was written during the 1950s, before China's break with the Soviet Union and before the Cultural Revolution.

12 Labor and Monopoly Capital

conclusions which achieve their plausibility only by worship of the existing fact. The problem can be fruitfully attacked, it seems to me, only by way of concrete and historically specific analysis of technology and machinery on the one side and social relations on the other, and of the manner in which these two come together in existing societies. Such an analysis could well start with the possibility that the present mode of the organization and control of labor arose in capitalist society for reasons specific to that society, and was transferred to Soviet society and imitated by it for reasons that have to do with the specific nature of that society. Recognizing that there are very few “eternal" or “inevitable" features of human social organization in an abstract sense, such an analysis would proceed by way of an understanding of the historical evolution which produced modern social forms. And most important, such an analysis must not simply accept what the designers, owners, and managers of the machines tell us about them, but it must form its own independent evaluation of machinery and modern industry, in the factory and in the office; otherwise it will create not a social science but merely a branch of management science.

I must at this point devote a few pages to some discussion of Marx's view of the relation between technology and society before saying something more about the Soviet Union. A clarification of Marx's views on this relationship is necessary because orthodox social science, although it is, as we have just seen, itself prone to the most vulgar and superficial technological determinism, often misunderstands Marx in exactly this respect, and accuses him of this very sin.

In the first published essay in which his approach to history and society was outlined, the reply to Proudhon written in 1846-1847 and called The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx at one point says:

M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood is that these definite social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc. Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.

The final sentence has the striking quality and broad historical fidelity characteristic of Marx's best aphorisms. But unfortunately it is its other quality, that of appearing to be a ready-made formula, that has attracted the attention of many and caused them to try to use it as a substitute for the immense historical and analytical labors Marx performed on this theme. “Science," Marx says of Proudhon only a few pages later, “for him reduces itself to the slender proportions of a scientific formula; he is the man in search of formulas."8 In spite of such warnings, there are those who have tried to understand Marx as a provider of formulas, and in that way labeled him a “technological determinist."

Marx did, of course, give a position of primacy to the "means of production" in social evolution. But this was never conceived as a simple and unilateral determinism which “causes" a specific mode of production to issue automatically from a specific technology. Such a determinism is false to history in general, and particularly useless in confronting revolutionary and transitional epochs, with which Marx was especially concerned. In such epochs, clearly, societies exhibiting a variety of forms of social relations coexist on the basis of substantially the same technology. Marx's solution to the problem of transition turns upon his conception of the development of the productive forces within a system of social relations, until they outgrow it, come into conflict with it, and burst its bounds. This has two important implications which clash with the interpretation of Marx as a “technological determinist wielding a simple formula. On the one hand, it means that the same productive forces that are characteristic of the close of one epoch of social relations are also characteristic of the opening of the succeeding epoch; indeed, how could it be otherwise, since social and political revolutions, although they may come about in the last analysis because of the gradual evolution of the productive forces, do not on their morrow provide society with a brand-new technology. And on the other hand, it provides for the growth and evolution of the forces of production within the bounds of a single social system, a feature of all social systems but especially significant for capitalism. Thus if steam power “gives us" the industrial capitalist, industrial capitalism “gives us," in turn, electric power, the power of the internal combustion engine, and atomic power.

On the basis of this sketch, we would expect the technology and organization of production of early capitalism to be much closer to those of the late feudal epoch, and those of late capitalism much closer to those of early socialism, than they are to each other. This is of course true, and serves as an elementary demonstration of the fact that the relations between technology and society are beyond the reach of any simpleminded "determinism." The treatment of the interplay between the forces and relations of production occupied

Introduction

13

itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel."6 One may agree wholeheartedly with Engels that in mastering natural forces and using them in social production, humanity has altered the terms of its social life and introduced organizational limits to the free and individual activity of the isolated producer. But in postulating “a veritable despotism," and in making this “independent of all social organization,"Engels was so carried away by his polemic that he used terminological generalities uncharacteristic of the body of his, and especially Marx's, writings. In particular, the use of the term “authority" as a supra-historical concept, independent of the various forms which it may assume—individual or collective, antagonistic or harmonious, alienated or retained in the hands of the direct producers—can only be a source of confusion.