Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974/1998.
Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital was both the most difficult, and the most Marxist, book I have read this semester. As that reading list includes selections from Karl Marx’ Capital, Vol. I, I have to add that I do not think saying this is an exaggeration. Braverman, a laborer by experience with an intellectual and socialist bent, intends to document the decline of labor in a number of senses – the reduction of work to the lowest level of skill, and its reduction as much as possible to the status of automated mechanical activity. But Braverman is also interested in how these reductions tend to cause reduced wages, reduced job satisfaction, and the reintegration of lost craft skills within the machines that do the majority of work in twentieth century industry. The object of interest is the subjection of all facets of work to the needs of the capitalist. Braverman’s book in fact follows many of the key themes in Capital but expands upon them to include changes occurring in the 20th century, and Braverman seems if anything more ardent than Marx about the need for workers to understand these changes and act upon them. He discusses the failure of unionism, and the concomitant failure of Marxism because it became tied up with unions. He is fascinated with the increasing use of the worker as automaton. He is also interested in the way that capital hides the deskilling of labor under a blanket, allowing only minimal glimpses at work and its meaning, even by those who perform it, by literally removing work as a meaningful part of a laborer’s life.
As Marx made so clear, one of the key problems with the relationship of labor to capital is that “[the] technical subordination of the worker to the uniform motion of the instrument of labour…gives rise to a barrack-like discipline…thereby dividing the workers into manual laborers and overseers, into the private soldiers and N.C.O.s of an industrial army,” and that while an individual craftsman makes use of tools, “in the factory, the machine makes use of him.”[1] Braverman takes this idea beyond Marx’s comments, claiming that the process of “deskilling” labor results not just from the use of machines, but from the nature of management in a large corporation. His primary target here is “Taylorism,” the theory of Scientific Management developed in the United States in the early 20th Century in which even the movements of workers were scrutinized in order to find the one best system which minimized movement and time on task, but maximized the results – productive work.
Working off of Marx’s idea that work is purposeful, and conceptual as well as transformative of nature, Braverman says that “Labor that transcends mere instinctual activity is thus the force which created humankind, and the force by which humankind created the world as we know it.”[2] Work is the prime creative force that makes us human. Thus the reduction of work to mere process – the deskilling of work in the industrial factory and the modern corporation, which is what Taylorism aims to do, is also the process of dehumanization.
Braverman asserts that the conceptual function, as well as the coordination function, that belonged to skilled craft workers is transferred to management workers in industrial capitalism.[3] This is an interesting extension of the production process model of labor which is often discussed by Adam Smith and by Marx, and which is a fundamental component of Taylorism – namely that the separation of tasks in industrial capitalism not only separates workers according to function, but also adding managerial workers to the functional process by giving them a separate piece of the puzzle – the conceptual piece. This certainly would only add to the process of deskilling labor. Braverman shows this by giving a history of the development of management, and concentrating on the change in the goals of capital from, in line with Marx’s theories in Capital, the goal of purchasing and owning labor completely, “in the same way he bought his raw materials: as a definite quantity of work, completed and embodied in the product” to a preference for the purchase of labor power – the direct hiring of laborers, the control of which gives the ability to wring more value from the labor, particularly through the device of management – a further division of labor that provides a brain to operate the warm bodies on the production floor.[4]
Braverman goes further in his discussion of the division of labor, however, making another very Marxist argument that while a “social division of labor” is common and natural to human societies, the breakdown of specific industrial processes into constituent parts is not a natural process, but one unique to the capitalist mode of production. He illustrates this with Adam Smith’s famous pin-making example, showing how even simple manufacturing processes can be made more productive through a division of labor into its constituent parts. He then makes the point that Smith and others make about division of labor: “in a society based upon the purchase and sale of labor power, dividing the craft cheapens individual parts.” This is thus the goal of capitalism – as Marx outlines in Capital – to increase the value of the product through the creation of excess value by increasing the productivity of workers. Braverman calls this the “general law of the capitalist division of labor.”[5]
When he directly confronts Taylorism (or Scientific Management), Braverman makes the point that Scientific Management is not concerned with technology, nor is it really scientific, but is simply the application of the needs of capital to the process of controlling work. It takes as a given the idea that management and labor exist in opposition to each other, and does not attempt to resolve that tension, despite its claim to approach work from a humanistic point of view. Taylorism, according to Braverman, is only a new way to gain excess labor from the workforce. Taylor, he says, had two categories into which he slid management practices. The first he called “ordinary management” – the control of the general conditions of work, and the second, “scientific management” which was the control of every phase of the work process. Management should, he said, plan out each act in the work process precisely. One goal was to remove the thinking process from work. The job of management was to reduce craft knowledge to a set of tasks and rules and time tables, and return it to the worker as a decided plan which only needed to be carried out physically. This is the deskilling process that modern management in large industrial corporations carry out in the name of improving productivity by reducing the cost of labor.[6]
The results of this division of labor in capitalist society are a persistent and inexorable loss of skill among workers, and, moreover, Braverman says, the loss of craftsmanship and the place in society of the craftsman that went along with it. Braverman gives the example of the rise of the profession of engineering – engineers, who connect technology–and science in their work – came into existence, he says, because the deskilling of the labor force took that position, and capacity, away from craftsmen, who were in the past the group within society who bridged science and work through their intimate knowledge of their crafts. This contributes to an acute level of dissatisfaction for workers, and a great loss to society.
The dissatisfaction of workers, primarily because of the increasingly de-humanization of working conditions, has been ameliorated by modern industry, according to Braverman, by the manipulation of the labor force, both through modern personnel techniques that accept labor conditions as a given and profess to help workers adjust to “reality,” and through the use of pay, benefits, and other parts of work that make it desireable, (Braverman uses an example the institution of the $5 day at Ford Motor Co.) to help workers accept industrial conditions as reality and limit protests and strikes. This is the primary function of personnel and human resources departments in large corporations.[7]
Along with labor, science has become the most important item employed by capital to create excess value. Braverman makes some interesting observations while discussing how science began as what can essentially be called invention (the steam engine probably contributed more to science than science did to the steam engine, he says), but became systematically integrated into large industrial firms as a part of the means of production itself. Science and technology became a commodity that added value to the production process, and therefore were sought after by corporations attempting to increase the value of their capital and products.[8]
Combining his ideas about the tension between management and labor, and the increasing importance of automation and machinery, Braverman then moves into perhaps his most original and most important argument. Machinery, what Marx called the “instruments of production” are improved to the point where they are no longer controlled by the worker, but instead actually do the work of the worker, and control the worker as if he/she were part of the machine itself. Moreover, the machines in the twentieth century actually reintegrate the labor process, so that the division of labor, which cheapened work, and deskilled workers, created a mass of low-paid, low-skilled workers who come only to operate machines. This completes the dehumanization process, because it removes thinking, skills, and even production from the workers, and then reintegrates all of those things within machines, asking the workers only to operate the machines at the pace, and according to the rules, set by management. There is no more of the humanizing process of work that Marx, and Braverman, say is what defines us as human beings.
I found Braverman’s analysis to be very compelling. It updates Marx so that his theories, developed in the mid-nineteenth century, can be seen to be applicable to modern industry and work. His argument that clerks and office workers are new skilled workers, but that there work is being controlled, deskilled, and divided as well, and that the vast majority of workers are thus dissatisfied with their jobs, goes far toward the conclusion that de-humanization is a trend of modern industrial society. I found here a critique of a number of other works that I have read, including journalistic accounts of labor, and capitalism, that is compelling and useful.
Like Marx, though, I think that Braverman has a blind spot. He is a proletarian intellectual. He has no place in his analysis for intellectuals, however. At one point he mentions the profession of engineering, but really only in passing, and only as an example of the deskilling of crafts. Academic pursuits, and knowledge-based careers do seem to me to be on the rise over the late part of the Twentieth Century. However, as the introduction and the preface note, this may not – is probably not – enough to offset the loss of skills and satisfaction in industrial labor.
If Braverman were writing today, I think that he would find the growth of the service sector in the American economy, and the increased economic importance of the financial services industry in particular, to be further proof that the trends he identifies – deskilling of the labor force, increasing domination of the economy by capital, and increasing levels of job-dissatisfaction throughout the United States.
Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974/1998.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin ed. 3 vols. Vol. 1. New York: Penguin Books, 1867, 1976. Reprint, 1976.
[1] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Penguin ed., 3 vols., vol. 1 (New York: Penguin Books, 1867, 1976; reprint, 1976), 548-9.
[2] Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974/1998), 34.
[3] Ibid., 41.
[4] Ibid., 42-47.
[5] Ibid., 52-58.
[6] Ibid., 59-83.
[7] Ibid., 96-104.
[8] Ibid., 114.