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

by Harry Braverman

Book Overview

This widely acclaimed book, first published in 1974, was a classic from its first day in print. Written in a direct, inviting way by Harry Braverman, whose years as an industrial worker gave him rich personal insight into work, Labor and Monopoly Capital overturned the reigning ideologies of academic sociology. This new edition features an introduction by John Bellamy Foster that sets the work in historical and theoretical context, as well as two...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0853453403
• ISBN13: 9780853453406
• Release Date: January 1975
• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 1.29 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Finest book on economics from the last half of the 20th century

The finest book on economics from the last half of the 20th century. No one should claim they understand capitalism if they can't address the fundamental points of this book. It shows Why Labor Matters--and how suppressing the social and political power of labor makes the system work.

a classic analysis of what capitalism does to work

This is a very detailed study, written by a writer who had been a skilled craft worker earlier in his life, not an academic. The book provides a good theoretical understanding of the way the logic of capitalist development degrades work. Through his discussion of Taylorism, aka "scientific management," Braverman shows how the breaking up of work into tasks and then re-defining the jobs is used to concentrate the conceptual and decision-making control into a hierarchy, and the control of workers is thus diminished. Capitalists will tend to do this because it strengthens their bargaining clout in dealing with workers. But this is not a "technological determinist" argument. On the contrary, in his intro Braverman criticizes technological determinism. Rather, it is a particular social system, particular class interests, that shape decisions about what techniques are used in production. Technology is not neutral or independent of who controls it. The alternative, which Braverman has hinted at in some of his writings, would be an economic system in which the physical work is re-integrated with the conceptual and decision-making tasks so that workers would become masters of production. But this would require a different economic system than capitalism, a labor-managed economic system.

Technological determinism

This book is the classic in the field of labor process. Marx put the labor process at the center of his masterpiece, ¡®The Capital¡¯. But since then, not much, if any, studies were done in Marxist schools. This book filled the temporal gap between Marx and the 20th century in the Marxist tradition. The author focused on the labor process under the Fordism. Braverman illustrates convincingly how the work, under the discipline of scientific management or Taylorism, becomes fragmented, dull, and repetitive tasks. The work is degraded. There has been not much objection to this argument. But when it comes to technology, things are different. His argument has too much smell of determinism. The theme of this book could put in this way: how the peculiar technological change in Fordism affected the feature of work and the differentiation of working class. No dispute. But his prophecy on technological change seems to go too far: every new technology just destroys our jobs and degrades the work. This kind of grim image has proliferated with the high-tech wave of the 1990s. Should we listen to such a forecast? I don¡¯t think so. Braverman made a wrong calculation. In the larger picture, technological innovations, driven towards cost-saving and enhancing efficiency, bring job growth with revamped competitiveness of the industry and economy-wide. For example, in the US economy, when the IT investment leaped up in service sector during the 1980s, unemployment rate skyrocketed. But despite continuous downsizing and rapid diffusion of IT, unemployment rate fell sharply in the 1990s. High rates in EU area and Japan should be attributed to the factors of business cycle or rigid labor market. If Harry Braverman took the helm, the economy would end up in bankruptcy to nobody¡¯s interest. It¡¯s the picture of France or Spain, Italy. Even in Italy, the technologically innovative north faces labor shortage not unemployment. Here we can hardly see any relationship between new technology and overall unemployment rate. Sure. Every new technology makes old one obsolete, so it lead to deskilling of labor. But in turn, it entails its own skilled labor. Since the 1970s, the manufacturing sector experienced substantial technological upgrading. It resulted in the shift of labor market composition: jobs in manufacturing, less-educated work declined. Investment in earlier technologies negatively impacted mainly low-skilled production workers, particularly in the 1970s and early 1980s, whereas investment in IT negatively impacted mainly low-skilled white-collar workers in the 1980s and 1990s. Resulting bloody downsizing and restructuring have decimated so many middle-paying jobs in factories and offices. Workers who lost those jobs, especially older workers, are likely fall into lower-paying jobs or, facing long-term unemployment, retire from the labor force. But all kinds of new jobs are being created as the old ones disappear, although the new jobs go to new entrants or younger w

Updating labor theory for the age of high technology

Labor and Monopoly Power, by Harry Braverman, brings basic Marxist labor theory up to date for the modern age. Though written 25 years ago, Braverman's work is the ideal guideline to understanding the age of information technology. Braverman expertly explodes the smug myths of "knowledge age" boosters by drawing the parallels to earlier industrial technology. The major misapprehension exploded is the one that says workplace automation demands higher skills and upgrades jobs. Braverman, through developing and applying the ideas not only of Marx, but of management proponents such as Babbage, Taylor and Bright, makes a convincing case for the opposite. Computers, like other technology before them, are being applied in ways that expose two objectives: (1) the reduction of the absolute numbers of workers, and (2) the reduction of skills among the remaining workers. Braverman's 1974 book was prophetic in that it described longstanding capitalist relationships that, applied vigorously since that time, have led to increasing income inequality in America.