This book is an exploration of the key technological changes and characteristics of the monopoly capitalist period and its affects on the state, working conditions and composition of the working class.
Notes
Foreward
Explicitly builds on the work of Baran and Sweezy with their book monopoly capital
Baran and Sweezy opens up the book and explains how in their analysis of monopoly capital one thing they didn’t focus on was labor as a process. This book enters into that gap
Introduction
The industrial working class in America has declined which has had an effect on the idea of radical politics and marxist economic organizing where some understand the revolutionary subject as the industrial worker
Focused on labor in two ways
Evolution of labor within occupations as well as shifts among occupations
Braverman worked as a coppersmith
The changing nature of the craftperson and craft oriented jobs with technological change is something be paid attention to, not necessarily to lament the romantic past of a man and his work with his hands but to understand how technology as a tool of capital has been used to re (con) figure the labor process
Lenin’s thoughts on and admiration of taylorist management practices
We need concreate and historically situated analysius of modern economic, labor, and technological processes
Argues against a simplistic understanding of determisnm as a way of understanding the relations of technology and society similar to mau-soren-mute-compulsion-2022
Instead of a determinist philosophy of technology where technology conditions the economic social relations technology should be understood as core to a social ontology both mediating humans relations with each other, their environment, and means of social reproduction while also under capitalism being dominated by the power of capital and turned toward aims of accumulation and subjection of labor
Labor and management
Human work is different from animal in that it is conscious and purposive instead of instinctual
It is necessarily social and likely is mediated by tools as external organs
For braverman there can be a gap between the conception of work and the execution of work that can take place in other settings or be retained
Difference between marxist political economy vs bourgesious economism
Marxist political economy is concerned with social relations, power, and value
Bourgious is primarily concerned with price relations expressed in markets. Relations among commodities that obscure the labor going on.
The assemblage of workers under capitalist production was originally under the management of the owner, over time increasing layers and complexity of management have evolved.
The division of labor in manufacturing was the innnovation that was needed to drive industrial production
Babbage an early thinker in computer science was also very obsessed with the control of labor processes and industrialization. He also was very interested in labor control practices on plantations and surveillance. The history of the computer, the plantation, and the industrial factory are all bound up and illustrate how technology can be subject to the power of capital as a compulsive force combined with the libidinal drive of antiblackness. Babbage application of labor division techniques were applied to his thinking about division of labor of mental processes as well.
Science and mechanization
Science has been subjected to capital
Braverman makes a point about a germanic anglo divide in science and philosophy by looking at the influence of the philosophy and work of science in england informed by bentham and hegel and his influence on philosophy and science in germany
Hegel was very influential in germany and also casts a long shadow on all of continental philosophy including marxism. German speculative tradition influenced scientific thinking with the emphasis theory on theory and speculative thinkng
The anglo world was more influenced by an emphasis on empirisicm common sense betham etc. Ideas about control. Some of this can still be seen in the analytical philosophy tradition
If we continue this line of thinking we can arrive at heidegger as in some ways seeking to recover the project of kant and a bit of a reaction to the industrial world arguing against instrumentalization and a return to things in themselves. But for heidegger he isn’t in a hegelian tradition of dialectics which continues in marx but instead his critique of enframing and instrumentalization is based upon a Dasein fundamental being.
Corporatization of research and science
Labor is turned from a subjective aspect of the production process into a input object that the manager fully control
Key Concepts
Scientific management
Attempt to apply science to labor control i.e. taylorism, babbage, etc.
Division of mental and physical labor processes
Emphasis on rationalization and optimization of labor extraction for a given days work
Extraction, externalization, centralizing and ordering of workers knowledge of the labor process
Remove mental labor from the shop and centralize in management an planning departments
Management pre-plan all works talks that are then handed to workers
Monopoly capital
Monopoly capital was a thesis developed by Baran and Sweezy in the 60 s to refer to the newest developments in capitalism as an evolution of lenin’s observations of the connections between imperialism, capitalism and monoply
Shifting away from an understanding of small firms and competition to giant corpoarations, surplus, and accumulation
Surplus absorption is a problem for capitalism, military spending and imperialism is a key way of dealing with this
Characteristics of monpoly capital and the state
Generates more surplus than can be obsorbed
Permanent war mobilization as a way to deal with competitions between
Military spending can expand beyond what civilian spending can do to absorb surplus capital
Internaltional economies and economic surplus absorption
Increase in povery and insecurity
Increase in need for government services and spending
Appendixes
Regarding the womens movement
Quotes :
From this point of view, the first volume of Capital may be considered a massive essay on how the commodity form, in an adequate social and technological setting, matures into the form of capital, and how the social form of capital, driven to incessant accumulation as the condition for its own existence, completely transforms technology. (pg 14)
Machinery offers to management the opportunity to do by wholly mechanical means that which it had previously attempted to do by organizational and disciplinary means.