Labor and Monopoly Capital
Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century is a book by Harry Braverman on the economics and sociology of work under capitalism. It was first published in 1974 by Monthly Review Press.[1] According to one source, the book sold 120,000 copies between 1974 and its 1999 reissue.[2]
Key thinkers examined in Labor and Monopoly Capital were Karl Marx, Charles Babbage, Vladimir Lenin, F. W. Taylor, Frank Gilbreth, William Leffingwell, Elton Mayo, and Lyndall Urwick. Braverman subjected Taylor to intense critique, describing Taylor's strident pronouncements on management's attitudes to workers as the "explicit verbalization of the capitalist mode of production". He argued that, in the present day, the 'successors to Taylor are to be found in engineering and work design, and in top management'.[1]
Additionally, according to Braverman, Taylorism had not been superseded by more humanistic management methods, such as those of Hugo Münsterberg or Elton Mayo. Braverman instead argued that these 'practitioners of "human relations" and "industrial psychology"' have supplemented Taylor's influence by forming 'the maintenance crew for the human machinery'.[1]
Influence[edit]
Despite being overtly hostile to academic sociology,[3] Labor and Monopoly Capital became one of the most important sociological books of its era. It revived academic interest in both the history and the sociology of workplaces setting the agenda for many subsequent historians and sociologists of the workplace.
Sociological analysis was provided by such authors as Paul Sweezy, Paul A. Baran, Georges Friedmann, William Foote Whyte, and Daniel Bell.
The work started what came to be called, using Braverman's phraseology, "the labor process debate".[4] This had as its focus a close examination the nature of "skill" and the finding that there was a decline in the use of skilled labor as a result of managerial strategies of workplace control. It also documented the workers resistance to such managerial strategies.[5]
Labor and Monopoly Capital built on influential historians such as E.P. Thompson, Alfred Chandler, J.D. Bernal, David Landes, Lyndall Urwick, and E.F.L. Brech. In particular, Urwick was attacked as the 'rhapsodic historian of the scientific management movement'.[1]
Historical studies influenced by Labor and Monopoly Capital include research into deskilling, bureaucracy, Marxist historiography, business history, historical sociology, the Bedaux System, Bedaux Unit, and the Taylor Society.
References[edit]
- ^ a b c d Braverman, Harry (January 1998). Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press. ISBN 0-85345-940-1.
- ^ "Harry Braverman". www.Marxists.org. Retrieved August 17, 2017.
- ^ On pp. 96–97, Braverman remarks that 'The cardinal feature of these various schools and the currents within them is that, unlike the scientific management movement, they do not by and large concern themselves with the organization of work, but rather with the conditions under which the worker may best be brought to cooperate in the scheme of work organized by the industrial engineer ... Most orthodox social scientists adhere firmly, indeed desperately, to the dictum that their task is not the study of the objective conditions of work, but only of the subjective phenomena to which these give rise: the degrees of "satisfaction" and "dissatisfaction" elicited by their questionnaires.'
- ^ Littler, Craig R., 'The Labour Process Debate: A Theoretical Review, 1974-88' in David Knights, and Hugh Willmott (eds.), Labour Process Theory (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1990).
- ^ Meiksins, P. (1994). "Labor and Monopoly Capital for the 1990s: A Review and Critique of the Labor Process Debate". Monthly Review. 46 (6): 45–59. doi:10.14452/MR-046-06-1994-10_4.
