Marx in modern times (1979)

Book Review from the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labor and Monopoly Capital, by Harry Braverman. Monthly Review Press, 1974. (£3.25)

Labor and Monopoly Capital is a most remarkable book, providing the answer to the criticisms, alleged refutations and revisions of Marxism.

Carrying on from Marx’s own description of the transformation of the labour process by manufacture in Volume I of Capital (manufacture begins when the tool is driven by a machine) Braverman gives the first detailed historical study of the continuation of the process in its hot bed, the United States of America.

Our author, by the way, is in the best tradition of the worker-writer. Unlike Professors of Sociology, who do nothing but lecture students and conduct “surveys” (ask people their opinions of themselves) Harry Braverman is a skilled coppersmith who spent seven years or so working as a craftsman in the shipyards. While this does not necessarily make him right, it does make him interesting! He knows what he writes about, from books and from life.

He explains that the way to increase relative surplus value is to break down the labour process into the tiniest possible detail, transferring from the productive worker the last vestige of any kind of decision about size, shape, weight, material to the “office”. The worker can now be watched and timed, every moment being closely studied and recorded. This is the famous Taylor system of scientific management. Braverman recounts from Taylor’s own book The Principles of Scientific Management how he raised the handling of pig iron at the Bethlehem Steel Company from 12½ to 47 tons per man per day, with a 60 per cent increase in wages. They studied the men intently before selecting the first victim, “a little Dutchman”. The following dialogue ensued: 

“You see that pile of pig iron?”
“Yes”
“Well, if you are a high priced man you will load that pig iron on that car for $1.85 [the standard rate was $1.15]. “You will do exactly as this man tells you. When he tells you to pick up a pig and walk—you walk; when he tells you to sit down and rest, you sit down. And you do it straight through the day. But no back-talk — understand!”

As Braverman explains, this is the origin of the system of time and motion study now universal in capitalist production. True, now electronic timers, stroboscopic cameras, microphones, television cameras have been added, but the principle is the same (shades of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times).

Increasing Misery

Consequently Braverman is able to show pretty convincingly that Marx’s view regarding the increasing misery, dubbed the “weak point” of his system by so many latter-day critics, is not wrong, but absolutely right in America in 1979. The classic example is the Model T Ford car. With the invention of the now universal conveyor chain assembly line system, Ford was producing by 1925 as many cars in a day as he had in a year.

  But the new technology proved increasingly unpopular. The men walked out in droves; they could pick and choose. So great was labour’s distaste for the new system, that when the company wanted 100 men, it had to hire 963.

The Legend of Henry Ford, page 149.

However, once the conveyor belt system had spread to other plants the workers could not pick and choose: they were shackled to the assembly line.

Perhaps the author’s greatest achievement, in addition to showing the degradation of the craftsman to an automaton, is his shattering debunking of that sacred cow of American sociology, the “white collar worker”. How many gallons of ink, scores of surveys, dozens of graphs, have analysed the status of the so-called Management Sector?

From official sources, Braverman shows how the “white collar” worker in America today is actually paid below the wage rates of “blue collar” workers. The explanation given is that those very same methods of scientific management (Taylorism) have now invaded the office. The process of dividing all mental effort from the craftsman’s work has attacked the managers and their staffs.

  If one ascribes to the millions of present day clerical workers-the “middle class” of a long vanished clerical stratum of early capitalism, the result can only be a drastic misconception of modern society. Yet this is exactly the practice of academic sociology and popular journalism.
  [In the office] the productive processes of society disappear in a stream of paper, moreover, which is processed in a continuous flow line like that of a cannery, the meat packing line or the car assembly conveyor, by workers organised in much the same way.
  Time and motion study reveal just as startling results in the ordinary details of clerical work as they do in the factory . . . since every motion involves consumption of physical energy, why should not analysis result in the discovery of a mass of useful effort in clerical work, just as it does in the factory.
(Lee Galloway, Office Work, its Principles and Practice)

Braverman quotes from the Guide to Office Clerical Time Standards of the Systems and Procedures Association of America such gems as

           

          Chair Activity                   Minutes

Get up from chair                 .033
Sit down in chair                 .033
Turn in chair                         .009
Move in chair to adjoin desk .080

Similar times are given for cut with scissors, rubber stamping, collating, gather, lay aside, handle, punch, staple, and so on.

New Division of Labour

With the invention of the Hollerith punched card system a means of reading and interpreting simple data without direct human participation was available. Information is now stored by electric impulses, with the result that the magnetic disc-pack can store 29 million characters. These can be transferred to or from a computer at the rate of 186,000 characters a second. The computer introduces a new division of labour, the largest single new occupation being that of key punch operator.

  Mrs. Duncan described all key punch girls as nervous wrecks. Mrs. Calvin reported the same kind of tension. “If you tap one of them on the shoulder when she is working, she’ll fly through the ceiling. Although the girls do not quit, they stay home frequently and keep supplies of tranquillisers and aspirins at their desk”; they felt they were doing a factory job, “frozen” to their desk like an assembly line.

(Automation in the Office, Hoos)

The vice president of an insurance company, pointing to a room tilled with key punch operators, remarked “All they need is a chain”. Said one operator: “This job is no different from a factory job, except that I don’t gel paid as much”.

Typists' Pool Eliminated

With the use of the modern word processor the typists pool is eliminated. The other functions of the secretary are taken over by an “administrative support centre”, which handles filing, phone answering and postings. Thus Lewis Corey could write “a typical large office is now nothing but a white collar factory.”

  The problem of the so-called employees, or white collar workers, which so bothered early generations of Marxists, and which was hailed by the anti-Marxists as proof of the falsity of the ‘proletarianisation’ theses, has thus been unambiguously clarified by the polarisation of office employment, and the growth at one pole of an immense mass of wage workers. The apparent trend to a large non-proletarian ‘middle class’ has resolved itself into the creation of a large proletariat in a new form.

This is a book in which the problems of the so-called middle class, ‘‘increased misery", polarisation, automation, are dealt with on strictly Marxian lines . It has the further merit of being written in clear, limpid style of easy flowing English.

Horatio