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

Television work and play (1980)

From the February 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

A quite remarkable letter from a viewer was published in the Radio Times recently. A Mr. Howell wrote a crushing exposure of a series of three BBC television programmes on “The Right to Work”:

   The first programme gave a glossy ‘To-morrow’s World’ treatment to the potential of the micro processors, with interviewers and presenters blissfully unaware of the contradictions. We heard how service industries would expand, and then saw computers taking the place of room service . . . We heard how leisure would become a big money- spinner, and next day found that those who have the leisure will be on the dole-or social security.
  Let us turn from the fact that the planners of those programmes did not know any answers to the questions of the effects of the introduction of the new technology: and look at the final programme which showed that they did not even know the questions to be asked.

Radio Times, 29.9.79.

And what was the response of the BBC Horizon programme producer, Michael Blakstad, and editor of the “Right to Work” programme? A pathetic confession that they understand nothing about it:

I cannot but agree that we need to re-examine the real meaning of “work”. We took an enormous subject and we drew no conclusions.

ibid.

In other words, Mr. Howell was right and they admit they don’t know what they are talking about. Perhaps the Socialist Standard can help.

Obviously the first job is to define “work”. What is here in question is not work as understood in physics, which is a straight, simple mathematical relation. “Work” in sociology is rather more complex. Here we are dealing not with inanimate objects but the effort of human beings. This is our first fundamental distinction, for it is obvious that many animals work and as Fourier, the French Utopian, pointed out, obviously derive the greatest happiness and joy in doing so. Bees, ants, spiders and birds build hives, nests and webs, while beavers build dams and termites actually raise reinforced structures.

Here we are indebted, once again, to Karl Marx for pointing out the basic difference between the work of chimpanzees who have been induced to join sticks or build ladders to reach food, or rats to push coloured buttons, or even angle worms to thread a maze, and that of human beings. Harry Braverman, the American author, quotes from Marx (the very first page of Capital, volume I) in Labour and Monopoly Capital:

We pre-suppose Labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of the bees is this: that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour process we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at the commencement . . . he realises a purpose of his own . . .  to which he subordinates his will.

This above all, is the distinguishing feature of human work; the result of conceptual thought, and a pronounced enlargement of that part of the brain (the parietal) possessed by no other animal, making humans independent of the animal’s captor—Instinct. It produces articulate speech which can communicate and transmit knowledge, making a general social culture inevitable. It is this ability to imagine—to create the subjective image—which characterises the greatest scientists and artists.

“In recent times” writes Braverman, “the artistic mind has often grasped this special feature of human activity, better than the technical mind.” Quoting Paul Valery:

  Man does not merge into the materials of his undertaking, but proceeds from the material to his mental picture, from his mind to his model.
  Art, indeed, consists in the conception of the result to be produced, before its realisation in the material writes Aristotle.
  Men, who made tools of a standard type, must have formed in their minds images of the ends to which they laboured. Human culture is the outcome of this capacity for human thought Professor Oakley, Skill As a Human Possession.

This gives us the key to the understanding of the basis of the organisation of the capitalist production system; the division of labour or the breaking down of a process into its simplest possible parts, thus depriving the work of its natural essence-its imagination, its creativity.

Thus John Ruskin wrote:

We have much studied, and perfected, of late, the great civilised invention of the division of labour, only we give it a false name. It is not the labour that is divided, but MEN, divided into mere segments, broken into small fragments and crumbs of life, so that all the little intelligence that is left of a man is not enough to make a pin, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin. The Stones of Venice.

The division of labour has always existed (for instance, in child-bearing) but its application to the capitalist system

is the breakdown of the processes involved in the making of the product into manifold operations performed by different workers.

Braverman, p. 73.

Labour power has become a commodity. Its uses are no longer according to the needs of that who sells it—but of employers seeking to expand their capital. The most common mode of cheapening labour-power . . .  is to break it up into its simplest elements.

ibid.

This explains the technology of capitalist society. In the words of Frederick Taylor the inventor of American “Scientific Management”

All possible brainwork should be removed from the shop and centred in the planning—or lay-out department.

Scientific Management.

Now we are on the track of the explanation of the system at the Lordstown plant of General Motors in Ohio, USA ‘the most advanced in the world’, where each worker on the assembly line gets 36 seconds “to complete work on one car and get ready for the next”. See this, from the Guide to Office Clerical Standards of the Systems Association of America:

                                               

                                                      Minutes

Open file drawer                             .04

Folder: open/dose flaps                   .04

Open center drawer                         .026

Close side                                        .015

Work “as an activity that alters natural materials to improve their usefulness” is transformed by capitalism into hated toil, converting the toilers into robot automatons repeating the simplest mechanical operations thousands of times. It is this which has induced some writers to predict a future where 15 per cent will be the all-powerful technicians with the ‘know-how’, 15 per cent managers who understand the general process, and 35 per cent general unskilled labourers, button-pushers and key-punchers, leaving 35 per cent of the workforce permanently unemployed, because redundant.

Each form of society produces the technology it requires. In capitalist society every machine, each process, which reduces the necessity for initiative or creativity, is welcomed, every elimination of personality introduced. The reason that the “experts” invited by the BBC proved utterly incapable of defining the nature of the problem is because they do not understand capitalism.

There is no solution but the abolition of capitalist technology itself. Knowing the main incentive for the fragmentation of the labour process under capitalism, enables us to extrapolate the nature of work in socialist society. The general guiding principles will obviously be the integration and synthesis of the mental (imaginative or planning) side with the actual operation, by the same people. Once again we turn to the creative artist for a description of labour in a socialist society:

In Socialist society all unintellectual labour, all monotonous dull labour, all labour that deals with unpleasant things and involves dreadful conditions will be done by machinery; and just as trees grow while the countryman is asleep, so while humanity is enjoying itself in cultured leisure, machinery will be doing the necessary and unpleasant work.

again

Every man must be free to choose his own work. No form of compulsion must be exercised over him. If there is, his work will not be good for him, will not be good in itself, and will not be good for others; and by work I simply mean activity of any kind.

The Soul of Man under Socialism, Oscar Wilde.

In socialism work will become the ultimate form of art.

Art, Labour and Socialism, William Morris.

For the worker, the craft satisfaction that arises from conscious and purposeful mastery of the labour process, will be combined with the marvels of science and the ingenuity of engineering. An age in which every one will be able to benefit from this combination.”

H. Braverman, ibid.

The forecasts of some fanciful writers that in Socialist society everybody will be a lotus-eating sybarite, cossetted by robots, have minimal validity. In the words of Marx, work will be “darned serious” in Socialist society.

   The exchange of living labour for objectivised labour is the ultimate development of the value relation and of production resting on Value. But to the degree that large industry develops; the creation of the real wealth comes to depend less on labour-time—whose effectiveness is out of all proportion to the direct labour-time spent in their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and the progress of technology . . .  Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process, rather the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself.
   No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing as middle link between the object and himself . . .  he steps to the side of the productive process, instead of being its chief actor.
   In this transformation it is the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation stone of production and of wealth.
   As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour-time ceases to be its measure, and exchange-value ceases to be the measure of use- value.
    Production based on exchange value breaks down. The free development of individualities, not the reduction of necessary labour time to create surplus labour, but the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic scientific development of individuals in the time set free.
    The measure of wealth is then NOT labour time, but disposable time.

Die Grundrisse, Karl Marx, p. 709.

Divison of labour under capitalism will be transformed into multiplication (repeated additions) in socialism. Humans will become scientific, technical creative artists of production and will make their historic leap “from Necessity into Freedom”.

Horatio

Labour and Monopoly Capital (1980)

From the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

The sad, horrible, heart-breaking way the vast majority of my fellow countrymen and women, as well as their counterparts in most of the rest of the world, are obliged to spend their working lives is seared into my consciousness in an excruciating and unforgettable way. And when I think of all the talent and energy which daily go into devising ways and means of making their torment worse, all in the name of efficiency and productivity but really for the greater glory of the god ‘Capital’, my wonder at humanity’s ability to create such a monstrous system is surpassed only by amazement at its willingness to tolerate the continuance of an arrangement so obviously destructive of the well-being and happiness of human beings.
    If the same effort, or only half of it, were directed to making work the joyous and creative activity it can be, what a wonderful world it would be.

From Paul Sweezy’s foreword to Labour and Monopoly Capital by Harry Braverman (Monthly Review Press)