>1) "Mechanization is increasingly reducing the quantity and intensity of
>physical labor in labor."
>Isn't this true?
Though Louis's examples are excellent, here is some counter evidence
a. Galbraith shows that most consumer good producing industries are still "stuck in the old fashioned business of employing production workers to make consumption goods", though the relative pay of non production workers did increase. But the point is that their relative employment did not. We also need to consider the conditions of agriculture labour. There is a new book out ed. Michael Watts and David Goodman and Miriam Wells Strawberry Fields, which is being touted as a breakthrough work.
b. if we include the world wide stage on which capital accumulates, have we not witnessed what what Alain Lipietz has called bloody Taylorism? Indeed it may be cheaper for firms to use labor intensive techniques since as they only pay for labor power, not labor; their new mobility has allowed them to use very cheap wage workers indeed, including of course in the US?
c. aren't there reports of increased intensity, e.g., the indirect evidence of industrial accidents and the observational evidence of Jane Slaughter?
d. jobs which are classified as machine operators may indeed be unskilled and low paying, as Braverman showed.
e. there is however considerable evidence of a Marcusean like automation in David Schwartzman's new book Black Unemployment--Part of Unskilled Unemployment. Praeger, 1998.
>2) "The assimilating trend shows forth in the occupational stratification.
>In the key industrial establishments, the 'blue-collar' worker force
>declines in relation to the 'white-collar' element; the number of
>non-production workers increases.'
>
>Again, this seems both undeniable and important.
Well, again this is not true in the production of consumer goods though it seems to be true in what Galbraith classifies as knowledge intensive goods, e.g. computers, aircraft, drugs. But the total employment growth in this set of industries seems to have been small, though this is contested.
> Doug Henwood has argued
>that the number of white-collar workers has increased, but does anybody
>think that all of the computer programmers and data entry clerks employed
>by Mobil Oil, General Motors, IBM, etc. have anything in common with the
>traditional working-class?
The working class is defined by its social relation to capital--its absolute dependence on wage labor to reproduce itself. That even these workers are part of the dominanted class is manifest in downturns. These workers are also subjected to capital's attempt to press their reproduction costs to an absolute minimum. Carchedi calls this deskilling.
>
>3) "These changes in the character of work and the instruments of work and
>the instruments of production change the attitude and the consciousness of
>the laborer, which become manifest in the widely discussed 'social and
>cultural integration' of the laboring class with capitalist society.
>The other thing that is taking place is that many of the new jobs are
>created in a high-technology sector in which the 1950s type bonding is
>still possible, since the profit margins are still high.
It is possible that their are what Galbraith calls industry rents here, so a janitor, sharing in those higher profit margins, makes more than a janitor in a sneaker factory. But hell costs of living are higher in Silicon Valley too. So high indeed it seems that most production had to be moved out--except for prototype production--because housing a working class was too expensive. With the fabs went the canneries and cookie factories as well, according to Saxenenian.
>4) "The new technological work-world thus enforces a weakening of the
>negative position of the working class: the latter no longer appears to be
>the living contradiction of the established society."
Check out Carchedi' work for the argument that the working class has not disappeared from advanced industrial capitalism; what about Erik Olin Wright's research? And how does Marcuse appear from the perpective of the global proletariat, including the women at the center of it. For example, the work of Swasti Mitter and Peter Custer.
Reading One Dimensional Man, I must say that I get sense that Marcuse was willing to theorize on a narrow empirical base. But people like Vance Packard didn't it have it all figured out after all.
best, rakesh