Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
-- Frederick Douglass --
There is something to be gained from a discussion of different types of labor and their value, of the labor process, of manual and intellectual labor, but I fear that we have lost that something because our discussion has become mired in side, personal issues and misunderstandings.
Could I try to refocus the discussion?
First, for the person who asked for more references on the work that followed Braverman, here goes.
You need to start, of course, with Braverman himself: Harry Braverman, _Labor and Monopoly Capital_. NY: Monthly Review Press, 1974.
There was a spate of work which followed in the decade or so after Braverman:
Andre Gorz, editor. _The Division of Labor_. Sussex: Harvester Press, 1976. [Includes the very important essay Steve Marglin essay, "What Do Bosses Do?"]
Conference of Socialist Economists, _The Labour Process and Class Strategies_. Kent: Whitstable, 1976.
Michael Buroway, _Manufacturing Consent_. University of Chicago Press, 1979.
Andrew Zimbalist, editor. _Case Studies on the Labor Process_. NY: Monthly Review Press, 1979.
Richard Edwards, _The Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century _. NY: Basic Books, 1979.
Dan Clawson, _Bureaucracy and the Labor Process_. NY: Monthly Review Press, 1980.
Stephen Wood, _The Degradation of Work? Skill, Deskilling and the Labor Process_. London: Hutchinson, 1982.
Paul Thompson, _The Nature of Work: An Introduction to Debates on the Labor Process_. London: Macmillan, 1983.
Then it comes to a screeching halt.
There are faint echoes of discussions of the labor process in the literature on post-Fordism [See, for example, John Tomaney "A New Paradigm of Work Organization and Technology?" in Ash Amin, editor. _Post-Fordism_. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.], but the main theoretical influence is quite clearly a kind of "regulationist" school approach with more focus of macroeconomic issues centering on the role of the state in the economy.
What was quite remarkable because of its singularity and exceptional status was the publication last year of the collection, Mike Wardell, Thomas Steiger, and Peter Meiksins, _Rethinking the Labor Process_. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. as a 25 year commemoration of _Labor and Monopoly Capital_.
I might also add that the whole paradigm of looking at the labor process and 'deskilling' was productive in a number of fields. For example, there was some very interesting work which applied it to education. A general analysis of work intensification and labor process among educated labor was produced by Magalai Sarfatti Larson, "Proletarianization and Educated Labor" in _Theory and Society_. Vol. 9, No. 1. (1980) This analysis was applied to teacher work in Michael Apple's work, especially _Education and Power_. Routledge, 1982 and _Teachers and Texts_. Routledge, 1989., and in Kathleen Densmore's "Professionalism, Proletarianization and Teacher Work" in Thomas Popkewitz, editor. _Critical Studies in Teacher Education: Its Folklore, Theory and Practice_. London: Falmer Press, 1987. There is more, but these are the best cites.
In the day and age when I would have called myself a Marxist and attached some political meaning to that self-identification, it would have been in no small part because of finding real use in work such as this, and in identifying with its general intellectual thrust. But it has completely petered out, and with it, for many of us -- not quite sure whether it is cause or effect -- the sense of a live Marxist intellectual tradition to which you would want to belong. Discussions of M-C-M do not appear to me to be live analyses, but fetishistic worship of old intellectual relics. How telling that Zizek has had to take -- of all things -- the relic of Lenin out of his textual closet, a Lacanian Lenin at that, to sustain his faith.
Why did it happen, and what does it tell us?
As many critics have pointed out over time, Braverman [who came out of the American Trotskyist movement, and was a leader with Bert Cochran of one of the few Trot tendencies, with the Shachtmnanites, that combined intelligent thought with a presence in the trade union movement] really had no conception of worker subjectivity. His analysis of Taylorism put all power in the hands of management, with workers being able to mount, at best, rearguard shopfloor resistance against the ever greater loss of control over the labor process. This was, in my view, because of a millennial conception of social change, taken from the major thrust of Marxian analysis, in which workers could only have their subjectivity stolen under capitalism, could only be reduced, more and more, to complete objectivity; only a socialist revolution which transformed workers from complete objects to total subjects could change that. Thus, there was no point of doing anything but organize workers for socialist revolution. Indeed, many saw the reduction of workers into the lowest denominator, completely deskilled labor force, into a homogeneous mass, as some sort of necessary predicate for their organization into a force for socialism.
For a brief moment at the end of the 60s and the start of the 70s, there was some reason [although in retrospect, it was much more self-delusion than reason] to think that something like that sort of a socialist revolution was a viable historical project. Not anymore, if the brain still thinks for itself. Now in the face of that reality, one can either maintain the basic Braverman thesis, and be left with a rather bleak political future not all that different from Marcuse's "one dimensional" society, or one can rethink the whole question of worker subjectivity and objectivity, of the potential for worker organization and progress, of ways in which work can be reorganized without millennial revolution. Richard Edwards is an example of someone who basically remained with the Braverman paradigm, and whose latest work _Rights At Work_ [Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1993.] envisions a post-union, post-solidarity world in which workers are isolated monads, but with individual rights at work. Why bosses would ever allow isolated workers without a smattering of collective organization any rights is a fundamental question he never confronts.
I believe -- and I have been struggling with this question in my work on teacher unionism -- that it is possible to conceive of workers as a duality of subjectivity and objectivity, and to see battles over the labor process, over deskilling and the control of knowledge, over the organization of work, as ongoing struggles. In short, it is possible to think of ways in which worker power, and worker organization, and worker control over knowledge, can be advanced without some sort of millennial revolution. That is the project of radical democracy, as I understand it.
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