A Fresh Start At Looking At Labor And The Labor Process

[Justin Schwartz]

The criticism of Braven quoted here is pretty common, but strikes me as 
wrong and unfair. As far as I can see, the reasoning goes: first, Braverman 
believed in classical socialist revolution, and he believed this was 
necesasry to free workwers from the degradation of work that he describes, 
therefore, he must have rejected all lesser reform struggles; therefore he 
did not believe in worker subjectivity or the point of production, or indeed 
politics of labor, as sites of class struggle. Needless to say this is a 
caricature of someonme whose whole adult life was devoted to reform 
struggles and organizing radical unionism at several different kinds of 
point of production. Also the reasoning doesn't follow; it's a mess.

It may be that with the demise of self-identified workers' movements calling 
thselves marxist that there is no point in the "Marxist" identification 
nowadays. I don't care to argue the point here. But there can't be much 
doubt that the view of production and politics as sites of class struggle 
and workers as people with divided consciousnesses, radical and 
conservative, rebellious and consenting, is the heart of Marxist thinking 
about the working class and has been ever since Marx himself. Nor was it 
unimportant in the strain on Trostkyism that Braverman represented. That 
won't distinguish "radical democracy" from Marxism, whatever will.

--jks

Braverman
>had no conception ofw orker 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. . . . . >
>I believe . . . . 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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