>The criticism of Braven quoted here is pretty common, but strikes me as
>wrong and unfair.
>--jks
yes. Braverman was very much aware of worker resistance on the shopfloor. and, he was quite clear about the limitations to capitalist control of the labor process:
"The displacement of labor as the subjective element in a productive process now conducted by management, is an *ideal realized by capital only within definite limits, and unevenly among industries.* " (emph added)
Braverman was interested not in how Taylorist control worked (or failed) but in Taylorism as an ideology. this is what i'm doing in my own work, and i've used braverman as a model, supplemented by dorothy smith and michael burawoy, as more expansive marxist ethnographic approaches--albeit, i want to explore resistance in the context of objective limits to that resistance. it's about, as burawoy explains, making a connections between the objective operations of capital and the subjective expression of this ideologies as sites of consent, resistance, some combination thereof. it is the fact that management actually does time and motion studies or, today, promulgates new managerial ideologies in various ways that is of interest, not because control via these mechanisms is an inexorable force against which workers are powerless.
braverman makes no bones about it: rationalization over work processes is successful in all sorts of ways. reading braverman as some mistakenly read foucault -- that this is a call to give up or claim that it's impossible to resist--is too simplistic. he was, as justin notes, too involved in labor struggles to assert such a thing. rather, i think what he was saying was precisely what marx said: this is why struggle/resistance is imperative.
kelley
>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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