It is hard not to romanticize Harry Braverman. A Depression-era metalworker and committed socialist who in 1974, two years before his untimely death, published what remains one of the most powerful applications of Karl Marx’s theory of capital to American history — isn’t this the archetype of Antonio Gramsci’s organic intellectual, the worker raised to consciousness through study and struggle?

To understand how capitalism works requires journeying into “the hidden abode of production,” Marx wrote, the place where human labor power is consumed. Labor and Monopoly Capital took this idea seriously. Across twenty meticulous chapters, Braverman explored the process by which capitalists siphoned value out of their workers. This extraction splintered the human being. Body was torn from mind; motions became mechanical; knowledge was locked away in business suites. Here was “the degradation of work in the twentieth century,” as Braverman’s subtitle had it. But alongside degradation ran a second process. As workers were automated out of industrial production, capital furrowed its way into other realms of life. Factories gave way to offices, the coppersmith to the clerk, and then to sprawling postindustrial economies of services and care. The genius of Labor and Monopoly Capital was to narrate these two developments together. Capital reconstituted itself over and over in an endless cycle. But in so doing it created new worlds of labor, a molten working class.

Half a century after its publication, Labor and Monopoly Capital remains a classic. It has sold over one hundred thousand copies and continues to inform studies of capital, labor, and class. But it has also been subject to partial or plainly incorrect assessments. Many have reduced Braverman to the “deskilling thesis” — the idea that capitalism linearly forces workers to perform ever-simpler and more menial labor — when in fact he insisted that this was too simple a claim. Others have accused him of a wistful nostalgia for artisanal labor, when in fact Braverman countered that objection in his introduction (although this is a point to which we will return). Worst of all, despite its impressive reach in radical circles, Labor and Monopoly Capital has been ignored by mainstream historians of capitalism and dismissed by many sociologists of labor. (With some important exceptions: for instance, the labor historian David Montgomery and many of his students.) The feeling was mutual, though. Never a professor, Braverman acerbically critiqued his academic counterparts.