A Half-Century of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital
Harry Braverman’s arguments in his classic book Labor and Monopoly Capital presciently forecasted much of our present labor regime — and can help us move beyond it.
Assembly line workers polish body panels at a Ford Motor Company assembly plant in Minnesota, March 1935. (Minnesota Historical Society / Corbis via Getty Images)
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.
Braverman’s text remains remarkably useful to think with. Some of its assumptions feel dated, of course. There is no mention of globalization, and Braverman did not anticipate the full force of neoliberalism — two processes that, although already underway in 1974, had yet to cohere into objects of analysis. And yet much of the book feels ahead of its time. Labor and Monopoly Capital was prescient in its emphasis on services and care work as capital’s future objects. It correctly anticipated that the mid-century boom in productivity was singular and unrecoverable. It identified a confluence of management and technology that has evolved into ever more oppressive forms under platform capitalism. On each of these fronts, Braverman’s arguments forecast the present historical conjuncture. They can help see us through it too.
We want to emphasize three aspects of Labor and Monopoly Capital that feel particularly relevant today. The first is Braverman’s fidelity to Marx — especially the latter’s understanding of capital as an unending process of valorization that nonetheless creates a potential emancipatory future. The second is Braverman’s treatment of the service economy, which is too often subordinated to his analysis of Taylorism and industrial production. For Braverman, the rise of services was not a mere repetition of capital accumulation in a new realm. It threatened the emancipatory opening of the future that he took from Marx. In other words, this second aspect of the book puts pressure on the first. The result is an ambivalent approach to nostalgia and temporality in Braverman’s anti-capitalism — the third aspect — that speaks to our own moment just as much, if not more, as it did to his.
Origins of an Anti-Capitalist Organic Intellectual
Braverman came young to Marxism. Born in 1920 to a working-class family in Brooklyn, as a teenager he joined the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), where he remained an active member until mounting internal conflict led to his expulsion in 1953. Founded in 1938, at the height of the political upheavals of the “Age of the CIO,” the SWP was communist but anti-Stalinist; skeptical of big-tent coalitions with liberals; committed to a worker-led revolution. Although Braverman often criticized the party, for fifteen years it was his political home. It gave his radicalism a dissident lilt, invested in revolutionary politics but equally in critique, a rare blend of what Ernst Bloch called the “warm” and “cold” streams of Marxist thought.
From 1937 to 1953, Braverman worked as a manual laborer. He apprenticed as a coppersmith at the Brooklyn Naval Yards and refit asbestos pipes on harbored ships (possibly the cause of his early death). In 1946, he followed his wife, Miriam — also an SWP organizer — to Youngstown, Ohio, where he became a steelworker. Braverman rarely invoked these experiences in his public writing. And yet in a sense he was always reflecting on them. “I had the opportunity of seeing first hand, during those years, not only the transformation of industrial processes but the manner in which these processes are reorganized,” he remarked in the introduction to Labor and Monopoly Capital; “how the worker, systematically robbed of a craft heritage, is given little or nothing to take its place.”
For much of this time, Braverman was writing: book reviews, essays, screeds in the latest intra-Trotskyite brawl. But it was upon leaving the SWP that he turned his full attention to critical analysis, first as the editor (with Bert Cochran) of a short-lived but significant journal, American Socialist — an effort to strip the “Old” Left of its worn-out slogans and analyze the postwar conjuncture with fresh eyes — and then at Grove Press and finally Monthly Review Press. In essays written in and against the heady “golden age of capitalism” of the 1950s and early 1960s, he homed in on the two themes that would undergird Labor and Monopoly Capital. The first was bringing Marx’s critique of political economy to bear on the current social world; the second, understanding the process by which capital shaped the American working class.
These were urgent and related tasks. Capital seemed to be expanding into every corner of life, subjecting an ever greater variety of social roles to the logics and immiserations of proletarian labor. And yet “working class life is less described the more it has become widespread,” Braverman wrote in 1959. Socialists had abandoned Marx’s “critique of the capitalist mode of production” in favor of “a critique of capitalism as a mode of distribution” (a slippage that endures today). What would it mean to “revivify Marxist economic perspectives,” bringing them to bear on “the world around us as it is, not as it once was”? That is what Labor and Monopoly Capital proposed to do.
Starting With the Building Blocks of the Labor Process
Braverman understood work and the working class as social processes, continually producing and produced by history. He rejected the contradictory and ahistorical analysis proffered by contemporary social science: the obsession with the better-educated “new working class,” the acceptance of alienation as “inevitable,” the measurement of worker consciousness through snapshot surveys. In its place, Braverman returned to the building blocks of the capitalist labor process. Labor and Monopoly Capital therefore began with the concepts of labor power and the manufacturing division of labor. The former set up the problem of capitalist management (the need to extract labor from workers within a given timeframe), while the latter partially solved it (by simplifying tasks and gathering workers under one roof). Both were precedents to the next advancement in capitalist control of labor, and an object of real ire for Braverman: the rise of Frederick Taylor’s scientific management, “the explicit verbalization of the capitalist mode of production.”
Scientific management was distinct from actual science in that it did not revolutionize tools or technology. Instead, it sought to perfect capital’s control over labor by monopolizing knowledge of the labor process. Management separated conception from execution, assigning to itself the work of science and depriving the worker of any planning capacity. This negated craft knowledge (a key element of worker power) and degraded work “almost to the level of labor in its animal form.” Braverman’s focus on this particular form of alienation was likely informed by his own experience as a craft worker.
The historical process of degradation was born with the detailed division of labor in early manufacturing, perfected by Taylorism in the late nineteenth century, and intensified with technological advancements like computing throughout the twentieth century. This last phase, the “scientific-technical revolution,” marked a qualitative change for the labor process. Rather than reappropriating worker knowledge, management produced its own knowledge, leaving the worker in “ignorance, incapacity, and thus a fitness for machine servitude.” Science itself became capital, an instrument bent toward management and production rather than human flourishing. For example, the advent of “numerical control” technology — in which preprogrammed software moved tools automatically — divided and simplified the machinist’s work, transforming what was once control and knowledge of the machine into its mere operation.
The constant advancement of machinery had a double effect. It both intensified managerial control and increased productivity, at once harnessing labor power and rendering it obsolete. As we will discuss below, Braverman recognized mechanization as a reality that would alter the occupational structure of the working class, and he sought to understand that new structure. But he also insisted that mechanization took a particular (and horrific) form under the social relations of scientific management.
More liberatory possibilities presented by machinery were “systematically thwarted” by management’s obsession with separating control and execution. Instead, the social relations of machinery were “best adapted to control of both the hand and the brain worker, best adapted to profitability, best adapted to everything but the needs of the people.”
In elaborating these processes — the stripping of knowledge from workers, then the creation of new knowledge from which workers were alienated from the start, and finally the domination of living by dead labor — Braverman effectively superimposed volume I of Capital onto the arc of the American Century. (In his forward, Monthly Review editor Paul Sweezy argued that it was necessary to read the two texts alongside one another.) Braverman’s fidelity to Marx’s magnum opus is remarkable. Labor and Monopoly Capital might even be read as an early, Americanized application of value-form Marxism, then nascent in Germany and now en vogue in Marxist circles.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Braverman’s insistence that capital, not labor, is the universal subject of the modern social world. This was not an easy move to make in 1974, when what Moishe Postone calls “traditional Marxism,” with its emphasis on the working class as a uniquely positioned agent for revolutionary change, remained dominant. Though Braverman held out hope for proletarian self-actualization — “I have every confidence in the revolutionary potential of the working classes,” he wrote in 1975 (note the plural) — the theme was conspicuously absent from Labor and Monopoly Capital. The Subject of the book, in every sense, was capital, an unending process that over time stripped labor of its concrete specificity, rendering it increasingly interchangeable and increasingly abstract. Braverman’s fellow radicals often reprimanded him for the lack of agency afforded to workers in his text. Doubtless that lack had something to do with
organized labor’s faltering power in his historical moment. But it was also based on a faithful reading of Marx’s later works.
Faithful, too, in Braverman’s insistence that the damage wrought by capital had nothing to do with workers getting paid less and less (which they weren’t) or with inequalities of wealth. The real problem was that under capitalism it “becomes essential for the capitalist that control over the labor process pass from the hands of the worker into his own.” The cruelty lay in the absence of control. “The transformation of working humanity into . . . an instrument of capital,” Braverman wrote, “is repugnant to the victims, whether their pay is high or low, because it violates human conditions of work.” The reference to Marx’s own “immiseration theory” in Capital — “in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse” — is hardly subtle.
But behind the degradation of labor lies an ironic point of light (or, depending on your disposition, an ongoing tragedy). Capital develops the possibility for its own transcendence through the creation of potentially emancipatory technologies. Here too Braverman drew directly from Capital. Under capitalism, he argued, “the remarkable development of machinery becomes, for most of the working population, the source not of freedom but of enslavement, not of mastery but of helplessness, and not of the broadening of the horizon of labor but of [its] confinement.” Compare this passage to Marx’s commentary on machines in chapter fifteen of volume I:
Therefore since machinery itself shortens the hours of labour, but when employed by capital it lengthens them; since in itself it lightens labour, but when employed by capital it heightens its intensity . . . since in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but in the hands of capital it makes them into paupers.
Braverman parallels Marx’s substance but also his form: the rhythmic give-and-take of a potential freedom coming into view even as it curdles into its opposite. In generating the possibility of a new social world even as it prevents that world from being realized, capital creates the grounds from which we might criticize it. That is, we can critique the present from the standpoint of an immanent (though not necessarily imminent) future, rather than a transcendental norm or a lost past.
The Commodification of Service Work
An immanent critique of the present requires a clear-eyed analysis of the present. To that end, the second half of Labor and Monopoly Capital took stock of the recently transformed working class. As machine technology advanced, it created the conditions for the decline of manufacturing work. Braverman refused to lament this, avoiding the trap of industrial nostalgia that burdens the Left even today. Instead, he followed the history of manufacturing degradation to its unexpected conclusion: the rise of service degradation.
Drawing as ever on Marx, Braverman argued that capitalist accumulation affected working-class composition in two major ways. First, newly mechanized methods of production “set free” former industrial workers, creating a labor surplus that would tend to cluster in labor-intensive occupations. Second, newly accumulated capital, needing somewhere to go, “thrust itself frantically” into new branches of production, creating new occupations in the process. From these two tendencies, the rise of services followed. Capital expanded into all of society, transforming previously uncommodified relations (like recreation, amusement, security, and care) into service commodities produced by service workers.
Explicit in Braverman’s analysis was a normative argument against the encroachment of the market into family and community life. (The Frankfurt School and Monthly Review crowd might have inspired this line of thinking for Braverman, though it also strikes a reader as reminiscent of Karl Polanyi or anticipating Christopher Lasch.) The marketization of leisure resulted in “a standard of mediocrity and vulgarity which debases popular taste.” The atrophy of community life “leaves a void,” filled by institutions like schools and prisons that were “barbarous and oppressive.” While Braverman acknowledged that marketization resulted in part from increased efficiency and decreased costs, he argued that it also resulted from advertising, changing status expectations, and a deterioration of skills. That is, the commodification of daily life was not just a natural process in which technology created more free time but was instead a process created by capitalist social relations that ultimately degraded social life.
Normativity aside, the commodification of daily life doubtlessly reconfigured the working class. The expansion of state institutions to fill the new social “void” meant job growth for prison guards, police, and social workers, as well as teachers. Meanwhile the growing hospitality and retail industries created “a huge specialized personnel whose function is nothing but cleaning.” Newly commodified service occupations were growing far more rapidly than employment as a whole. It was ironic, but also perfectly coherent, that in an “advanced” capitalist economy, labor was most concentrated in parts of the economy least impacted by the scientific-technical revolution, in occupations that had not yet been mechanized or never would be.
This process of labor accumulation was a gendered one. Braverman criticized the Department of Labor’s “custom of disregarding female employment, which is considered to be somehow temporary, incidental, and fortuitous, when it should actually be placed at the very center of all occupational studies today.” Gender operated on multiple levels of the new working class. It was women’s household production most recently commodified — the work of cleaning, caring, and feeding — that supplied capital with new opportunities of valorization. It was women who entered the workforce to do these now-commodified jobs, in part because of the declining participation of men in the workforce and in part because of a need for larger household incomes to purchase the service commodities once produced in the household. And it was largely women who were relegated to sub-subsistence-level waged work.
What is so helpful about Braverman’s account is that even as he explained the rise of services, he refused to naturalize that rise. The entrance of women into the workforce was not a simple product of progressive politics. The rise of services was not an evolution into a “higher” or more civilized economic form. Capitalist accumulation brought new occupational structures into being, but those occupational structures were not an inevitable or final form of work. On the contrary, they were continuously degraded and necessitated some kind of challenge.
But what is missing from Labor and Monopoly Capital is a clear direction for that challenge — an alternative to degradation — in the context of services. Regarding manufacturing, Braverman had a coherent demand: the reuniting of mental and manual work, of conception and execution, in combination with modern engineering and science. But since much service work remains immune to scientific progress, the “reintegration” of conception and execution is less relevant. The problem with cleaning work is not that a janitor does not understand the technologies of her cleaning supplies. The problem with prison work is not that guards do not have enough space to think about their work processes, but that the work processes themselves are socially destructive. For service work, then, the solutions to degradation seem to be of a different character.
In his analysis of the transition from artisanal to industrial labor, Braverman insisted that capital creates a hitherto unknown potential for human freedom even as it degrades our existence in the present. The history of capitalism was thus a tragedy and a comedy all at once. The mandate to labor to the rhythms of Taylorism was “a crime against the person and against humanity.” And yet it was part of a process that was “necessary for the progress of the human race,” a process that once underway was not only “inexorable” but, on the longest of views, good. Writing in 1984, Fredric Jameson implored Marxists to “somehow . . . lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst,” to think “catastrophe and progress all together.” Braverman did this.
But the rise of services seemed to push this “austere dialectical imperative” (to again quote Jameson) to its limits. Braverman tried to articulate the same give-and-take that he had applied to the rise of machines in industry. “The very social services which should facilitate social life and social solidarity [now] have the opposite effect,” he wrote:
As the advances of modern household and service industries lighten the family labor, they increase the futility of family life; as they remove the burdens of personal relations, they strip away its affections; as they create an intricate social life, they rob it of every vestige of community and leave in its place the cash nexus.
Here Braverman repeats, in a new key, his careful mirroring of Marx’s description of machines in Capital. Capitalism creates the potential for “an intricate social life” of mutual interdependence, but in degraded form and to degrading ends. Yet even as Braverman gestured toward this interpretation of the service economy, he seemed unwilling to accept it. The commodification of care, the subsumption of our most human social relations into the logic of capital — was this development too one-sided, too totalizing, for the old dialectic to hold? Braverman never broached this question explicitly. But it ran hot beneath his analysis.
If capital had ceased to point beyond itself, one solution was to turn back. The longing for a bygone past is a spectral presence in Labor and Monopoly Capital, never quite there but never quite absent either. “I was always a modernizer,” Braverman wrote in his introduction, an insistence that preceded an admission: “as I reread these pages, I find in them a sense not only of social outrage, but also perhaps of personal affront.” Still, though: “I hope no one draws from this the conclusion that my views are shaped by nostalgia for an age that cannot be recaptured. Rather, my views about work are governed by a nostalgia for an age that has not yet come into being.”
Braverman protested too much. If it is hard not to romanticize him, it is also hard to deny that he romanticized — against his intentions — a world of artisans and embedded communities, itself a part of early capitalism. “I think it is hard for people of the present student generation to understand,” he said in a lecture soon before his death. “When my generation was growing up, this wholesale destruction of a way of life was still going on.” Social outrage, personal affront: the line is thin. Fifty years on, though — as capital hollows out our social relations and sets our future ablaze — Braverman’s ambivalences are instructive for the anti-capitalism that our moment requires. Not just the transcendence of work through technology, but its redistribution and abolition through political will. Perhaps the social revolution of the twenty-first century should take some of its poetry from the past.