Ranko Bon and Elise Bon-Rudin

1. Braverman’s[1] contribution lies in the extension (or “modernization”) of Marx’s description of the labor process dominated by machinery, from the point of view of a worker.[2] However, Braverman fails to see the labor process in its totality, from the point of view of the revolutionary working class, and in the context of the capitalist system as a whole. Notice the crucial distinction here: worker-working class. Also notice that the confusion of the two categories implies a denial of the revolutionary character of capitalist industry.

2. To an industrial worker machinery appears as a “demon” under whose domination he is forced to toil. Marx graphically describes “an organized system of machines” as “a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demon power, at first veiled under the slow and measured motion of his giant limbs, at length breaks out into fast and furious whirl of his countless working organs.”[3] In the text that follows we read this, seemingly contradictory, statement:

Modern Industry never looks upon and treats the existing form of a process as final. The technical basis of that industry is therefore revolutionary, while all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative.[4]

The contradiction is only apparent, since Marx speaks here in a different voice, a voice directed to the working class as a class-for-itself. It follows that this contradiction is not of theoretical nature, but something inherent in social reality.

But Braverman neglects numerous similar passages in Marx’s work, since he confuses the two categories—worker and working class. This is why he fails to understand that in the same technological context, the labor process has an essentially different nature under capitalism and under socialism. (Nowhere do we find in Braverman’s work the analysis of the potential uses of the same technology.) We will elaborate this point after we discuss another aspect of this confusing characteristic of Braverman’s analysis.

3. The fact that Braverman does not understand industry as a revolutionary force is also predicated by the lack of a clear distinction between the forces of production and the relations of production. In the common-sense concepts such as “technology” and the “organization of the labor process” this distinction is hopelessly blurred. Braverman himself demonstrates again and again the potentialities of the forces of production, including the instruments of production, but only implicitly, without being aware of it. His excellent description of the development of “scientific management” clearly demonstrates the fact that Taylor’s goal was not to change the machine, but to change the worker’s relation to it. Only post festum we see the further development of machinery as the result. But this further development is rooted in the worker, even though it appears to him as something foreign to him, something dissociated from him. Clearly, this is only an aspect of commodity fetishism and nothing else. A worker’s perception is almost irrelevant in this context. It is relevant in the context of class struggle, but exactly for that reason it is necessary to explicate theoretically the process of transfer of worker’s knowledge to the management and into the machines as something essentially stemming from the labor process itself, from worker’s praxis! This is the only consistent materialist interpretation. Again, Braverman’s description is excellent, but the lack of theoretical basis prevents him from drawing appropriate conclusions from it.

It is not technology that fragments the working class in general, or a particular labor force. This fragmentation is imposed from outside of technology proper. Technology rebels against it. To put it more generally, the social relations of production act as “fetters” of the forces of production.[5]

This perversion of the labor process was recorded by Marx. The following passage clearly demonstrates to what extent his understanding of the revolutionary character of capitalist industry was not blurred by romanticism:

By means of machinery, chemical processes and other methods, it [Modern Industry, R.B., E.B.-R.] is continually causing changes not only in the technical basis of production, but also in the functions of the laborer, and in the social combinations of the labor-process. At the same time, it thereby also revolutionarizes the division of labor within the society, and incessantly launches masses of capital and of workpeople from one branch of production to another. But if Modern Industry, by its very nature, therefore necessitates variation of labor, fluency of function, universal mobility of the laborer, on the other hand, in its capitalistic form, it reproduces the old division of labor with its ossified particularizations.[6]

Marx calls this the “absolute contradiction between the technical necessities of Modern Industry, and the social character inherent in its capitalistic form.”[7] This contradiction, for Marx, represents a motor of social development. We already encountered this contradiction above as reflected through the distinction: worker—working class. These two dialectical moments of social development, the subjective and the objective moment, are confused in Braverman’s analysis. Furthermore, and as a consequence of this confusion, their relationship is lost.

4. Now, let us turn to the work of another student of the labor process in capitalist industry, Sohn-Rethel, who would most likely agree with most of Braverman’s description, but who derives entirely different conclusions from that description in the context of socialism. Parenthetically, American parochialism in this area is demonstrated by the fact that this important thinker has not yet been discovered, as witnessed by the literature cited by Braverman and by those who share his views.[8] Because of the unfamiliarity with Sohn-Rethel’s work in America, we may be justified in quoting extensively from one of his articles.[9]

Sohn-Rethel introduces a distinction between “plant economy” and “market economy,” which immediately places the problem on a level of abstraction significantly closer to that at which Marx was capable of working. Let us follow his argument:

The decisive outcome of (the) evolution of the labor process of capital was the unintended creation of a new kind of economics: the internal plant economy governing the industrial processes under the control of a given financial concern. The chief ruling of this economy is the systematic synchronization (or proportionate timing) of all part-processes of production. […] The principle of maximizing profits impels the reorganization of the plant until it satisfies the rule of proportionate timing. This rule is a basic principle of economy; it was formulated by Marx in “Grundrisse” […]: “Economy of time, this is wherein all economy ultimately resolves itself.”[10]

Sohn-Rethel continues:

Now what is the effect of the consistent application of this basic principle upon “plant economy”? Note that this whole evolution has been described without once mentioning the market or referring to the system of market economy, except that the efficiency of different plants according to their rate of flow shows in terms of profit. How, then, does an industrial complex organized to satisfy the demands of plant economy fit into the existing system of market economy? […] Clearly, the demands of plant economy cannot often harmonize with those of market economy, and if they do it is by no other logic than that of sheer coincidence.[11]

Upon analysis the incompatibilities between plant and market economies, he concludes:

[…] as industries become more and more perfect in terms of plant economy they become increasingly imperfect in terms of market economy. The impact of plant economy makes it impossible for capitalist firms to obey the requirements of the market. They are hence compelled to try to make the market obey the demands of plant economy. Their methods to achieve this are varied, but one word describes them all—monopoly. The essence of monopoly capital is the irreconcilable contradiction between plant and market economy.[12]

Thus Sohn-Rethel establishes essentially the equivalent basis for further analysis which Braverman takes from Baran and Sweezy[13]—monopoly capital. He continues by examining the consequences of plant economy’s development in this context.

Potentially the plant economy of monopoly capital is socialist economy. In the labor process of modern mechanized mass production the trend towards ever more highly socialized forms of labor, which Marx has traced from its beginnings in the co-operative methods of pre-mechanical “manufacture,” has reached a new stage, which is, in fact, the stage of its structural completion. Modern plant economy is therefore the economy of completely socialized labor brought about by an amalgamation of technology and labor in such a way that the motions of machinery are measured in terms of labor and the motions of labor in terms of machinery. The operating principle of the totally socialized labor process is the unity of measurement of labor and machinery motion. “Job analysis” aims to achieve this unity for an individual operation. […] It is still the same principle which reaches up to complete absorption of labor in automation.[14]

And furthermore:

The elements of socialist economy have developed in the womb of capitalism, albeit in the utterly alienated and irrecognizable shape of modern plant economy and conceived in terms of “scientific management” that serves monopoly capital as one of its most potent tools for the submission of the workers under its domination.[15]

Notice that Braverman fails to recognize all this precisely because of the “irrecognizable shape” the potential socialist economy takes from the point of view of a worker! Also notice that this is the starting point of our argument.

Now, Sohn-Rethel examines the implications of his analysis in the context of socialism:

But let us come to the crucial question: How can the plant economy of monopoly capital be turned into its opposite, socialist economy? The answer is that the operating principle of socialized labor offers an excellent example of dialectics. Its formula, the unity of measurements of labor and machinery motion, allows for the complete subjection of labor to technology under capitalism, and it allows for the control of labor over technology in socialism.

Judging in terms of his individual operations within a socialized labor process, the worker has never been more impotent and the anonymous forces of capital arrayed against him more overwhelmingly crushing than in this present age of monopoly capital. For his operations, his contribution to the social process, are cut down to fragments of a job, to fractions of a fragment, down to the meaningless “therbligs” of synthetic timing. […]

The position appears transformed, however, when it is judged in terms of the functional total of socialized labor which works in continuous flow of a given production process as if it were done by One labor force acting with the bodies and brains of the hundreds of individual workers that compose it. In these terms the relation is reversed against the previous one. For now the human labor wields the technology for the sake of the productivity that it can draw from it. […]

Socialized labor as the essence of plant economy is afflicted with its peculiar fetishism just as is commodity, the basis of market economy (and upon the contemporary mind both are acting in conjunction). That fetishism, we suggest, or at least an essential part of it, is managerialism.[16]

Can the workers transcend this state? Can they master the labor process? Sohn-Rethel answers positively! The “science” of management is certainly not beyond the worker’s grasp.

On the contrary, there is no better place from which to grasp that “science” than the place of work of the workers. In fact, the managers cannot even start to evolve their “science” before they have laboriously extracted the basic information that underlies it all from the workers by means of time and job analysis.[17]

The process of socialization of labor exposes the inner contradiction of capitalism that will necessarily cause the disruption of the capitalist mode of production. But only to the extent that the working class is conscious of it, and to the extent that it is organized to transcend it in revolutionary practice.

This disruption, which we witness in an advanced stage, is the direct result of the contradiction, foretold by Marx and Engels, between the increasingly social character of production and the private character of capitalist appropriation. The dialectic of this contradiction can now be seen at work. By itself this disruption does not solve humanity’s problems. On the contrary, if allowed its course it can only lead through anarchy of violence to the catastrophe of destruction. The rule of monopoly capital must be overthrown and capitalism have cleared out of the way before the caricature of socialized labor that we termed “plant economy” can assume its proper shape of socialist economy in which it becomes the basis of the socialist mode of production.

Socialized labor cannot achieve its proper identity except by a re-appropriation by the workers of the mental functions which capitalist management has alienated from them. This can be done by the workers acting as a revolutionary class in conscious realization of the implications of their status as socialized labor in the process of national production. However, effective absorption of the managerial rule and the corresponding change of status by the workers is, in fact, tantamount to the formation of socialist man. This can only be achieved with the help of persistent socialist education, practical and theoretical, under guidance and as a vital part of the proletarian dictatorship instituted by the revolutionary party.[18]

Sohn-Rethel concludes:

In capitalism there exists no common term between technology and economics; technology develops in complete blindness as to the economic effects of its application. But under the rule of the principle of unity of measurement of labor and machinery motion the gap between science and economics, or between nature and society, will, if correctly handled, tend to close.[19]

Starting from apparently similar bases Braverman and Sohn-Rethel arrive at diametrically opposed conclusions. What is important to us is that Sohn-Rethel’s conclusions, and not Braverman’s, are consistent with a revolutionary view of the working class.

5. A few words on workers’ self-government in the context of capitalism seem to be appropriate here. If “scientific management” progressively dismantled the conscious control of the labor process by the immediate producers, the dismantling of “scientific management,” that is, its merging into workers’ self-government, cannot be realized but by progressively “returning” conscious control of the labor process to the associated producers. Self-government and “scientific management” are on a collision course, and self-government consequently represents the proper political objective for the working class. Its revolutionary character lies in the fact that workers’ demands for self-government cannot be fully realized in the context of capitalism. It is a perspective that necessarily reaches outside the capitalist world, since it cannot but develop into the struggle for conscious control of social processes in toto. The process of dismantling of centralized planning, dissociated from the associated producers, which to a large extent developed out of “scientific management,”[20] is part and parcel of the movement of the working class toward the abolition of management’s domination and fragmentation of the labor process. This, naturally, applies equally well to the post-revolutionary societies where the means of production were nationalized, but where the revolution stopped short of inaugurating the process of gradual transfer of control back to the associated producers.

6. Braverman unwittingly removes a pillar of Marx’s theoretical structure: he a-historically denies the revolutionary nature of industry, and of the forces of production in general. This is why he fails to include questions of class consciousness and the working class as an active force in the context of his analysis. Even though we can agree with Braverman’s answer to his critics on this matter that he was forced to draw arbitrary lines about the issue, the question remains why he chose to omit even an indication of the direction that questions of consciousness would take, given his analysis of the labor process. We have indicated here why he was unable to do even this. Braverman’s implicit argument is immobilizing.[21] It is negative. It is abstract, regardless of the concreteness with which he describes the labor process. It provides the working class with nothing to fight for. It simplemindedly, sociologically, compares the labor process in the capitalist and socialist countries and dismisses the socialist experience as equally detrimental to the worker.[22] It provides no perspective. Only a retrospective, regardless of Braverman’s explicit statements to the contrary.[23]

It is not enough to analyze the sphere of material production to be a materialist. Braverman’s is a contemplative materialism. It lacks the “active side” (First Thesis on Feuerbach).[24] Furthermore, Sweezy was certainly right: direct experience with the labor process, of which Braverman had plenty, is not sufficient for an adequate analysis of that process.[25]

7. Let us return to Marx:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.[26]

This radically different conception of the rôle of the forces of production in social development is the bridge between Braverman’s analysis of the labor process and his feelings of mere “hope” for and “belief” in the working class, feelings that demonstrate a sentimentality toward the working class which has so often plagued the theories of American leftists. Social transformations require a certain correspondence of the level of development of both the material basis of social existence and of class consciousness. The uneven development of various segments of the working class, determined by the uneven development of different sectors of capitalist production, call for an organization that coordinates and guides class struggle. And also an organization that provides dialectical unity of theory and practice.[27]

And once this bridge is defined in this, materialist, fashion, the criticism of “determinism” is already dispensed with. Even more, this criticism may be addressed to Braverman himself. The “determinism” of the Second International, for example, is simply the complementary pole of Braverman’s contemplative materialism. Only it was simplemindedly for, not against.

Addendum I (September 12, 1994)

This was the first and last piece Elise and I had ever written together. Besides, this was the first time she had used her new last name—Bon-Rudin. She added her maiden name to my name, which she assumed when we got married in 1970. Soon afterwards she changed her name legally, as well. She still uses it. Of course, this concoction does not make any sense because it transposes her maiden and her married names, but it probably sounds a bit better this way than the other way around.

Although I wrote the first draft of the piece and although her contribution was mainly in copyediting, she asked me to put her name first because she needed to beef up her curriculum vitae. I offered to put her name first if we would both go by my last name, which could imply a bit of chivalry on my part, but I refused to put her first under her new name, which would involve an explicit lie about our relative rôles. She ultimately declined my offer, and we kept the order of our names as it originally appeared in the manuscript.

I remember our polite but reserved discussion about her request. We were sitting at our dining table, which had a wonderful maple tabletop and which was otherwise painted bright blue. There were four chairs around the table. One of its short sides was resting against the wall of our long and spacious living room. Above the table there was a large poster of Tatanka Yotanka, hunkpapa Dakota—the father or chief of the Dakota Indians, otherwise known as the Sitting Bull. A magnificent man, he must have disapproved of our squabble over precedence in such a pitiful endeavor.

We sent our brainchild to one of the Slovene critical journals with Neo-Hegelian leanings, where it was soon translated and published. We also sent it to Paul Sweezy for publication in his journal, the prestigious Monthly Review. We exchanged a few letters with him concerning the essay, but he ultimately rejected it as unfair to Braverman’s position. I do not remember his arguments or our counter-arguments, but this is irrelevant at this moment. The reason for this addendum is that I have recently learned from Marko that Elise’s latest boyfriend is Paul Sweezy’s son, whose name escapes me now. Perhaps it is Harry. He is a photographer. They are apparently happy together. A small world!

Addendum II (April 24, 1995)

Marko was born in Boston in April 1975. By the time this piece was written, Elise and I must have become quite distant. A year or so later we split up for a bit less than two years. Perhaps this is why Marko’s early years are blurred in my memory. I remember a few small things, though.

On our way from Boston to Ljubljana in August 1975 we spent a couple of days in Amsterdam, one of our favorite places. Marko was only four months at the time. When we finally arrived to our hotel in Amsterdam, we put him on the bed. We were exhausted after a long flight, but he gave us a big smile—one of his first. We looked at each other and shook our heads in awe of the little fellow’s sweetness. We must have loved each other at the time…

Until he was about six or seven months old we would take Marko everywhere we went, including the movies. He would sleep in a sling on my chest, sweating and drooling, oblivious to anything and everything happening around him. The last time we had done this is quite memorable. I do not remember which movie we went to see, but Marko was on my chest again. Exactly when two people on the screen started to make love—exactly when the fellow put it in, as it were—Marko woke up and started screaming at the top of his lungs. The entire theater burst out laughing. Elise and I got up and crawled out of the merry theater, smiling awkwardly to the people on our way. I am sure many people in Ljubljana still remember Marko’s perfect timing. We, too, must have laughed our heads off when we finally got out. Yes, we must have still loved each other at the time.

Footnotes

1. Braverman, H., Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1974.

2. See Paul Sweezy’s Foreword, Op. cit., p. xi: “In terms of theory, as he [Braverman, R.B., E.B.-R.] would be the first to say, there is very little that is new in this book.”

3. Marx, K., Capital, Vol. I, New York: International Publishers, 1967 (first published in 1867), pp. 381-382.

4. Op. cit., p. 486. And also, in the footnote following this we find its further elaboration taken from the Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without continually revolutionarizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production and all the social relations” (emphasis added, R.B., E.B.-R).

5. Marx, K., A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, New York: International Publishers, 1970, p. 21.

6. Marx, K., Capital, Op. cit., pp. 486-487.

7. Op. cit., p. 487.

8. To some extent this is true of all the essays collected in Monthly Review, July-August 1976 (special issue entitled “Technology, the Labor Process, and the Working Class”).

9. Sohn-Rethel, A., “Imperialism, the Era of Dual Economics: Suggestions for a Marxist Critique of ‘Scientific Management’,” Praxis (International Edition), Vol. V, No. 1-2, pp. 313-322.

10. Op. cit., p. 313.

11. Op. cit., p. 314.

12. Op. cit., p. 315.

13. Baran, P. and P. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966.

14. Sohn-Rethel, Op. cit., pp. 316-317. See also Marx, Capital, Op. cit., p. 386:

Machinery […] operates only by means of associated labor, or labor in common. Hence the co-operative character of the labor-process is […] a technical necessity dictated by the instrument of labor itself.

15. Op. cit., p. 317.

16. Op. cit., p. 318.

17. Op. cit., pp. 318-319. This was abundantly clear even in Marx’s time. See, e.g., Marx, Capital, Op. cit., p. 331 (fn):

[…] the Spectator states that after the introduction of a sort of partnership between capitalist and workmen in the “Wire-Work Company of Manchester,” “the first result was a sudden decrease in waste, the men not seeing why they should waste their own property any more than any other master’s, and waste is, perhaps, next to bad debts, the greatest source of manufacturing loss.” The same paper finds that the main defect in the Rochdale co-operative experiments is this: “They showed that associations of workmen could manage shops, mills, and almost all forms of industry with success, and they immediately improved condition of men, but then they did not leave a clear place for masters.” Quelle horreur!

18. Op. cit., p. 321. See also, e.g., Marx, Capital, Op. cit., p. 503:

If the general extension of factory legislation to all trades for the purpose of protecting the working-class both in mind and body has become inevitable, on the other […] that extension hastens on the general conversion of numerous isolated small industries into a few combined industries carried on upon a large scale […]. It destroys both the ancient and the transitional forms, behind which the dominion of capital is still in part concealed, and replaces them by the direct and open sway of capital; but thereby it also generalizes the direct opposition to this sway. While in each individual workshop it enforces uniformity, regularity, order, and economy, it increases by the immense spur which the limitation and regulation of the work-day give to technical improvement, the anarchy and the catastrophes of capitalist production as a whole, the intensity of labor, and the competition of machinery with the laborer.

19. Op. cit., p. 322.

20. See, e.g., J. Friedmann, Retracking America: A Theory of Transactive Planning, Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973. In the Preface he states (p. xiii): “The planning with which most of us are familiar today was invented nearly one hundred years ago by the originator of scientific management.” Friedmann credits this thesis to Rexford Tugwell and Edward Banfield. Friedmann continues (p. xiv): “Frederick Taylor’s legacy is still with us in its contemporary forms of operations research and systems analysis.”

21. E.g., John and Barbara Ehrenreich, “Work and Consciousness,” Monthly Review, July-August 1976, pp. 10-18. Ehrenreichs catch Braverman’s mood most precisely. They accept the “most pessimistic implications of Braverman’s analysis,” that “modern industry was designed to make workplace struggle not only difficult but unimaginable” (p. 17). What they mean by “designed” is best illustrated by the following statement: “Both the degradation of labor and what could be called the ‘de-collectivization’ of labor are, to a certain extent, built into the productive technology itself” (p. 13).

It should be mentioned that Ehrenreichs open their essay with the central problem of Braverman’s analysis, even though they fail to solve it themselves:

The problem is this: Braverman argues with exceptional thoroughness that objectivity monopoly capitalism is following the course foreseen by Marx. […] But he has nothing to say about other parts of Marx’s vision: the development of the working class as the conscious agent of socialist revolution. Why didn’t the U.S. working class become a class-for-itself (to use Marx’s language) at the same time as it developed as a class-in-itself? (p. 10)

22. Braverman, Op. cit., is often contradictory on this score. While he agrees with Marx on the theoretical level, he is unable to transfer his own arguments to this concrete analysis. This accounts for recurrent contradictions. For example, he states that “the same productive forces that are characteristic of the close of one epoch of social relations are also characteristic of the opening of the succeeding epoch” (p. 19). However, when he examines the failure of Soviet socialism, he contradicts himself by arguing that the central problem of Soviet industrialization was in the failure to “attempt to organize labor processes in a way fundamentally different to those of capitalism”(p. 22, emphasis added, R.B., E.B.-R.). In particular, Lenin’s “approval” of Taylorism is taken for the “original sin” of Soviet industrialization (p. 12).

23. Braverman, Op. cit., p. 6.

24. Marx, K., “Theses on Feuerbach,” in F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, New York: International Publishers, 1941, p. 82.

25. See Paul Sweezy’s Foreword, pp. x-xi, in Braverman, op. cit.

26. Marx, K., A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Op. cit., p. 21. Naturally, most American radicals are acquainted with this text, but very few understand it as it was presented in this note.

27. Cf. G. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1971 (first published in 1922), p. 299:

Organization is the form of mediation between theory and practice. And, as in every dialectical relationship, the terms of the relation only acquire concreteness and reality in and by virtue of this mediation.