The contemporary idea of “the labor process” is based on Marx’s distinction between labor and labor power. The employer can buy people’s ability to work, their labor power, but in general not their actual labor. Political-economic analysis of work, then, is the study of how the employer/capitalist induces and commands workers to perform “surplus labor,” labor whose value is over and above that necessary to reproduce the workers and replace machinery, buildings and raw materials.
Adam Smith began The Wealth of Nations with three chapters on the division of labor. He saw this division as the primary cause of the wealth of nations, especially as the market expands so that this division can be deepened, extended and mechanized. Thus, work and the separation of work into its constituent elements is the starting point of modern political economy. Marx added many things to this analysis. For our purposes the key concepts are the labor/labor power distinction, his concept of the reserve armies of the unemployed and habituation of the worker to the capitalist rules of the workplace.
The analysis of the labor process is literally the centerpiece of Marx’s Capital volume 1. The chapters on the labor process occupy the middle 400 pages of an 800-page book; Marx must have thought he was on to something. Oddly, the ideas in these chapters were hardly developed by his followers for over a century. Beginning with Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974) a small library of books and articles has appeared, building on and criticizing Braverman and Marx to analyze current labor process developments. In this essay I will summarize Marx’s treatment, the context for Braverman’s intervention and some of its consequences. In a second entry I will touch on some of the post-Braverman literature, especially insofar as it examines the change in capitalism dating from the 1970s, and especially globalization as it relates to the labor process.
In Chapter 7 of volume 1 of Capital, Marx sets out to resolve the problem he has set up in the first six chapters: if all goods are sold at their value, including labor power, where do profits come from? To the individual putting his money in the bank or in a treasury bond, it appears that that money grows by its own nature. But this is absurd. Where does the increment come from? The short answer that Marx gives in chapters 5 and 6 is “not through exchange.” While he recognizes the historical and contemporary role played by merchant and interest-bearing capital, they are, he argues, in a subordinate role in the industrial capitalism that became prevalent in nineteenth-century England. Merchant companies and banks can redistribute but not create value. Value is created in production, and the key condition for this is the generalized existence of wage labor. Here, Marx believed he had found the unique commodity that produces more value than it embodies.
The value of labor power is initially determined—as is the value of everything else—by the value of the commodities needed to (re)produce it. Workers must be housed, fed, clothed and trained, and another generation must be raised to replace the current one as it wears out. The value of the commodities needed to do this (over)determines the value of labor power. But the value of labor power also has a “historical and moral element” to it, as normal human needs vary given geography, the development of civilization, the state of the class struggle, etc. The labor time “necessary” to reproduce the working class is socially variable. So labor power is a different sort of commodity in its value creating potential and in the determination of its own value. The latter is assumed equal to the wage in the first volume of Capital, and Marx makes little attempt to analyze these historical and moral elements.
To examine the value creating power of labor we have to leave the world of the market—as Marx calls it the world of freedom, equality, property and Bentham—and enter the hidden abode of production, a realm of un-freedom. Here the worker produces more new value than she is paid for, or what Marx terms surplus value.
The diagram below represents Marx’s analysis. During part of the day, A–B, the worker produces new value sufficient to reproduce herself and the means of production she uses. During the rest of the day, B–C, she produces new value that, under the conventional property rules of capitalism, goes to the capitalist as surplus.
The labor process involves the processes of producing commodities and surplus value. In the labor process human labor is purposively combined with raw materials and tools to create useful objects and surplus value. Marx calls the simplest form absolute surplus value. This is when the working day, week or year is extended beyond what is necessary to reproduce the worker and the means of production. Workers are paid the value of what they sell—the value of their labor power—so it is not in the labor market but in the labor process that they are exploited. In the diagram increasing absolute surplus value involves moving point C to the right.
Why would the worker agree to work longer than is necessary to reproduce herself? First, a group of wage laborers must exist, in other words a group that has no alternative but to sell their labor power in order to survive. Wage labor that has been stripped of ownership of the means of production is not a natural category, and Marx notes in passing that its existence is “clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production.” This is a violent process of legal expropriation, but he postpones the development of this point to the end of the book. Second, the worker’s sale of her labor power for money involves another element of compulsion because of unemployment or what Marx describes as “the reserve army of labor.” Since there are generally more sellers than buyers, capitalists are typically able to set the terms of employment, including working hours.
It is no accident that some of the earliest forms of labor organization had as their goal the reduction of the working day. The working day, week, year and life are also influenced by a whole series of cultural and legal factors, and Marx provides a rich analysis of some of these, both in England and elsewhere in his long chapter on the working day. This conjunctural analysis of class struggle is also an extended examination of some of the limits of and possibilities for reform within capitalism (McIntyre 2008, 134–61).
As it becomes more difficult to extend the working day, week and year capitalists turn to a second strategy of reducing necessary labor time through technological change and organizational innovation. In fact capitalists pursue such a strategy even before the potentials of absolute surplus value are exhausted: competition forces them to. This involves moving point B in the diagram to the left, and this move is the starting point for the contemporary labor process literature.
New ways of organizing the division of labor, new forms of cooperation in the workplace and new machines all can reduce the amount of time it takes to reproduce the worker, leaving more of the working day to produce surplus value for the capitalist. Some of these innovations, especially those involving new forms of workplace cooperation, prefigure the better society that Marx believes will emerge from capitalism, but under capitalist relations of production they tend to mainly benefit the capitalist and to degrade the worker. Marx describes the factory regime, the division of labor internal to the firm, as a planned despotism that is the reverse image of the anarchy of the market and the social division of labor outside the firm.
In the 1930s the Italian trade union and communist leader Antonio Gramsci examined Fordism as not just a new way of organizing the labor process but a new way of organizing society. For Gramsci (1971), Fordism meant machine-paced production of standardized goods, with workers being paid enough to purchase those goods while becoming standardized themselves, through moral coercion inside and outside the workplace. This was the product of a new “historic bloc” that could resolve some of capitalism’s dilemmas through a peaceful revolution. Fordism appeared first in the USA because that country lacked the “vast army of parasites” that still prevailed in much of Europe. Gramsci was interested in whether such an alliance of class forces and hegemonic ideas was possible in Europe. His concepts were not influential in the English-speaking world until the 1970s when The Prison Notebooks were first translated. The concept “Fordism” remains influential if now primarily as something different from what has emerged in the rich countries since the 1970s (Harvey 1991). Marxists provided little else of value in the analysis of the labor process until the 1970s.
In the midst of the heightened worker militancy of the late 60s and 70s a number of books emerged on the labor process. The most influential was Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital. Braverman investigated Taylorism as a hegemonic idea that rationalized and degraded work and the worker in the twentieth century.
Braverman characterizes Taylorism as the scientific management of work flow, or as Braverman puts it, the scientific process of removing skill from the shop floor. Braverman analyzed the general extension of the principles of Taylorism to all kinds of work. Labor engaged in circulation of commodities, money changing, information exchange, etc. is or will be deskilled, as is much administrative work.
Braverman related this transformation of work in “monopoly capitalism” to the makeover of all aspects of life in the twentieth century. Rather than deskilling, it seems to me that Braverman’s book is about commodification of social life and the degradation of work. For instance, family life is transformed as production leaves the household in favor of consumption. The destruction of the old form of the family creates the possibility for transition to a higher form, but in capitalism these possibilities are underdeveloped, as are the possibilities for cooperation inside the workplace.
Braverman’s critics were many and quick. It was claimed that he drew too much from American sources, treated workers as objects, class struggle in the labor process was of minor import, worker resistance to changing labor processes was totally neglected, the focus was on the male industrial worker, etc. Some argued that both Braverman and Marx miss the ways in which new technologies, by increasing interdependence, increase the capacity for sabotage and disruption. Others claimed that he overestimates the importance of control and underestimates the importance of ideology, which induces consent and encourages workers’ willing cooperation with management.
Rick Edwards’ alternative to Braverman was particularly influential (Edwards 1979). Since the working class is fragmented, and oligopoly allows paying off the top fraction, the only sensible strategy for the working class is defending the terrain of social democratic compromise—i.e., the New Deal—and extending it where possible. Unfortunately for Edwards and similar radical analyses, that compromise fell apart in the 1980s and 90s due to the capitalists’ counteroffensive and the global expansion of the reserve army.
Marx and Braverman do seem to understand what workers are forced to cope with—speed-up, layoffs, deskilling, authoritarianism. And they show that capitalism is characterized by fetishisms that obscure—for everyone—the origin of surplus value in exploitation. It seems that the worker is being paid for the value of what she produces, but actually, according to Marx, she is paid for the value of what she sells, her labor power. Of course some labor power is worth more than others, as it takes more time to produce a skilled worker than an unskilled worker.
Marx did not fully theorize how the subjective, lived experience of the working class influenced the labor process, perhaps because of his hostility to the utopian socialists. Nor did he solve the problem of political consciousness, and Braverman sees it as wise to avoid this question. Historically, management strategy has fluctuated between repressing workers and seeking their consent by involving them in decision-making. In the end Marxists have generally understood the repressive side to be the more important.
The threat of capital mobility, plant closure, and direct and technological supervision in the workplace are all disciplining forces. These may provoke resistance, but Marx assumes that in the end worker resistance must give way so long as that resistance stays within the bounds of economistic trade unionism.
Marxists want to know “what is to be done?” So far there is no general answer from labor process analysis. But that analysis has illuminated the exploitation in capitalist relations of production as well as the reason for various management strategies to extract labor from labor power.
Braverman thought he was writing a book on occupational shifts in the U.S. but came to realize that no one had really examined changes in the labor process within occupations alongside the co-evolution of management and the structure of the corporation. Although it was a commonplace among Marxists that the capitalist production process is incessantly transformed by the accumulation of capital, Braverman found little in the Marxian tradition to guide his study beyond volume 1 of Capital. Marx’s writing in the middle sections of that book are certainly powerful and prophetic, but Braverman attributed that absence also to the seemingly more pressing concerns of imperialism, war and economic crisis in the twentieth century, and the tendency within the trade union movement to be more concerned with distribution than production. More important, perhaps, in the one state that openly declared itself Marxist there was more of an attempt to adopt the lessons of the capitalist labor process than to overthrow it. Soviet social scientists dismissed job satisfaction studies as meaningless in a workers’ state. No appreciable difference in the organization of the labor process occurred in the Soviet Union, and some Western analysts took this to mean a convergence between the two systems; only one way to organize production was even possible. Braverman was critical of technological determinism. “The concrete and determinate forms of society are indeed ‘determined’ rather than accidental, but this is the determinacy of the thread by thread weaving of the fabric of history, not the imposition of external formulas” (Braverman 1998, 15). A better lesson might be that the Soviet system was not different from the capitalist system on this count because it was in fact just another form of capitalism, state capitalism in this case.1
Thus the analysis of the labor process, once a strong point of Marxism, became one of its weak points. This changed somewhat with the Cuban revolution, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the various radical movements of the 1960s. Braverman found the latter particularly important as the discontents of youth, women, blacks and other groups occurred against the background of capitalism functioning at its peak rather than during one of its periodic breakdowns. “Dissatisfaction centered not so much on capitalism’s inability to provide work as on the work it provides” (Braverman 1998, 10). This was signified for Braverman and many others by the 1972 “Lordstown strike” at GM against the pace of the assembly line, but one can see this kind of dissatisfaction in any number of strikes and actions during the international wave of worker militancy in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Barkin 1983). That this dissatisfaction was bought off in some places by higher wages does not change the fact that its source was working conditions, not pay. Braverman quotes a job design consultant to the effect that “We may have created too many dumb jobs for the number of dumb people to fill them” (Braverman 1998, 24).
The “deskilling hypothesis” became central to the labor process debate, but in fact Braverman never uses the term. He was quite aware that it was labor costs not skill content that management was primarily concerned with. He did see “job enrichment” as applying mostly to office rather than line employees and as representing a change in management style rather than “a genuine change in the position of the worker” (Ibid., 26). Workers were given the illusion of making decisions rather than actual power to make them, and he uses the homely example of removing the powdered egg from baking mixes to reduce the guilt of the housewife.
Braverman went far beyond the question of skill at work. In his chapter titled “The Habituation of the Worker to the Capitalist Mode of Production” he notes that the working class is not made once and for all but must be adjusted to work in its capitalist form with each generation. This habituation, as he says, “becomes a permanent feature of capitalist society” (Ibid.,140). It had been known since the Hawthorne experiments of the 1920s that productivity had little relationship to ability—and in fact sometimes a negative relationship—and that collective resistance to the pace of work was a central problem for management. Two tendencies developed, with industrial engineers trying to minimize the role of the individual while personnel administrators celebrated it. Braverman develops the example of Ford, where high wages certainly played a role in habituating workers to soul-deadening employment but could not eliminate resistance. Worker hostility:
continues as a subterranean stream that makes its way to the surface when employment conditions permit, or when the capitalist drive for greater intensity of labor oversteps the bounds of physical and mental capacity. It renews itself in each new generation, expresses itself in the unbounded cynicism and revulsion which large numbers of workers feel about their work…
(Braverman 1998, 151).2
In the chapter on “the universal market” Braverman examines the subordination of individual, family and social needs to the market as these are reshaped to meet the needs of capital. All of society, he says, has been transformed into a gigantic marketplace, and this had been little investigated when he was writing. Of course it has been since, and it is peculiar that Braverman chooses the market rather than the factory as his preferred metaphor. Nonetheless Braverman anticipates arguments made subsequently by feminist scholars: the transformation of the family from production to consumption unit and urbanization as encouraging the commodity form. Home labor becomes costly relative to market purchase, but as Braverman notes, this is reinforced by social custom, the deterioration of homemaking skills, and the drive of housewives and teenagers for an income of their own. This is just the first step, as in time the satisfaction of physical but also emotional needs are outsourced from the household. Both social life and production are evacuated from the household, leaving only consumption. New commodities substitute for both household production and the human relations formerly provided by families. Entertainment and sport too are transformed from areas of self-production to production for profit. Of course there is resistance to this, but “underground” innovations are quickly incorporated into profit-making enterprise. Caring labor is increasingly commoditized, creating new occupations and industries. “… the inhabitant of capitalist society is enmeshed in a web made up of commodity goods and commodity services from which there is little possibility of escape…. This is reinforced … [by] the atrophy of competence” (Braverman 1998, 281).
Increased dependence on the market is the other side of the coin of increased dependence on capital for employment. Most of the new “service sector” jobs are less susceptible to technological change and thus are low productivity and low wage. These jobs, along with clerical work, are what originally drew women out of the household and into paid employment. Braverman’s treatment of the universal market was prescient, anticipating the work of Arlie Hochschild, David Harvey, Naomi Klein, and Juliet Schor.
Finally Braverman deals with “the structure of the working class and its reserve armies” focusing on the proletarianization of agricultural populations and women. Many of the former first entered industrial work, but these jobs began to shrink earlier on in the face of automation, sloughing off those workers into low-productivity service sector employment. He quotes Marx on this process of reserve army formation at length, closing with “The whole form of the movement of modern industry depends, therefore, upon the constant transformation of a part of the labouring population into unemployed or half-employed hands” (Braverman 1998, 383). Thus in the age of scientific-technological progress the most rapidly growing occupations are those not touched by that progress: retail sales, some clerical work, etc. The masses thrown off by imperialist penetration of the colonies and neo-colonies are also available as surplus populations so that the reserve armies become internationalized and the female population becomes “the prime supplementary reservoir of labor” (Ibid., 385).
Braverman uses Marx’s categories of the latent, stagnant, and floating parts of the reserve armies: those not fully integrated into capitalist production, those with irregular employment, and those who once had good jobs but are now out of work. The latent part figures in a critical way in the debates over immigration, while in the U.S. the stagnant part (along with paupers and the “lumpenproletariat”) is managed through prison policy. Portions of the white male working class had moved into the floating reserve army in the 1970s and this has accelerated since. Braverman was also prescient in noting that the most rapidly growing industries were those with the lowest wages, many below subsistence level. The rapid expansion of workers drawing welfare benefits of one kind or another—primarily food stamps in the U.S.—is not surprising on this account, nor is the polarization of income which in fact Braverman noted (Braverman 1998, 397). The multiple job holding that is necessary to support a family on jobs paying less than subsistence causes family tensions, as Braverman observes.
There is a good amount of material on the degradation of work in Labor and Monopoly Capital. Contemporary analysts have been less kind to this aspect of Braverman’s book to the extent that it is interpreted to mean the deskilling of jobs. In his chapters on Taylorism and the scientific revolution he emphasizes the separation of conception and execution in the workplace as management breaks craft workers’ monopoly of skills, concentrating skilled work in the management suite while production work is mechanized, simplified and dehumanized. While initially applied to production jobs, this process would, he argued, be extended to white-collar employment as well, so that the status and salary differentials attached to these jobs would be eroded over time.
The consensus in the literature now is that deskilling is at best a tendency, the desire on the part of management to control labor—as opposed to minimizing the cost—was overstated by Braverman, and the purely American focus occluded other possibilities. In the German model skill was retained in production through a different structure of class-state relations and system of education and training (Thelen 2004). Both Marx and Braverman seem overly focused on the Manchester (internal economies of scale) rather than the Birmingham (agglomeration economies) model, as Harvey has noted (Harvey 2010, 214–15, 289). But Labor and Monopoly Capital was also a useful corrective to the unrealistically optimistic theories of post-industrialism, knowledge economy, and informational society that became popular in the 1980s and 90s, as well as to the continuing claims for a “skills gap” in the American economy. Moreover, the separation of conception and execution in space is a key aspect of production in contemporary global supply chains, as is discussed in the second part of this entry.
1 For a contemporary discussion of determinism in labor process theory see Basole 2013.
2 Burawoy (1979) captures this succinctly in his formulation resistance-adaptation-habituation as the typical timeline of workplace struggles.
Barkin, S., ed. 1983. Worker Militancy and Its Consequences, 2nd edition. New York: Praeger.
Basole, A. 2013. “Class Biased Technological Change and Socialism.” Rethinking Marxism 25(4): 592–601.
Braverman, H. 1998 [1974]. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review.
Burawoy, M. 1979. Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Edwards, R. 1979. Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the 20th Century. New York: Basic Books.
Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers.
Harvey, D. 1991. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Hoboken: Basil Blackwell.
Harvey, D. 2010. A Companion to Marx’s Capital. London: Verso.
Hochschild, A. and A. Machung. 2012. The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home. London: Penguin.
Klein, N. 2009. No Logo. New York: Picador.
Marx, K. 1977 [1867]. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. London: Penguin.
McIntyre, R. 2008. Are Worker Rights Human Rights? Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Schor, J. 1993. The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. New York: Basic Books.
Thelen, K. 2004. How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.