Response to R. Jamil Jonna and Chris Smith

In spite of the widespread adoption of more scientific methods in industry since the war, the evils of restriction [of output by workers], which was the starting point of Taylor’s activity, continues unabated. Management has not been able to abolish the conditions which bring it about.

On the morning of my recent 8:00 a.m. final exam, I arrived to find my shared office locked. After eight years at the community college, the keyed doors were replaced with electronic locks, and adjuncts will not be given an electronic fob. We can only enter the building and the classroom when the computer allows us to. Nothing makes the relevance of Harry Braverman’s analysis of the division of labor more relevant than being an adjunct professor—a highly autonomous but anonymous and interchangeable mental worker.

Labor and Monopoly Capital was a groundbreaking exploration of Karl Marx’s analysis of the role of technology in devising a new division of labor. The Taylorist rationalization of work, which is central to Braverman’s book, was a reaction to the problem of widespread worker insubordination and organizing at the turn of the nineteenth century. Resistance did not follow capital’s plan of Taylorism, but preceded it. Although he never explained what caused it, Braverman gave us the tool to analyze the struggle.

Braverman inadvertently demonstrated the dead end of both Marxist determinism and sociology—the former for replacing class struggle with the hegemony of monopoly capital and the later for a faux historical materialism with “no transformative agency” (C. Smith 2015). Sociology was born to service capital’s need to counter the mortal threat posed by worker insurgency. It has at last arrived, “full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing” (Macbeth, Scene V).

Braverman’s de-emphasis of working class struggle (or what sociology safely calls “agency”) is the source of serious confusion in contemporary interpretations of his work. Resistance has become a reaction rather than a cause of the rationalization of work (Jonna 2015). The academic field of labor process analysis that is somehow “beyond labour-capital relations in workplaces” traces its origin to Braverman’s work (C. Smith 2015). Braverman is credited for portraying redundant labor as “making workers increasingly unskilled and interchangeable parts,” and outsourcing to countries with similarly large pools that have “deepened, and even accelerated” the “polarization of skill” (Jonna 2015). This confuses cause and effect: rationalization makes outsourcing possible, thereby expanding the disposable labor force.

Ultimately, what is missing is the necessity to contextualize rationalization in the struggle over work. Capital must impose work on those it employs and force them to work. If there is no struggle, there is no need to change the division of labor. The resistance to work can be read in the process of rationalization that is no less than a reaction to the potential of insubordinate workers to rupture the capital accumulation process (Cleaver 1989; Holloway 2002). The exceptional strike wave during the Taylorist era makes it clear that rationalization was a strategy for restoring control.

As Jonna reminds us, Braverman perceived administration as a tool in the struggle for capital’s control over workers:

Management has become administration, which is a labor process conducted for the purpose of control within the corporation, and conducted moreover as a labor process exactly analogous to the process of production. . . . From this point on, to examine management means also to examine this labor process, which contains the same antagonistic relations as are contained in the process of production. (Braverman 1974, 267; emphasis in original)

The same “antagonistic relations” between capital and labor are still with us today. Rationalization, deskilling, redundancy, contingency, outsourcing, and automation are tactical weapons of capital in the class struggle. Braverman’s analysis is crucial for understanding how the recomposition of working class power drives capital to reorganize work in order to discover a new composition of its own power. In doing so, it seeks to decompose the strategic alliances among insurgent workers that threaten not merely to rupture the capital accumulation process but transcend it. Mental labor is crucial to capital’s strategy.

To see mental labor at work, we need not visit a sweatshop. The new virtual putting out system is emerging in online campuses and “smart” classrooms made possible by big data and predictive analytics that “can create virtual factories composed of workers who only meet on line” (C. Smith 2015). Remotely linked by the global panopticon called the Internet, faceless students (who are increasingly students of color and children of waged workers) toil away completing timed sequences of “competency based” tasks. These present day “wretches” are in turn overseen by increasingly interchangeable female PhD “appendages” of the machine (Marx, 1858: 517). To demonstrate their disciplined willingness to work without immediate coercion and remuneration, these unwaged workers are rewarded with a lifetime of debt and contingent work.

Braverman hardly understated the “consequences of free waged labour for the organization of the labour process” (C. Smith 2015). He provided a means for analyzing the process by which capital seeks to subdue the struggle of workers to resist the drive for an endless expansion of unwaged work in the waged workplace. Labor and Monopoly Capital extended Marx’s fundamental premise that the labor theory of value explains how all profits are created by unwaged labor. It is no wonder the “Graded by unwaged labor” sticker is so apt for us adjunct professors. Our labor produces the massive expansion of the unwaged labor of our students.

The purpose of using Braverman’s analytical tools is not to merely analyze the new division of labor but to engage it as a terrain of struggle. We need look no further than our own academic mental labor for both the place of origin of the new ideas and technologies driving what Marx (1885, 119) called “the production of means of production.”