Comments on “When Hephaestus Fell to Earth” and “Continuity and Change in Labour Process Analysis Forty Years after Labor and Monopoly Capital ” *

I trust that the ways in which my own work is complementary to that of Chris Smith (“Continuity and Change in Labor Process Analysis Forty Years After Labor and Monopoly Capital,” this issue) and Robert Ovetz (“When Hephaestus Fell to Earth,” this issue) will be obvious to readers, so I will use this space to focus on points of divergence or disagreement. Ovetz’s searing critique of the recomposition of academic labor in the United States aptly demonstrates the power of Braverman’s method, as well as the continuing relevance of Labor and Monopoly Capital (LMC). However, Ovetz seems to neglect (1) Braverman’s relentless critique of technological determinism, which might have been useful in his analysis of the technological reorganization of the campus, and (2) the importance of the macroeconomic theory of Baran and Sweezy, which would be helpful in the analysis of the corporatization of the college campus. A double issue of Monthly Review, “Education Under Fire” in July-August of 2011, addressing the struggle in public schools, takes up some of these issues. For example, Foster (2011) explicitly theorizes the relation of monopolization to the Taylorization of education work, which lays a foundation for investigating the politics and economics behind the assault on education. This and several other recent articles published in Monthly Review on education (DiMaggio 2010; June 2013 issue) might serve to strengthen Ovetz’s basic argument. I hasten to emphasize that Ovetz’s investigation of academic labor is overall a sterling example of the creative extension and development of key concerns raised in LMC.

Smith’s overview of the labor process literature in Britain, while exhaustive and highly informative, serves largely to downplay the contemporary relevance of LMC; it also tends to exhibit the same sort of ambivalence discussed in my own article in this issue. In the introduction, for example, Smith states that the second part of his article will focus “elements of LMC that were not developed” by labor process theorists since the publication of LMC, and points specifically to the reserve army of labor as an important neglected element of the book. Unfortunately, Smith fails to expand on these neglected elements (the section appears to be missing entirely). Apart from its mention in the section on scholarly impact, the term reserve army only comes up in one other place—under the heading of “Gender” where we learn “Weber’s ideas of ‘occupational closure’” have superseded the “Marxist notion of the reserve army.” Meanwhile, when Smith discusses elements from LMC that have been carried forward—control, skill and conflict—the primary purpose is to highlight limitations in the concepts originally deployed by Braverman.

Uncritical application of certain concepts or arguments from LMC to contemporary problems in the labor process is indeed problematic. Braverman himself made such warnings, repeatedly emphasizing the self-imposed limitations of his study. Still, even though Smith indicates his focus on the British literature, it is surprising that there is no mention of the 25th Anniversary Edition of LMC (1998), which contains a New Introduction by John Bellamy Foster ¹ along with two posthumously published speeches by Braverman, delivered after the publication of LMC. Smith is largely correct when he says Braverman “was not around to . . . respond to critics” (p. 224, this issue) given his untimely death just two years after LMC was published. Yet this should make whatever criticisms to which Braverman did reply even more consequential. Given that Braverman did in fact address many criticisms raised by Smith—vis-à-vis gender, household labor, education, deskilling, control, the reserve army, the internationalization of production—it is unfortunate these and other posthumously published speeches go unmentioned in Smith’s review. ²

Despite the inconsistencies highlighted above, Smith’s review of labor process theory in Britain still cannot be faulted for excluding material from U.S. journals and publishers. However, it is considerably more difficult to explain away the exclusion of Tony Tinker’s (2002) extensive review of labor process theory ³ in Britain, as it relates specifically to Braverman’s LMC. Tinker’s article commemorates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the book and was in fact conceived as complimentary to Foster’s New Introduction, though critical in the sense that it laments the fact that Foster failed to respond directly to the more radical criticisms of Braverman made by British labor process theorists (Tinker 2002, 252).

Tinker’s central argument is that most criticisms of Braverman (and Marx) do not “appreciate what is core and what is contingent.” In other words, critics fail to distinguish the “levels of generality and specificity” built into the analysis (even though explicit articulation of such is a hallmark of the Marxian method). “They are thus unable to determine what can, and what cannot, be legitimately imported into an analysis of the present” (Tinker 2002, 252, 256). While this, indeed, is at the root of the most common misunderstandings of LMC, the point has been made before. What makes Tinker’s analysis novel is his attempt to clarify the actual core in Braverman’s (as much as Marx’s) conceptualization of the labor process, with those in mind who insist that “we must have a ‘core’ for labour process research.” The components of the core identified by Tinker are worth quoting at length.

First, an anthropological, humanist, and historical awareness recognizes patterns that persist across different cultures, distinguishing between what is—and is not—specific to capitalism at various hegemonic junctures; second, any core of Marx’s and Braverman’s work needs to accommodate what endures in their investigations and interventions—the dialectical method; and third, for political efficacy in the present, historical analysis is subordinate to this dialectical engagement with social reality. This is not to say that history does not matter, only that the political intelligence that endures—that can be transported from one historical site to the next—is dialectical. In that sense alone, it is primary (Tinker 2002, 271-272).

In conclusion, there is at least one implication of Tinker’s argument that has direct relevance for the present discussion. The particular way in which Tinker debunks the assertion that Braverman “underrates subjectivity” allows him to reconcile the work of Braverman and Burawoy (1982, 1985), to reveal their complementarity. In Smith’s review, which takes the antimony between Braverman and Burawoy as the starting point for modern labor process studies (an all too common tendency), such a feat seems impossible. The importance, and indeed hope, represented by this potentiality—of the formation of a clear and unified intellectual and political project in labor process studies and beyond—cannot be overstated in a time when workers around the world are in such great need.