On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Conclusion

Summary of Conclusion

Whereas D&G’s Conclusion was essentially a rehearsal of several key concepts from throughout their text, Simondon’s is more of a brand new agenda building off the book so far, like a passionate instructor who excitedly introduces a slew of new concepts into the last day of class.

Simondon declares:

To this day, the reality of the technical object has been relegated to the background behind the reality of human work. The technical object has been apprehended through human work, thought and judged as instrument, adjuvant, or product of work. However, one ought to be capable, in favor of man himself, to carry out a reversal that would enable what is human in the technical object to appear directly, without passing through the relation of work. It is work that must be known as a phase of technicity, not technicity as a phase of work, for it is technicity that is the whole of which work forms a part, and not the reverse. (247, emphasis added)

The old “naturalistic definition” of work [travail], as human shaping of nature, is no longer sufficient, as it does not capture work as a part or phase of technicity.

There is work only when man must offer his organism as tool bearer, that is, when man must, along with his organism and his psychosomatic unity, follow the step-by-step unfolding of the human-nature relation. Work is the activity through which man actualizes the mediation between the human species and nature within himself; in this case we say that man operates as tool bearer because he acts on nature in this activity and follows this action, step by step, gesture by gesture. There is work when man cannot entrust the technical object with the function of mediation between the species and nature, and must fulfill this function of relation himself, through his body, his thought, his action.

Work is the shaping of natural matter into human-designed form:

The activity of work is what forms the link between natural matter and form, which comes from man; work is an activity that succeeds in making two realities as heterogeneous as matter and form coincide and renders them synergetic. And the activity of work makes man aware of the two terms he synthetically relates, because the worker must have his eyes fixed on these two terms which he must bring closer together (this is the norm of work), not on the interiority itself of the complex operation through which this bringing together is obtained. Work masks the relation in favor of the terms. (248)

S states that it is in part the “servile condition of the worker” that makes “the operation by which matter and form are made to coincide more obscure,” insofar as

the man who orders [commande] work to be done is concerned with what must appear in the given order [ordre], in terms of content and of the raw material that is the condition of execution, rather than with the operation that enables the process of taking form to occur: the attention is given to form and matter, not to the process of taking form as operation. The hylomorphic schema is thus a couple in which the two terms are clear and the relation obscure.

So interestingly S does not see work itself as the “process” of giving form to matter, but rather as, just another input? along with matter and the organization achieved by the “man who orders work to be done.” A focus on labor per se is, acc S, obscurantist because it hides the real “process” of which labor is just a part or phase. Cf. this quote from way back in Part Two, Chapter Two:

It is rather difficult for a worker to know technicity through the aspects and modalities of his daily work on a machine. It is also difficult for a man who is the owner of machines and who considers them productive capital to know their essential technicity. It is the mediator of the rela­tion between machines alone who can discover this particular form of wisdom. (160)

Pace Hegel, it is neither the Master, nor the Servant, for whom there is a path toward transcendence. S illustrates his point with a passage about clay which is worth quoting at length:

Indeed, it is not enough to enter the workshop with the worker or slave, or even to take the mold into ones own hands and to operate the potter’s wheel. The point of view of the working man is still too external to the process of taking form, which is the only thing that is technical in itself. It would be necessary to be able to enter the mold with the clay, to be both mold and clay at once, to live and feel their common operation in order to be able to think the process of taking form in itself. For the worker elaborates two technical half-chains that prepare the technical operation: he prepares the clay, makes it malleable, without lumps, without air bubbles, and correlatively prepares the mold; he materializes the form by making it into a wooden mold, and makes matter pliable, capable of receiving information; then, he puts the clay into the mold and presses it; but it is the system constituted by the mold and the pressed clay that is the condition of the process of taking form; it is the clay that takes form according to the mold, not the worker who gives it its form. The working man prepares the mediation, but he doesn’t fulfill [accomplit] it; it is the mediation that fulfills itself on its own once the conditions have been created; even though man is very close to this operation, he does not know it; his body pushes the mediation to fulfill itself, enables it to fulfill itself, but the representation of the technical operation does not appear in work. It is the essential part that is missing, the active center of the technical operation that remains veiled. (248-9, emphasis added)

[Simondon apparently has a similar discussion of clay at the beginning of his other book, on individuation (cf. Lambert 2012)]. In any event, the worker’s labor is external in S’s account, because it is just setting up the “condition of the process” by preparing the clay and the mold; it is the clay that takes form, which action is the “active center of the technical operation.”

For as long as man practiced work without using technical objects, technical knowledge could only be transmitted in an implicit and practical form, through professional habits and gestures: this motivating [moteur] knowledge is effectively what enables the elaboration of two technical half chains, the one starting from form and the one starting from matter. But it does not and cannot go further, it stops before the operation itself: it does not penetrate inside the mold. In its essence, it is pre-technical and not technical. (249)

I was recently reading about the transformation of beer-brewing in the 19^th century, from old, more-art-than-science practices formed through observation and tradition, toward those informed by scientific investigations into how yeast, malt, hygiene, etc. actually worked (Sigsworth 1965); the old, artisanal brewers were essentially setting up the Simondonian “technical half chains,” with no full understanding of how fermentation (or other related processes such as malting, etc.) actually worked. Nevertheless for S the key step is not just growing scientific understanding, but the switch from “tool-bearing” to “using technical objects.”

Technical knowledge, on the contrary, consists in starting from what happens inside the mold in order to find the different elaborations that can prepare it by starting from this center. Man cannot leave the center of operation in the dark, when he no longer intervenes as tool bearer; it is the center that must effectively be produced by the technical object, which does not think or feel, and which does not acquire habits. In order to construct the technical object that will function, man needs to represent to himself the way of functioning that coincides with technical operation, which accomplishes it.

[He makes distinctions in use between “function” and “operation” which I find it a bit hard to puzzle out (contrast the quotes above and below); clearer is the difference between “function” and “work:”]

One cannot speak of the work of a machine, but only of its functioning, which is an ordered ensemble of operations. Form and matter, if they still exist, are at the same level and belong to the same system; there is continuity between the technical and the natural.

Making the technical object is no longer accompanied by this obscure zone between form and matter. Pre-technical knowledge is also pre-logical, in the sense that it constitutes a couple of terms without discovering the interiority of the rela­tion (like in the hylomorphic schema). Technical knowledge on the contrary is logical, in the sense that it seeks the interiority of the relation. (250)

Different “paradigmatisms” arise from considering the “relation of work,” as opposed to considering technical operation and “technical knowledge.” This leads into a discussion of the hylomorphic scheme as essentially a misunderstanding preserved from ancient, pre-technical thought (apparently linked to the experience of the two half-chains, instead of understanding what happens in the middle, the zone left obscure before the development of true technicity? S also insists that technical objects are “detachable” mediations between nature and humanity [akin to Latour’s immutable mobiles, although part of their power derives from the fact that they are not exactly “immutable” in L’s sense, but rather adaptable? to new contexts; in any event their detachability from context of production [an aspect of alienation, in Marx’s view] gives them a power and importance which is part of what the new mechanological or whatever understanding needs to capture and bring to the fore. [Even though it’s sometimes a pain in the ass, I like having a detachable mediation.]

For all Simondon’s conscious differences with Marx he shares some of the early Marx’s arguably mystical ways of talking about work as the mediation between humanity and nature. “Work adheres to the worker, and reciprocally, through the intermediary of work, the worker adheres to the nature on which he operates.” Because of their detachability, technical objects are not, er, sticky in this way... and for this reason they somehow enable a better mediation:

The relation of man to nature, rather than being only lived and practiced obscurely, takes on a status of stability, of consistency, making it a reality that has laws and an ordered permanence. In edifying the world of technical objects and by generalizing the objective mediation between man and nature, technical activity re-attaches man to nature through a far richer and better defined link than that of the specific reaction of collective work. A convertibility of the human into the natural and of the natural into the human establishes itself through the technical schematism. (251)

[It is not clear from the context, to me at any rate, when this is happening. Is it happening throughout history, during the course of technical development? Or is it happening in the future, after this book has transformed cultural understanding of technicity?]

S makes a distinction between function [fonctionnement] and work [travail] (in French it makes more sense to say that machines “function” and people “work”). S writes, “The technical object thus carries with it a broader category than that of work: operational functioning [fonctionnement opératoire]” (252). [I’m still not clear on the difference or relation between “operation” and “function”]. Operational functioning is more than work because it includes also a previous act of invention.

Now, invention is not work; it does not presuppose the mediation between nature and the human species to be played out by somato-psychic man. Invention is not only an adaptive and defensive reaction; it is a mental operation, a mental functioning that is of the same order as scientific knowledge.

“Work” for S is limited to this physical mediation between nature and the human species; invention, by including mental operation, is not work, and can be communicated, transmitted through the technical object, unlike work, which as we saw above, somehow “adheres” to the worker. (The terms “mental operation, mental functioning” further distinguish invention from “work” in S’s usage.) The communicative, informational aspect of invention leads to the development of a “universe of technicity:”

Henceforth, above the social community of work and beyond the inter-individual relationship not supported by an operational activity, a mental and practical universe of technicity establishes itself, in which human beings communicate through what they invent. The technical object taken according to its essence, which is to say the technical object insofar as it has been invented, thought and willed, and taken up ... by a human subject, becomes the medium [le support] and symbol of this relationship, which we would like to name transindividual.

The potential of this mental universe can only be grasped or developed by people who can appreciate it “according to its essence” (cf. the previous chapter):

The technical object can be read as carrier of a definite information; if it is only used, employed, and consequently enslaved, then it cannot bring any information, any more than a book that would be used as a wedge or pedestal. The technical object that is appreciated and known according to its essence, i.e., according to the human act that has founded it, penetrated it with functional intelligibility, valorized it according to its internal norms, carries with it pure information. (252-3)

The “human act that has founded it,” per S, is not labor as some might claim, but rather invention. “what is known in the technical object is the form, the material crystallization of an operational schema and of a thought that has resolved a problem” (253).

S makes a crucial distinction between the individual and the subject:

Work, conceived as productive, insofar as it comes from the localized individual hic et nunc, cannot account for the invented technical being; it is not the individual who invents, it is the subject, vaster than the individual, richer than it, and having, in addition to the individuality of the individuated being, a certain weight of nature, of non-individuated being. (253)

Per Barthélémy (2012: passim) the “subject” is more than the mere “individual” because it carries also the “pre-individual charge;” collectively subjects form the transindividual, which for this reason is also more than a mere collection of individuals. S uses the terms “community” and “inter-individual” to refer to this lesser sort of collective, which he associates with the thought of Marxists, sociologists, etc. In relation to this S opines that, contra Marx, it is not the social relations of work in capitalism, but work itself that is inherently alienating.

If this hypothesis is right, then the true path toward the reduction of alienation would not be situated within the domain of the social (with the community of work and class), nor in the domain of inter-individual relationships that social psychology habitually envisages, but at the level of the transindividual collective. (254)

S’s is here taking on both Marx’s critique of labor and alienation within the conditions of production, but also what he calls a “counter-Marxism” of social psychology (the organizational sociologists of the human relations school, whom Braverman criticizes, come to mind). “Work,” being a concept left over from the era of mere utensils, is not the right way to understand technical objects:

the relation of the worker to the machine is inadequate, because the worker operates on the machine without his gesture continuing the activity of invention in this gesture. The obscure central zone characteristic of work has transferred itself to the utilization of the machine: it is now the functioning of the machine, the provenance of the machine, the signification of what the machine does and the way in which it is made that is the obscure zone.

A worker, according to Simondon, confronts a machine as something they use without understanding; the action which “continues the activity of invention” is the adjustment, maintenance, or repair of the machine, which requires understanding of the technical schema. (S adds the “breaking in” of machines a page later (256)).

The worker’s alienation is translated by the break between technical knowledge and the exercise of the conditions of use. This break is so noticeable that the function of adjusting the machine is strictly distinct from that of the machine’s user in a large number of factories, in other words, distinct from the worker, and it is prohibited for workers to adjust [régler] their own machines by themselves. The activity of adjustment, however, is the one that most naturally continues the function of invention and construction: adjustment is a perpetual, if limited, invention. (255)

Braverman, of course, would strongly object that it is precisely within the “domain of the social” that we can find the cause of this separation. Simondon would apparently rather situate it on a cultural or even civilizational level, as the effect of continued hylomorphic thinking, than situated socially and historically as an aspect of the class struggle over the control of knowledge in the productive process. S talks about the knowledgeable user/adjuster who has “forms within himself” which allow for an understanding of the “forms carried by the machine;” through this communication “the work done on a technical object becomes a technical activity and not simply work” (emphasis added). [In Heideggerian terms, for the worker the machine is ready-to-hand; for the adjuster/controller it is present-at-hand:]

The technical activity distinguishes itself from mere work, and from alienating work, in that technical activity comprises not only the use of the machine, but also a certain coefficient of attention to the technical functioning, maintenance, adjustment, and improvement of the machine, which continues the activity of invention and construction. (emphasis added)

S then goes into an interesting (and today very relevant) discussion of alienated consumers: “The technical objects that produce the greatest alienation are those meant for ignorant users.” [Cf. Stiegler on technology making people “stupid.”]

Such objects progressively deteriorate: they are new for a short time, and quickly begin to devalue when losing this aspect of being new because they can only distance themselves from the conditions of initial perfection. The sealing of delicate organs is indicative of this divide between the manufacturer, who is identified with the inventor, and the user who only acquires usage of the technical object through an economic process … (255-6)

“The machine remains one of the obscure zones of our civilization, at all social levels. This alienation exists as much at the management level … as it does at the level of workers.” Thus, contra Marx, this alienation is not solvable by the mere ownership of the means of production:

... it wouldn’t be enough for workers simply to be the owners of their machines in order for alienation to be abruptly reduced; to possess a machine is not to know it. Non-possession, however, increases the distance between the worker and the machine on which his work is accomplished; it makes the relation even more fragile, more external, more precarious. It would have to be possible to discover a social and economic mode whereby the user of the technical object would not only be the owner of this machine, but also the man who chooses it and who maintains it. (256-7)

[Finally Simondon and Braverman agree about something!] Nevertheless Simondon says nothing more about this promising “social and economic mode.”]

Per S, both labor and capital are “inessential with respect to technical activity;” as we have seen earlier in the book, he considers economic and political context “extrinsic” to the essence of technics. The sort of [transcendence] he is aiming for is somehow thus distinct from that achieved through class struggle:

This level of technical organization where man encounters man not as the member of a class but as a being who expresses himself within the technical object which is homogeneous with respect to his activity, is the level of the collective, going beyond the inter-individual and the given social. (257)

“The relation with the technical object cannot become adequate individual by individual” because the desired condition of the transindividual requires “a coupling between the inventive and organizational capacities of several subjects.” Yet interestingly he does not seem to see this as coming about through a reorganization of society at large, but as happening through companies, which unify labor and thought through the organization of “technical committees at the level of their employee councils:”

in order to be efficient and creative, an employee committee should be essentially technical. The organization of channels of information in a company must follow the lines of technical operation and not that of social hierarchy or of purely inter-individual relations, which are inessential with respect to technical operation. The company, being the ensemble of technical objects and men, must be organized on the basis of its essential function, that is its technical functioning; it is at the level of the technical operation that the whole [ensemble] of the organization can be thought, not as a confrontation of classes, i.e., as a pure social ensemble, or as a grouping of individuals each having their psyche, which brings the ensemble down to an inter-psychological schema, but as a unit [une unité] of technical functioning. (258)

It is a bit jarring to see such innovative and thought-provoking philosophical reconceptialization lead up to such tepid reformism. Simondon’s idealism leads him yet again to imagine that existing hierarchies are “extrinsic” to the alienation of labor and thought, which can be overcome simply by introducing a new way of thinking. [And how surprising that sixty years after this book’s publication, our society remains so alienated!]

He goes on to criticize Bergson, Poincaré, Le Roy, and pragmatists in general for “conflating” work and technical operation; they attempt to overturn the Classical hierarchy (e.g., in Plato, etc.), in which mental activity (σχολή) was seen as superior to manual labor, by insisting on the primacy and validity of the latter. This, however, only preserves the false opposition of utility to truth:

Pragmatism, by appearing to reverse the hierarchy of values, defines the true by the useful; but it preserves the schema of opposition between the norm of utility and the norm of truth, to such an extent that it results in a relativism in the order of knowledge, or at nominalism if this attitude is pushed to its most rigorous and extreme consequences; science is not more true, but more useful for action than common perception. (260)

Technics is an “intermediary reality” between work and σχολή, and thus not understandable through either concept.

It seems that this opposition between action and contemplation, between the immutable and the moving, must cease in the face of the introduction of the technical operation within philosophical thought as area of reflection and even as paradigm.

Barthélémy, Jean-Huges (2012) “Fifty Key Terms in the Works of Gilbert Simondon” in de Boever, et al., eds. Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

Lambert, Léopold (2012, Dec. 8). “Form and Matter: Gilbert Simondon’s Critique of the Hylomorphic Scheme Part 1” The Funambulist (blog). https://thefunambulist.net/editorials/philosophy-form-matter-gilbert-simondons-critique-of-the-hylomorphic-scheme-part-1

Sigsworth, E.M. (1965) “Science and the Brewing Industry, 1850-1900.” Economic History Review, 17(3): 536-550.

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 20

 

Summary of Chapter 20: A Final Note on Skill

Braverman notes that his argument in this book goes against the “popular view” of his time, that increased mechanization leads to an increase in skilled work, because there is a need for training to use the machinery.

The concepts of “skill,” “training,” and “education” are themselves sufficiently vague, and a precise investigation of the arguments which are used to support the thesis of “upgrading"” is further hampered by the fact that they have never been made the subject of a coherent and systematic presentation. We can grapple with the issue only by attempting to give coherence to what is essentially an impressionistic theory, one which is obviously considered so self-evident as to stand above the need for demonstration. (294)

He criticizes discussion of “average skill” in this regard, when it is really an issue of polarization.

The mass of workers gain nothing from the fact that the decline in their command over the labor process is more than compensated for by the increasing command on the part of managers and engineers.

“For most of those who hold it, the ‘upgrading’ thesis seems to rest upon two marked trends. The first is the shift of workers from some major occupational groups into others; the second is the prolongation of the average period of education” (295). This is “a splendid example of the manner in which conventional social science accepts carefully tailored appearances as a substitute for reality.”

B not surprisingly demolishes the argument for the first trend (that workers have been “upgraded” into higher skill levels) by showing that the supporting statistics have been created retroactively “based not upon a study of the occupational tasks involved, as is generally assumed by the users of the categories, but upon a simple mechanical criterion, in the fullest sense of the word” (297). To illustrate this he gives a great example of the difference between horse-driving and automobile-driving occupations:

Let us take as an example the categories of teamster on the one side, and the operators of motor vehicles (such as truckdrivers, chauffeurs and taxidrivers, routemen and deliverymen, etc.) on the other. These categories are important because that of teamster was, before World War I, one of the largest of occupational groups, while the drivers of various sorts are, taken together, one of the largest today. The former are classified, retroactively, among the “unskilled” laborers, while the latter, because of their connection with machinery, are classed as operatives and hence “semi-skilled.” When the Edwards scale is applied in this fashion, a skill upgrading takes place as a consequence of the displacement of horse-drawn transport by motorized. Yet it is impossible to see this as a true comparison of human work skills. In the circumstances of an earlier day, when a largely rural population learned the arts of managing horses as part of the process of growing up, while few as yet knew how to operate motorized vehicles, it might have made sense to characterize the former as part of the common heritage and thus no skill at all, while driving, as a learned ability, would have been thought of as a “skill.” Today, it would be more proper to regard those who are able to drive vehicles as unskilled in that respect at least, while those who can care for, harness, and manage a team of horses are certainly the possessors of a marked and uncommon ability. In reality, this way of comparing occupational skill leaves much to be desired, depending as it does on relativistic or contemporary notions. But there is certainly little reason to suppose that the ability to drive a motor vehicle is more demanding, requires longer training or habituation time, and thus represents a higher or intrinsically more rewarding skill than the ability to manage a team of horses. (297-8)

It is only in the world of census statistics, and not in terms of direct assessment, that an assembly line worker is presumed to have greater skill than a fisherman or oysterman, the forklift operator greater skill than the gardener or groundskeeper, the machine feeder greater skill than the longshoreman, the parking lot attendant greater skill than the lumberman or raftsman. (298)

The “semi-skilled” category and descriptions barely differs from the “unskilled”. The issue of some required training is raised, but B points out that even “unskilled” job typically require some training. The operative/assembly line jobs, which the statisticians take as “semi-skilled” and thus an upgrade for formerly “unskilled” workers, are typically easier to learn [and thus in actuality less skilled, per Braverman] than the jobs that are being left behind. B denounces this as the “imaginary creation of higher categories of skill by nomenclatural exercises” (300). He goes on to emphasize the range of skills represented in the category of “farm laborer,” contradicting contemporary sociologists who imagine that any movement of workers out of this category is an upgrade. Likewise, statisticians consider “service worker,” as well as clerical work, as higher categories than industrial operative or laborer, but Braverman has already pointed out in previous chapters how these categories obscure an actual deskilling and decrease in pay.

The reflex response which causes governmental and academic social scientists automatically to accord a higher grade of skill, training, prestige, and class position to any form of office work as against any and all forms of manual work is a tradition of long standing in American sociology which few have ventured to challenge. … The weight of the prejudice which rates all “white-collar” above all “blue-collar” work is such that the growth of the former at the expense of the latter is again taken as evidence of an increase in skill and training for which no real factual backing is required, so self-evident is this conclusion for the conventional wisdom (301-2)

Another argument the sociologists Braverman is arguing against put forward as evidence of increased skill is increased education. B points out this has to do with far more than work:

In this we see first of all the fact that the requirements of literacy and familiarity with the numbers system have become generalized throughout the society. The ability to read, write, and perform simple arithmetical operations is demanded by the urban environment, not just in jobs but also for consumption, for conformity to the rules of society and obedience to the law. Reading and figuring are, apart from all their other meanings, the elementary attributes of a manageable population, which could no more be sold, cajoled, and controlled without them than can symbols be handled by a computer if they lack the elementary characteristics of identity and position. Beyond this need for basic literacy there is also the function of the schools in providing an attempted socialization to city life, which now replaces the socialization through farm, family, community, and church which once took place in a predominantly rural setting. Thus the average length of schooling is generally higher for urban populations, and the shift of a population from farm to city brings with it, almost as an automatic function, an increase in the term of education. (302)

B recounts the history of how high school diplomas became widely seen as requirements for many jobs in the US, for reasons unrelated to the actual skill required in work, such as policies to control unemployment.

The postponement of school leaving to an average age of eighteen has become indispensable for keeping unemployment within reasonable bounds. In the interest of working parents (the two-parent-job-holding family having become ever more common during this period), and in the interest of social stability and the orderly management of an increasingly rootless urban population, the schools have developed into immense teen-sitting organizations, their functions having less and less to do with imparting to the young those things that society thinks they must learn. In this situation the content of education deteriorated as its duration lengthened. The knowledge imparted in the course of an elementary education was more or less expanded to fill the prevalent twelve-year educational sojourn, and in a great many cases school systems have difficulty in instilling in twelve years the basic skills of literacy and numbers that, several generations ago, occupied eight. This in turn gave a greater impetus to employers to demand of job applicants a high school diploma, as a guarantee – not always valid – of getting workers who can read. (304)

He goes into a lengthy and quite savage critique of the education system:

We cannot neglect the direct economic impact of the enlarged school system. Not only does the postponement of the school-leaving age limit the growth of recognized unemployment, but it also furnishes employment for a considerable mass of teachers, administrators, construction and service workers, etc. Moreover, education has become an immensely profitable area of capital accumulation for the construction industry, for suppliers of all sorts, and for a host of subsidiary enterprises. For all these reasons – which have nothing to do with either education or occupational training – it is difficult to imagine United States society without its immense “educational” structure.... The schools, as caretakers of children and young people, are indispensable for family functioning, community stability, and social order in general (although they fulfill even these functions badly). In a word, there is no longer any place for the young in this society other than school. Serving to fill a vacuum, schools have themselves become that vacuum, increasingly emptied of content and reduced to little more than their own form. Just as in the labor process, where the more there is to know the less the worker need know, in the schools the mass of future workers attend the more there is to learn, the less reason there is for teachers to teach and students to learn. In this more than in any other single factor – the purposelessness, futility, and empty forms of the educational system – we have the source of the growing antagonism between the young and their schools which threatens to tear the schools apart. (304-5)

Braverman turns to the central thesis of the book:

For the worker, the concept of skill is traditionally bound up with craft mastery – that is to say, the combination of knowledge of materials and processes with the practiced manual dexterities required to carry on a specific branch of production. The breakup of craft skills and the reconstruction of production as a collective or social process have destroyed the traditional concept of skill and opened up only one way for mastery over labor processes to develop: in and through scientific, technical, and engineering knowledge. But the extreme concentration of this knowledge in the hands of management and its closely associated staff organizations have closed this avenue to the working population. (307)

[And this is not because of any inherent aspect of technological development, but because of the particular shape this development takes in a capitalist system.]

B moves on to the next key point, which is what lessons this study of labor in monopoly capitalism can have for a post-capitalist society: “The worker can regain mastery over collective and socialized production only by assuming the scientific, design, and operational prerogatives of modern engineering; short of this, there is no mastery over the labor process.” This can to an extent build off the current educational system:

But such an education can take effect only if it is combined with the practice of labor during the school years, and only if education continues throughout the life of the worker after the end of formal schooling. Such education can engage the interest and attention of workers only when they become masters of industry in the true sense, which is to say when the antagonisms in the labor process between controllers and workers, conception and execution, mental and manual labor are overthrown, and when the labor process is united in the collective body which conducts it. (308)

In this light, B criticizes certain schemes for workplace democracy which he thinks do not go far enough in actually challenging control over the means of production:

The demands for “workers 'participation” and “workers’ control,” from this point of view, fall far short of the Marxist vision. The conception of a democracy in the workplace based simply upon the imposition of a formal structure of parliamentarism­ – election of directors, the making of production and other decisions by ballot, etc. – upon the existing organization of production is delusory. Without the return of requisite technical knowledge to the mass of workers and the reshaping of the organization of labor – without, in a word, a new and truly collective mode of production – balloting within factories and offices does not alter the fact that the workers remain as dependent as before upon “experts,” and can only choose among them, or vote for alternatives presented by them. Thus genuine workers’ control has as its prerequisite the demystifying of technology and the reorganization of the mode of production. This does not mean, of course, that the seizure of power within industry through demands for workers’ control is not a revolutionary act. It means rather that a true workers’ democracy cannot subsist on a purely formal parliamentary scheme.

In this context he remarks that the Soviet Union, which seized ownership from the bourgeoisie but did not institute true worker’s control in the workplace, was stuck in the “abortive first stage of revolution” from a truly Marxist perspective.

In contrast to B’s more hopeful vision, the current capitalist system separates knowledge and skill from labor, robbing humanity of “its birthright of conscious and masterful labor” (309). He ends by casting back to the previously noted, almost refreshingly naive directness of the Taylorians, who had explained that under Scientific Management there is in fact no “unskilled” labor, because all workers will have been trained to carry out their specific tasks:

It is this conception that lies behind the shabby nominal sociology in which the sociologists find “upgrading” in the new names given to classifications by the statisticians. “Training a worker,” wrote Frank Gilbreth, “means merely enabling him to carry out the directions of his work schedule. Once he can do this, his training is over, whatever his age.” Is this not a perfect description of the mass of jobs in modern industry, trade, and offices?

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 19

Summary of Chapter 19: Productive and Unproductive Labor

Braverman reiterates that being in the working class is determined by a social relation, not the specific form of work that is done:

The various forms of labor which produce commodities for the capitalist are all to be counted as productive labor. The worker who builds an office building and the worker who cleans it every night alike produce value and surplus value. Because they are productive for the capitalist, the capitalist allows them to work and produce; insofar as such workers alone are productive, society lives at their expense. (284)

There remains the question of what constitutes “unproductive” labor. B notes that the distinction between “productive and unproductive” originates with the classical economists, whom Marx was critiquing:

In order to understand the terminology it is necessary to grasp first of all that the discussion of productive and unproductive labor, as it was conducted by Marx, implied no judgment about the nature of the work processes under discussion or their usefulness to humans in particular or society at large, but was concerned specifically and entirely with the role of labor in the capitalist mode of production. Thus the discussion is in reality an analysis of the relations of production and, ultimately, of the class structure of society, rather than of the utility of particular varieties of labor. (284-5)

… Marx defined productive labor under capitalism as labor which produces commodity value, and hence surplus value, for capital. (285)

Self-employed proprietors, such as independent farmers, artisans, professionals and so on, are unproductive for capital, or even outside the productive/unproductive distinction and in fact “outside the capitalist mode of production.” Servants are also outside the distinction, since their labor is not exchanged against profit but against revenue (e.g. the capitalist pays for the gardener at his home out of his own pocket). [But does this change if the maintenance of the home for future sale is seen as an investment? Not to mention the other forms of “capital” which having a home with a garden and a gardener produces, outside of a strictly Marxist framework—by which I mean to refer not so much to Bourdieu’s original forms of “capital,” but attempts to integrate these with Marxian concepts, e.g. Zhu (2020) on the “cultural fix.” (Which also being a variation on Harvey’s “spatial fix,” is linked to the expansion of capitalist relations which Braverman is talking about).]

B points out that the productive/unproductive distinction is important because as more kinds of work are brought into direct exchange for capital, this shows the expansion of capitalism, and capitalist relations, through society. He gives the example of an individual tailor employed by a customer for one suit alone, vs. a capitalist employing a roomful of tailors for suits, plus profit. “Capital is thus not just money exchanged for labor; it is money exchanged for labor with the purpose of appropriating that value which it creates over and above what is paid, the surplus value” (286).

In each case where money is exchanged for labor with this purpose it creates a social relation, and as this relation is generalized throughout the productive processes it creates social classes. Therefore, the transformation of unproductive labor into labor which is, for the capitalist’s purpose of extracting surplus value, productive, is the very process of the creation of capitalist society.

... the capitalist mode of production has subordinated to itself all forms of work, and all labor processes now pass through the sieve of capital, leaving behind their tribute of surplus.

The unproductive labor which capitalism increasingly pays for is involved, not in the production of value, but in the work of the appropriation of surplus value, and in the “realization problem” of ensuring that products get sold, so they can be turned back into capital.

These two functions, the realization and the appropriation by capital of surplus value, engage, as we have seen, enormous masses of labor, and this labor, while necessary to the capitalist mode of production, is in itself unproductive, since it does not enlarge the value or surplus value available to society or to the capitalist class by one iota. (287)

[This is furthermore important, because in a different organization of society, these would be unnecessary, or not as important; there would be no need, or less need, for these kinds of “unproductive” labor in a socialist economy.]

B gives an example of the same kind of work being in one case productive, in another unproductive:

The receivables clerk who keeps track of outstanding accounts, the insurance clerk who records payments, the bank clerk who receives deposits—­all of these forms of commercial and financial labor add nothing to the value of the commodities represented by the figures or papers which they handle. Yet this lack of effect is not due to the determinate form of their labors—the fact that they are clerical in nature. Clerical labor of similar and sometimes identical kinds is used in production, storage, transportation, and other such processes, all of which do contribute productively to commodity value, according to the division of productive labor into mental and manual sides. It is due rather to their occupation with tasks which contribute only to the realization of value in the market, or to the struggle of competing capitals over value, and its transfer and redistribution according to individual claims, speculations, and the “services” of capital in the form of credit, etc.

Summarizing his argument so far:

Labor may thus be unproductive simply because it takes place outside the capitalist mode of production, or because, while taking place within it, it is used by the capitalist, in his drive for accumulation, for unproductive rather than productive functions. And it is now clear that while unproductive labor has declined outside the grasp of capital, it has increased within its ambit. … the greater the mass of capital, the greater the mass of unproductive activities which serve only the diversion of this surplus and its distribution among various capitals.

Modern bourgeois economics has failed to grasp this change, because it can’t account for it, only being able to see things from the point of view of the bourgeoisie. Thus, for bourgeois economists, “the measuring of the productivity of labor has come to be applied to labor of all sorts, even labor which has no productivity. It refers, in bourgeois parlance, to the economy with which labor can perform any task to which it is set by capital, even those tasks which add nothing whatever to the wealth of the nation” (288).

And the very idea of the “wealth of nations” has faded, to be supplanted by the concept of “prosperity,” a notion which has nothing to do with the efficacy of labor in producing useful goods and services, but refers rather to the velocity of flow within the circuits of capital and commodities in the marketplace.

[Here, couched in Adam-Smith-ian terms, is another implicit critique of the capitalist international economic system vis-a-vis a possible socialist system.]

Unproductive workers employed in early capitalism had a certain high status as enablers of the capitalists’ wealth, but the new system means they have lost this status. Just as productive workers lost their individual input and now create value only as a mass (for example, the individuals on an assembly line only contribute partially, and production is actually brought about by all of them together), unproductive laborers have also lost their individuality and are now also a mass, “which shares in the subjugation and oppression that characterizes the lives of the productive workers” (289).

And this remains true despite the fact that, technically speaking, all those who do not themselves produce commodity values must perforce consume a portion of the commodity values produced by others. In the modern corporation, and for the mass of labor which it employs, this distinction has lost its social force as a line of division between proletarians and middle class: that line can no longer be drawn as roughly corresponding to the division between productive and unproductive workers, but must be inscribed elsewhere in the social structure. (290)

B clarifies how his own argument is rooted in Marx’s sketches of the issue. Contra Ian Gough, B insists that Marx never described commercial workers as a “commercial proletariat,” but as “wage-workers,” this distinction being important because, although they do have the same employment status as industrial workers, they are not productive of surplus value, like a true proletariat:

The unproductive labor hired by the capitalist to help in the realization or appropriation of surplus value is in Marx’s mind like productive labor in all respects save one: it does not produce value and surplus value, and hence grows not as a cause but rather as a result of the expansion of surplus value. (292)

However, Braverman also notes that Marx did not peer far into the future of capitalism, since he was more intent on ending capitalism, soon:

... it is necessary to keep in mind that Marx was not only a scientist but also a revolutionary; that so far as he was concerned the capitalist mode of production had already operated for a sufficiently long period of time; and that he anticipated not its prolonged continuation but its imminent destruction, a conviction which is part of the armament of all working revolutionaries.

And, as a revolutionary sharing this conviction, B concludes by noting that unproductive laborers now share much in common with the true proletariat, hinting at (though not stating here) their potential role as co-revolutionaries:

That which in Marx was a subordinate and inconsequential part of the analysis has thus for us become a major consequence of the capitalist mode of production. The few commercial wage-workers who puzzled Marx as a conscientious scientist have become the vast and complicated structure of occupations characteristic of unproductive labor in modern capitalism. But in so becoming they have lost many of the last characteristics which separated them from production workers. When they were few they were unlike productive labor, and having become many they are like productive labor. Although productive and unproductive labor are technically distinct, although productive labor has tended to decrease in proportion as its productivity has grown, while nonproductive labor has increased only as a result of the increase in surpluses thrown off by productive labor—despite these distinctions, the two masses of labor are not otherwise in striking contrast and need not be counterposed to each other. They form a continuous mass of employment which, at present and unlike the situation in Marx’s day, has everything in common.

Zhu, Annah Lake (2020) “China’s Rosewood Boom: A Cultural Fix to Capital Overaccumulation.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110(1):277-296.

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 18

 

Summary of Chapter 18: The “Middle Layers” of Employment

Braverman turns now from the proletariat to the new “middle class,” which, however, differs from the old petty-bourgeois middle class of pre-monopoly capitalism, in that it lacks independence and access to the means of production (e.g. as oldtime artisans, farmers, etc. had), instead having some characteristics of a working class, in particular being dependent upon capital for employment:

This portion of employment embraces the engineering, technical, and scientific cadre, the lower ranks of supervision and management, the considerable numbers of specialized and “professional” employees occupied in marketing, financial and organizational administration, and the like, as well as, outside of capitalist industry proper, in hospitals, schools, government administration, and so forth. (279)

The stark contract between the old class structure and the modern one is that, before monopoly capital, a large portion of the working population were independent of capital per se, being neither owners nor employees of capitalist enterprises. Today, however, “almost all of the population has been transformed into employees of capital” (ibid., emphasis original).

However, for the middle class, it is about more than the mere structural fact that they are employees, for this technically holds true also of upper management:

These operating executives, by virtue of their high managerial positions, personal investment portfolios, independent power of decision, place in the hierarchy of the labor process, position in the community of capitalists at large, etc., etc., are the rulers of industry, act “professionally” for capital, and are themselves part of the class that personi­fies capital and employs labor. Their formal attribute of being part of the same payroll as the production workers, clerks, and porters of the corporation no more robs them of the powers of decision and command over the others in the enterprise than does the fact that the general, like the private, wears the military uniform, or the pope and cardinal pronounce the same liturgy as the parish priest. (280)

Thus, the shared “form of hired employment” in fact represents two distinct realities: on the one side that of the working class, selling their labor power, and on the other a mechanism by which the ruling class selects representatives from within itself to carry out leadership roles in the corporation.

Then, “between these two extremes there is a range of intermediate categories, sharing the characteristics of worker on the one side and manager on the other in varying degrees,” primarily in terms of relative authority and expertise, as well as “working independence.” These intermediate positions are those held by the new middle class in the corporation.

Their pay level is significant because beyond a certain point it, like the pay of the commanders of the corporation, clearly represents not just the exchange of their labor power for money—a commodity exchange—but a share in the surplus produced in the corporation, and thus is intended to attach them to the success or failure of the corporation and give them a “management stake,” even if a small one.

There is a vast hierarchy which blends into management at the top, and the workers at the bottom. This “new middle class” is distinct from the old middle class, again, because they are not outside the capital-labor relationship, but possess a status combining aspects of both sides, though increasingly of the latter, in that, like workers, they are subject to downward pressure on wages from an unemployed reserve army, and their workplaces are periodically subject to “rationalization” in the interests of capital (282). B notes that employment crises in the 20^th century exposed the myth that these middle class workers were independent “professionals:”

... rising rates of unemployment among “professionals” of various kinds once more brought home to them that they were not the free agents they thought they were, who deigned to “associate themselves” with one or another corporation, but truly part of a labor market, hired and fired like those beneath them.

In such occupations, the proletarian form begins to assert itself and to impress itself upon the consciousness of these employees. Feeling the insecu­rities of their role as sellers of labor power and the frustrations of a controlled and mechanically organized workplace, they begin, despite their remaining privileges, to know those symptoms of dissociation which are popularly called “alienation” and which the working class has lived with for so long that they have become part of its second nature.

Thus, the new “middle class” either is going or will go through the same shifts towards proletarianization as the clerical class discussed earlier in the book. Braverman draws from this the moral that class is not a static “thing” (as presumed by those who want to come up with inherent definitions for classes), but a relationship (283).

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 17

 

Summary of Chapter 17: The Structure of the Working Class and its Reserve Armies

An elegant statement of the duality of labor and capital:

Labor and capital are the opposite poles of capitalist society. This polarity begins in each enterprise and is realized on a national and even international scale as a giant duality of classes which dominates the social structure. And yet this polarity is incorporated in a necessary identity between the two. Whatever its form, whether as money or commodities or means of production, capital is labor: it is labor that has been performed in the past, the objectified product of preceding phases of the cycle of production which becomes capital only through appropriation by the capitalist and its use in the accumulation of more capital. At the same time, as living labor which is purchased by the capitalist to set the production process into motion, labor is capital. That portion of money capital which is set aside for the payment of labor, the portion which in each cycle is converted into living labor power, is the portion of capital which stands for and corresponds to the working population, and upon which the latter subsists. (261)

The working class is the “animate part of capital,” upon which the operation of all of capital, and the production of surplus value, depends. Though it has independent existence as a class, it is “first of all raw material for exploitation” from the capitalist perspective. “It is seized, released, flung into various parts of the social machinery and expelled by others, not in accord with its own will or self-activity, but in accord with the movement of capital.”

B notes the “formal definition” of the working class as “that class which, possessing nothing but its power to labor, sells that power to capital in return for its subsistence.” Though a static definition, this is a necessary starting point for understanding the working class in modern times. Braverman traces the growth of working class as a percentage of working population, over last century, from 50% to over two-thirds.

He argues that “the new mass working-class occupations tend to grow, not in contradiction to the speedy mechanization and ‘automation’ of industry, but in harmony with it” (264). Automation depresses employment in the fields automated, but [because it increases overall productivity] leads to expanded employment elsewhere. “The fastest growing industrial and occupational sectors in the ‘automated’ age tend, therefore, in the long run to be those labor-intensive areas which have not yet been or cannot be subjected to high technology.” [So far!] These are, in Braverman’s time, the clerical, service, and sales fields. The true function of automation is not to replace labor, but to deskill it, and to produce also a “reserve army of labor:”

The mechanization of industry produces a relative surplus of population available for employment at the lower pay rates that characterize these new mass occupations. In other words, as capital moves into new fields in search of profitable investment, the laws of capital accumulation in the older fields operate to bring into existence the ‘labor force’ required by capital in its new incarnations.

He turns to the role of colonialism in disrupting world populations, making them available to the core as surplus population for labor, a global “labor reservoir” (266). Women also have become “the prime supplementary reservoir of labor”, along with families increasingly needing multiple incomes to get by.

Unemployment is not a “problem” for capitalism, but an essential aspect of how it depresses wages and maintains a ready surplus army of potential workers when needed: “Under conditions of capitalism, unemployment is not an aberration but a necessary part of the working mechanism of the capitalist mode of production” (267). This is not just the unemployed, but the part-time employed, “houseworkers,” migrant laborers, etc.

Marx’s three forms of the reserve army: floating, latent, and stagnant:

The floating form is found in the centers of industry and employment, in the form of workers who move from job to job, attracted and repelled (that is to say, hired and discarded) by the movements of technology and capital, and suffering a certain amount of unemployment in the course of this motion.

B details the importance and growth of this form in the 20^th century capitalist economy. The latent relative surplus population is that which has yet to be drawn into capitalist production; in Marx’s day this was the rural agricultural population, in Braverman’s, that of the post/colonial states. Marx’s stagnant surplus labor reserve is “pauperism,” or the desperately poor; B promises to speak more of this category later.

B quotes Marx on “the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation,” which “establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with the accumulation of capital” (Marx, Capital, quoted on page 269). This had seemed to be “the weakest aspect of the Marxian analysis” in the flush growth after the Second World War, but this was no longer the case by the early 70s. He discusses the trends since World War II of male workers moving out of the labor force into the reserve army, and women moving into the workforce; these are only apparently contradictory, as both show the growing importance of the floating and stagnant pools of reserve labor. It also reflects the replacement of higher-paid, more skilled, masculinized jobs with lower-paid, less skilled, feminized jobs, according to the processes he has been outlining throughout the book. He backs this up with data from Victor Fuchs on the stagnation of the higher-paying industrial sector, and the growth of the lower-paying “services” sector. He notes that pay in the service sector is so low that it is below subsistence for a family, and this accounts for the growing number of employed people on welfare, along with the growth of multiple-income families. In addition, many low-income families are supported by less-than-full-time work. Nevertheless, traditional employment statistics undercount “discouraged” workers who have given up job seeking, and underemployed workers.

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 16

Summary of Chapter 16: Service Occupations and Retail Trade

The giant mass of workers who are relatively homogeneous as to lack of developed skill, low pay, and interchangeability of person and function (although­ heterogeneous in such particulars as the site and nature of the work they perform) is not limited to offices and factories. Another huge concentra­tion is to be found in the so-called service occupations and in retail trade. (248)

The reasons for the growth of the service sector have already been discussed in chapter 13; they fill in for functions previously played by communities, etc.:

the completion by capital of the conquest of goods-producing activities; the displacement of labor from those industries, corresponding to the accumulation of capital in them, and the juncture of these reserves of labor and capital on the ground of new industries; and the inexorable growth of service needs as the new shape of society destroys the older forms of social, community, and family cooperation and self-aid.

B quotes Marx to the effect that a “service” is “nothing more than the useful effect of a use-value.” However, unlike directly productive labor creating objects, in this case no object is created:

The useful effects of labor, in such cases, do not serve to make up a vendible object which then carries its useful effects with it as part of its existence as a commodity. Instead, the useful effects of labor themselves become the commodity. When the worker does not offer this labor directly to the user of its effects, but instead sells it to a capitalist, who re-sells it on the commodity market, then we have the capitalist form of production in the field of services.

B notes that the census, etc., are much more lax in their definition of “service work” than his “scientific” definition, including, for example, restaurant cooks, etc. who produce tangible objects, as “service workers.” Part of this is the same old obfuscatory counting which gives the illusion of a shift from production to “service” work. A note on transportation:

Workers in transportation are often regarded as workers in a “service” industry, but if the location of a commodity is taken as an important physical characteristic, transportation is a part of the process of production. And if we do not take this view we fall into insuperable difficulties, because we are forced to extend the distinction between “making” and “moving” back into the factory, where many workers do not play a role in fashioning the object with their own hands but merely move it through the plant, or through the process. The distinction so applied becomes meaningless and even ridiculous. (149)

Management in fact recognizes this when they do time and motion studies on their “service” workers such as chambermaids [cf. In-N-Out!].

All this really just illustrates that capitalism does not care about the “determinate form” of labor, but its social form:

They merely illustrate the principle that for capitalism, what is important is not the determinate form of labor but its social form, its capacity to produce, as wage labor, a profit for the capitalist. The capitalist is indifferent to the particular form of labor; he does not care, in the last analysis, whether he hires workers to produce automobiles, wash them, repair them, repaint them, fill them with gasoline and oil, rent them by the day, drive them for hire, park them, or convert them into scrap metal. His concern is the difference between the price he pays for an aggregate of labor and other commodities, and the price he receives for the commodities—whether goods or “services”—produced or rendered. (250)

Thus, capitalists do not care about the “determinate form” of the labor, (whether something tangible or intangible is produced), but of the social form, that is, whether this sort of work, which has always been done, has been transformed into wage work from which a profit is extracted. “And this began on a large scale only with the era of monopoly capitalism which created the universal marketplace and transformed into a commodity every form of the activity of human­kind including what had heretofore been the many things that people did for themselves or for each other.”

B discusses Adam Smith’s misunderstanding of service labor as merely wasteful, because in his day it was something capitalists spent their own income on, rather than something they invested in for further profit. B adds that it has been an error among economists of every age to always assume that the most prevalent or growing form of labor of their own time is the most important; it becomes increasingly clear with monopoly capitalism and the universal market that in the end, they are all the same and interchangeable from a capitalist perspective.

He turns to the effects of mechanization and industrial processes in deskilling even this sector, for instance restaurants relying on frozen foods, so they don’t need skilled cooks, they need “thawer-outers” (256). He talks about supermarkets and checkout clerks, describing the beginning of checkout scanners in his day, speeding up and eroding the skill and knowledge needed by grocery checkout clerks who now just wave the produce over the scanner [although it is easily seen how much faster even these “deskilled” clerks of today are compared to the customers in the self-check out line; at my local store they will see you searching for your produce on the screen, walk over, and rapidly push several buttons to get you on your way; so it is notable that even in “deskilled” operations workers still develop situational knowledges and skills, basically out of whatever is available to them in that setting. This is not to argue against B’s point but rather to suggest that human creativity and – whatever the word would be, ability to create situational knowledge and skill? – is unlimited and undefeatable.]

In sum, much of the new service work sector is poorly paid, dead-end work, and it is primarily women who are stuck in it; this puts the lie to the breathless spoutings of “enthusiastic publicists and press agents of capitalism (with or without advanced degrees in sociology and econom­ics)” (258), of Braverman’s day, who touted the supposed societal benefits of the increasing service sector.

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 15

Summary of Chapter 15: Clerical Workers

This is the first chapter of a new section on “the growing working-class occupations,” and at 42 pages, quite lengthy by Braverman’s standards. The shifting use of the term “clerical work” has led to confusion, because over time this does not represent “the continuous evolution of a single stratum” (203). Rather, the clerical workers of the 19^th century are the “ancestors of modern professional management,” and today’s clerical workers are in fact a new stratum. Acamedic sociology and popular journalism fail to understand this, leading to “a drastic misconception of modern society” whereby great numbers of working class occupations are miscategorized as “middle class,” or with the “common but absolutely meaningless term ‘white-collar worker’” (204).

The creation of a new class of workers, having little continuity with the small and privileged clerical stratum ofthe past, is emphasized by fundamental changes in two other respects: composition by sex, and relative pay. (205)

He documents the shift from 19^th century clerical work being paid twice as much as production work, to being paid at rates lower than “so-called blue collar work.” Clerical work in earlier times was craft-like; skilled, and lower levels worked up the ladder to mastery and/or management. He discusses the various industries which rely heavily on clerical work. A footnote on banking:

The fact that banking corporations produce nothing, but merely profit from the mass of capital in money form at their disposal through activities which once went by the name “usury,” no longer subjects them to discredit in monopoly capitalist society as it once did in feudal and in early capitalist society. In fact, financial institutions are accorded a place at the pinnacle of the social division of labor. This is because they have mastered the art of expanding capital without the necessity of passing it through any production process whatsoever. (The magical appearance of the feat merely conceals the fact that such corporations are appropriating a share in the values produced elsewhere.) The cleanliness and economy ofthe procedure, its absolute purity as a form of the accumulation of capital, now elicit nothing but admiration from those who are still tied to production. (208)

These management functions of control and appropriation have in themselves become labor processes. They are conducted by capital in the same way that it carries on the labor processes of production: with wage labor purchased on a large scale in a labor market and organized into huge “production” machines according to the same princi­ples that govern the organization of factory labor. Here the productive proc­esses of society disappear into a stream of paper – a stream of paper, moreover, which is processed in a continuous flow like that of the cannery, the meatpacking line, the car assembly conveyor, by workers organized in much the same way.

This ghostly form of the production process assumes an ever greater importance in capitalist society, not only because of the requirements of the new way in which production is organized, and not only because of the growing need for coordination and control, but for another and more significant reason as well. In the social forms of capitalism all products of labor carry, apart from their physical characteristics, the invisible marks of ownership. Apart from their physical form, there is their social form as value. From the point of view of capital, the representation of value is more important than the physical form or useful properties of the labor product. The particular kind of commodity being sold means little; the net gain is everything. A portion of the labor of society must therefore be devoted to the accounting of value. As capitalism becomes more complex and develops into its monopoly stage, the accounting of value becomes infinitely more complex. The number of intermediaries between production and consumption increases, so that the value accounting of the single commodity is duplicated through a number of stages. The battle to realize values, to turn them into cash, calls for a special accounting of its own. Just as in some industries the labor expended upon marketing begins to approach the amount expended upon the production of the commodities being sold, so in some industries the labor expended upon the mere transformation of the form of value (from the commodity form into the form of money or credit) – including the policing, the cashiers and collection work, the recordkeeping, the accounting, etc. – begins to approach or surpass the labor used in producing the underlying commodity or service. And finally, as we have already noted, entire “industries” come into existence whose activity is concerned with nothing but the transfer of values and the accounting entailed by this. (209)

He notes a recurrent theme: the inefficiencies of capitalism leads to the new technologies being used in more wasteful ways than would presumably be the case in, say, an economy organized through worker cooperatives. The distrust between corporations means they all do their own accounting, with great reduplication of effort: “each set of records is as a rule a private affair to be used not for helpful coordination but as a weapon.”

The internal record keeping of each corporate institution is, moreover, constructed in a way which assumes the possible dishonesty, disloyalty, or laxity of every human agency which it employs; this, in fact, is the first, principle of modern accounting. (209-10)

The need for independent outside audits, to establish the veracity of records, is an additional reduplication, all based on “presumed dishonesty” of corporations and their employees in the general capitalist context of universal mutual suspicion.

Thus the value-form of commodities separates itself out from the physical form as a vast paper empire which under capitalism becomes as real as the physical world, and which swallows ever increasing amounts of labor. This is the world in which value is kept track of, and in which surplus value is transferred, struggled over, and allocated. A society which is based upon the value-form surrenders more and more of its working population to the complex ramifications of the claims to ownership of value. (210)

He explores the history of office managership as a specialized form of management, dealing with this workforce; by 1917 there was already a book emulating Taylor’s system, applied to offices. He discusses the various ways typists, mail clerks, etc. are measured and controlled in manners similar to factory production. It is the mere fact of surveillance and the fear it generates, rather then the mystique of “scientific” techniques, which increases production:

A great many of the effects obtained by scientific management came from this alone, despite the pretense that the studies were being conducted for purposes of methods improvement. When Leffingwell says, for example, that “the output of one clerk was doubled merely by the re-arrangement of the work on the desk,” we may understand this was an effect of close and frightening supervision rather than a miracle of efficiency; this was understood by the managers as well, although concealed beneath a “scientific” mystique. (213)

He discusses the control of workers through piecework systems, and the placement of water fountains, etc. to limit walking time; this leads to some great comments, comparing this to Ford’s assembly line, and to a feed-lot:

All motions or energies not directed to the increase of capital are of course “wasted” or “misspent.” That every individual needs a variety of movements and changes of routine in order to maintain a state of physical health and mental freshness, and that from this point of view such motion is not wasted, does not enter into the case. The solicitude that brings everything to the worker’s hand is of a piece with the fattening arrangements of a cattle feed-lot or poultry plant, in that the end sought is the same in each case: the fattening of the corporate balance sheet. The accompanying degenerative effects on the physique and well-being of the worker are not counted at all. (214-5)

Just like in the factory, the transformation of office work comes about through the technical division of labor, and increased mechanization; he discusses these in turn. Office work is analyzed as a “continuous flow process;” just as with production, there is the increased replacement of all-around clerical workers with detail workers:

the work of the office is analyzed and parcelled out among a great many detail workers, who now lose all comprehension of the process as a whole and the policies which underlie it. The special privilege of the clerk of old, that of being witness to the operation of the enterprise as a whole and gaining a view of its progress toward its ends and its condition at any given moment, disappears. Each of the activities requiring interpretation of policy or contact beyond the department or section becomes the province of a higher functionary.(217)

Clerical work by its nature lends itself more easily than production work to this rationalization process; the previous division between manual labor of the shop, and mental labor of the office no longer applies. He discusses Babbage’s “On the Division of Mental Labour,” which provides a historical example from decimal conversion in French Revolution, which was accomplished through a division of labor into three levels of workers, in terms of how much of the overall process they need to understand, and how much skill they need.

The way is thereby opened for two conclusions which capitalism finds irresistible, regardless of their consequences for humanity. The first is that the labor of educated or better-paid persons should never be “wasted” on matters that can be accomplished for them by others of lesser training. The second is that those of little or no special training are superior for the performance of routine work, in the first place because they “can always be purchased at an easy rate,” and in the second place because, undistracted by too much in their brains, they will perform routine work more correctly and faithfully. (219-20)

Babbage also foresaw a “calculating engine” that would replace the lowest kind of worker, and simplify the work of the middle tier.

In Babbage’s vision we can see the conversion of the entire process into a mechanical routine supervised by the “first section” which, at that point, would be the only group required to understand either mathematical science or the process itself. The work of all others would be converted into the “preparation of data” and the operation of machinery. (220)

The progressive elimination of thought from the work of the office worker thus takes the form, at first, of reducing mental labor to a repetitious performance of the same small set of functions. The work is still performed in the brain, but the brain is used as the equivalent of the hand of the detail worker in production, grasping and releasing a single piece of “data” over and over again. The next step is the elimination of the thought process completely – or at least insofar as it is ever removed from human labor – and the increase of clerical categories in which nothing but manual labor is performed.

This reduction of work to abstract labor, to finite motions of hands, feet, eyes, etc., along with the absorption of sense impressions by the brain, all of which is measured and analyzed without regard to the form of the product or process, naturally has the effect of bringing together as a single field of management study the work in offices and in factories.

B goes into lots of relishing detail on time-motion measures of different steps in office work (walking, typing, reading figures, using scissors) with occasional somewhat catty observations; even the time to punch a time clock is measured in detail. He provides a nice observation on one table of the times involved in punching a numeric key on a typewriter:

It is worth noting that this simple list of three unit times, with their total, is made into a “table” by the addition of two useless lines and two useless columns. This is typical of the manner in which management “experts” dress their presentations in the trappings of mathematics in order to give them the appearance of “science”; whether the sociologists have learned this from the schools of business administration or the other way around would make a nice study. (224)

In the clerical routine of offices, the use of the brain is never entirely done away with – any more than it is entirely done away with in any form of manual work. The mental processes are rendered repetitious and routine, or they are reduced to so small a factor in the work process that the speed and dexterity with which the manual portion of the operation can be performed dominates the labor process as a whole. More than this cannot be said of any manual labor process, and once it is true of clerical labor, labor in that form is placed on an equal footing with the simpler forms of so-called blue-collar manual labor. For this reason, the traditional distinctions between “manual” and “white-collar” labor, which are so thoughtlessly and widely used in the literature on this subject, represent echoes of a past situation which has virtually ceased to have meaning in the modern world of work. And with the rapid progress of mechanization in offices it becomes all the more important to grasp this. (224-5)

In mechanization of the office it is no longer motion and production per se which the machines take control of, but information:

Machinery that is used to multiply the useful effects of labor in production may be classified, as we have seen, according to the degree of its control over motion. Insofar as control over motion rests with the operator, the machine falls short of automatic operation; insofar as it is rendered automatic, direct control has been transferred to the machine itself. In office machinery, however, the control over motion is generally incidental to the purpose of the machine. Thus the rapidity and precision of the high-speed printer are not required in order to print rapidly – there are other and faster ways to ink characters onto paper – but in order to record a controlled flow of information as it is processed in the computer. It is one part of a machine system designed to control not motion but information. (225)

As long as information was only conveyed in notation comprehensible by humans, “each of these machines could only carry or process information through a very short part of its total cycle before it again had to involve the human brain to move it into its next position. In this sense, the office process resembled a pipeline that required a great many pumping stations at very close intervals.” He discusses the invention of punched cards that machines can read (for the 1890 census); developments along this line (electronic impulses, etc.) result in much greater speed and scale for the mechanized flow of information:

This automatic system for data-processing resembles automatic systems of production machinery in that it re-unifies the labor process, eliminating the many steps that had previously been assigned to detail workers. But, as in manufacturing, the office computer does not become, in the capitalist mode of production, the giant step that it could be toward the dismantling and scaling down of the technical division of labor. Instead, capitalism goes against the grain of the technological trend and stubbornly reproduces the outmoded division of labor in a new and more pernicious form. The development of computer work has been so recent and so swift that here we can see reproduced in compressed form the evolution of labor processes in accord with this tendency. (226-7)

The positions of systems analyst and programmer are at the top of the new computer hierarchy; that of programmer becomes split into program analysts who are like engineers, and program coders who merely carry out the process; below these computer work is working class, with pay scales which align with those in factories. Key punch operator is the single largest job created by computerization, in B’s day. These jobs require less and less training; they are very boring, with no possibilty for advancement, and high turnover. B quotes an insurance company vice president, who notes that “the machines” keep the key-punch girls chained to their desks; B observes that this is typical “fetishism,” as it is the boss, not the machines, which does this. (232) He quotes debates among managers, etc., about how educated the girls should be, is a high school diploma really required? There is the question of [overqualified] workers, “of too high an intellectual calibre for the new simple machine jobs,” because they don’t stay in data-processing, because it is dead end job.

These effects of computer mechanization impact all clerical workers, not just those “grouped immediately around the computer” (234) for two reasons. First, the need to create information in a form that computers can understand and process spreads throughout the entire office, as “the reduction of data to symbolic form with accurate positional attributes becomes, increasingly, the business of the office as a whole, as a measure to economize on labor costs.” Second, in addition to computers, there are other machines which are being inserted into office work, which result in the deskilling of workers. He gives the example of bank tellers, whose work is more and more automated and controlled, and faces replacement with ATMs.

B traces the history of the occupation of secretary; it is motivated by the Babbage principle (the secretary does work more cheaply, which it would be wasteful for the manager to be bothered with).; plus there is the prestige factor of having a “personal secretary.” The division of labor in office work spreads to “wherever a mass of work may be subdivided and its “lower” portions separated out and delegated” (236). Having a personal secretary becomes a “traditional and entrenched privilege” to the alarm of upper management, who seek to “tackle this monstrosity in order to reduce the drain on the corporate pocketbook;” yet “these very trappings and pretenses of managerial status” are key to the loyalty of lower management.

There is ample evidence, however, that this situation is ending, and that management is now nerving itself for major surgery upon its own lower limbs.

This is done by breaking down the work of secretaries into typing, and administrative routine, then delegating these to different groups of workers.The first function is assumed by typists using word processing machines (pre computers per se), who “process” the words coming from “word originators,” meaning managers, etc. B interestingly gives a definition of “word processing” from the journal Administrative Management, 1972, as automated word substitution – personnel are trained on codes the machine can recognize, so it will spit out the formula or phrase; this speeds up typing and reduces the need for training. [This is an interesting predecessor to autocomplete, and for that matter to text-generating AI.]

The second function of the secretary (filing, phone answering, and mail handling )is taken over by an “administrative support center” serving four to eight “principals” (managers). Thus is the modern office converted into a factory-like system. Just as with the factory, the struggle over knowledge remains crucial in the office:

The greatest single obstacle to the proper functioning of such an office is the concentration of information and decision-making capacity in the minds of key clerical employees. Just as Frederick Taylor diagnosed the problem of the management of a machine shop as one of removing craft information from the workers, in the same way the office manager views with horror the possibility of dependence upon the historical knowledge of the office past, or of the rapid flow of information in the present, on the part of some of his or her clerical workers. (239)

[This reminds me of one of my old Anthropology departments, in which the Department Secretary was key to running everything in the department, while faculty members took turns playing the role of “department head” or whatever. Then as I was leaving the university was downsizing, combining department staff, probably with disastrous consequences for continuity and the ability to get anything done.]

Mechanization produces the recording of everything that is done, and mechanical control, and is thus ideal for freeing management from reliance on this kind of worker knowledge:

But this conversion of the office flow into a high-speed industrial process requires the conversion of the great mass of office workers into more or less helpless attendants of that process. As an inevitable concomitant of this, the ability of the office worker to cope with deviations from the routine, errors, special cases, etc., all of which require information and training, virtually disappears. The number of people who can operate the system, instead of being operated by it, declines precipitously.

B observes:

Managers often wag their heads over the “poor quality of office help” available on the labor market, although it is their own system of office operations which is creating the office population suited to it. This complaint is, unfortunately, too often echoed by unthinking “consumers” when they run into trouble with an office, as they often do. Such difficulties will tend to increase in the same way that the quality of factory production tends to decline and the servicing of consumer appliances tends to worsen even as it becomes more expensive, and for the same reasons. (240)

[This reminds me of a guy working in the management of a solar panel company who told me, some years ago, that they preferred hiring people without experience because it was easier to train than to retrain; I immediately thought, who would want to go into a field where having experience has no value, or is even seen as a disadvantage? You would learn skills you could never use if you needed to switch companies, or moved to another city, for instance.]

When office work was first expanding in early 20^th century, it was misunderstood as a new middle class. B points out that the commonly used demarcators “white collar” (dress) and “salaried employee” (form of compensation) are merely secondary characteristics of these workers, not true markers of their class relation to the means of production. He provides another eloquent and impassioned footnote on how the term “white-collar” plays a obfuscatory role:

The continued use of this terminology long after the realities behind it have disappeared is one of the greatest sources of confusion in the analysis of this subject. A term which lumps together into a single class grouping the authoritative executive representing capital on the one hand, and the interchangeable parts of the office machine which serves him on the other, can no longer be considered useful. This terminology is, however, considered serviceable by those who are alarmed by the results of a more realistic terminology – those, for instance, whose “sociology” pursues apologetic purposes. For them, such terms as “white-collar employees” conveniently lump into a single category the well-paid, authoritative, and desirable positions at the top of the hierarchy and the mass of proletarianized inferiors in a way that makes possible a rosier picture: higher “average” pay scales, etc. In this use of the term, the '”white-collar” category tends to get its occupational flavor from the engineers, managers, and professors at the top of the hierarchy, while its impressive numerical masses are supplied by the millions of clerical workers, in much the same way that the stars of an opera company occupy the front of the stage while the spear-carriers provide the massive chorus. (241)

As machinery, “dead labor” plays an increasing role in the office:

The use of automatic and semi-automatic machine systems in the office has the effect of completely reversing the traditional profile of office costs. A situation in which the cost of operating a large office consisted almost entirely of the salaries paid to clerical employees has changed to one in which a large share of the total is now invested in the purchase (or paid out monthly for the leasing) of expensive equipment. Past or “dead” labor in the form of machinery owned by capital, now employs living labor, in the office just as in the factory. But for the capitalist, the profitability of this employment is very much a function of time, of the rapidity with which dead labor absorbs living. The use of a great deal of expensive equipment thus leads to shift work, which is particularly characteristic of computer operations. (243)

He discusses the mechanization-enabled separation of office spaces, with fancy executive offices downtown, and lower clerical work relegated to lower rent districts. The class distinction between production and office work is disappearing, though a gender distinction is reinforced:

The sex barrier that assigns most office jobs to women, and that is enforced both by custom and hiring practice, has made it possible to lower wage rates in the clerical category, as we have seen, below those in any category of manual labor.

...one of the most common United States occupational combinations within the family is that in which the husband is an operative [i.e., works in production] and the wife a clerk. (245)

He provides several lengthy quotes on “semi-skilled labor” as an amorphous category; then summarizes:

The problem of the so-called employee or white-collar worker which so bothered early generations of Marxists, and which was hailed by anti-Marxists as a proof of the falsity of the “proletarianization” thesis, has thus been unambiguously clarified by the polarization of office employment and the growth at one pole of an immense mass of wage-workers. The apparent trend to a large nonproletarian “middle class” has resolved itself into the creation of a large proletariat in a new form. In its conditions of employment, this working population has lost all former superiorities over workers in industry, and in its scales of pay it has sunk almost to the very bottom. But beneath them, in this latter respect at least, are the workers in service occupations and retail trade, whom we must consider next. (245)