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.

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 1

Summary of Chapter 1: The Insignificant Signified.

The title is a play on semiotic terminology. Vaneigem provides his own brief summary of each chapter, and here is this one's:

Because of its increasing triviality, daily life has gradually become our central preoccupation (1). No illusion, sacred or deconsecrated (2), collec­tive or individual, can hide the poverty of our daily actions any longer (3). The enrichment of life calls inexorably for the analysis of the new forms taken by poverty, and the perfection of the old weapons of refusal (4).

Similarly (not surprisingly) to the premise of the Society of the Spectacle, the opening falls into the Death-of-God, disenchantment-of-the-world tradition. V writes that we are like cartoon characters who have rushed off a cliff and have yet to notice. “Lucidity” is an awareness that the spectacle/etc. is not satisfying, that there is something wrong; that we are off the cliff and falling. [The potential felicitous connection with “lucid dreaming” does not appear to be invoked.] “Everyday life” appears as both an illusion and an unnoticed or underappreciated source of potential understanding or inspiration: “There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man’s life than in all the philosophies” (21). Philosophers see everything upside down (a very Marxian reversal-style criticism, favored also by Debord).

The analyst tries to escape the gradual sclerosis of existence by reaching some essential profun­dity; and the more he alienates himself by expressing himself according to the dominant imagery of his time (the feudal image in which God, monarchy and the world are indivisibly united), the more his lucidity photographs the hidden face of life, the more it 'invents' the everyday. (22)

The Enlightenment accelerated the “descent towards the concrete.” [It would be great if this was a continuation of the falling metaphor; that does not seem to be the case.] Science exposes the fallacy of mysticism, pops its bubble:

I have little inclination to choose between the doubtful pleasure of being mystified and the tedium of contemplating a reality which does not concern me. A reality which I have no grasp of, isn't this the old lie reconditioned, the highest stage of mystification?

This is to be asked to choose between “the false reality of gods or ... the false reality of technocrats.” [i.e., the technocrats support their order by exposing the previous order of mysticism, but they simply ask us to have faith in a new order [which furthermore is beyond our senses, dependent on technology to grasp?]]

Docility is no longer ensured by means of priestly magic, it results from a mass of minor hypnoses: news, culture, city planning, advertising, mecha­nisms of conditioning and suggestion ready to serve any order, established or to come. (23)

There is a reference to the “living reality of non-adaptation to the world:” [with an almost hauntological language of a double or shadow?]:

Art, ethics, philosophy bear witness: under the crust of words and concepts, the living reality of non-adaptation to the world is always crouched ready to spring. Since neither gods nor words can manage to cover it up decently any longer, this commonplace creature roams naked in railway stations and vacant lots; it confronts you at each self-evasion, it grasps your shoulder, catches your eye, and the dialogue begins. Win or lose, it goes with you.

“Non-adaptation” seems to be used usually (e.g. by Leroi-Gourhan, Steven Jay Gould) as a synonym for cultural adaptation, or reliance on technology. V might mean that, or (more interestingly) he might mean a sense of discomfort, of inability to adapt or conform to the mediated world of the spectacle. [It is probably the former, given how often V will speak of "adaptation" throughout the rest of the text.]

Individualism and collectivism are “two apparently contrary rationalities" which "cloak an identical gangsterism, an identical oppression of the isolated man.” -Isms are falsehoods:

The three crushing defeats suffered by the Com­mune, the Spartakist movement and Kronstadt-the-Red showed once and for all what bloodbaths are the outcome of three ideologies of freedom: liberalism, socialism and Bolshevism. (24)

The great collective illusions, anaemic from shedding the blood of so many, have since given way to the thousands of pre-packed ideologies sold by consumer society like so many portable brain-scrambling machines. Will it need as much blood­shed to show that a hundred pinpricks kill as surely as a couple of blows with a club?

Modern consumerism is less bloody than the great ideologies of the past, but it is also weaker, less enthralling, more dependent on constant change and novelty, and this means its illusion grows threadbare:

... to consume without respite is to change illusions at an accelerating pace which gradually dissolves the spaces behind the waterfall of gadgets, family cars and paperback books.

... people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure, but of the use to which they are put, which is precisely what stops us enjoying them. (25)

The affluent society is a society of voyeurs.

[In his many references to the technologically-enabled illusions of modern consumerism, it is easy to find imagery applicable to smartphones, e.g.,:]

To each his own kaleidoscope: a tiny movement of the fingers and the picture changes.

But the kaleidoscope of consumerism is just a new kind of monotony:

The monotony of the ideological spectacle makes us aware of the passivity of life, of survival.

Class struggle grew as a response to this, a refusal; contra mainstream Marxism, V argues that not just workers should be considered as revolutionary, but also artists; he lists various romantic poets and asks, “wasn't this also poverty and its radical refusal?” it was a mistake for revolutionary Marxism to “turn its back on artists,” especially now:

What is certain is that it is sheer madness a century later, when the economy of consumption is absorbing the economy of production and the exploitation of labour power is submerged by the exploitation of everyday creativity. The same energy is torn from the worker in his hours of work and in his hours of leisure, and it drives the turbines of power which the custodians of the old theory lubricate sanctimoniously with their purely formal opposition. (26)

The importance of the revolutionary potential of art and poetry, etc., have to do with the importance of the everyday as a potential subversive realm:

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints – such people have a corpse in their mouth.

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 12

 

Summary of Chapter 12: The Modern Corporation

The first of the forces transforming modern capitalism which Braverman will discuss is the modern monopolist corporation, and how it has been formed by the concentration and centralization of capital in fewer hands. Before the invention of the modern corporation form, capitalist enterprises were limited by the scale of the “personal fortunes and personal capabilities” of individual capitalists (179).

It is only in the monopoly period that these limits are overcome, or at least immensely broadened and detached from the personal wealth and capacities of individuals.

This makes vast amounts of wealth available (from stockholders, etc.), and largely replaces the individual owner with a “specialized management staff.” “Owner” and “manager” are two aspects of the ruling capitalist class; “as a rule, top managers are not capital-less individuals, nor are owners of capital necessarily inactive in management. But in each enterprise the direct and personal unity between the two is ruptured.” The limiting personal form of the past has been replaced with an institutional form. The existence of a managerial element within the ruling class gives an opening for those from lower classes to rise by virtue of ability, through “a process of selection... having to do with such qualities as aggressiveness and ruthlessness, organizational proficiency and drive, technical insight, and especially marketing talent” (180), which abilities are co-opted by the capitalist organization; nevertheless, managers are usually drawn from within the ranks of the ruling class.

B discusses the large number of jobs which go by “manager” in the census, most of these are much lower positions than the ones he is talking about. The expansion of upper management corresponds with a great expansion in scale and also diversity of departments in modern capitalist enterprise vs earlier family-run firms.

However, this emergence of management as a part of the corporation is perhaps outstripped in importance by the role of marketing. B traces the development of transportation networks which allowed corporate products to reshape city life: “cities were released from their dependence on local supplies and made part of an international market” (182). The food industry (e.g. Gustavus Swift’s refrigerator railroad cars) played an important trailblazing role: “the industrialization of the food industry provided the indispensable basis of the type of urban life that was being created;” this industry was also important for developing the “marketing structure” of modern corporations. Specialty and electrical equipment need not only distribution but maintenance and service available in urban markets, this affects corporate structure and marketing network; example, auto industry.

Finance is discussed as another important division; subdivisions are formed within these divisions, because each division may require its own accounting division, personnel, etc. “Thus each corporate division takes on the characteristics of a separate enterprise, with its own management staff” (183). This is made yet more complex by vertical and horizontal integration. This “pyramiding” in turn creates a need for decentralization, resulting in the “modern decentralized corporate structure” of the 1920s through Braverman’s day. Each division is relatively self-governing and contributes to the corporation as a whole.

From this brief sketch of the development of the modem corporation, three important aspects may be singled out as having great consequences for the occupational structure. The first has to do with marketing, the second with the structure of management, and the third with the function of social coordination now exercised by the corporation. (184)

1. Marketing

Marketing becomes of great importance as a means of reducing uncertainty in business, by inducing demand. Braverman quotes Thorstein Veblen extensively on the “fabrication of customers” (185). Marketing also reshapes manufacturing, with styling, design, and packaging, as well as planned obsolescence and the idea of a “product cycle: the attempt to gear consumer needs to the needs of production instead of the other way around.”

2. Change in overall structure of management

The proliferation of divisions represent the “dismemberment of the functions of the enterprise head;” each takes over “in greatly expanded form a single duty which he exercised with very little assistance in the past. Corresponding to each of these duties there is not just a single manager, but an entire operating department which imitates in its organization and its function­ing the factory out of which it grew. … Thus the relations of purchase and sale of labor power, and hence of alienated labor, has become part of the management apparatus itself.” (185-6)

This means we can now look at labor relations, and exploitation, within this realm of “management:”

Management has become administration, which is a labor process conducted for the purpose of control within the corporation, and conducted moreover as a labor process exactly analogous to the process of production, although it produces no product other than the operation and coordination of the corporation. From this point on, to examine management means also to examine this labor process, which contains the same antagonistic relations as are contained in the process of production. (186)

3. The corporate function of social coordination.

The complex division of labor which has emerged with modern capitalism comes with an increased need for “social coordination” or planning. Because our society resists the rational emergence of this, it is left to corporations to play much of the role of social planning in our society. This is irrational, because corporate planning is limited to seeking returns on capital, at the expense of all other motivations. [This is the same argument made today by the “planned degrowth” school.] As long as the corporations play such a huge role in investment, and control of resources, personnel, etc., government in fact plays a secondary role in social planning, filling “the interstices left by these prime decisions” 187).

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 10

 

Summary of Chapter 10: Further Effects of Management and Technology on the Distribution of Labor

This brief chapter discusses the changing composition of the industrial workforce due to management practices and mechanization. Braverman points out several times that this is not simply due to the effects of technological change and increased productivity, but also to the specific demands of the capitalist system, and the form this has taken since the Scientific-Technical revolution:

A necessary consequence of management and technology is a reduction in the demand for labor. The constant raising of the productivity of labor through the organiza­tional and technical means that have been described herein must, in itself, produce this tendency. The application of modern methods of management and machine technology, however, become practical only with the rapid increase in the scale of production. Thus the rapid increase in the productivity of labor tends to be counterbalanced by the growth in production. Chiefly as a conse­quence of this, employment in those industries concerned with the production of goods has not declined in absolute terms. (163)

That is, increased productivity [real subsumption] reduces the need for labor, but overall increased productivity [expansion, formal subsumption], keeps people employed by creating new industries. Also, creating a reserve army of laborers who have been put out of work [and deskilled], lowers the price of labor, and so puts a check on mechanization, since it has to compete with this lowered cost of labor.

Thus the very rapidity of mechanization, insofar as it makes available a supply of cheap labor by discharging workers from some industries or putting an end to the expansion of employment in others, acts as a check upon further mechanization.

The absolute numbers of workers in industry has grown, but as a percentage of the workforce they were fairly consistent through 19^th century up until the 1920s, after which they have shrunk. But within the industrial workforce, the percentage of those involved in actual production has decreased, and indirect workers (administration, etc.; those involved in maintaining the “shadow replica of the entire process of production in paper form” (165)) has risen, since the late 19^th century. Within this “residual category” of nonproductive workers, Braverman identifies two categories: technical: “engineers, technicians, and the clerical workers associated with production tasks,” (he later adds scientists of various sorts employed in industry), and commercial: “administrative, financial, marketing, and other such employment.” (166)

The point he is going for is that the actual technical personnel are a small group:

On balance, it is probably proper to say that the technical knowledge required to operate the various industries of the United States is concentrated in a grouping in the neighborhood of only 3 percent of the entire working population-although this percentage is higher in some industries and lower in others. (167)

He gives a history of the dramatic rise in the number and diversity of engineers in the US, since the early 19^th century, with a rapid rise since the late 19^th century

The enormous and continuous growth in demand for engineers has created a new mass occupation. On the one hand, this has, along with other new professions such as accounting, given a place to those thrust out of the old middle class by the relative decline of the petty entrepreneurial occupations in trade and other erstwhile arenas of small business. But on the other hand, having become a mass occupation engineering has begun to exhibit, even if faintly, some of the characteristics of other mass employments: rationalization and division of labor, simplification of duties, application of mechanization, a downward drift in relative pay, some unemployment, and some unionization.

Even design is now broken down into tasks and division of labor; he gives the example of the design of an AO Smith auto frame plant; engineers encounter increased routine and limited responsibilities, with less creativity and independence. Computer-aided design and engineering result in an increasing amount of knowledge and control over the design process being transferred from engineer to computer.

Apart from the labor-saving aspects of the technique, it alters the occupational composition in the same manner as does numerical control. Since such techniques are used in accord with the management-fa­vored division of labor, they replace engineers and draftsmen with data-entry clerks and machine operators, and further intensify the concentration of conceptual and design knowledge. Thus the very process which brought into being a mass engineering profession is being applied to that profession itself when it has grown to a large size, is occupied with duties which may be routinized, and when the advance of solid-state electronic technology makes it feasible to do so. (169)

He discusses the class of technicians, less educated and paid less than engineers, “the routine which can be passed to a lower-paid and slightly trained person goes to the technician.” But with the high supply of people with engineering degrees, an increasing number end up as technicians.

The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, Part 3

 

Summary of Part III: Modernity

In this section, there is a strong feeling of Benjamin’s mode of composition of the essay from his clippings gathered in the Arcades Project. You can see him gathering his clippings and quotations into groups, first under the higher headings (Bohemian, Flaneur, Modernity), then here, under "Modernity," into further subheadings (writing as work/fencing, the ragpicker, the apache, antiquity as modernity, etc.) which he strings along in turn. Since he rarely gives an overall summary of how these are related to each other, the reader is left to infer this for themself.

The first point has to do with Baudelaire’s writing and representation of the city as a kind of dangerous, even perilous labor. Baudelaire saw writing poetry as work, and Benjamin compares it to the labor of Guys in painting (as described by Baudelaire in the Painter of Modern Life). Though Baudelaire wrote favorably of the flaneur, he himself was not one. The [modern hero or representer of the city] is distinguished from several types of "observer:" first the flaneur, also the "amateur detective" and the badaud, or rubbernecker (98-9); observation is a "priggish habit," per Chesterton. In contrast, Baudelaire and Dickens are absent-minded dreamers who wander the city: "Dickens did not stamp these places on his mind; he stamped his mind on these places."" (99, quoted from GK Chesterton)

Benjamin uses the language of "shocks" and "parries," and fencing,  though not referencing urban environment but events of Baudelaire's life, and his writing in response:

The shocks that his worries caused him and the myriad ideas with which he parried them were reproduced by Baudelaire the poet in the feints of his prosody. Recognizing the labor that he devoted to his poems under the image of fencing means learning to comprehend them as a continual series of tiny improvisations. (99)

 For Baudelaire the street became a place of refuge from creditors, this he made a "virtue of necessity":

But in flanerie, there was from the outset an awareness of the fragility of this existence. It makes a virtue out of necessity, and in this it displays the structure which is in every way characteristic of Baudelaire's conception of the hero. (100)

Baudelaire was "overtaxed," and lacked control over his own means of production, or an apartment, good clothes, etc. Through an emphasis on Baudelaire’s hard work and penury, Benjamin establishes links between Baudelaire as poet and the lumpen, "dangerous classes" etc. – though he will later pull Baudelaire back from this linkage, in a sort of dialectical move. In any event Baudelaire portrayed proletarians in their everyday lives as being as brave as gladiators.

Benjamin discusses the idea of suicide as a noble gesture, practiced by the proletariat as a form of resistance to the brutality of modernity; according to Benjamin, this is different than how suicide was seen in ancient times, in which the suicides were somehow noble or exceptions of some kind. Suicide is a distinctly modern thing; [though this complicates the opposition Benjamin has already made between Baudelaire and Balzac etc. as [realist-era] moderns in an opposition against the preceding "romantics," of whom who could be more a clear example than Goethe's Young Werther?]

Benjamin gives a nuanced discussion of how somber blacks and greys came to dominate men’s clothing during the 19^th Century. This is on the one hand part of the beautiful aspects of the specifically modern which Baudelaire wants the painter of modern life to illustrate: yet there is also a mocking aspect to his description of a nation of everyone dressed as undertakers, as if “We are all attendants at some kind of funeral” (106). Benjamin describes the later critique of men's fashion by Friedrich Theodor Vischer and its similarity to Baudelaire’s in emphasizing the ridiculousness of modern somber fashion as also at the same time somehow democratic, or at least moreso than the earlier eras when the wealthy emphasized their difference through the richness of their clothing [procession to circulation here]. [Nevertheless there is a contradiction here which Benjamin does not seem to fully emphasize, not to mention that while he situates the origin in the contest between democratic and monarchist regimes in 19^th century France, there is an earlier history coming from the Protestant Reformation. I am thinking of Rembrandt's group portraits of Dutch bourgeois men, all nearly identical in their somber democratic Protestant black, which they nevertheless distinguish by the finery of their textiles, showing that they are in fact wealthy and not commoners. Or in the 19^th and 20^th Century American cities, in which most men dressed practically identically in suit, tie, and hat, but the wealthy are wearing tailored suits from prestigious makers, and the poor are wearing mass-produced suits off the rack. Or in 21^st Century Silicon Valley, etc. culture, which adopts the democratic hoodie and jeans, but then these are super-expensive designer hoodies and jeans, and so on.]

Benjamin turns to how Baudelaire and writers like him celebrated the “apache” (an urban ne'er-do-well)  or the chiffonier or ragpicker as hero; [the key question is, how is this personage presented differently as "hero," than in the panoramic/flaneuristic literature? The difference appears to be that there is a parallel between the ragpicker and the poet who is describing them, in terms of their activity: Baudelaire sees himself in the ragpicker, or vice versa? There is apparently at least a respect for these urban characters as “heroes,” as opposed to the flaneuristic representation of them as images for bourgeois consumption, but frankly Benjamin may assert this but does not go far to demonstrate it.]

The poet and the ragpicker are linked in an “extended metaphor.” Even their gait or way of movement through the city is equated:

This is the gait of the poet who roams the city in search of rhyme-booty; it is also the gait of the ragpicker, who is obliged to come to a halt every few moments to gather up the refuse he encounters. (108-9)

According to the translators, Benjamin here borrows a term from Brecht, "Gestus," to describe this gait or characteristic [in the original German, but translated out as “gait?” It is unclear]. (252n221).

Baudelaire felt some need for modernity to become antiquity, meaning apparently to achieve greatness in art etc., sufficient to be admired by later epochs. This is linked to his valuation of modern life as subject matter for art, and the idea that antiquity should “serve as a model only where construction is concerned; the substance and the inspiration of a work are the concern of modernity." (110) In the Guys essay, Baudelaire defines modernity as "the transitory, fleeting beauty of our present life." [Benjamin’s interest in drawing out and emphasizing Baudelaire’s juxtaposition and mixing of modernity and antiquity is perhaps an example of his practice of the dialectical image, a way of destabilizing the categories of modern and ancient, more particularly the modern?]

Baudelaire's theory of beauty, from the Painter of Modern life, regards the interaction of two elements: one is "constant, immutable," and the other is "relative, limited," derived from the current milieu (i.e., the modern) (110, quoted from Baud). Benjamin adds, hysterically: "One cannot say that this is a profound analysis" (111). Benjamin criticizes Baudelaire's theory of art as not living up to his own work, and being inadequate for the time: the poem "Le Cygne" is presented as an example, with the city as brittle and changing, with the famous line about the city changing faster than a mortal's heart. Benjamin quotes Peguy about Hugo, to show what Baudelaire wanted: Hugo could see in the beggar on the street, the ancient beggar; in the modern fireplace the ancient hearth, etc.

Benjamin discusses the Victorian fascination with visions of Paris, London, etc. as future ruins, and also the city as doomed [Baudrillard's much later concept of “exposure” a la the WTC fits here] and as involving some impeding urge to suicide, which is the "passion moderne" (114). Maxime Du Camp has a vision of Paris as future ruins, and is moved to write a description of the city as the ancient authors had failed to write of their now ruined cities, in the past. Benjamin links this to the concurrent destruction and rebuilding of Paris by Haussmann. [Thus it is the changing nature of the modern city which compels the writers to try and capture it for the future; there is a need for a sense of fragility and vanishing, in order for this momentary capture to be understood as desirable or necessary/urgent]. This is in fact what Benjamin means by an "image":

"Les poetes sont plus inspires par les images que par la presence meme des objets;" said Joubert. The same is true of artists. When one knows that something will soon be removed from one's gaze, that thing becomes an image. Presumably this is what happened to the streets of Paris at that time. (115)

However, Baudelaire himself is not impressed with the future ruins image so much but the idea of [a living?] antiquity springing directly out of modernity, and thus he prefers the detailed engravings of Charles Meryon that gave a sense both of detailed lifelikeness of the modern, and the timelessness of antiquity. Benjamin makes a reference to "allegory" as the form or means of "interpenetration of antiquity and modernity": 

For in Meryon, too, there is an interpenetration of classical antiquity and modernity, and in him, too, the form of this superimposition – allegory – appears unmistakably. (116)

Modernity's constant renewal and consuming of itself means that the modernity of Baudelaire's time is indeed already antique:

To be sure, Paris is still standing and the great tendencies of social development are still the same. But the more constant they have remained, the more everything that stood under the sign of the "truly new" has been rendered obsolete by the experience of them. Modernity has changed most of all, and the antiquity it was supposed to contain really presents a picture of the obsolete. (118-9)

The next pile of clippings Benjamin assembles are on the subject of lesbians as modern heroes (119). He links this to Saint-Simonianism which celebrated the image of the androgyne or hermaphrodite, and discusses Claire Démar's early Saint-Simonian feminism, and her plan to abolish motherhood through a [Spartan] style system (119-20). Benjamin situates this historically, talking about the "masculinization" of the "feminine habitus" through factory work, and in "higher forms of production." Baudelaire had a fascination with this, his stance was ultimately contradictory, as revealed through his poems. Benjamin quotes Lemaitre on Baudelaire’s contradictory attitude toward women and to modernity; yet, according to Benjamin, this contradiction was what Baudelaire was aiming for:

To present this attitude as a great achievement of the will accorded with Baudelaire's spirit. But the other side of the coin is a lack of conviction, insight, and steadiness. In all his endeavors, Baudelaire was subject to abrupt, shock-like changes; his vision of another way of living life to extremes was thus all the more alluring.

[The overall fascination Benjamin has with Baudelaire and his time seems to be with its incompleteness or unachieved possibility. Baudelaire achieves partial insights but then draws back from them or rejects them. This was prefaced earlier in the essay in the context of Baudelaire’s class position and his linkage with the bourgeois “professional conspirators,” who, not truly linked with or representing the truly revolutionary class, were doomed to fail. This link will return at the end of this section when Baudelaire is compared again to Blanqui, whom Benjamin treats as the exemplar of this conspiratorial type, both admirable and pathetic at once.]

The subject of poetic rhythm comes up in a discussion of Baudelaire’s poem, “L'Invitation au voyage:”

This famous stanza has a rocking rhythm; its movement seizes the ships which lie moored in the canals. To be rocked between extremes: this is the privilege of ships, and this is what Baudelaire longed for. (124) 

[In this reference to rhythm Benjamin contradicts Bakhtin's claim, according to which rhythm is a form of stylization which removes the poem from reality, and monologizes it under the voice of the poet. Here, in contrast, rhythm is affective, an impress of the actual view or experience of the rocking boat, into the poem, and into the experience of the reader or listener [i.e., something analogue is carried through]. This in turn perhaps demonstrates Baudelaire's susceptability, his openness to shocks, etc., and even a place for the non-human in the “polyphonic” and “heteroglossic.”]

The image of the boats is significant to Benjamin’s argument, because they embody a contradiction, in that that they are tied up, yet beckoning to sail away; this is like the modern hero:

The hero is as strong, as ingenious, as harmonious, and as well-built as those boats. But the high seas beckon to him in vain, for his life is under the sway of an ill star. Modernity turns out to be his doom. There are no provisions for him in it; it has no use for his type. It moors him fast in the secure harbor forever and abandons him to everlasting idleness. Here, in his last incarnation, the hero appears as a dandy.

[With this description of the hero as dandy, we are of course reminded that we are in the Second Empire, in which there is considered no hope, no room for innovation or advancement, etc. [one of the “No Future” generations, at least in Benjamin’s telling]. This somewhat constrains the overall applicability of the "modern hero" as described here, to other stages or periods of the modern, does it not?]

Benjamin describes the modern hero with a quote from Baudelaire: "a Hercules with no labors to accomplish" (124). Benjamin links dandyism to bourgeois merchants, who desire to avoid or not show the shocks of trade, and changing fortunes [it is a pretense or artifice that covers one up]; Baudelaire himself was not a successful dandy because he was too strange, when it requires a balancing act. [The discussion here of the dandy is very short, and little of the complex class issues are gone into]. The point seems rather to raise and then dismiss the equivalence of the writer-as-modern-hero with the dandy (whom Baudelaire had described as the last of the heroes) because the "modern hero" is in fact not a "hero":

Because he did not have any convictions, he assumed, ever new forms himself. Flaneur, apache, dandy, and ragpicker were so many roles to him. For the modern hero is no hero; he is a portrayer of heroes.  (125)

So now we see the list of (proletarian and bourgeois) heroes, oppositional to modernity (apache, ragpicker, flaneur and dandy) are pulled back away from the modern hero, who either fails to become one or never could have been one of them. The “extended metaphor” ends here.

Turning to the subject of poetic language, Benjamin asserts that Baudelaire, like some other writers in his time, fought against the "segregation" of words into those worthy of lyric or tragic poetry ("elevated speech") and those words which were not, being too urban, modern, intimate, or crude. Baudelaire also pursues this line in his use of words and images for allegories and metaphors, which is part of what makes his writing surprising and effective. Benjamin ends this section by comparing the effect of Baudelaire’s writing to a protest march by Blanqui and his forces in 1870 during the funeral procession of Victor Noir (about a year and a half before the Commune): "Baudelaire's poetry has preserved in words the strength that made such a thing possible." (129)

With this comparison of these two figures that Benjamin had begun the essay by contrasting, the image of the modern hero becomes that of someone produced by, trapped in, and fighting against their own time:

But the differences between [Baudelaire and Blanqui] are superficial compared to their profound similarities: their obstinacy and their impatience, the power of their indignation and their hatred, as well as the impotence which was their common lot. (129)

[It seems there may also be something in this regarding Baudelaire and Blanqui being limited to their own class perspective and position, despite their empathy for the proletariat.]