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Monopoly Capital and Labor: The Work of Braverman,

Baran, and Sweezy as a Dialectical Whole

Article  in  Labor Studies Journal · September 2015

DOI: 10.1177/0160449X15606321

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2015, Vol. 40(3) 262–274
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Dialectical Whole

R. Jamil Jonna1

Abstract
Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital, although the single most influential
work in labor sociology in the post–Second World War period, is often viewed
narrowly as a theory of the labor process and labor degradation. However, the
central focus of Braverman’s analysis was the structure and dynamics of the working
class as it evolved in the period of monopoly capitalism. While the labor process was
key to unlocking class dynamics, including changing class composition and increasing
precariousness within the working class, Braverman never failed to emphasize how
the labor process was intimately intertwined with contradictions and tendencies
buried deep within contemporary monopoly capitalism. Indeed, Marx’s theory
of the reserve army of labor, which Braverman used as a basis for explaining the
degradation of labor and the generalization of precariousness, formed a crucial link
between Braverman’s analysis and that of monopoly capital theory. In this essay, we
reengage with these neglected dimensions of Braverman’s analysis making it possible
to address contemporary problems such as increasing worker precariousness and the
internationalization of production, in a broader and more comprehensive context. In
the course of the analysis, we develop fresh perspectives on the continuing significance
of Braverman’s work.

Keywords
labor, labor procces, occupations, technology, monopoly, oligopoly, capital, Marxian
analysis

1Monthly Review Foundation, New York, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:
R. Jamil Jonna, Monthly Review Foundation, 146 W. 29th Street, 6W, New York, NY 10001, USA.
Email: jamil@monthlyreview.org

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Jonna 263

From the moment it was published in 1974 until the present day, Harry Braverman’s
Labor and Monopoly Capital elicited a peculiar mixture of unease and ambivalence
from academic writers—especially those on the left. Trapped between contradictory
impulses—adamant dismissal on one side and reluctant praise on the other—reviews
and assessments of Braverman’s work tend to adopt a tortuous sort of logic, praising
his analysis for opening up a whole new area of analysis and crucial questions, but
dismissing his answers, while barely considering his methods.
Thus, in a recent book about Dissident Marxism, the author can claim that “the
most powerful book ever written about work is Harry Braverman’s Labor and
Monopoly Capital.” Then qualify this praise in a curious manner by cautioning that the
book “should not be understood primarily as an academic event,” for its audience was
workers, as indicated by its “clear, accessible [writing] style.”1 The problem for this
author, as for so many authors, is that Braverman, not being an academic, was also too
close to his subject. Consequently his analysis was “shaped by the strengths and weak-
nesses of [his] own political background” (Renton 2004, 163). One is reminded here
of the contrary fact that, as Braverman noted in his book, most academics writing
about work in the 1950s and 1960s did not have the slightest idea of what they were
talking about in this respect. A lack of any working-class experience or direct exposure
to the work conditions they were writing about led to Daniel Bell’s whopper of an
error in which he wrote in great detail of the worker shoveling whole “scoops” of pigs
of iron—referring to managements control of the “the arc of the swing, and so on”—
without any recognition on Bell’s part that shoveling even a single pig of iron was
impossible, indicating he had never seen a pig of iron and did not know what it was.
This meant that these academics were prone to believe any fairy tale management told
them, having little idea of the reality of work. It was precisely a figure like Braverman,
who was an outsider with respect to academic life, not even having obtained his BA at
the time he was writing his book, who was able to penetrate into these hidden recesses
beyond the ideology and to reveal what Marx had called “the hidden abode of produc-
tion” (Braverman 1998, 73 n; Marx 1976, 1:279).
A similar pattern was evident in 1999, when the editors of Contemporary Sociology
selected Labor and Monopoly Capital as one of its ten most influential sociological
books of the previous twenty-five years. The ambivalence of the editors was made
clear by their selection of Michael Burawoy (1996), one of the book’s earliest and
most adamant critics, to write an assessment. Burawoy wasted no time informing read-
ers that Labor and Monopoly Capital was not the sort of classic to which “we return
again and again . . . [as a source] of continuing inspiration.” Nor was it “sufficiently
profound to endure and sufficiently multivalent and multilayered to sustain new inter-
pretations.” Rather, Labor and Monopoly Capital was typical of the more mundane
variety of classic, “whose impact is singular and therefore more ephemeral . . . no
mecca to which we make continual pilgrimage. Its contributions have become conven-
tional wisdom, the field has moved on.” Linking the “charm and appeal” of the book
to its simplistic message, encapsulated in the hypothesis of deskilling, Burawoy
concludes his introductory remarks with the assertion that Braverman’s “simple,
even unoriginal thesis” would have amounted to nothing were it not for impeccable

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264 Labor Studies Journal 40(3)

timing, that is, the coincidence of a theoretical vacuum in labor sociology (Burawoy
1996, 296).2
Despite these strident criticisms by the end of the assessment, Burawoy can be
found lamenting the fact that the “critical moment” opened up by Labor and Monopoly
Capital was lost, that contemporary social science abandoned Braverman’s powerful
“double critique”3 combining critical analysis with a vision of the future (Burawoy
1996, 298-99). As other observers have pointed out, a glaring paradox in Burawoy’s
narrative becomes evident:

On one hand, we are told that Braverman’s model is too simplistic and has been
scientifically transcended. On the other, we are informed that the current literature has
sacrificed critique in “a welter of scientific ‘explanation.’” When Burawoy laments the
fact that the sociology of the labor process, which Braverman inspired, has lost sight of
“The Degradation of Work,” of Braverman’s “double critique,” of any connection to the
working class; when he acknowledges that Braverman has been “domesticated,”
“absorbed into the mainstream”—the alarm bells ought to go off. (Foster 1999, 15)

On the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Labor and Monopoly Capital, it

seems appropriate to address the paradoxical response to Braverman’s work by offer-
ing a novel interpretation of the book’s significance from the standpoint of the tradi-
tion from which it emerged: the theory of monopoly capital. It is startling that nearly
all interpretations of Labor and Monopoly Capital suggest—more often implicitly
than explicitly—that there is no essential relation between Paul A. Baran and Paul M.
Sweezy’s (1966) Monopoly Capital and Braverman’s treatise. Nor is monopoly capi-
talism more generally seen as an important part of his analysis. Why was the left so
disposed to deny the relation between his works and the close connections between
these thinkers?
The very fact that the authors were so closely connected explains some of the
ambivalence toward Labor and Monopoly Capital. Many Marxian political econo-
mists did not accept the theory of monopoly capital in whole or in part, since it not
only challenged mainstream political economy (thus raising iconoclastic issues) but
also pointed to the need to go beyond the argument that Marx himself had presented
in Capital in order to take account of changing historical conditions. Monopoly
Capital put the question of the new relations of corporate power at the center of the
discussion.
An even more difficult issue, however, lay in the fact that all three relied heavily on
Marx’s “general law of accumulation.” It was this part of Marx’s analysis that had
been savaged most severely not only on the right but also on the left, by thinkers from
John Strachey to Anthony Giddens. In the late 1970s, there was still a strong tendency
on the left to reduce the general law to a crude theory of “immiseration,” out of which
emerged the erroneous claim that Marx “‘predicted’ that real wages would not rise
under capitalism, so that workers’ average standard of living must remain constant or
decline” (Foster and McChesney 2012, 130-32; also see Rosdolsky 1977, Appendix
B-5). Clearly anticipating objections on this score, Paul Sweezy in his Forward to the

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Jonna 265

Original Edition of Labor and Monopoly Capital highlighted the importance of

Braverman’s conclusions in Chapter 17, “The Structure of the Working Class and Its
Reserve Armies”:

[L]et me call attention to Chapter 17 . . . where the thesis is put forward that Marx’s
“General Law of Capitalist Accumulation,” according to which the advance of capitalism
is characterized by the amassing of wealth at one pole and of deprivation and misery at
the other, far from being the egregious fallacy which bourgeois social science has long
held it to be, has in fact turned out to be one of the best founded of all Marx’s insights into
the capitalist system. How much more coherent and useful the voluminous literature of
recent years on poverty and related questions would be if it had started from this solid
foundation! (Sweezy quoted in Braverman 1998, xxvii)

Nonetheless, intransigence over the general law and the theory of monopoly capital
(two concepts that in Marx’s analysis were closely bound together through his theory
of concentration and centralization of production) has persisted, resulting in a blind
spot that has hindered both critics and proponents of Labor and Monopoly Capital,
particularly those who have sought to approach it armed with the reductionist methods
favored by the liberal academy rather than the historical and dialectical methods of
Marxism.
To address this blind spot, it is necessary for Braverman’s connection to the theory
of monopoly capital to be made explicit. Much more than simply an extension or add-
on to Baran and Sweezy’s argument, the view developed here is that Labor and
Monopoly Capital represents a crucial development in the theory of monopoly capital
itself, something even Sweezy was slow to recognize fully (Foreword to the Original
Edition in Braverman 1998; Sweezy 1981, 64-65). Together, Labor and Monopoly
Capital and Monopoly Capital, understood as a dialectic of labor and value, extend
and strongly reinforce the original theory of monopoly capital, making it a much more
robust “tool of combat” (Braverman 1998, 313). From this standpoint Labor and
Monopoly Capital is still very much “a classic of our time” that should be read as
widely today as it was when it was first published. Indeed, placing Braverman’s work
squarely within the monopoly capital tradition serves to deepen critical analysis of key
developments in twenty-first–century capitalism, such as the internationalization of
production.

The Dialectic of Labor and Value

While Part III of Labor and Monopoly Capital, which is titled “Monopoly Capital”
(Chapters 11-14), deserves special attention in the present discussion for obvious rea-
sons, it must be stressed that the chronological and analytical pattern deployed by
Braverman in each of the previous chapters correlates historically and theoretically
with the development of conditions associated with phase monopoly capitalism. That
said, it is no coincidence that Braverman brings together key strands of the argument
laid out in prior chapters at this point in the narrative. Here, Braverman reassesses

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266 Labor Studies Journal 40(3)

some of the key elements of his argument—distribution of labor, management, scien-

tific management, and technology—more explicitly within the context of conditions
associated with the new phase of monopoly capital.4 There is no chance a reader who
seriously engaged with this part of the book could miss the significance of the theory
of monopoly capital to Braverman:

It will already have been noticed that the crucial developments in the processes of
production date from precisely the same period as monopoly capitalism. Scientific
management and the whole “movement” for the organization of production on its modern
basis have their beginnings in the last two decades of the [twentieth] century. And the
scientific-technical revolution, based on the systematic use of science for the more rapid
transformation of labor power into capital, also begins, as we have indicated, at the same
time. In describing these two facets of the activity of capital, we have therefore been
describing two of the prime aspects of monopoly capital. Both chronologically and
functionally, they are part of the new stage of capitalist development, and they grow out
of monopoly capitalism and make it possible. (Braverman 1998, 175-76)

The theory of monopoly capital not only framed Braverman’s analysis, but it also
reinforced its historical scope and served as a guide to industrial shifts in the U.S.
working class discussed in later chapters. However, digging deeper into the chapters
of Part III, it becomes evident that the relation to monopoly capital theory is consider-
ably more profound.
In Monopoly Capital, Baran and Sweezy were primarily concerned with the rising
economic surplus that came into being as traditional forms of competition gave way to
monopolistic (or “non-price”) competition. In brief outline, new forms of competition
such as advertising and marketing serve to prevent smaller, more competitive firms
from entering monopolized sectors. This, along with much greater freedom to adjust
prices, production processes and employment, enables the largest corporations to
maintain higher and more stable profit margins. In this new environment, the terrain of
battle swings decisively toward the attainment of low-cost position (through ever more
precise refinements in the labor process) vis-à-vis other firms, and every advantage
here enables larger firms to accumulate ever greater surpluses. The problem for the
system of monopoly capital as a whole becomes one of absorbing this expanding sur-
plus, a problem exacerbated by the continual enlargement of monopolized sectors.
This is because any surplus that is not invested back into the economy (or is not
absorbed via capitalist consumption or the state) has the effect of slowing economic
growth and increasing unemployment, thereby raising the specter of crisis (Baran and
Sweezy 1966, chap. 3; Foster and McChesney 2012, chap. 3). Focusing on the contra-
dictions and constraints of movements of the economic surplus therefore provides a
key to comprehending a wide range of tendencies associated with the system of capital
dominated by the giant corporation.
Baran and Sweezy were keenly aware that their approach, which was concerned
with the absorption of the economic surplus at the level of the economy as a whole,
“resulted in almost total neglect of . . . the labor process,” a subject at the center of

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Jonna 267

Marx’s analysis of capitalism (Baran and Sweezy 1966, 8). Yet, they did not doubt that
Marx’s main argument on the labor process, exploitation, and the general law of accu-
mulation (i.e., the polarization of labor and capital) remained correct, and that monop-
oly capital had only modified, and intensified, rather than undermined these tendencies.
It was left to Braverman, however, to rationalize the approach of Baran and Sweezy at
this level, clearly specifying the fundamental relation of Monopoly Capital to his own
study: “The investigation of the movements of labor undertaken here are but another
form of the investigation of the movements of value undertaken in Monopoly Capital.”
Braverman goes on to explain that it was Marx who first described the dialectical rela-
tion between “the movement of value and the movement of labor” in his “exposition
of the general law of accumulation” (Braverman 1998, 176).5
Where Baran and Sweezy set out to find the statistical trace of the economic surplus
submerged beneath the new forms of production brought into being by the giant cor-
poration, Braverman focused attention on the “surplus labor” associated with these
very same movements. “In tracing this mass of labor,” Braverman explains,

We will be led not only to “newly formed branches of production” in Marx’s sense, but
also, as were Baran and Sweezy, into branches of nonproduction, entire industries and
large sectors of existing industries whose only function is the struggle over the allocation
of the social surplus among the various sectors of the capitalist class and its dependents.
(Braverman 1998, 177)

In the process, Braverman provides ample demonstration of the dialectic of labor and
value as it develops under conditions of monopoly capital.
For example, in his discussion of the Modern Corporation (chap. 12), Braverman
assesses how the structure of management (first introduced in chap. 2) is modified by
the dominant form of corporate organization associated with monopoly capital: the
multidivisional firm. Here, the function of management is exercised “not just by a
manager, nor even by a staff of managers, but by an organization of workers under the
control of managers, assistant managers, supervisors, etc.” This brings into being a
complex of administrative departments organized on the basis of “the factory out of
which it grew” (Braverman 1998, 185; emphasis in original):

Taken all together, this becomes the administrative apparatus of the corporation.
Management has become administration, which is a labor process conducted for the
purpose of control within the corporation, and conducted moreover as a labor process
exactly analogous to the process of production. . . . From this point on, to examine
management means also to examine this labor process, which contains the same
antagonistic relations as are contained in the process of production. (Braverman 1998,
186; emphasis in original)

Along with the emergence of other forms of nonproduction labor, such as market-
ing, that is, “sales, advertising, promotion, correspondence, orders, commissions, sales
analysis,” and so forth (Braverman 1998, 183)—associated with the “sales effort”
described in Monopoly Capital (Baran and Sweezy 1966, chap. 5)—it is clear that these

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268 Labor Studies Journal 40(3)

movements of labor presage the great expansion of office (or clerical) labor taken up in
Chapter 15, “Clerical Workers” and Chapter 18 “The ‘Middle Layers’ of Employment.”6

Proletarianization and Service Work

Chapter 13, “The Universal Market,” of Labor and Monopoly Capital contains one of
Braverman’s most important theoretical contributions: the development of a theory of
proletarianization. The social and historical changes identified by Braverman are
closely connected with the historical ascendance of monopoly capital. Since Baran and
Sweezy paid little attention to this problem, Braverman’s explication of the process of
proletarianization as it played out in the United States represents a crucial development
in the theory of monopoly capital. Braverman, revealing the extraordinary depth of his
understanding of Marx’s theory, recognized that only under monopoly capitalism was
what Marx called the “real” as opposed to the “formal subsumption of labor”—con-
cepts presented in Marx’s “Results of the Immediate Process of Production” (Marx
1976, Appendix Part II:1-4) appearing in English only after the publication of Labor
and Monopoly Capital—to occur, giving capital control over the conception and hence
detailed management of the labor process. Such a complete subsumption of labor to
capital, for Braverman, appears only with the giant, multidivisional, monopolistic cor-
poration, and when “all social life, and indeed of all the interrelatedness of humankind,
[is dependent] upon the marketplace” (Braverman 1998, 192).
What makes Braverman’s approach to the process of proletarianization so profound
is that he draws out the dialectical relations of proletarianization—between the disso-
lution of social institutions on the one hand, and their corresponding commodity form
shaped by conditions of monopoly, on the other—in all their complexity. The process
begins as the bonds of farm, family, and community are weakened through the com-
modification of goods production, which is completed with the subsumption of food
production. Crucially, however, capital could not fill the voids created by the erosion
of key social institutions like the family until there appeared a large pool of redundant
labor. The source of this pool is the enormous productivity of the modern corporation,
which drives down the relative need for labor power within actual industrial produc-
tion. And by reducing workers to cogs within the machine, through a relentless process
of degradation of work, and simplification of most workers—making workers increas-
ingly unskilled and interchangeable parts—the new system enhances the control and
power of management, which confronts a work force that no longer embodies the
skills that are now increasingly incorporated within the productive apparatus itself.
The masses of labor are therefore thrust into new branches in degraded form.
It is only at this point that “new services and commodities” begin to provide “sub-
stitutes for human relations in the form of market relations”: a process that “further
weakens” social bonds as these new occupations become normalized by government,
economic institutions, educational institutions, and so forth, in the form of the “service
sector” (Braverman 1998, 193; emphasis added). For Braverman, this last point is
crucial because proletarianization is understood as “a process that involves economic
and social changes on the one side, and profound changes in psychological and affective

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Jonna 269

patterns on the other” (Braverman 1998, 193). At each successive stage of the process,
workers, as consumers, experience a process of habituation that is deepened as monop-
oly capital conquers more and more the cultural and affective spheres of life. Moreover,
this process is understood as the obverse of the degradation of the labor process and its
own profound social and psychological impacts. In the labor process, technical com-
petence is eroded, whereas in the provision of social services, social competence is
eroded:

Just as in the factory it is not the machines that are at fault but the conditions of the
capitalist mode of production under which they are used, so here it is not the necessary
provision of social services that is at fault, but the effects of an all-powerful marketplace
which, governed by capital and its profitable investment, is both chaotic and profoundly
hostile to all feelings of community. (Braverman 1998, 193)

The process of proletarianization may seem an issue in relation to the original theory
of monopoly capital even though there are obvious implications with respect to class
consciousness and resistance. However, in light of the recent publication of the “Some
Theoretical Implications” (Baran and Sweezy 2012) and “The Quality of Monopoly
Capitalist Society: Culture and Communications” (Baran and Sweezy 2013), two incom-
plete chapters of Monopoly Capital that never made it in to the final version, one can find
many similarities between Braverman, Baran, and Sweezy, with respect to the theory of
labor exploitation, wage determination, and the role of waste and unproductive labor.
What emerges is not only a theory that emphasizes the real subsumption of the labor
process under capital but also the real subsumption of worker consumption in the new
universal market, and growth of waste, unproductive labor, and precariousness.

The Reserve Army of Labor and Precariousness

Braverman’s analysis of the condition of labor as he emphasized in his “Foreword” to
Labor and Monopoly Capital was not original in its basic theoretical framework, tak-
ing its ideas from Marx’s Capital, but was distinctive in reinterpreting this analysis
and giving it renewed meaning in the age of monopoly capital. Moreover, Braverman
did not stop with resurrecting Marx’s theory of the labor process but was concerned
with resurrecting his analysis of the reserve army and developing an understanding of
the material conditions of labor and the structure and composition of the working
class, including the relation between active and inactive layers (hence the working
class as a whole). Only then, he believed, could the even more difficult issues of class
consciousness and class change develop (“Two Comments” in Braverman 1998, 20).
Contemporary social scientists, still hindered by crude conceptions of Marx’s the-
ory of the general law, can certainly benefit from Braverman’s deployment of the
concept of the reserve army of labor. Braverman’s familiarity with the sociological
dimensions of the layers of the reserve army—floating, latent, and stagnant—is evi-
dent throughout Labor and Monopoly Capital, though particularly in Chapter 17, “The
Structure of the Working Class and its Reserve Armies.” In this chapter, Braverman

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270 Labor Studies Journal 40(3)

draws on or extends the theory of the reserve army to analyze a number of issues cru-
cial to his argument, as well as that of Monopoly Capital:

•• The demystification of unemployment statistics (263, 270).

•• The unemployed as working class (264).
•• The lower pay scale of female workers (266).
•• Contrasting movements in the male and female labor force participation
(267, 270).
•• Movements of the wage rate by industry (273).

It is important to note with respect to the last three of these points that Braverman
also draws on the theory of proletarianization developed in Chapter 13—in particu-
lar, the character of service work, which, it will be remembered, has as its condition
the mechanization of the goods-producing sector of the monopoly capitalist econ-
omy. It is precisely Braverman’s ability to make sense of historical processes like the
rise of service work—where the intersection between long-run movements in the
distribution of labor, the process of proletarianization, and the reserve army of labor
is clarified historically and theoretically—that demonstrates the significance of the
theory of monopoly capital and the power of the dialectic of labor and value more
broadly.
Indeed, an updated theory of the reserve army of labor—which forms a crucial
bridge connecting the work Baran, Sweezy, and Braverman—has recently been used
to address the problem of increasing worker precariousness (Jonna 2012; Jonna and
Foster 2014). Although the term precariousness is never used in Labor and Monopoly
Capital, Braverman’s updated theory of the reserve army of labor, along with his the-
ory of proletarianization, provides a basis for investigating the phenomenon. This can
be seen by observing broad changes in major occupational groupings in the United
Sates. Table 1 lists the top five occupations by employment for the years 1999 and
2014, and provides data on the level of employment, percent total employment, and
median wage adjusted for inflation.

Table 1. Employment and Median Wages, Top 5 Major Occupations by Employment.

Employment (millions) Median wage ($2014)

% Growth Change, Change,

Occupation 1999-2014 1999 2014 1999-2014 % 1999 % 2014 1999 2014 1999-2014

Food preparation and serving 27 9.7 12.3 2.59 7.6 9.1 $9.43 $9.20 −$0.23
related
Sales and related 10 12.9 14.2 1.31 10.2 10.5 $12.81 $12.19 −$0.62
Transportation and material −3 9.5 9.2 −0.29 7.5 6.8 $14.49 $14.20 −$0.29
moving
Office and administrative −4 22.6 21.6 −0.92 17.7 16.0 $15.82 $15.64 −$0.18
support
Production −29 12.6 8.9 −3.69 9.9 6.6 $15.27 $15.25 −$0.02

Source. Occupational Employment Statistics, Bureau of Labor Statistics; Sahr (2015).

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Jonna 271

The occupations are sorted by the rate of growth (or decline) from 1999 to 2014.
The greatest growth occurred in occupations with the lowest median wage, “Food
preparation and serving related occupations” and “Sales and related occupations”; the
greatest decline by far occurred in the “Production occupations,” which lost close to
3.7 million jobs during the fifteen-year period, and the largest of all the top five occu-
pations, “Office and administrative support occupations,” which included close to
twenty-three million workers in 1999, had only decreased by a million jobs in 2014.
Meanwhile, median wages declined in all five occupational groups.
These patterns reflect what would have been predicted by the theory of the reserve
army in the period of monopoly capital as presented by Braverman:

Thus the scientific-technological revolution possesses, in the long run, this trait: that with
its spread, the proportion of the population connected with scientifically and
technologically advanced industry, even if only in the form of helots, eventually shrinks.
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. (Braverman 1998, 264)

In light of the theory of proletarianization presented by Braverman, it is precisely

within the so-called service sector—“Food preparation and serving related occupa-
tions” and “Sales and related occupations” in Table 1—that we would expect to
observe the lowest wages, being the primary reservoir for the absorption of degraded
labor expelled from parts of the working class engaged in direct production (manufac-
turing, mining, construction, etc.). Finally, because these sectors have grown at the
fastest pace, the clear implication is that the overall level of precariousness within the
working class will tend to rise.

Twenty-First-Century Capitalism
As Braverman (1998, 175) recognized, “Monopoly capitalism . . . embraces the
increase of monopolistic organizations within each capitalist country, the internation-
alization of capital, the international division of labor, imperialism, the world market
and the world movement of capital, and changes in the structure of state power.”
Indeed, it is striking to note that, despite the internationalization of production—
wherein the highest paid and more skillful7 occupations have generally been retained
within the United States and other advanced capitalist countries, as more routine tasks
have been exported to countries with high labor reserves—the polarization of skill has
nonetheless deepened, and even accelerated in recent times (Autor 2014; Kristal 2013;
Mishel, Schmitt, and Shierholz 2013; Beaudry et al. 2013). It is also important to note
that this polarization of skill in monopoly capitalism (including today’s globalized
monopoly-finance capital) is also reflected in the fact of stagnant or declining real
wages since the 1970s.
Today, the reality of a rationalized world of factory labor, which was the key to the
enormous productivity and rate of exploitation of monopoly capital, and also the

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272 Labor Studies Journal 40(3)

increasing redundancy and precariousness of labor, has been captured by Robert

Hutchinson, who writes,

Just as physical labor on the factory floor has long been controlled and rationalized
through the design of machinery and layout of facilities, and later through numerical
control, so too has management extended rationalization and control of mental labor
through the layout and design of information systems. (Hutchinson 2008, 291)

For Braverman, the real subsumption of labor under capital and the labor surplus that
resulted was the form that Marx’s general law of accumulation took under monopoly
capital, and was related to the growth of the giant corporation, the expansion of the ser-
vice industry (part of the universalization of the market), and the new precariousness of
labor. All of these factors lay behind the peculiar contradictions of monopoly capital that
produced a growing economic surplus that could not be absorbed, on the one hand, and
a growing labor surplus, partly concealed by a shrinking economically active population,
on the other. Moreover, it was increasingly a global system. We can see the significance
of Braverman’s analysis today not simply in the United States, Europe, and Japan, but
even more on a world scale, through the examination of the global reserve army of labor,
global proletarianization, global polarization of income and wealth and production and
consumption, and new forms of imperialism (see Foster and McChesney 2012). The
general law of accumulation, the scientific management of the labor process, and the
dominance of monopoly capital are now all operative on a global scale.
It is precisely those elements of Braverman’s analysis that linked Marx’s nine-
teenth-century analysis of the labor process under competitive capitalism to that of the
twentieth-century analysis of the labor process under monopoly capital, that are most
valuable to us today—if we are to understand the globalized labor process of twenti-
eth-century monopoly-finance capital.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.

Notes
1. Apart from this statement’s apparent condescension to “workers,” it draws attention to the
unfortunate fact that most modern academic social science is written so poorly as to be
incomprehensible to the average person (let alone most other social scientists).
2. No doubt Burawoy leaves readers wondering whether “A Classic by Virtue of Timing”
would have been a more appropriate title.
3. What Burawoy attempts to describe here is given clearer expression by Baran and Sweezy
when they discuss the significance of critique that “confronts reality with reason.” This

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Jonna 273

manner of critique, which “inevitably involved comparisons of what was with what would
be reasonable,” characterized the work of classical political economists (including them-
selves, as well as those in the same tradition, such as Braverman). In contrast, “modem
economics has made its peace with things as they are, has no ideological or political battles
to fight, wants no confrontations of reality with reason” (Baran and Sweezy 1966, 134).
4. Rereading these sections of the book, one gets the distinct impression that most critics
skipped them entirely. This is unfortunate because there are a number of important modi-
fications made to the argument, which, if acknowledged, would have saved a great deal of
paper and ink.
5. Careful readers will notice that Braverman’s consistent references to Marx’s general law
(and associated theory of the reserve army) often serve to identify the relation of his study
to that of Monopoly Capital.
6. According to the Occupational Employment Statistics provided by the Bureau of Labor
Statistics (http://www.bls.gov/oes/), in 2014, the broad sector “Office and administrative
support occupations” (SOC code 43-0000) was by far the largest, employing some 21.6
million workers (down from 23 million in 2000) and encompassing 16 percent of total
reported employment. In the next largest, “Sales and related occupations” (SOC code
41-0000), there were 14.3 million workers in 2014 (up from 13.5 million in 2000).
7. Nonroutine cognitive tasks is the term presently preferred by neoclassical economist.
The term was introduced to distinguish routine from nonroutine mental tasks, in an effort
to assess the impact of computerization on jobs (see Autor, Levy, and Murnane 2003).
Unsurprisingly, these researchers take the history, development, and current organization
of given tasks as natural (i.e., “technical”) and eternal (i.e., geared to maximize profit).

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Author Biography
R. Jamil Jonna is an associate editor for technology at the Monthly Review Foundation, and
researcher at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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