Braverman, Monopoly Capital, and AI: The Collective Worker and the Reunification of Labor

Automation associated with algorithms designed for computers, raising the possibility of intelligent machines displacing human labor, is an issue that has been around for more than a century and a half, going as far back as Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine and Karl Marx’s famous treatment of the “general intellect” in the Grundrisse and his subsequent concept of the “collective worker” in Capital.¹ Yet, it was only with the rise of monopoly capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that large-scale industry and the application of science to industry were able to introduce the “real” as opposed to “formal” subsumption of labor within production.² Here knowledge of the labor process was removed systematically from the workers and concentrated within management in such a way that the labor process could be progressively broken down and subsumed within a logic dominated by machine technology. With the consolidation of monopoly capitalism after the Second World War and the development of cybernetics, the transistor, and digital technology, automation of production—and particularly what we now call artificial intelligence (AI)—constituted a growing threat to labor.

This shift was dramatically portrayed in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 novel, Player Piano, which drew on his experience working for General Electric. Set in the near future in the fictional town of Ilium in upstate New York, Player Piano depicts a society that had been entirely automated, displacing nearly all production workers. On one side of the river dividing the town, in an area known as Homestead, live the mass of the population, including all those who failed to score high enough on a set of national tests, and who are largely idle or employed in reconstruction and reclamation projects, the few remaining commercial jobs, and the military. The population overall mostly subsists on universal basic income, set at levels far below the wage income that unskilled workers had formerly obtained, though they are able to enjoy twenty-eight-inch TVs. On the other side of the river live the engineers, managers, and civil servants who service the machinery of production, also located on that side of the river, or who conduct public affairs. The novel centers on how the main protagonist, Paul Proteus, a highly esteemed engineer, drives over the bridge to the Homestead side of the river, meeting ordinary people and getting entangled in a mass revolt. Early on in the novel, Proteus explains that “the First Industrial Revolution devalued muscle work, then the second one devalued routine mental work,” while a projected Third Industrial Revolution would be based on computerized “machines that devalue human thinking,” decentering “the real brain work.” Human intelligence would be replaced by machines, or with what a few years after the publication of Vonnegut’s novel would be dubbed “artificial intelligence.”³

Vonnegut’s Player Piano was a product of the widespread concern regarding automation in the 1950s. In November 1958, The Nation published an article titled “The Automation Depression,” in what turned out to be a misguided response to the short economic crisis of 1957–1958.⁴ The concerns that The Nation and other publications voiced in the 1950s about automation creating mass unemployment were mostly exaggerated at the time. Yet, the general recognition that the growth of large-scale industry with the consolidation of monopoly capitalism after the Second World War—along with the associated Scientific-Technical Revolution (and the emerging Third Industrial [or Digital] Revolution)—represented a fundatmental alteration in the relation of labor and capital was a completely rational concern, then as now. It raised issues that went back to the First Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, and which are reemerging today at a still more advanced stage of development with the spread of generative AI.

Perhaps the most perceptive analysis of the general state of automation and its relation to labor in the 1950s originated with Marxist economist and Monthly Review editor Paul M. Sweezy in an anonymous monograph titled The Scientific-Industrial Revolution written for the Wall Street investment house Model, Roland & Stone in 1957. In this report, Sweezy argued that while the steam engine had powered the First Industrial Revolution, the Scientific-Industrial (or Scientific-Technical) Revolution was powered by science itself, a development made possible by the rise of large-scale capital. This gave rise to the “collective scientist,” a concept that he took from Marx’s notion of the collective worker. In referring to automation, Sweezy explained that “the labor process,” in which machinery was increasingly incorporated, was characterized by “a loop” of information involving both workers and machines. “When the human being is replaced by one or more mechanical devices, the loop is closed. The system has been automated.”⁵

Sweezy referred in this context to a lecture by the U.S. engineer, inventor, and scientific administrator Vannevar Bush, in which Bush theorized the possibility of a self-driving car that would follow the white line on the road even after the driver fell asleep. The larger economic and social implications of such a high level of automation with smart machines, according to Sweezy, were mainly due to labor displacement. “The purpose of automation,” he went on to explain, “is to cut costs. In all cases it does this by saving labor. In some cases, it saves capital too.” With the advent of the transistor, the technological possibilities for expansion seemed endless. Computers, Sweezy predicted, would become not only more reliable but also “pocket-sized.” Mobile radio-telephones operating through networks were also feasible and could be reduced to even smaller sizes than the pocket-sized computer, to fit on a wrist. With the Scientific-Technical Revolution, automation and more versatile intelligent machines meant a “shift to profits” and away from wages in the overall economy. It also meant the conceivable displacement of millions of workers.⁶

In 1964, the issue of the growth of productivity associated with automation resulted in the publication of the document “The Triple Revolution,” submitted to President Lyndon B. Johnson by the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution. There, the main response to what was characterized as the break in the income-through-jobs connection, as a result of the increasing redundancy of industrial workers, was to promote a universal basic income. This, however, was strongly opposed by Leo Huberman and Sweezy in a Monthly Review article on “The ‘Triple’ Revolution” in November 1964. They viewed universal basic income as a short-sighted policy of the kind portrayed in Vonnegut’s novel, which would lead to a dependent and demoralized population, reduced to living off a greatly expanded but chronically deficient welfare system. Instead, they advocated for a more revolutionary movement toward socialism, through public ownership of the means of production, and the implementation of planning by and for the workers.⁷

None of these issues, however, were taken up in Paul A. Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, which was completed in the same year in which the Triple Revolution debate occurred (Baran died in March 1964, and Sweezy avoided introducing new elements into the book when it was published in 1966). Monopoly Capital took for granted the high rates of exploitation and productivity of monopoly-capitalist industry reflected in a “tendency of surplus to rise.” They deliberately stopped short of an analysis of the transformation of the “labor process” along with “the consequences which the particular kinds of technological change characteristic of the monopoly-capitalist period have had.”⁸ Rather than taking up these issues, they indicated that these elements went beyond the self-imposed limits of their study and would need to be addressed in a more comprehensive treatment of monopoly capitalism.

Nowhere in the 1960s, in fact, was the real nature of the labor process systematically addressed, either on the left or in bourgeois social science.⁹ It was simply assumed that more advanced technology, which was seen as a fait accompli, enhanced the skill of workers while threatening ever higher unemployment. Discussions of alienation, influenced by Marx, saw the relentless mechanization and automation of production as posing “a catastrophe of the human essence,” in the words of Herbert Marcuse.¹⁰ Yet, detailed, meaningful critiques of the labor process under monopoly capitalism were missing.

In his foreword to Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974), Sweezy was to highlight this shortcoming of Monopoly Capital with respect to the labor process, while seeing Braverman’s work as filling this enormous gap. “I want to make it clear,” he wrote,

that the reason Baran and I did not ourselves attempt in any way to fill this gap was not only the approach we adopted. A more fundamental reason was that we lacked the necessary qualifications. A genius like Marx could analyze the labor process under capitalism without having been immediately involved in it, and do so with unmatched brilliance and insight. For lesser mortals, direct experience is a sine qua non, as the dismal record of various academic “experts” and “authorities” in this area so eloquently testifies. Baran and I lacked this crucially important direct experience, and if we had ventured into the subject we would in all probability have been taken in by many of the myths and fallacies so energetically promoted by capitalism’s ideologists. There is, after all, no subject on which it is so important (for capitalism) that the truth should be hidden. As evidence of this gullibility, I will cite only one instance—our swallowing whole the myth of a tremendous decline during the last half century of the percentage of the labor force which is unskilled (see Monopoly Capital, p. 267).¹¹

In contrast, Braverman had a wealth of experience in the monopoly-capitalist labor process and was able to combine this with an extraordinarily deep understanding of Marx’s treatment of the working day in Capital, plus an examination of the entire history of modern management and the development of labor-saving machinery.¹² Yet, while Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital served to fill the gap left in Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, Braverman at the same time took the description of the Scientific-Technical Revolution developed in Sweezy’s monograph, together with the general analysis of Monopoly Capital, as the historically specific basis of his own analysis.¹³ Fifty years after the publication of Labor and Monopoly Capital, the work thus remains the crucial entry point for the critical analysis of the labor process in our time, particularly with respect to the current AI-based automation.

Marx, Braverman, and the Collective Worker

Braverman’s basic argument in Labor and Monopoly Capital is now fairly well-known. Relying on nineteenth-century management theory, in particular the work of Babbage and Marx, he was able to extend the analysis of the labor process by throwing light on the role of scientific management introduced in twentieth-century monopoly capitalism by Fredrick Winslow Taylor and others. Babbage, nineteenth-century management theorist Andrew Ure, Marx, and Taylor had all seen the pre-mechanized division of labor as primary, and as the basis for the development of machine capitalism. Thus, the logic of an increasingly detailed division of labor, as depicted in Adam Smith’s famous pin example, could be viewed as antecedent and logically prior to the introduction of machinery.¹⁴ In Babbage’s case, Smith’s pin example was reconfigured to account for the economics of both manufacturing (the early factory system under cooperation) and modern industry (or machinofacture). The logic of the capitalist division of labor set the stage for Babbage’s designs of early calculating computers, aimed at the progressive development of the detailed division of labor as a means for promoting surplus value. Hence, there was a direct connection in the emerging theory of management of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution between the detailed division of labor, automation, and the development of the computer.¹⁵

It was Braverman, following Marx’s lead, who brought what came to be known as the “Babbage principle” back into the contemporary discussion of the labor process in the context of late twentieth-century monopoly capitalism, referring to it as “the general law of the capitalist division of labor.” According to this principle (now often divided into two parts), the division of labor in capitalist conditions was about determining (1) the least amount of labor necessary for each individual task, broken down into its smallest components, thus (2) generating an economy in labor costs, since each individual task could be assigned the cheapest amount of labor necessary for its fulfillment.¹⁶

Babbage had explained the benefits of the division of labor in terms of assigning the less demanding tasks (then seen as requiring less muscular effort as well as less skill) to cheaper female or child labor, as opposed to more expensive adult male labor, traditionally artisan labor.¹⁷ “By dividing the work to be performed into different processes each requiring different degrees of skill or force,” he wrote, the owner “can purchase exactly the precise quantity of both which is necessary for each process.”¹⁸ “The whole tendency of manufacturing industry,” according to Ure, was, if not bound to supersede human labor altogether, at least a means with which “to diminish its cost by substituting the industry of women and children for that of men, or that of ordinary labourers for trained artisans.”¹⁹

“In the mythology of capitalism,” Braverman wrote,

the Babbage principle is presented as an effort to “preserve scarce skills” by putting qualified workers to tasks which “only they can perform,” and not wasting “social resources.” It is presented as a response to “shortages” of skilled workers or technically trained people, whose time is best used “efficiently” for the advantage of “society.” But however much this principle may manifest itself at times in the form of a response to the scarcity of skilled labor…this apology is on the whole false. The capitalist mode of production systematically destroys all-round skills where they exist, and brings into being skills and occupations that correspond to its needs. Technical capacities are henceforth distributed on a strict “need to know” basis. The generalized distribution of knowledge of the productive process among all its participants becomes, from this point on, not merely “unnecessary,” but a positive barrier to the functioning of the capitalist mode of production.²⁰

With the advance of the detailed division of labor, as Marx argued in his critique of capitalist production, machinery could be introduced to replace labor altogether, generating what was potentially automatic production, while throwing masses of workers into the relative surplus population, or reserve army of labor, thus decreasing labor costs across the board. The worker where still present was reduced to an appendage of the machine. This whole tendency was evident, as Marx pointed out, in the fact that the vast majority of workers in the textile industry at the heart of the Industrial Revolution in England were women and children, who were superexploited, receiving only a small fraction of the wage of the male artisanal workers that they had replaced, which was not enough for subsistence. All of this fed the development of machine industry and the further exploitation of workers, whose conditions—whether their wages were high or low—placed them at an increasing disadvantage in relation to the enormous productive apparatus that their collective labor had generated, and which was imposed on them like a deadweight to enhance both their exploitation and their displacement by machines.²¹

Still, in order to develop the division of labor further, it was necessary to break down the resistance of the workers with the aid of science as a direct power within production. This enabled what Marx called the real, as opposed to merely formal, subsumption of the worker within the capitalist production process. As Matteo Pasquinelli states in The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence: “Marx was clear: the genesis of technology is an emergent process driven by the division of labour,” while the implementation of the Babbage principle pointed all the way to automation and the dominance of the machine as the means for the enhanced exploitation of labor.²²

The incorporation of science, personified by what Sweezy was to call “the collective scientist,” as itself a new emergent power within capitalist production, was only actually possible with the economies of scale and the extension of the market associated with the growth of the giant corporation of monopoly capitalism. Simple management carried out by the owner and a handful of overseers in small-firm freely competitive capitalism would no longer suffice to maintain profitability under the new conditions of the giant, multidivisional corporation following the massive merger waves of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.²³

The new approach to management was best captured by Taylor; so much so that scientific management and Taylorism became synonymous terms. Taylorism was summarized by Braverman in terms of three distinct principles: (1) “disassociation of the labor process from the skills of the workers,” (2) “separation of conception from execution,” and (3) “use of this monopoly over knowledge to control each step of the labor process and its mode of execution.” Although Taylor claimed wage increases were integral to the system, at least in the early stages of the employment of scientific management in a given industry, the overall object was to reduce employers’ unit labor costs. “Taylor,” Braverman wrote, “understood the Babbage principle better than anyone of his time, and it was always uppermost in his calculations.… In his early book, Shop Management [1903], he said frankly that the ‘full possibilities’ of his system [of scientific management] ‘will not have been realized until almost all of the machines in the shop are run by men of smaller caliber and attainments, and who are therefore cheaper than those required in the old system.'” Taylor’s own distinctive contribution was to articulate a full-scale managerial imperative for increased job control, to be implemented primarily through deskilling. Hence, within Taylorism, Braverman maintained, “lies a theory which is nothing less than the explicit verbalization of the capitalist mode of production.”²⁴

The full contradictory logic of the capitalist mode of production and the possibilities for a revolutionary socialist response were, for Braverman, only brought out with mechanization and automation, including the introduction of AI (a more advanced form of automation) within monopoly-capitalist production. Here Braverman’s analysis relied fundamentally on Marx’s concept of the collective worker, which Marx used as a category to encompass the totality of the detailed devision of labor, the hierarchy of labor, and the incorporation of labor knowledge into machines. Even in the context of higher levels of mechanization associated with the deskilling and displacing of workers, the labor process, according to Marx, remained organically, and in terms of labor value as its basis, essentially the same.²⁵

Marx’s analysis of the collective worker in Capital transcended his discussion of the general intellect in the Grundrisse, written around a decade earlier. In what came to be known as the “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse, the “general intellect” was incorporated into machines, leading to the apparent elimination of labor—and even of labor value—in production with the growth of automation.²⁶ Braverman himself was to refer in Labor and Monopoly Capital to Marx’s statement in the “Fragment on Machines,” where Marx had written: “The production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing agency.”²⁷ The “Fragment on Machines” has sometimes been used erroneously in recent discussions to argue that Marx saw the labor theory of value as being progressively displaced by machine production and automation.²⁸ Yet, this has been refuted by analyses of how Marx’s later concept of the collective worker came to demystify the entire process of mechanization and automation, demonstrating both the continuing centrality of labor and of the labor theory of value.²⁹

Braverman’s approach to the seeming contradiction associated with the subsumption of the labor process to the machine was to focus precisely on Marx’s concept of the “collective worker,” not only as accounting for labor’s everlasting centrality to production, but also pointing to new revolutionary possibilities. In the collective worker, labor as a whole was seen by Braverman, like Marx, as materialized within an organic process, encompassing the hierarchy of labor and mechanization.

Commenting on automation and the collective worker in Capital in response to Ure, Marx had written:

Dr. Ure, the Pindar of the automatic factory, describes it, on the one hand, as “combined co-operation of many orders of work-people, adult and young, in tending with assiduous skill a system of productive machines continuously impelled by a central power” (the prime mover); and on the other hand as “a vast automaton composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object, all of them being subordinate to a self-regulated moving force.” These two descriptions are far from being identical. In one, the combined collective worker appears as the dominant subject [übergreifendes Subjekt], and the mechanical automaton as the object; in the other, the automaton itself is the subject, and the workers are merely conscious organs, co-ordinated with the unconscious organs of the automaton, and together with the latter subordinated to the central moving force. The first description [related to the collective worker in general] is applicable to every possible employment of machinery on a large scale, the second is characteristic of its use by capital, and therefore of the modern factory system. Ure therefore prefers to present the central machine from which the motion comes as not only an automaton but an autocrat. “In these spacious halls, the benignant power of steam summons around him his myriads of willing menials.”³⁰

In this contradictory posing of the implications of automation by Ure, the first description, corresponding, as Marx suggested, to the phenomenon of the collective worker in general, is consistent with the development of socialist production. The second corresponds to the myth of the machine itself, endowed with a general intellect, and in which labor is either totally absent or reduced to an abject, brainless state. For Ure, “when capital enlists science into her service, the refractory hand of labor will always be taught docility.”³¹ For Marx, in contrast, the revolutionary response was to enlist science on behalf of the collective worker in such a way as to enhance free social development.

What was to emerge as the culmination of Braverman’s own analysis, building on that of Marx’s Capital, was the development of a revolutionary approach to the division of labor, mechanization, automation, and AI, in which the collective worker was at least potentially the active subject of social labor. Such a view was strongly opposed to the more machine-fetishized characterizations—the preferred view of Ure and Taylor—of a “vast automaton composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs” and functioning as the insurmountable autocrat of production, with the workers reduced to mere appendages.

The Collective Worker, AI, and the Reunification of Production

In Braverman’s critique, modern technology, including automation and AI in the digital age, ultimately represented a powerful tendency to reunify a labor process that had been degraded by the capitalist division of labor. Significantly, all of the tasks used by Smith in his pin example at the beginning of The Wealth of Nations were now united in a single machine, allowing for the reunification of the labor process itself. Yet, capitalism in its monopoly stage, in which the exploitation of labor and the valorization process were still rooted in the Babbage principle, constantly sought to use higher levels of mechanization and automation to reinstitute what was now an increasingly archaic division of labor. As Braverman declared, “The re-unified process in which the execution of all the steps is built into the working mechanism of a single machine would seem now to render it suitable for a collective of associated producers, none of whom need to spend all of their lives at any single function and all of whom can participate in the engineering, design, improvement, repair, and operation of these ever more productive machines.” However, these possibilities technically open to the collective worker as a result of developments in the forces of production are thwarted by the social relations of production of monopoly capitalism. “Thus the capitalist mode of production enforces upon new processes devised by technology an ever deeper division of labor no matter how many possibilities for the opposite are opened by machinery.”³²

As Marx himself recognized in his conception of the collective worker, and as Braverman was to highlight in the context of monopoly capitalism, the new technological possibilities for human freedom, in which human beings potentially are the subjects of production, are turned against them. The worker becomes a mere commodified object in a world where capital management uses new machine technology to reinforce the detailed division of labor, treating the ever more “intelligent” machine as itself the subject of production. In Braverman’s terms, Marx’s collective worker was itself degraded under monopoly capitalism. “While production has become collective and the individual worker has been incorporated into the collective body of workers, this is a body the brain of which has been lobotomized, or worse, removed entirely. Its very brain has been separated from its body, having been appropriated by modern management as a means of controlling and cheapening labor power and labor processes.”³³

But if Ure’s notion of collective labor as reduced to a machine logic was clearly present under monopoly capitalism, Marx’s collective worker, combined with Sweezy’s collective scientist, stood for the new revolutionary possibilities that emerged as machines became more automated, incorporating knowledge of the labor process developed over the course of human history. With more extended education of workers in science and engineering through polytechnic schools made possible by increased productivity, this could lead to the reunification and enhancement of human labor and creativity. Ironically, the more that this became feasible, the more the capitalist education system was itself degraded, keeping workers under the domination of the Babbage principle, which depended on the devaluation of the knowledge of the worker.

Hence, in monopoly-capitalist society, education is increasingly subjected to the same logic as the detailed division of labor. The imperative of the system in this respect was clear from the start. As Frank Gilbreth, one of the founders of scientific management, wrote: “Training a worker means merely enabling him to carry out the directions of his work schedule. Once he can do this, his training is over, whatever his age.”³⁴ This principle, coupled with the degradation of work, lies behind the intensive degradation of education in public schools in the United States and elsewhere. Science, culture, history, and critical thinking are being systematically removed or deemphasized at the K–12 levels, which are increasingly devoted, particularly in the early grades, to a reductive process enforced by standardized testing. It is as if the system has finally found the means to take full advantage of the classical-liberal political economist Adam Ferguson’s adage, “Ignorance is the mother of industry,” emphasizing that workers are more productive from the standpoint of capital the more mindless they are.³⁵ The digitalization of education, rather than expanding knowledge and creativity, is leading to the opposite: relentless standardization. The goal seems to be to convert the larger portion of the population to what C. Wright Mills called “cheerful robots.”³⁶ With the rise of large-scale language models, coupled with the growth of generative AI capable of incorporating masses of data inputs and artificially synthesizing information in “neural networks” in accordance with predetermined algorithms, university students are increasingly being encouraged to use these technologies as a mechanical substitute for actual learning.³⁷ Rather than a collective worker or a collective scientist, the emphasis is on AI as a collective machine intelligence.

Behind this, in the hidden abode of production, lies the continued degradation of human labor. Google hired one hundred thousand temporary and contract workers to scan books at a rapid pace in time with a rhythm-regulated soundtrack as part of its plan to digitalize all of the world’s books (estimated to be 130 million unique volumes). Although the project has been largely abandoned, it was viewed as a mechanism for the development of generative AI.³⁸ The rise in the number of temporary and contract workers, constituting precarious labor, are the hidden realities of the digital/AI era, obscured by the mystique of “cloud computing.” New platform jobs employ millions of contract workers. Online surveys of the national workforce by business groups such as the McKinsey Global Institute “indicate [that] between 25 and 35 percent of workers” in the United States have “engaged in non-standard or gig work on a supplementary or primary basis in the preceding month. As of 2024, that means at least 41 million people in the United States are engaged in some form of gig [or platform] work,” usually as contingent workers. Although countless jobs are threatened by AI—the estimates of which vary greatly—work is not so much being displaced overall as being made more contingent and precarious.³⁹

Yet, there are opposing tendencies to this seemingly inexorable degradation of work. New revolutionary struggles aimed at “the reconstitution of society at large” inevitably emerge, as Marx famously observed, where expanding human potential, associated with the development of productive forces, is fettered by the social relations of production.⁴⁰ Today’s class struggles over the labor process are not directed against new digital technology or AI, but against the reduction of human beings themselves to mere algorithms. The collective worker as the embodiment of the general intellect can only control the conditions of production for the benefit of society as a whole under a developed socialism, or an egalitarian and sustainable system of human development.

Notes

1. ↩ See Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (London: Verso, 2023); Pietro Daniel Omodeo, “The Social Dialectics of AI,” Monthly Review 76, no. 6 (November 2024): 40–48; Simon Schaffer, “Babbage’s Intelligence Calculating Engines and the Factory System,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (Autumn 1994): 205, 209–10, 220–23.
2. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 1019–25, 1034–38.
3. ↩ Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Player Piano (New York: Dell Press, 1952, 1980), 12–13, 187. The particular characterizations of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions utilized in the novel were attributed by Vonnegut to the American computer scientist and mathematician Norbert Wiener.
4. ↩ Rick Wartzman, “The First Time the Nation Freaked Out Over Automation,” Politico, May 30, 2017.
5. ↩ Paul M. Sweezy (published anonymously), The Scientific-Industrial Revolution (New York: Model, Roland & Stone, 1957), 10, 27–36; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 461, 483, 544. Paul A. Baran in the 1940s and ’50s had done studies for the Wall Street firm of Model, Roland & Stone in order to obtain additional income. In 1956–1957, however, he was completing The Political Economy of Growth and enlisted Sweezy’s aid in the research. Sweezy ended up writing the monograph The Scientific-Industrial Revolution in order to help Baran. Given the context of a Wall Street firm wishing to offer an optimistic view of investment opportunities, Sweezy was essentially compelled to point the monograph in that direction, which differed considerably from his own views in this respect. However, as he told Baran at the time, the research into the basic science and its social and economic implications that such a project entailed was extraordinarily valuable, and this is where the importance of his contribution lies. See Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, The Age of Monopoly Capital, Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster, eds. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 146, 503.
6. ↩ Sweezy, The Scientific-Industrial Revolution, 28–30.
7. ↩ Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy, “The ‘Triple’ Revolution,” Monthly Review 16, no. 7 (November 1964): 417–23. See also George and Louise Crowley, “Beyond Automation,” Monthly Review 16, no. 7 (November 1964): 423–39. In their article, Huberman and Sweezy wrote: “Our conclusion can only be that the idea of universal guaranteed income is not the great revolutionary principle that the authors of the ‘Triple Revolution’ evidently believe it to be. If applied under our present system, it would be like religion an opiate of the people tending to strengthen the status quo. And under a socialist system it would be quite unnecessary and might do more harm than good” (Huberman and Sweezy, “The ‘Triple’ Revolution,” 122). More radical alternatives to a universal basic income (short of socialism) are guaranteed full employment and a policy of universal public services. On the latter, see Jason Hickel, “Universal Public Services,” Jason Hickel (blog), August 4, 2023.
8. ↩ Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 8–9, 72.
9. ↩ See John Bellamy Foster, introduction to Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, xi–xiv,
10. ↩ Herbert Marcuse quoted in Bruce Brown, Marx, Freud, and the Critique of Everyday Life (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 14.
11. ↩ Paul M. Sweezy, foreword to Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, xxv–xxvi.
12. ↩ On Braverman’s role as a production worker, see Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 4–5.
13. ↩ Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 115. In addition to Sweezy’s account of the Scientific-Technical Revolution and “the collective scientist,” Braverman incorporated Sweezy’s analysis of “the age of synthetics” based on the development of organic chemistry.
14. ↩ Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), 4–5.
15. ↩ Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master, 53–76.
16. ↩ Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 55–58; Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master, 17, 104.
17. ↩ Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, facsimile of original published by Charles Knight in 1831), 143–45, 186.
18. ↩ Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 137–38.
19. ↩ Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures (London: Charles Knight, 1835), 19–23.
20. ↩ Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 57.
21. ↩ Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 544–45, 798–99; Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), 693–705.
22. ↩ Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master, 109.
23. ↩ Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 175; Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
24. ↩ Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 77–82; Frederick Winslow Taylor, “Shop Management,” in Frederick Winslow Taylor, Scientific Management (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 105; Foster, introduction to Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, xvii.
25. ↩ Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 464–69, 544; Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master, 99, 104–5, 108–10, 116–18; Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 308, 320–21; Rob Beamish, Marx, Method, and the Division of Labor (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 110–13, 126–32.
26. ↩ Marx, Grundrisse, 693–705.
27. ↩ Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 118–19.
28. ↩ See Paulo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude (New York: Semiotext[e], 2004), 105–6.
29. ↩ Looked at from a value standpoint, as Michael Heinrich has explained, Marx’s treatment of the collective worker broke through the mythology of the machine and the notion of the “general intellect.” It was linked to his further development of value theory (beyond the Grundrisse) through distinctions between value and exchange value, and concrete and abstract labor, and through his development of the concept of relative surplus value. The ultimate purpose of the introduction of machinery in capitalist production, according to Marx, was to enhance the rate of surplus value or the exploitation of the worker (both individual and collective). Michael Heinrich, “The ‘Fragment on Machines’: A Marxian Misconception in the Grundrisse and its Overcoming in Capital,” in Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse, Riccardo Bellofiore, Guido Starosta, and Peter D. Thomas, eds., (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013), 197–212. See also Cheng Enfu, The Creation of Value by Living Labour (Canut, Turkey: Canut International Publishers, 2005), 109–11.
30. ↩ Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 544–45; Ure, Philosophy of Manufactures, 13, 18.
31. ↩ Ure, Philosophy of Manufactures, 368.
32. ↩ Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 320.
33. ↩ Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 321.
34. ↩ Frank Gilbreth quoted in Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 309.
35. ↩ Adam Ferguson quoted in Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 483.
36. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, “Education and the Structural Crisis of Capital,” Monthly Review 63, no. 3 (July–August 2011): 6–37; C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 175.
37. ↩ Jason Resnikoff, “Contesting the Idea of Progress: Labor’s AI Challenge,” New Labor Forum, September 10, 2024, newlaborforum.cuny.edu; Katy Hayward, “Machine Unlearning: AI, Neoliberalism and Universities in Crisis,” Red Pepper, August 25, 2024, redpepper.org.uk.
38. ↩ Moritz Altenried, The Digital Factory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 3–4; Jennifer Howard, “What Happened to Google’s Effort to Scan Millions of University Library Books?,” EdSurge, August 10, 2017; “How Many Gig Workers Are There?,” Gig Economy Data Hub, accessed October 23, 2024.
39. ↩ The IMF estimates that AI will “affect” 40 percent of the world’s jobs, and 60 percent in the advanced economies. What this actually means and the timeline, setting aside the hype, is unclear. H. Daron Acemoglu, an MIT economist, has estimated that “only a small percent of all jobs—a mere 5%—is ripe to be taken over, or at least heavily aided, by AI over the next decade.” Kristalina Georgieva, “AI Will Transform the Global Economy. Let’s Make Sure It Benefits Humanity,” IMF Blog, January 14, 2014; Jeran Wittenstein, “AI Can Do Only 5% of Jobs, Says MIT Economist Who Fears Crash,” Bloomberg, October 2, 2024. On precariousness, see R. Jamil Jonna and John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Working-Class Precariousness,” Monthly Review 67, no. 11 (April 2016): 1–19.
40. ↩ Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 21; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto: 150th Anniversary Edition (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), 2.