The Classic Transcending Borders and Ages: Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of ‘Labor and Monopoly Capital’

At the same time, the book also aroused numerous doubts and criticisms, leading to the “labor process debate,” with some even using the term “Bravermania” to criticize Braverman and his followers. The most significant criticisms can be summarized into two categories. First, some criticized Braverman for neglecting the subjectivity of labor and focusing mainly on the resistance and struggles of the working class in the workplace as the central focus of the study of the labor process. Second, Braverman was criticized for the temporal and spatial limitations in his analysis of the labor process, because he overlooked the changes brought about by new historical conditions and the specific circumstances of different countries. Objections include that Braverman’s definition of skill is too narrow, his focus on Taylorism is excessive, and the phenomenon of labor degradation that he points to is not universally applicable. Subsequently, in 1996, in his review of Labor and Monopoly Capital, Michael Burawoy declared that the book is “a classic of its time” that is now outdated.²

Unfortunately, Braverman himself passed away in 1976, shortly after the publication of his book, depriving him of the opportunity to further advance his research. However, as Paul M. Sweezy stated in his forward to Labor and Monopoly Capital, the book’s role is “to pose rather than answer questions, to open (or re-open) lines of inquiry which have been neglected and which cry out for research and elaboration.”³ Braverman identified the general trend of labor degradation in capitalist society and, through the inheritance and development of Marx’s study of the labor process, provided a basic framework and methodology for analyzing this trend and the resulting changes in the structure of the working class.

As John Bellamy Foster points out, the evolving structure of the working class is not a static issue and the key is “the analysis of changing historical conditions” and the examination of “how the changes in the labor process were integrally connected to the emergence of whole new spheres of production, the decomposition and recomposition of the working class in various sectors, and the development of new structural contradictions” within specific temporal and spatial contexts.⁴ In response to Burawoy’s claim that Labor and Monopoly Capital is a “classic of its time,” Foster strongly asserts that Labor and Monopoly Capital is a “classic of our time.”⁵ Now, the crucial questions remain: With the innovations in production technology and organization, how has the labor process changed today, how does it reflect the general trend of labor degradation, and how does it contribute to the decomposition and recomposition of the structure of the working class?

Braverman’s basic ideas still shed light onto contemporary capitalist production. Since the 1990s, developed countries, including the United States, have been leading the construction of a core-periphery global production network through modularization, along with information and communications technology. Despite the demand for multiskilled workers, the skill requirements for the majority of workers have been decreasing. Within the global production network, core enterprises in developed countries are responsible for the research, development, and manufacturing of critical core components and specialized equipment. They define the standards and parameters for the production of other modularized components and outsource labor-intensive segments of the production process to emerging market economies, where standardized production and assembly of modular components are carried out.⁶

Correspondingly, the labor market also possesses a core-periphery structure. The core labor force consists of high-skilled workers such as managers, designers, and technicians within the enterprises who receive high wages, engage in stable employment, and perform various tasks to achieve product diversification. However, the peripheral labor force comprises low-skilled workers within enterprises and temporary employees from outsourcing agencies. They receive low wages, face employment instability, and must be able to quickly adapt to market fluctuations and cost-cutting measures.⁷ The emergence of new forms of high-skilled labor, which experiences a partial integration of conception and execution in the labor process, has not improved the general structure of the U.S. working class. Instead, due to extensive outsourcing of manufacturing processes and the prevalence of low-skilled jobs in the service sector, the skill requirements have become extremely low, leading to labor market polarization and the collapse of the middle class in U.S. society. As Foster argues, “the myth of the United States as a ‘middle-class society’ stabilized by a large intermediate strata is eroding rapidly.”⁸

Braverman and China

From a global perspective, the formation of the global production network has been accompanied by the rise of China as the largest “world factory” and, potentially, the largest working-class population. Thus, China has become a key research subject in the return to the “hidden place of production.” Labor and Monopoly Capital should have provided some insights on China’s development. In fact, the Chinese version of Labor and Monopoly Capital was introduced in 1978, marking a watershed moment in the development of Chinese research on the labor process. However, it was not until the turn of the century that the Marxist political economy community in China showed an interest in studying the labor process. Apart from Marxist political economists like Xie Fusheng, who introduced Labor and Monopoly Capital for the first time in the Marxist political economy community in China, it was the sociology community that, inspired by scholars like Burawoy, conducted research on the labor process in various industries in China, using sociological research methods and analyzing it from multiple angles such as gender and region.⁹ However, it was Xie’s research that first applied and developed Braverman’s research method.¹⁰ He found that although the sociology community enriched the diversity of labor process research, the fundamental contradiction of labor-capital relations was overlooked and concealed by focusing on characteristics such as gender and region. It was necessary to return to Marx and Braverman to reveal the new forms of change in the relationship between labor and capital in the direct production process.¹¹ Xie expanded Braverman’s analysis of the labor process to the circulation process of capital and conducted extensive forward-looking research on China’s economic issues based on the analysis of the transformation of the contemporary capitalist labor process.

During the process of integrating into the global production network, China has maintained a high demand for flexible, low-skilled labor. Scholars like Xie and others have noted that, since joining the World Trade Organization in the early twenty-first century, China has witnessed a significant influx of foreign direct investment, leading to the integration of its export-oriented enterprises into the global production network through mass production of standardized modular components. This mass production approach reduces the demand for labor skills by combining machinery with a single function with locally hired flexible workers who perform specific tasks. The technology and capabilities of the equipment are inflexible, allowing only for low-cost mass production of standardized products.¹²

Simultaneously, as China continues to occupy for the most part the lower end of the global production network, export-oriented enterprises in the country have implemented flexible labor strategies to mitigate losses in fixed capital because of demand fluctuations. They have employed a large number of rural migrant workers and urban unemployed individuals who have been affected by state-owned enterprise reforms. To meet the demands of large-scale orders, these enterprises rely on extended working hours and high labor intensity. The relatively low wages have enticed workers to engage in overtime work in pursuit of additional income. Many migrant workers, unable to adapt to the excessive overtime labor, have had to withdraw from the urban labor market after the age of 45.¹³ Despite the existence of a large reserve army of labor, the high demand for low-skilled workers has led to structural employment issues in China, characterized by a shortage of labor in the low-skilled labor market and difficulties in employment in the middle- and high-skilled labor market.

It is worth mentioning that in order to break away from being locked in at the low end of the global labor process and restore its momentum in economic growth, the Chinese government has recently put forward the concept of “new quality productive forces.” In addition to emphasizing technological innovation, the government also highlights the need for education and reform of the personnel system, signaling a new direction for the transformation of the labor process in China’s future.

Braverman and the Future

In the new era of the information and communications technology revolution, the rapid development of a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation—represented by new developments such as the rise of big data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and blockchain—continuously reshapes the traditional labor process and gives rise to emerging business models and labor organizations. This has had a profound impact on workers in the twenty-first century, for which Labor and Monopoly Capital can still provide insights. In a word, when considering the evolution of the labor process from a longer-term perspective, tacit knowledge, professional skills, and cognitive and analytical capacities, which were often considered counterexamples to Braverman’s analysis, are not the permanent fortresses protecting labor from degradation, as suggested by Labor and Monopoly Capital.

The application of new technologies, led by artificial intelligence, has greatly impacted the middle-skilled workforce responsible for routine tasks in traditional labor processes.¹⁴ In the field of traditional manufacturing, industrial robots are taking over a significant number of routine operations, resulting in frontline workers losing control over both the concept and execution aspects of their work. As industrial robots increasingly replace frontline workers on a large scale, labor is faced with further degradation, leaving them only able to engage in lower-skilled support work. Technicians who acquire knowledge of industrial robot programming have some opportunities for skill enhancement. However, artificial intelligence extracts core scientific technologies from basic technical skills, leading to the hollowing out of the skills of technical personnel. Moreover, artificial intelligence significantly reduces the skill requirements and demand for workers engaged in statistical and managerial work by improving information collection and processing efficiency, resulting in the downsizing of management departments. From a societal perspective, professionals involved in cognitive and analytical tasks, including “white-collar” (and even “gold-collar”) workers such as lawyers, accountants, budget analysts, quantity surveyors, doctors, bank tellers, and translators, will all face significant impacts from the adoption of artificial intelligence.

In addition to the impact on traditional labor processes, the digital platforms that have emerged alongside the new technological revolution have also shaped the gig economy as a new form of labor organization, exacerbating capital’s control over labor, labor degradation, and employment instability. Many companies and enterprises have shifted from the traditional enterprise-employee labor organization model to a platform-individual model. Factories with physical boundaries have disappeared to be replaced by the social factory centered around online platforms without physical boundaries. This has disrupted traditional stable employment relationships, as the modern-day merchants in the putting-out system, digital platforms, with their monopolistic advantages, reintegrate the means of living and idle time of workers into the production and realization processes of surplus value. They do so through data and algorithms, which covertly intervene in the labor process. These platforms continuously collect, analyze, and optimize algorithms to dynamically manage workers in task assignment, supervision, performance assessment, and other aspects. They even use data and algorithms to substitute for workers’ cognitive and decision-making behaviors in real-world scenarios, resulting in a further degradation of labor through digital Taylorism. In addition to low-skilled workers, such as ride-hailing drivers and food delivery riders, knowledge workers also face the challenges of employment instability and labor degradation.¹⁵ Digital platforms consolidate the scientific decomposition and restructuring of knowledge labor, and now methods such as crowdsourcing and offshore outsourcing can be used to reduce the cost of employing knowledge workers. At the same time, platforms, leveraging their technological advantages and rule-making powers, can exert more covert and extensive control over knowledge workers, represented by content creators.

If we shift our focus to the production process of new technological products, especially artificial intelligence, we witness the degradation of cognitive labor previously considered to be creative. Simultaneously, many low-skilled new employment positions are created. The production of artificial intelligence requires workers to imbue their own cognition into machines through human-computer interaction, making cognitive labor associated with recognition, judgment, innovation, and other human capabilities dominant.¹⁶ Yet, as complex labor is broken down into various simple tasks, only technical experts responsible for coordinating and planning work are needed to creatively utilize higher-level cognitive abilities such as decision-making and planning. Cognitive labor that only requires intermediate or basic cognitive capabilities faces degradation. For example, most programmers do not create algorithms; instead, they download suitable algorithm modules from open-source communities like GitHub and adjust parameters as needed. Additionally, with the emergence of new positions in the development of artificial intelligence products, such as data annotators, these algorithms serve as sensory organs assisting machines in discerning and accepting external information. They only need fundamental cognitive abilities, like judgment and recognition, without requiring any technical knowledge. These workers can be trained in a few hours and are akin to assembly-line workers. Artificial intelligence products that emphasize human-computer interaction can only be realized by relying on a significant degradation of cognitive labor in becoming auxiliary to machines. At the same time, workers—including data annotators and content moderators—join the gig economy in forms like crowdsourcing and outsourcing, becoming “ghost labor” and facing employment instability.¹⁷

Summary

It has been proven that under the capitalist mode of production, technological advancements do not automatically lead to an upgrade in labor; instead, there is a persistent general trend of labor degradation, with decreasing skill requirements for workers in their positions. As Braverman once observed, “it is in the nature of machinery, and a corollary of technical development, that the control over the machine need no longer be vested in its immediate operator,” and this “possibility is seized upon by the capitalist mode of production and utilized to the fullest extent.”¹⁸ The emergence of new technologies such as artificial intelligence further illustrates that the “more science is incorporated into the labor process, the less the worker understands of the process; the more sophisticated an intellectual product the machine becomes, the less control and comprehension of the machine the worker has.”¹⁹ Even those so-called middle-class individuals who temporarily acquire high skills during the transformation of the labor process will ultimately “succumb in large part to the same general forces that had broken down skilled labor” and become homogenized, ordinary laborers.²⁰ With the global expansion of the capitalist mode of production, the significance of Labor and Monopoly Capital has long surpassed narrow national boundaries and the era in which Braverman lived. In the visible future, Labor and Monopoly Capital will continue to be a classic work “to which we return again and again,” standing out as a source “of continuing inspiration.”²¹

Notes

1. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 279–80.
2. ↩ Michael Burawoy, “A Classic of Its Time,” Contemporary Sociology 25, no. 3 (May 1996): 296–99.
3. ↩ Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), xxvi–xxvii.
4. ↩ Jamil Jonna and John Bellamy Foster, “Beyond the Degradation of Labor,” Monthly Review 66, no. 5 (October 2014): 1–23.
5. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, “A Classic of Our Time: Labor and Monopoly Capital after a Quarter-Century,” Monthly Review 50, no. 8 (January 1999): 12–18, emphasis added.
6. ↩ Burawoy asserts that, in the global production network, “transnational labor processes were divided between processes of conception concentrated in advanced capitalism and processes of execution concentrated in the labor reservoirs of the periphery.” For further discussion, see Burawoy, “A Classic of Its Time,” 298.
7. ↩ John Atkinson, “Manpower Strategies for Flexible Organisation,” Personnel Management 16, no. 8 (August 1984): 28–31.
8. ↩ Jonna and Foster, “Beyond the Degradation of Labor,” 14.
9. ↩ For example, Genxing Tong, “The Production of Consensus Workers: A New Institutionalist Framework for Understanding Burawoy’s ‘Manufacturing Consent,'” Sociological Studies 1 (January 2005): 224–31 (in Chinese); Xiang Wen and Xiao Zhou, “Western Labor Process Theory and Chinese Experience: A Critical Review,” Social Sciences in China 3 (May 2007): 29–39 (in Chinese); Mingjie He, “Labor and Divisions between Sisters: A Case Study of the He Ji Restaurant Production Regime,” Social Sciences in China 31, no. 2 (April 2010): 165–78 (in Chinese).
10. ↩ Xie Fusheng, “The Development of Theories on the Change of Production Organizations in Marxism Economics,” China Review of Political Economy 5 (June 2005): 88–107 (in Chinese).
11. ↩ Xie Fusheng and Song Xianping, “The Studies of Capitalist Labor Process: From Absence to Resurgence,” Studies on Marxism 10 (October 2011): 74–83 (in Chinese).
12. ↩ Case studies have shown that the photovoltaic subsidiary of the South Factory in Guangzhou, China, underwent a transformation after collaborating with Heinrich, a German company. Previously, the subsidiary employed a large number of professional engineers and technical workers who were mainly involved in independent design and manufacturing. However, it shifted its approach and began outsourcing work to a team of subcontractors consisting of informal workers to meet the flexible production order demands. Consequently, the skill requirements were gradually reduced, and it became exclusively an original equipment manufacturer workshop for Heinrich. For more details, see Jia Wenjuan, “The Making of a Dualistic Labour Regime: Changing Labour Process and Power Relations in a Chinese State-Owned Enterprise under Globalization,” in China at Work: A Labour Process Perspective on the Transformation of Work and Employment in China, Liu Mingwei and Chris Smith, eds. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).
13. ↩ Fusheng Xie, Xiaolu Kuang, and Zhi Li, “The Reserve Army of Labor in China Economy 1991–2015,” Monthly Review 77, no. 4 (September 2018): 23–34.
14. ↩ David Autor and David Dorn, “The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market,” American Economic Review 103, no. 5 (August 2013): 1553–97.
15. ↩ Alex Rosenblat, Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018); Kathleen Griesbach, Adam Reich, Luke Elliott-Negri, and Ruth Milkman, “Algorithmic Control in Platform Food Delivery Work,” Socius 5 (January–December 2019): 1–15.
16. ↩ Herbert A. Simon, Cognition: The Thinking and Intelligence Behind Human Behavior (Beijing: Renmin University of China Press, 2020) (in Chinese); Yann Moulier-Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).
17. ↩ Benjamin Shestakofsky, “Working Algorithms: Software Automation and the Future of Work,” Work and Occupations 44, no. 4 (November 2017): 376–423; Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri, Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019).
18. ↩ Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 133.
19. ↩ Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 295.
20. ↩ Jonna and Foster, “Beyond the Degradation of Labor,” 14.
21. ↩ Burawoy, “A Classic of Its Time,” 296.