VALORISATION AND `DESKILLING': A CRITIQUE OF ... - CiteSeerX

199 downloads 104 Views 2MB Size Report
ship between forms of the extraction of surplus value in the process of capital accumulation and phases in the organisation of the capitalist labour process.
VALORISATION AND `DESKILLING' : A CRITIQUE OF BRAVERMAN Tony Elger

Braverman's work has been central to the return of attention to the study of the capitalist labour process . This paper focusses on his major theme, and rejects as inadequate both his analysis of capital's generic impulsion to deskill and his location of the consummation of that impulsion in monopoly capitalism . Instead it argues for an historically located theorisation of the transformation of the labour process, which would explicitly locate that transformation in relation to phases of valorisation and accumulation and their contradictions . Some features of such an account are discussed, with particular reference to debate about the 'labour aristocracy', analyses of the role of Taylorism and contemporary discussions of automation .

INTRODUCTION[l] The Marxist analysis of the capitalist labour process is a relatively recent but increasingly significant aspect of the general renewal and development of Marxist analysis of contemporary capitalism . Braverman's Labour and Monopoly Capital has been one of the most influential contributions to this development and remains the fullest restatement to date of some of the fundamental themes of such an analysis. His work has served as both point of reference and inspiration for many current analyses of the transformation undergone by the labour process, the changing structure of employment and class composition, and the sources of wage labour in the era of 'monopoly capitalism' . Indeed Braverman's eloquent contribution is reminiscent of that of his mentors, Baran and Sweezy, in the manner in which it has confronted some of the major orthodoxies of bourgois social science and provided a focus for debate of issues which should be central to Marxist theory .



VALORISATION AND DESKILLING

59

The scope and significance of Braverman's analysis can be characterised in terms of the following features . First it reinstates the imperative of capital accumulation as the fundamental dynamic determining the 'incessant transformation' and 'tendential degradation' of labour in capitalist societies. Second it attempts to locate specific aspects of such transformation and degradation within the totality of developments in capitalist production set in motion by capital accumulation . In relation to this concern with the totality of capitalist production Braverman is centrally concerned to grasp the interrelations of the whole complex of features which appear to characterise 'monopoly capital' : the rise of oligopolistic competition among giant corporations ; the process of rationalisation of production ; the elaboration of the administrative apparatus of corporate capital ; the encroachment of capitalist commodity production into enclaves of non-capitalist production ; changes in the character and composition of the industrial reserve army ; and the consequent relationships between the modes of organisation of the labour process in different sectors . Two particularly notable features of Braverman's work are integral to this attempt to grasp the totality of production relations of monopoly capitalism . One is the novel attention he gives to analysing changes in the labour process in the 'new' service industries and occupations . The other is his recognition-unusual among Marxists and bourgeois social scientists alike-of the importance of the sexual division of labour in the changing structure of employment of different sectors of production . These achievements have been recognised by the wide and appreciative audience gained for Braverman's work and must be sustained in any critical assessment. At the same time the scope and power of his account suggests the value of such critical evaluation, as a basis for further developing the Marxist analysis of the capitalist labour process . In this paper I do not attempt to provide a comprehensive critique but instead limit myself to a consideration of the manner in which Braverman conceptualises the relationship between capital accumulation and the degradation of work, and the manner in which he characterises and periodises transformations in the organisation of production . Together these lines of criticism constitute an initial attempt to locate processes of deskilling within a Marxist analysis of the labour process, in a more adequate manner, by engaging in debate with Braverman's bold and impressive synthesis. Though Braverman's account serves as the focus of discussion this necessarily involves consideration of other recent Marxist analyses of the transformation of the capitalist labour process . Before turning to these specific arguments however I shall comment on the relationship between some general criticisms of Braverman's discussion of the degradation of work and the critique of his analysis of the relationship between capital accumulation and deskilling . GENERAL CRITICISM OF LMC Two dominant themes emerge from many of the Marxist critiques of Braverman .[2] The first concerns the inadequacy of his objectivist



60

CAPITAL & CLASS

conceptualisation of the working class, which fails to address the manner in which class struggle is integral to the course of development of the capitalist labour process .[3] The second focusses on the implication, in the structure and discourse of LMC, that analyses of both the obstacles confronting the accumulation process and their resolution in the reorganisation of the labour process can be divorced from analysis of broader forms of political domination and struggle .[4] The first criticism focusses on the much quoted self-denying ordinance announced by Braverman in his introduction : "no attempt will be made to deal wtih the modern working class on the level of its consciousness, organisation or activities . This is a book about the working class as a class in itself, not as a class for itself." (LMC p . 27) However valuable this disclaimer may be in relation to much conventional subjectivist sociology or other vague discussions of class consciousness it is evident that this conceptualisation remains seriously disabling . It warrants a treatment of the working class as an object of capital, which, while underlining the capacity of capital to reorganise the labour process, degrade the labourer, and propel her/him from sector to sector, forgets that the working class remains an active agency in the capital relation . As Schwarz remarks Braverman's approach fails to recognise "the working class as an active and problematical presence within the mechanism of accumulation ." [5] The second criticism is closely bound in with the first because it is primarily (though not exclusively) in relation to the problematical character of class relations in production that the critical significance of political relations and state institutions in reconstructing class relations has become a major focus of contemporary Marxist discussion of capitalist hegemony . In relation to such debate Braverman notices the central significance of economistic trade unionism for the character of working class accommodation with advanced capitalism . He implies however that this mode of accommodation 'arises directly out of the forms taken by capital accumulation and the capitalist labour process in the era of 'monopoly capitalism', rather than being a complex and contradictory product of the interrelations between such developments and the organisation of politics and state activity in capitalist society . [6] It is important to recognise that these criticisms do not merely suggest that Braverman's discussion is the necessarily incomplete account of one author, to be supplemented by that of others . The boundaries marked out by these criticisms delineate a more coherent project than that would imply : for the underlying theme of LMC is that a fundamental feature of monopoly capitalism is that capitalist control and domination is secured in a thoroughgoing fashion within production . For Braverman the process of degradation of work and the disciplining effect of the reserve army of labour together appear to produce a virtually inert working class, unable to pose any substantial problems for capital either within production or beyond it . This interpretation is, in my view, supported by the terms of Braverman's rejoinder to some of his critics-his response to the critique of objectivism focusses on the ultimate emergence of a revolutionary consciousness under the spur of "an enormous intensification of the pressures which have only just begun to bear upon the working class",



VALORISATION AND DESKILLING

61

with minimal recognition of the need to explore the complex relations between current problems of accumulation and forms of class struggle and such a possible future .[71 Of course, this in no way denies the significance of an analysis of the development of the capitalist labour process, but it does argue that such an analysis must (a) locate the forms of class struggle, characteristic of specific phases in the transformation of the capitalist labour process, as integral features of that transformation, and (b) remain sensitive to the complex relationships between class relations in production and broader forms of political domination and struggle . If the structure of Braverman's analysis enables him to forclose such crucial questions it is important to go beyond a reassertion of their importance to examine the features of his account of the capitalist labour process which facilitate this closure, and to consider alternative conceptualisations which do not have similar consequences . In accordance with this objective I will now turn to an examination of Braverman's analysis of the transformation of the capitalist labour process, and to a consideration of alternative accounts . THE DEGRADATION OF CRAFT WORK The most sustained theme of LMC concerns the degradation of craft work into common detailed labour as the capitalist labour process is "rendered independent of craft, tradition and the workers' knowledge" (p . 113) . Braverman's most vivid passages depict the process-or more often the capitalist theorisation of the process-of the arrogation of established 'rounded' craft expertise by capital and its transformation into a body of principles and practises from which the worker is excluded, and through which she/he is thoroughly subordinated to the imperatives of capital accumulation . This theme provides the focus of the discussion of 'scientific management' but is also central to the discussion of machinery and to the analysis of the degradation of clerical labour . Thus in the latter case Braverman notes that while "clerical work in its earliest stages has been likened to a craft" (p . 298) the increasingly predominant form of office labour is routinised, mechanically paced paper processing, in many ways analogous to other forms of routinised manual labour within manufacturing industry . Braverman's treatment of the degradation of craft work focusses upon two central imperatives of the capitalist organisation of the labour process . The first is the concern to cheapen labour : in Marxian terms, to reduce the value of labour power by substituting simple for complex labour . The second, and more fundamental imperative for Braverman, is to guarantee effective capitalist control of the labour process-by dissolving those esoteric skills which underpinned effective craft opposition to the reorganisation of production in the hands of capital and its agents . "In destroying the craft as a process under the control of the worker, he reconstitutes it as a process under his own control" . For Braverman, these developments are seen to gain their most significant momentum and their most coherent theoretical expression for capital in the last decades of the 19th century, in the 'scientific managec. & c .

I



62

CAPITAL & CLASS

ment' movement, and to achieve unrivalled dominance during the first half of this century, thus constituting the most crucial form of 'the degradation of work in the 20th century' . The central thrust of this major theme of LMC is succinctly outlined in Braverman's summary of the logic of Taylorism : "Workers who are controlled only by general orders and discipline are not adequately controlled, because they retain their grip on the actual processes of labour . . . (and) they will thwart efforts to realise to the full the potential in their labour power . To change this situation control over the labour process must pass into the hands of management, not only in a formal sense but by the control and dictation of each step of the process, including its mode of performance ." (p . 100) Thus Braverman's discussion of the theory, practises and consequences for workers of the process of deskilling constitutes an impressively concrete restatement of Marx's analysis of the tendency for capital to transform the labour process in the direction of simple, specialised and determined labour . I now turn to the mode of conceptualisation which underlies this account . Braverman's point of departure for an analysis of the unity of the labour process and capital accumulation is a restatement of the classical Marxist account of the exchange between capital and wage labour : "The worker enters into the employment agreement because social conditions leave him or her no other way to gain a livelihood . The employer, on the other hand, is the possessor of a unit of capital which he is endeavouring to enlarge . . . in everything that follows therefore we shall be considering the manner in which the labour process is dominated by and shaped by the accumulation of capital ." (p . 53) This formulation does not, significantly, lead to any extensive discussion of the forms of extraction of surplus value and exigencies of accumulation which have dominated successive phases of the capitalist labour process . Rather it is simply accompanied by general references to the character of accumulation as a structural imperative of capitalism .[8] Braverman then proceeds to a general diagnosis of what he sees as the fundamental obstacle confronting capital accumulation . This diagnosis hinges on the manner in which, in the context of antagonistic class relations, the "infinite potentiality" of labour power may remain inadequately realised because of entrenched working-class routines : "If the capitalist builds upon this distinctive quality and potential of human labour power, it is also this quality by its very indeterminacy, which places before him his greatest challenge and problem . . . what he buys is infinite in potential but in its realisation it is limited by the subjective state of the workers, by their previous history, by the general social conditions under which they work, as well as the particular conditions of the enterprise and by the technical setting of their labour" . (p . 57)



VALORISATION AND DESKILLING

63

The dynamics of the transformation of the labour process are located in a general contradiction between capitalist control of the product of wage labour on one hand, and customary and worker regulated modes of labour (equated with craft skills) on the other . Thus Braverman establishes the basis for a general and abstract impulsion of capital towards the `real' subordination of labour and directly identifies this abstract impulsion with a uniform process of degradation of craft skills . I now want to draw out some of the deficiencies of this formulation and relate these to Marx's own discussion . CAPITAL ACCUMULATION AND THE REAL SUBORDINATION OF THE LABOUR PROCESS The major deficiencies of Braverman's discussion relate on one hand to the inadequately located character of the impulsion to control imputed to capital, and on the other to the singular role attributed to craft skill as obstacle to capital . 1 . A central feature of an adequate analysis of the transformation of the capitalist labour process, and one inadequately acknowledged by Braverman, must be an attempt to locate the forms, and phases of development, of capitalist control over the labour process more precisely than he attempts to do . This is not merely. a matter of specifying the discrete conjunctural conditions which affect the general tendencies which he delineates . It involves a commitment to the specification of the relationship between forms of the extraction of surplus value in the process of capital accumulation and phases in the organisation of the capitalist labour process . While Braverman acknowledges the distinct forms of appropriation analysed in Capital under the headings of absolute and relative surplus value, the relationship between these forms and the development from the `formal' to the 'real' subordination of the labour process to capital accumulation remains virtually unexplored . In Marx's discussion of the development of 'real' subordination, however, the forms of capitalist reorganisation of the labour process are situated in alternative strategies of surplus value production, each with inherent limits and contradictions and characteristic forms of class struggle .[9] 2 . There is a strong tendency in Braverman's account to conceptualise the transformation in terms of a switch from thoroughgoing craft controls to pervasive capitalist direction of the labour process . Even when he recognises that capital faces a recurrent task of reestablishing its control over the labour process he conceptualises worker opposition in the inadequate terms of a polarity : either renascent craft expertise or generalised subterranean hostility (for examples see LMC p . 120n, p . 172 and p . 180n) . As the Brighton Group have emphasised such an approach fails to recognise the complex form of the 'real' subordination of the labour process to capital, and in particular fails to appreciate the manner in which forms of specialised expertise and craft competence may be embedded within a complex structure of collective labour effectively subordinated to capital accumulation . In addition it loses sight of those forms and bases of organised working class resistance which cannot be understood in terms of



64

CAPITAL & CLASS

rounded craft skills . 3 . As the previous point implies Braverman's conception of the craft worker as obstacle to capital equates complex competences,' a high value of labour power and effective collective opposition to capitalist initiatives . There is little discussion of the problematic character of this equation where : i . complex competences may be thoroughly subordinated to capital and be subjected to both an extended working day and intensification (as in Marx's conception of modern manufacture and domestic industry), or ii . collective organisation may gain increased wages and the status of skilled worker with little evidence of craft expertise .[ 10] 4 . Finally, Braverman's discussion of the organisation of the labour process remains for the most part at the level of its theorisation by 'management scientists' . His reliance on such programmatic material gives a spurious concreteness to his account of a general impulsion to control directly realised in deskilling . However, a critical consequence is that insufficient consideration is given to the conditions in which such strategies are implemented, and in particular to the effectiveness of workers' resistance to changes in the labour process . Having outlined some of the major weaknesses of Braverman's discussion I now turn to a brief examination of Marx's conceptualisation to provide a more coherent indication of the implications of, in particular, the first two of these criticisms . Marx's discussion of the relationship between the logic of capital accumulation and the reorganisation of the capitalist labour process is a complex one and his treatment of absolute and relative surplus value is developed in the course of separate discussions of the historical development of struggles over the length of the working day on one hand, and of the sequential development of co-operation, the manufacturing division of labour and modern mechanised industry on the other . Thus I shall only provide a sketch of the form of Marx's argument in order to suggest the importance of an analysis couched in these terms, especially in relation to the issues which arise out of Braverman's account of the degradation of work . Marx's analysis of the extraction of absolute surplus value takes as its point of departure opportunities for valorisation open to the capitalist in the context of the given conditions of organisation of the labour process which capital inherits from previous modes of production . In this context surplus value is extracted under conditions where the capitalist deploys his market power to extend the length of the working day while the labourer retains some control over the actual process of production . In addition capital may impose a greater intensity and continuity of labourwhat Marx sometimes calls a reduction in the 'porosity' of the working day-without transforming the customary organisation of labour . However, this situation of the 'merely' formal subordination of the labour process to capital sets definite limits to extraction of surplus value -limits which are crucially defined by the market power and political organisation of capital and labour . In the context of competition among



VALORISATION AND DESKILLING

65

capitals and working class resistance to the lengthening of the working day and to reduce 'porosity' capital tends to turn increasingly to the extraction of relative surplus value . The development of co-operation and the manufacturing division of labour constitute the initial phases in this tendency towards the extraction of relative surplus value . The development of a complex organisation of specialised labourers, and the intensification and co-ordination of work in that context, constitute the initial transformation of the labour process from its inherited basis into a specifically capitalist mode of production even though one in which capital exercises its domination subjectively rather than in the objective form of machinery . [11 j In the context of manufacture and even more so in the context of modern industry capital turns to the extraction of relative surplus value on the basis of (i) the intensification of labour, and (ii) increasing productiveness of labour, which (a) provides the basis for relatively transitory increments in surplus value while specific capitals enjoy productivity above the social average, and (b) insofar as it cheapens the roduction of consumption goods, reduces the value of labour power .[ 12J Marx's account clearly does not represent a simple transition from absolute to relative surplus value . The era of machine production and modern industry becomes characterised by the pursuit of both, in relationships conditioned by the pressure on the rate of profit unleashed by investment directed at increasing the productivity of labour (summarised in the tendency towards a rising organic composition of capital), and by the specific conditions of class struggle which mediate such pressure influenced by the development of the reserve army of labour) . In relation to these tendencies the transition from 'formal' to 'real' subordination is seen as a complex process beset with contradictions . Thus the phase of the elaboration of the manufacturing division of labour represents, Marx argues, a distinctively capitalist mode of production in which the power of capital subsists not merely in the relation of capitalist and propertyless wage labourer but further in the necessary dependence of the specialised worker (whether relatively skilled or unskilled) upon the collective organisation of the capitalist workshop . At the same time this real subordination of the labour process to capital contains and is qualified by the forms of competence which remain embodied in the specialised skills of craft workers, which represent an important obstacle to valorisation . The significance of modern mechanised industry in this context is discussed in terms of the interrelationship between the strategy of relative surplus value production and the deepening of the real subordination of the labour process and the labourer to capital . First it represents the most substantial advance in the extraction of relative surplus value on the basis of increasing both the productiveness and intensity of labour ; an advance which is guaranteed for individual capitals only through the continual revolutionising of production, but which confronts its own contradictions summarised in the tendency and counter-tendencies to the falling rate of profit. Secondly, this pursuit of relative surplus value through mechanisation forms the bases for the 'completion' of the development of the real



CAPITAL & CLASS

66

subordination of the labour process and the labourer to capital, as capitalist control is objectified in machinery, as technical calculation and organisation by capital displaces craft expertise, and as the development of the reserve army of labour exerts its discipline on workers in both modern mechanised industry and modern manufacture . However this 'completion' of real subordination is not uniform or entirely coherent-for example the objectification of capitalist control in machinery, and the augmentation of the reserve army of labour press variously on different sectors, and in different phases of the cycle of accumulation-and confronts its own contradictions both in the increasingly general organisation of workers and in the tensions between the specialisation and flexibility demanded of workers in modern industry .[13] Having outlined Marx's discussion of accumulation and the development of real subordination I do not simply wish to contrast it with Braverman's exposition of the deskilling thesis . Marx's own treatment is ambiguous enough to be susceptible to varied interpretations and it is quite possible to read him as an exponent of a straightforward deskilling thesis particularly in his discussions of the relationship between machine and worker . However I do want to argue that an alternative interpretation is warranted by Marx's discussion and offers a more adequate basis for the analysis of the development of the capitalist labour process, and as one aspect of that development the tendency towards deskilling . This alternative approach would emphasise : (i) the complex character of the development of the real subordination of the labour process to capital, as the development of a large scale collective organisation of production which dominates any specific form of labour . (ii)the importance of analysing the development of the complex organisation of collective labour in relation to specific strategies of valorisation and accumulation and their characteristic contradictions and forms of class struggle . These emphases have not of course gone unnoticed among Marxists and at this point I would like to comment briefly on some discussions which in various ways represent different and more adequate analyses of these issues than that of Braverman .

(a) The Brighton Labour Process Group [ 14] The Brighton paper offers an account of the transformation of the labour process which is strongly influenced by the `additional' chapter of Capital vol . 1, and which is explicitly organised in terms of the distinction (which Marx develops most fully in that chapter) between formal and real subordination . The crucial implication of this approach is that capital transforms the general social and technical organisation of the labour process, in the manner already discussed, to achieve a more adequate basis for valorisation . The key aspect of this argument is that real subordination is the achievement of the reorganisation of the whole complex of the capitalist labour process . It cannot be understood at the level of the indi-



VALORISA TION AND DESKILLING

67

vidual worker's relation to the mechanisms of production as it is in Braverman's discussion of deskilling .[15] On the basis of this argument the Brighton Group emphasise that : (i) certain modes of skilled work may find a place within the framework of real subordination, not only in manufacture but also in modern industry ; (ii) major aspects of the transformation of the labour process may not best be understood in terms of deskilling-for example, the transition to machine production constitutes an objectification of the power of capital which cannot be reduced to a process of deskilling ; and (iii) analyses of the initiatives of capital which may slightly increase workers' decision-making or team work must be located within the overall structure of capitalist domination summarised in the conception of real subordination .[16] These important insights are, however, developed at a level of abstraction which in itself has critical limitations in relation to the analysis of class struggle and the labour process . The Brighton paper seeks to "establish the specificity of the labour process as a particular and irreducible functional form in the circuit of industrial capital" through an analysis of the generic dynamic of the valorisation process, abstracted from (a) specific phases in the development of capital accumulation, as these articulate with (b) changes in the relations of capital and labour beyond production .[17] This limitation of the scope of the analysis has important consequences for the discussion of the forms of development of the capitalist labour process within 'modern industry' and in particular for the conceptualisation of class struggle given 'real subordination' . Workers' resistance and struggle against capital in the phase of 'formal subordination' is located in the non-correspondence of the form of the labour process to the exigencies of valorisation .[18] However, in the context of real subordination and valorisation on the basis of relative surplus value, class struggle cannot be located in such fundamental non-correspondence, but must be related to the specific exigencies and contradictions of valorisation and accumulation which beset capitalist production and undermine the specific adequacy of real subordination . The level of abstraction of the Brighton analysis is made to exclude consideration of these features, with the result that the emphasis on the capacity of capital to pursue its objectives within the transformed labour process clashes with and overshadows the emphasis on the continuing centrality of class struggle . [ 191 It should be noted that it is this limitation which gives superficial plausibility to Cutler's diagnosis within the Brighton paper of an historical anthropology of labour-resistance paralleled by a capitalist impulsion to control equivalent to that discernible in Braverman .[20] However, this critique fails to register the self-declared limitations of the analysis mounted by the Brighton group, and the manner in which the elaboration of an analysis of the specific exigencies of valorisation and accumulation would locate more concretely the terrain of class struggle within production, and allow some specification of the forms of fragmentation, deskilling and hierarchy characteristic of specific capitalist labour processes .

(b) Palloix[21 ] Palloix's analysis of Fordism and neo-Fordism represents one attempt to move in the direction just mentioned . He attempts to relate develop-



68

CAPITAL & CLASS

ments in the labour process to phase in the processes of valorisation and accumulation in a manner which comprehends contradictions and transformation within the development of modern industry as well as in the earlier capitalist forms of co-operation and the manufacturing division of labour . He also suggests how these changes may interplay with changes in the organisation of the labour market and with ideological divisions between mental and manual labour to produce "the complex forms of the organisation of labour processes in contemporary capitalism". [22] Palloix's account of changes in the labour process focusses on the contradictory interrelation of intensification and productiveness in the development of modern industry .[23] He views mechanisation as having been initially adopted in pursuit of intensification beyond that gained through manufacture, while intensification also constitutes the major mode of extracting absolute surplus value accompanying the emergence and development of relative surplus value (through increasing productiveness) associated with continuing developments in the mechanisation of capitalist production .[24] Mechanisation advances both intensification and productiveness but in each case confronts limits and contradictions . On one hand intensification directly confronts working class resistance while on the other productiveness implies a rising organic composition of capital and, as it directly implicates the whole circuit of accumulation, problems of disproportionality . The various phases of mechanisation and social reorganisation of production (Taylorism, Fordism, automation and `job enrich ment'/neoFordism) can then be seen as strategies for increasing intensity and productiveness while minimising the problems posed for capital . Thus, for example Palloix analyses automation as such a strategy, involving deskilling and machine-pacing of labour-power and reduction of the turnover time of capital, in the following terms : "In mechanised production, the worker at the machine is surrounded by many other necessary operations, such as setting up the job, feeding the machine, regulating its operation and checking the product . . . this gives rise to a certain `porosity' in the utilisation of machines and in the degree of co-ordination between different machines within the whole mechanised system, which affects the rate of profit . . . By integrating machinery into a machine system which eliminates the `porosity', automation ensures the maximum turnover of capital for the production of an intensive (relative) surplus while carryin the `dequalification' of productive labour to its most extreme point."[25] However, while such arguments are suggestive his account, and hence his discussion of tendencies for 'dequalification' and 'hyperqualification' remains in general highly schematic and tends to imply the simultaneous progressive resolution of the strategic problems of valorisation and accumulation confronting capital, rather than their contradictory and problematical pursuit. The implication of the uniformly advancing hegemony of capital within production does become qualified in his discussion of the 'complex forms of organisation of the labour process' . Thus he argues that trans-



VALORISATION AND DESKILLING

69

formations in the labour process articulate with (a) the elaboration and internationalisation of dual labour markets, which may sustain concentrations of hyperqualified workers in capital-intensive sectors in the metropoles, and (b) the reproduction of capitalist domination of the labour process through the division of mental labour, in conception and realisation, from manual labour (even less specialised, 'semi-autonomous' manual labour) in production . However, these remarks on the dual-labour market and mental and manual labour are themselves highly schematic and assimilate together some quite diverse relations and processes, while contradictions arising in the organisation of the labour process, which might articulate with and be partially resolved through these processes, remain unexplored .

(c) Mandel [ 26 J Mandel's recent work in Late Capitalism constitutes a major attempt to develop an historically located analysis of specific phases of valorisation and accumulation and the characteristic forms of appearance of contradictions within those phases . In the course of this analysis, Mandel provides a brief discussion of the development of the capitalist labour process similar to that outlined by the Brighton Group, emphasising the development of a large-scale collective labour process within which specific forms of skill and competences may be lodged . However-and without attempting a general exposition and critique-the value of Mandel's account lies in his attempt to locate such an analysis of the labour process within his discussion of the historical development of capital accumulation .[27] It is this broader discussion which provides a suggestive basis for an analysis of the forms of development, contradiction and conflict which might characterise the organisation of the capitalist labour process . Of particular significance here are Mandel's arguments concerning : i . the contradictions which may develop, in specific phases of accumulation, between increasing the productiveness of labour through technical transformation and increasing or controlling the intensification of labour, when the former imperative creates forms of expertise and independence which militate against the latter, ii . the complex relationships between the pace of capital accumulation and the dimensions of the reserve army of labour, and between those dimensions and forms of working class organisation ; within which can be located the capacity of workers to effectively resist initiatives aimed at the intensification of labour and their capacity to incorporate an increasing value of wage goods in their consumption, thus depressing the rate of surplus value, iii . finally Mandel discusses the underlying incipient contradiction, mitigated by specifically located opportunities for the devalorisation of constant capital, that increasing the productiveness of labour may increase the organic composition of capital with consequent pressure on the rate of profit .



70

CAPITAL & CLASS

Thus the Brighton Group, Palloix and Mandel in different ways offer approaches to the conceptualisation of the relationship between capital accumulation and the development of the capitalist labour process which suggest more adequate bases than that provided by Braverman for a Marxian analysis of the process of deskilling . The implications of their arguments can be summarised as follows : 1 . the development of the real subordination of labour to capital must be interpreted in terms of forms of subordination appropriate to the imperatives of valorisation and accumulation . In this sense it is necessary to recognise that the continually revolutionised character of modern mechanised production persistently renders 'incomplete' the subordination of labour to capital (in the sense of total direction and control by capital) . On one hand it creates new skills, competencies and other opportunities for bargaining leverage arising from the complex co-ordination and interdependence of the collective labourer ; on the other hand, in phases of rapid accumulation unaccompanied by massive displacement of living by dead labour, it depletes the reserve army of labour and provides the basis for powerful worker organisation .[281 2 . Such developments can in no sense be interpreted in terms of a simple contradiction or non-correspondence between capitalist property relations and the social forces of production-in terms, that is, of the 'merely' formal subordination of labour to capital-since they are embedded within a complex capitalist apparatus of production subordinated to the imperatives of valorisation and accumulation . Rather these features define an arena within which subordination of labour adequate to those imperatives is sought by capital and meets various forms of working class opposition . 3 . This form of argument makes it quite clear that the analysis of the development of the capitalist labour process must be set within an analysis of the organisation of capitalist production as a whole . This would eventually involve articulation of the discussion of changes in the labour process with analyses of the relationship of capital and labour as it is mediated by the capitalist state and at the level of class organisation and conflict beyond production . The implication of these analyses is, then, that Braverman's account moves too directly from an abstract impulsion to control labour power to the concrete strategy of deskilling, in a way which provides a partial and telescoped view of the development of the capitalist labour process . They suggest the importance of locating an account of that development within a more complex and sustained analysis of the historical development of capital accumulation, the contradictions to which accumulation gives rise, and the manner in which such contradictions develop and are resolved in class struggle within and beyond production . BRAVERMAN AND 'MONOPOLY CAPITAL' Of course, as the very title of his book emphasises, Braverman's account is not simply of a uniform trajectory towards the realisation of



VA LORISA TION AND DESKI LLING

71

real subordination throughh deskilling. What he does is to locate the crucial phase of development of such real subordination in relation to the emergence of 'monopoly capitalism', but the above analyses suggest that this association itself radically simplifies a more complex pattern of development . It is at this point that the work of Baran and Sweezy so powerfully, but largely implicitly, structures Braverman's whole analysis . Their work enables him (a) to ignore any exploration of the contradictions and struggles which beset mechanisation in the form of the tendency and countertendencies to the falling rate of profit, and (b) to take for granted the capacity of capitals to finance the apparatus of 'conception' and control, which constitutes the counterpoint to deskilling, out of a rising surplus . These features follow directly from Baran and Sweezy's analysis of the fundamental determining features of capitalist accumulation in the era of monopoly capitalism : namely (i)their claim concerning the insignificance of tendencies for the organic composition of capital to rise once transformations are taking place within an already mechanised form of production, and (ii) their argument that monopoly capital has the capacity to generate an increasing surplus-since price competition is suspended while investment multiplies productivity and, given solutions to problems of realisation, production .[29] The critics of Baran and Sweezy challenge precisely these assumptions and thus suggest that 'monopoly capitalism' cannot be analysed in terms of such fundamental discontinuities in the logic of capital accumulation . Rather, Mandel and others argue that, while oligopolisation may tend to create distinct levels of profit in oligopolised and non-oligopolised sectors, this pattern is subject to fundamental processes of both long-term competition among capitals, and tendencies and countertendencies to a falling rate of profit associated with movements in the organic composition of capital .[30] Such criticisms underline the inadequacy of Braverman's treatment of the significance of monopoly capitalism merely in terms of the precipitation or facilitation of a generalised impulsion of capital towards deskilling, and they cohere with the earlier argument for a more complex and historically located analysis of the relations between valorisation and accumulation and the development of the capitalist labour process, before, during and after the phase of monopolisation identified as crucial by Baran and Sweezy, and Braverman . In the remainder of this paper I attempt to contribute to the development of such an analysis by undertaking a more limited task . That of analysing the transformation of skills and competences characteristic of specific phases in the development of the capitalist labour process, and considering their relationship to both phases of valorisation and accumulation, and developments in ideological and political relations beyond production . Before moving to such a discussion however some brief comments on Braverman's treatment of the reserve army of labour are appropriate . BRAVERMAN ON THE RESERVE ARMY OF LABOUR Braverman's analysis of the reserve army of labour follows Marx in emphasising the analytical importance of mechanisation in displacing workers



72

CAPITAL & CLASS

from established sectors of modern industry and thus furnishing a readily available pool of workers for employment by capital in other sectors . He also seeks to demonstrate the contemporary descriptive appropriateness of the categories of floating, latent and stagnant forms of the reserve army . Through the powerful development of these themes the reserve army of labour is given an equivalent place in Braverman's analysis to that of deskilling, as a process which disciplines and constrains the working class in its objective existence as a moment of capital .[31 ] However, there are a number of problems with this account which parallel those discussed in relation to deskilling, since this generic invocation of the reserve army of labour gives insufficient attention to the specific impacts of the reserve army during different phases of the cycle of accumulation . The first problem concerns the interplay between reserve army and reorganisation of the labour process in periods of stagnation or depression . In such contexts the reserve army of labour may allow adequate conditions for valorisation through both intensification and wage-cutting without major reorganisations of the labour process involving deskilling . While Braverman acknowledges the mutually conditioning effects of mechanisation and the reserve army (L .M .C . pp . 236-7) these implications are not adequately drawn out in relation to his broader treatment of deskilling . Other major problems arise in relation to periods of relative prosperity and accelerated accumulation . Once more Braverman acknowledges the manner in which in this case the reserve army of labour is depleted : "in periods of rapid capital accumulation such as that which has taken place throughout the capitalist world since World War II, the relative surplus population which is the 'natural' product of the capital accumulation process is supplemented with other sources of labour" (L .M .C . p . 384) . One difficulty which arises from this statement concerns the presentation of such 'supplementation' as unproblematic . Braverman's descriptive demonstration of the central significance of female labour for the reconstruction of the reserve army is, as Beechey argues, unaccompanied by any theoretical analysis of the problems of this reconstruction or of the specific conditions under which women have become a preferred source of the reserve army .[32] The other major difficulty concerns Braverman's failure to confront the mediated and varied impact of the reserve army upon working class organisation and struggle, a theme which is central to Mandel's historical analysis of valorisation and class struggle .[331 The elaboration of analyses of these features of the reserve army of labour must be central to any understanding of the effectiveness of the economic and non-economic combativity of some sectors of the working class alongside the relatively helpless condition of other sections in, for example, the post-war period .[34] Having noted these weaknesses of Braverman's treatment of the reserve army of labour, I will now return to discussion of the historical development of the capitalist labour process . CRAFT AND CAPITAL IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY As has already been noted Braverman's major concern is to analyse the de-



VALORISATION AND DESKILLING

73

gradation of work in the era of 'monopoly capitalism', but his understanding of that process is necessarily underpinned by a view of the earlier phases of capitalist development . Indeed a major premise of his account appears to be a periodisation of the degradation of craft work which emphasises the initiatives of nascent 'monopoly capital' in the final years of the 19th century rather than features of reorganisation of the labour process which characterised the development of machinery and modern industry throughout that century . This emphasis underwrites the account of the general deskilling of craft work in the monopoly era and the centrality attributed to Taylorism in that transformation . However, it requires rather serious qualification-both from the point of view of an analysis of the capitalist labour process in the 19th century, and in terms of the foreshortened perspective it offers on developments in the 20th . Two related problems can be posed in relation to the emphasis of Braverman's account: 1 . It fails to grant adequate recognition to the rapid development of the real subordination of the labour process to capital on the basis of mechanisation in some of the leading sectors of the capitalist economy of the period-a development which variously by-passed established craft skills, attacked and destroyed them directly to replace them with other forms of organisation of labour and expertise, or quite often incorporated them in modified form in a radically transformed organisation of the labour process. 2 . It tends to portray the craftsmen of the second half of the nineteenth century in terms of the 'artisan ideal' when clearly their positions must be seen as in various ways transitional, marked to a substantial degree by real subordination to capital .[35] This latter point, in particular, has been underlined by recent contributions to the 'labour aristocracy' debate, which have been concerned to specify more closely the interplay between changes in the organisation of the labour process and the nexus of political initiatives and commitments which have generally been associated with that notion . For example Foster, in his analysis of class struggle in Oldham, has argued that working class militancy, within and beyond the workplace, together with a crisis of declining profitability, precipitated major efforts to reorganise the labour process of both engineering and spinning . He suggests that skilled workers were placed in a more distinct relation of subordination to capital, while responsibilities for pace-making and direction of non-skilled workers were more explicitly delegated to them . His account also outlines some of the complex interrelations between such changes in the organisation of the labour process and the forms of capitalist political initiative concerned to secure local and national political hegemony .[36] Foster's account dwells overmuch on particular forms of this subordination, such as piecemastering, and it is evident that a variety of specific forms of hierarchy, subordination and relative 'privilege' constitute bases in production of the political phenomenon of the labour aristocracy . Nevertheless Foster does demonstrate the importance of changes in the



74

CAPITAL & CLASS

location and subordination of craft skills within the capitalist organisation of the labour process . Such considerations have led Stedman-Jones to argue that : "even the skilled sectors of modern industry bore only a superficial resemblance to those of handicraft . Such skills were precarious and transformable at the will of the capitalist in a way which those of handicraft had not been . In the cotton industry, the artificial position of the cotton spinner has already been noted . In engineering, apart from a residuum of semi-handicraft skills, the new forms of skill were based upon a quantum of literacy and technical instruction, and often included quasi-supervisory functions . They did not possess the direct purchase over the production process enjoyed by handicrafts, and were unusable except in the factories for which they had been acquired . This is part of what is meant by the 'real' subordination of wage labour to capital . . .What was decisive was the effect of modern industry upon their technical role in the labour process . It was not so much their privileged position as the vulnerability of that position that changed their industrial outlook ."[37] This account of the reorganisation of the capitalist labour process in terms of the increasing subordination and vulnerability of craft skills, coupled with (i) an emphasis on the distinctive forms of hierarchisation characterising different industries (notably the specific significance of the sexual division of labour in cotton), and, (ii) an insistence on the specifically social and ideological location of the labour aristocracy in relation to those forms, represents an important advance over Foster's preoccupation with pace-makers (and capital exports) . However, Stedman-Jones himself misplaces its significance when he formulates the transformation as "the breach in craft controls and then a restabilisation of the labour process which left formal distinctions of status untouched" . This implies that skills became purely artificial and illusory, when to an important though variable extent they were transformed and encapsulated within modern industry in ways which sustained significant forms of expertise . Indeed such skills became the locus of vigorous organisation by elite groups of workers, who, in the context of rapid capital accumulation based on established levels of mechanisation, were effective in defending relative privilege and parochial autonomy within the capitalist organisation of the labour process . Thus the relationship between 'real' expertise and craft privilege in this phase of development of the labour process was mediated by the specific relation of accumulation and mechanisation, by the ideological role of elite groups of workers, and by their established forms of collective organisation . These features clearly characterise the engineering industry during the second half of the nineteenth century, for, as both Foster and StedmanJones recognise and Burgess emphasises, the transformation of skills in that sector before mid-century (from millwright to more specialised fitters and turners) was followed by a long period in which, with expanding markets and a tendency towards labour-using investment, the newer



VALORISATION AND DESKILLING

75

categories of skilled worker were able, on the basis of powerful collective organisation, to sustain wage differentials and job controls which militated against the control of capital . Hinton suggests that these features of the 'craft tradition' became increasingly precarious, in the forms in which they had become stabilised after the 1850s, as a further wave of capital intensive mechanisation was unleashed in the last decades of the nineteenth century .[38] While engineering represents the outstanding case of the relative stabilisation of specialised skills for a significant interval within modern mechanised industry, the experience of cotton also reveals the scope for some sections of workers to develop 'skill niches' within the increasingly effective subordination of the labour process to capital represented by modern industry, again especially in the context of a phase of labourusing investment following a phase of increasing capital-intensity . It is in this context that the historian of the cotton unions can argue that "few occupations 'in the cotton' are intrinsically skilled in the sense that their adequate performance necessarily requires any long preliminary training", but "several textile occupations that are usually regarded as more skilled, are so because other duties-like the supervision of other operatives, or the maintenance and setting of machinery-have been added to the fundamental task of machine tending", while "there are cases . . . in which a 'skill' has been quite artificially created, by the workers' gradual imposition of labour supply controls on a formerly 'unskilled' occupation" .[39] Engineering and cotton represent sectors in which the changing forms of the real subordination of wage labour and the labour process to capital encapsulate groups of workers who, albeit on a changing basis, experience some continuity of skilled organisation and status . Other sectors exemplify, especially towards the end of the century, more thoroughgoing transformations which nevertheless involve important residual or emergent forms of competence and bargaining leverage . Stone's study of the transformation of production in the United States' steel industry is of particular interest in this respect, as it exemplifies one influential approach to such developments which is compatible with Braverman and suffers from similar deficiencies . There are two dominant themes in her account. The first concerns the capitalist offensive against long entrenched craft sub-contract domination of the labour process in the context of intensified competition among increasingly capital-intensive corporations . The second concerns the specific manner in which capital secured its hegemony over the reorganised labour process by removing planning and co-ordinating activities from the shop-floor and by differentiating a potentially homogeneous mass of semi-skilled workers through individual piecework and the elaboration of hierarchical job ladders . Stone's sharp and justified critique of technical determinist apologetics for the emergent organisation of production leads her to imply that the hierarchical organisation of jobs was a simply ideological differentiation of thoroughly homogeneous work tasks . However the detailed development of her argument suggests something different . It shows that the employers' strategy addressed a cluster of limited forms of expertise radically dependent for their deployment upon the whole edifice of



76

CAPITAL & CLASS

capitalist controlled organisation and machinery (the forms of semiskilled work associated with the mechanisation which followed the defeat of the crafts) . This strategy deepened that dependency by encapsulating such narrowly specified skills within job hierarchies . Thus : "the new skilled workers had skills of a specific nature that enabled them to perform specific tasks, but did not have a general knowledge of the process of production . . . these workers had skills which were only good for one job . They did not have the independence of the nineteenth century skilled workmen, whose skills were transferable to other jobs and plants ."[40] This account of the development of the real subordination of labour to capital in U .S . steel can usefully be compared with developments in the U .K . steel industry chronicled by Wilkinson . In the latter case a parallel development of job hierarchies of limited and plant-specific skills was accomplished by a somewhat different route which underlines the inadequacy of an account in terms of a capitalist strategy of divide and rule . In the British case job-specific skills and the absence of cohesive worker opposition to capital did not result from the direct defeat and exclusion of craft subcontractors, but rather from changes in the labour process accompanied by the extension and dilution of forms of collaborative collective bargaining originating in the capital/sub-contractor relation . The resultant mutations of collective bargaining (involving the transmutation of wage and promotion hierarchies, sliding-scale agreements and arbitration machinery) need to be understood in relation to both (a) the increasingly effective domination of capital over the labour process signalled by the development of more specific skills embedded within a complex apparatus of collective labour associated with intensive mechanisation, and (b) the specific phasing of increases in productiveness, levels of unemployment and levels of international competition which conditioned the combativity of labour and capital and hence the organisation of the collective labourer. [41 ] It is evident that the specialisation of labour and proliferation of semiskilled workers characteristic of much mechanisation in the last decades of the nineteenth century represent major advances in the real subordination of labour to capital . However it remains important to recognise the residual forms of expertise and skill, and the conditions in which they may constitute effective obstacles to capitalist initiative . Hobsbawm's study of the organisation of gas-workers focusses attention on some of the possible implications of these developments for worker organisation . He traces the manner in which stokers (workers with important but easily replicable expertise and dexterity) constituted a nucleus for the general organisation of gas works labour . This organisation was achieved in a boom period following a phase in which capital pursued increasing output primarily through the intensification of labour . It was followed, in the context of increasing competition, by a phase of increasing mechanisation which, however, did not destroy the organisation . For, Hobsbawm argues :



VALORISATION AND DESKILLING

77

"labour-saving and labour-simplifying devices do not, however, automatically dislodge key groups of workers from their strongholds . They do so only when such groups are unable to maintain their relative indispensibility (i .e . their bargaining strength) during the crucial transition period, and cannot therefore 'capture' the new devices for recognised unionism, the standard rate, and standard working conditions" .[42] In this example the pace of technical advance was relatively slow while the industry was comparatively sheltered and partially municipalised : in these circumstances the semi-skilled stokers sustained their organisation and leverage . The theme of all of these studies of skills and the labour process in the mid to late nineteenth century can be summarised as follows : the 'real' subordination of labour to capital, understood in terms of the adequate conditions for valorisation, cannot be simply equated with the thoroughgoing destruction of crafts and skills, but such tendencies for the degradation of work must be related to the specific obstacles to valorisation confronted by capital, and to the forms of political and economic domination of labour by capital . In particular they emphasise (a) the complex interplay between the ideological and immediately productive aspects of relations of hierarchy and privilege in the organisation of the collective labourer by capital, and (b) the manner in which forms of worker competence and initiative lodged within the real subordination of the labour process to capital may continue to constitute significant bases of both parochial worker resistance and counter-control and divisions within the working class . As has already been argued, it is necessary to locate the specific character of such features in relation to the specific strategies of valorisation dominating particular periods and sectors of nineteenth century capital accumulation . In relation to this task, Samuel has recently emphasised that characterisations of the transformation of the labour process in

this period merely in terms of the advance of mechanisation, and resultant increases in productiveness, are highly misleading. He stresses instead

that (i) mechanisation was adopted very unevenly and was combined with advances in the capitalist domination of the labour process which owed little directly to mechanisation but were founded on the further subdivision of labour and upon the existence of a surplus of cheap labour ; and (ii) the adoption of mechanisation was itself significantly characterised by a 'capita/-saving' bias in the context of relatively cheap labour, so that labour intensity, manual dexterity and expertise remained major features of the reorganised labour process . The latter feature has already been noted as characteristic of British engineering and cotton during specific phases of their development in the second half of the nineteenth century, and significantly makes a commonly argued point of contrast between the strategies of British and American capital in this period . Samuel's discussion hints at an important specification of the context within which the developing forms of vulnerability and strategies of counter-control characteristic of skilled and quasi-skilled workers in this C. & C.-F



CAPITAL & CLASS

78

period, might be analysed . However, as yet his argument remains at the more primitive level of a general emphasis upon the continuing centrality of labour power within the labour process, coupled with a rudimentary recognition of these developing forms . The argument that "nineteenth century capitalism created many more skills than it destroyed, though they were different in kind from those of the all-round craftsman, and subject to a wholly new level of exploitation now requires further explication along the lines indicated above, if we are to avoid either the romanticisation of craft or the imagery of precipitate deskilling which tends to seduce Braverman, whether that imagery is applied to the earlier development of modern industry or the later capitalist offensive constituted by 'scientific management' . [43 ] SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT Braverman's analysis of `scientific management' is the pivotal feature of his whole account of the degradation of work in the 20th century and represents a fine dissection of the manner in which the capitalist control of the labour process was theorised by some agents of capital . However, this account, while it rests firmly within Braverman's characterisation of the long-term tendency of capital to wrest the labour process from craft control, remains unsatisfactory in a number of important respects . Firstly, as has already been suggested, it fails to provide an adequate account of the pre-existing organisational and political bases of capitalist domination and extraction of surplus value, or the crises which confronted valorisation on that basis . Secondly, it appears to assume that an adequate level of subordination was then secured almost entirely at the level of the reorganisation of the labour process, in accordance with the theoretical logic of the Taylorist attack on craft skills . The inadequate analysis of pre-existing forms of the subordination of the labour process to capital, discussed in the previous section, makes it difficult for Braverman to locate the specific context and targets of 'scientific management' . Thus his discussion of the emergence of Taylorism is couched only in terms of a congeries of enabling features : "The separation of hand and brain is the most decisive single step in the division of labour taken by the capitalist mode of production . It is inherent in that mode of production from its beginnings, and it develops, under capitalist management throughout the history of capitalism, but it is only during the past century that the scale of production, the resources made available to the modern corporation by the rapid accumulation of capital, and the conceptual apparatus and trained personnel have become available to institutionalise this separation in a systematic and formal fashion ." (p . 126, see also p . 85) In this account it seems that the immanent tendency of capital to establish real control over the labour process reaches its culmination simply when capital has accumulated sufficient resources . There is little indication of the manner in which scientific management and related



VALORISA TION AND DESKILLING

79

initiatives arose out of any crisis in the process of accumulation of capital, of the manner in which capital was compelled to increase its scale and intensify its control over the labour process and create a complex corporate apparatus in an effort-itself not contradiction free-to transcend these constraints . [441 Hobsbawm provides an analysis, focussed upon the British experience, which constitutes an instructive comparison with Braverman in this respect . In his account, the development of major crises in the extraction of surplus value is seen as the underlying context of strategies for the reorganisation of production which were concerned with both the intensification of labour and the facilitation of technical reorganisation of production : "It was safer if less efficient to stick to the old ways, unless pressure of profit margins, increased competition, the demands of labour or other inescapable facts forced a change . But the periods of major economic adjustment after the Napoleonic Wars and the slump of 1873 subjected employers to just this kind of pressure, and hence led to major modifications in the methods of labour utilisation . In the post-Napoleonic period the effect was delayed, since employers first attempted to exhaust the possibilities of cutting labour costs by extending hours and cutting money wage-rates . During the Great Depression (1873-96), new methods tended to be adopted more quickly . Roughly speaking, the mid-century brought the beginning of the substitution of 'intensive' for 'extensive' labour utilisation, the latter part of the Great Depression the beginning of the substitution of rational for empirical 'intensive' utilisation, or of 'scientific management' ."[45] Thus Hobsbawm indicates the basis on which valorisation had been accomplished in the preceding phase of capital accumulation : mechanisation, coupled with the subjection of unskilled labourers to driving discipline and the cultivation of craft workers reliance on more-or-less customary wage-effort relationships . However, the development of a crisis of profitability in the last quarter of the nineteenth century-as a consequence of both intensified competition (marked in particular by emergence of overcapacity) and increasingly effective working class demandsconstituted the conditions for the 'efficiency movement' as a major capitalist initiative directed preeminently at the increasingly sophisticated intensification of labour . Two features of this account deserve particular attention, as bases for the location and qualification of Braverman's discussion of 'scientific management' and thus the development of a more adequate Marxist analysis of capitalist strategy . Firstly, Hobsbawm makes a real attempt to locate the crisis of accumulation which prompted these new forms of capitalist initiative . This allows us to address such issues as the uneven international adoption of 'scientific management', where it is evident that the United States was the pioneer in relation to Britain and the rest of Europe . Here Hobsbawm's focus on the Great Depression, together with the earlier discussion of differential wages and capital-intensive mechani-



80

CAPITAL & CLASS

sation, can be related to Sohn-Rethel's discussion of this issue . He suggests that the impact of crisis led U .S . employers to early attempts to reorganise the labour process, as they confronted both higher wages and the competitive disadvantage of lack of secure imperial markets . In Europe, however, such attempts were retarded, until the First World War, by lower wages and the cushion of imperialism .[46] In addition Hobsbawm indicates the cluster of initiatives aimed at the intensification of labour within which the pursuit of deskilling must be located . Thus he recognises that the most sophisticated schemes were devised against, and fought out with, the most organised and highly paid workers, and involved major moves towards fragmentation and specification of labour . However, they formed part of a broader array of techniques of wage payment, aimed at the direct intensification of both skilled and nonskilled labour, and of technical and organisational changes, aimed at increasing productiveness . I now want to turn to one of the few specific Marxian critiques of Labour and Monopoly Capital, Palmer's discussion of the American experience of the 'efficiency movement' between 1903 and 1922 . Palmer takes up this theme of the heterogeneity of capitalist initiatives but broadens the analysis in a crucial way by tracing the significance of working class resistance to Taylorism and by examining the ideological role of 'scientific management' in the pursuit of capitalist hegemony . He begins by relocating Taylorism within a broad range of technical innovations, and systems of wage payment and work rationalisation, which represented responses to the intensification of capitalist competition in the last decades of the nineteenth century . Thus he queries the adequacy of a discussion of the Taylorist programme which does not relate that programme to the role of technical innovations in generating relative surplus value, and underlines the perversity of Braverman's insistence on the lack of any basic interconnections between technical innovations and strategies for reorganising the work process . (L .M .C. pp . 85, 110) Within this complex of initiatives the attack on craft and quasi-craft controls is properly seen as a central feature, though one which was rather variably applied because of both the period of war-time boom and the specific exigencies of production in various sectors, and the forms of effective worker resistance developed in these contexts . Thus the pursuit of capitalist control of the labour process adequate to the requirements of valorisation led to a major but uneven advance of the practises of intensification of labour and of deskilling . It is in this context that Palmer's central criticism of Braverman, that he "is limited in his understanding of the extent to which working class opposition 'defeated' Taylorism and pushed capital to employ more subtle means of control in its quest for authority", must be interpreted . [47 ] Palmer's attention to working-class opposition, and in particular to the persistence of organised resistance through the second and into the third decade of the twentieth century, is not meant to deny the real importance of the processes of deskilling delineated by Braverman . It does, however, suggest that under certain technical and economic conditions craft workers rather effectively defended their autonomy, while the broader efforts to



VALORISATION AND DESKILLING

81

intensify labour which were intrinsic to the Taylor strategy also met more or less effective organised and unorganised resistance, most obviously during the war boom . It is this pattern of resistance and rebellion which has been discussed in greater detail by Montgomery, who draws out more fully the conclusions of a conflict over control of the labour process which became an important feature of these struggles, and the predominantly parochial control demands and counter-control strategies which issued from them .[48] Finally Palmer uses his discussion of the piecemeal application of Taylorist principles and the reality of working-class resistance as the basis for an appreciation of the significant ideological role of Taylorism and the (efficiency movement' more generally . This he portrays in terms of its significance in undermining a 'populist' conception of labour as the sole creative agent in production-a conception rooted in earlier modes of workers' control over the labour process and supportive of the remaining forms of counter-control characteristic of labour within the developing complex of the collective labourer in modern industry-and substituting a conception of labour as a passive factor of production . Palmer's discussion of this feature of Taylorism suggests that, while it informed and gained credence from developments in the practical degradation of work, it played a more general role, especially in the context of relatively effective parochial working class resistance . Thus it is to be s eer. a s a key component among a series of 'personnel' and 'welfare' initiatives which strengthened and sustained capitalist hegemony beyond and within production . Thus Palmer poses central questions about the relationship between capitalist initiatives in the reorganisation of the labour process and the broader ideological and political conditions of capitalist hegemony and valorisation which are glossed over in Braverman's treatment .[49] The decades spanning the turn of the century, then, marked a period of major capitalist initiatives concerned to secure adequate conditions for valorisation and accumulation in the context of intensifying international oligopolistic competition and increased worker organisation . A substantial deepening of the real subordination of the labour process to capital, accomplished through a combination of mechanisation and Taylorist specialisation and simplification of labour, was and remains central to, but not exhaustive of, the strategy of capital . The reorganisation of the labour process by capital interplayed with broader ideological and political strategies of incorporation and with specific attempts to intensify the exploitation of labour power . Without doubt capital, in for example the engineering sector, substantially advanced its domination of the labour process and of the increasingly specialised worker between the 1880s and the 1920s . Such changes, together with the evident dexterity and competence of significant nineteenth century 'labouring' occupations, justify Braverman's sharp critique of both the method of construction, and the conventional 'upgrading' interpretation, of occupational census data trends concerning the increasing prominence of 'semi-skilled' workers (see L .M .C . pp . 426-435) . However Braverman's own discussion of the semi-skilled, coloured as it is by an idealised conception of craft skills to which he assimilates very



82

CAPITAL & CLASS

heterogeneous instances of nineteenth century labour power, is itself severely inadequate in failing to locate the specificity of 'semi-skilled' work within the process of capital accumulation . The deepening of subordination of the labour process to capital associated with Taylorism and the advance of mechanisation did not, as Braverman tends to imply, create a simply homogeneous mass of deskilled labour on the shop-floor, but meant the elaboration of a complex, internally differentiated apparatus of collective labour which contained an uneven variety of narrow skills and specific dexterities . Hyman offers a valuable glimpse of these features in his account of the growth of a major trade-union organisation of semi-skilled workers in Britain in the first decades of the century : "automatic machines could be run by a novice after a minimum of instruction ; other, more complex machine tools could be operated by workers without a full craft training . . .By 1914 they (the semiskilled) accounted for a fifth of the engineering labour force, covering a wide range of operations ; indeed, the gap between such semi-skilled workers as the automatic stamper and the universal driller was far greater in terms of skill than was that between the driller and the fully-skilled turner . . . the situation of the semi-skilled worker who had become proficient on a complex machine tool was closer to that of the craftsman than that of the labourer ; he was difficult to replace quickly, and his employers suffered heavy losses if expensive mechanical plant was standing idle ."[50] Such a form of organisation of the labour process by capital cannot be understood merely as some transitional phase in the trajectory of a general process of deski.ll.ing; it must be analysed in relation to the conditions of valorisation and class struggle characterising the relevant sector and period . Thus it is necessary to consider the contributions which specific forms of mechanisation and semi-skilled labour make to the valorisation and accumulation process, in terms of increased productiveness, reductions in the value of labour power and intensification of labour, and the manner in which contradictions among these aspects constitute problems for capital and bases of organisation and resistance for sections of the working class . The emergence of new forms of expertise around specific phases of technical innovation may, for example, be significantly tolerated by capital during periods of expansion and valorisation predominantly on the basis of increasing productiveness of labour . Certainly the displacement of organised and costly. skilled labour by unorganised and cheaper 'semi-skilled' labour may constitute a major opportunity for increased profitability, but the discovery of bargaining leverage and increasing opposition to speed-up by semi-skilled workers will not automatically trigger afresh round of mechanisation aimed at further deskilling . The relations between the advantages and disadvantages to capital of the specific form of the labour process will be related to the relative significance of the aspects of valorisation mentioned above, and 'to the combativity of the labourers, as that is influenced by both the specific manner



VALORISA TION AND DESKILLING

83

in which `skills' or dexterities are lodged within the collective labourer and the broader context of forms of political and ideological domination and struggle . THE CONTEMPORARY DEGRADATION OF WORK The above argument is of particular importance in relation to Braverman's account of the central role of mechanisation in the contemporary degradation of work in factory and office . In that account he effectively challenges orthodox myths concerning the general upgrading of labour associated with, in particular, automation . However, because his analysis is developed at the general level of an abstract compulsion towards the destruction of craft expertise and its replacement by pervasive capitalist control of the labour process, he is unable to address the complex, uneven and contradictory character of the organisation of collective labour . Braverman does not entirely ignore the complex and contradictory role of mechanisation and reorganisation of the labour process in the process of capital accumulation : "This displacement of labour as the subjective element of the process, and its subordination as an objective element in a production process now conducted by management, is an ideal realised by capital only within definite limits, and unevenly among industries . The principle is itself restrained in its application by the nature of the various specific and determinate processes of production . Moreover, its very application brings into being new crafts and skills and technical specialities which are first the province of labour rather than management . Thus in industry all forms of labour ; oexist : the craft, the hand or machine detail worker, the automatic machine or flow process" . (L.M .C . p . 172) However, this recognition does not become the basis for an analysis of the manner in which particular forms of organisation of the collective labourer and the labour process arise out of specific exigencies of valorisation . Instead, in his discussions of mechanisation, Braverman tends to assume a general congruence between strategies of valorisation and accumulation and deskilling, in which the former is lodged directly within the latter : "In the capitalist mode of production, new methods and new machinery are incorporated within a management effort to dissolve the labour process as a process conducted by the worker and reconstitute it as a process conducted by management ." (L .M .C . p . 170) In such an analysis (i) the advance of mechanisation ultimately becomes a matter of the evolution of techniques adequate to the deskilling imperative, rather than an outcome of the relation between forms of potential technical transformation and other conditions of the process of accumulation, while (ii) working class struggle is accorded the status of



84

CAPITAL & CLASS

a merely transient or frictional reaction to capital (see e .g . L .M .C . pp . 129, 180, 203), rather than being located as the articulation of contradictions within the forms of valorisation dominating a specific period of capital accumulation . My earlier discussion of semi-skilled work has, in contrast with Braverman's treatment, underlined the importance of analysing the ways in which mechanisation, as a strategy of accumulation, might (in conjunction with changes in the reserve army of labour) afford opportunities for relatively effective worker organisation and struggle . On the one hand this would involve an attempt to specify the features of collective labour which arise out of the interrelation of mechanism and labour power required for valorisation ; both such 'positive' features as the need for labour with narrow expertise and experience, and such 'negative' features as dependence upon a disposition among workers to facilitate (rather than disrupt) the logic of integrated production . On the other hand it would be necessary to locate the organisation of these features as the outcome of conflict between capital and labour.[51) The limitations which the deskilling discourse imposes upon the analysis of mechanisation can be clearly traced in Braverman's critique of conventional interpretations of process production and automation . There they underwrite his reliance on Bright's account of transformations in the worker-machine nexus with the secular advance of mechanisation, and overshadow any consideration of specific exigencies of accumulation and their interrelation with the forms of expertise, dexterity, responsibility and leverage embodied in the organisation of the collective labourer . The importance of developing a more complex account of the organisation of the labour process in process production, in which the latter questions would become central, can be indicated by examining a recent study which, unlike Braverman, focusses upon worker organisation and struggle . Nichols and Beynon provide an account of the organisation of the labour process, capitalist strategy and worker organisation in one chemicals complex during the last decade . They, like Braverman, frame their analysis of the labour process in terms of deskilling : both contrast the realities of labour in process production with the real skills of nineteenth century craftsmen and with the spurious sociological idealisations of the upgrading of skills in process production . However, in their account of the workplace they also go beyond the simple conception of deskilling to expose the complex and differentiated character of the apparatus of 'deskilled' collective labour produced by the accumulation strategies of one sector of 'modern industry', and the manner in which contradictory features of that apparatus pose problems for capital at particular junctures in the accumulation process . Their discussion emphasises : (i) the persistent significance of heavy manual labour in the shadow of highly capital intensive production, conditioned by the trade-off for capital between, on the one hand, the wage levels of the labourers and the capacity of capital to intensify that labour, and on the other the costs of investment and gains in production from further mechanisation ;



VALORISATION AND DESKI LLING

85

(ii) The development of job hierarchies, associated with specific production processes, in which forms of limited expertise and empirical skill are radically subordinated to the demands of valorisation . The experience of these workers is summarised thus : "they know their present job, for all its stresses and problems, is the 'best job I could hope for-being unskilled' . They have escaped the tyranny of the bagging line but they live with the fear that it is a temporary release . . . the operator who is paid for being able to operate a particular chemical process is well aware of the transient nature of his skills . These skills 'cannot be bought'-it 'takes years to really get to know one of these plants'-but equally, by their very nature, they are tied to the continuance of a particular chemical process".[52] and (iii) the growing importance, for capital, of engineering an active vigilance, responsibility and initiative among workers on its behalf, as a result of the increasing integration, interdependency, and capitalintensity of the production process . This requirement gains particular prominence as capital responds to increased international competition by intensifying the process of labour and cutting manning levels . This provides the crucial context for the authors' discussion of such capitalist initiatives as 'job enrichment', which may then be located as complex responses to the specific problems of valorisation and accumulation confronting this sector of capital, rather than being seen in generic terms as a qualification of, or retreat from, 'deskilling' .[53] Nichols and Beynon's account of the labour process invites an analysis of the manner in which the organisation of the apparatus of collective labour articulates with the exigencies and contradictions of accumulation, but they do not pursue the issue very far . They move rapidly on to a discussion of the character of struggle in production defined on one hand by developments in the labour process and on the other by the forms of accommodation to capital represented by national trade unionism and the organisation and ideology of 'Iabourism' .[54] Some of the issues which require more systematic discussion in an analysis of the labour process in this sector are suggested by another account of the organisation of 'skills', in oil refining : "The problem of inter-unit mobility was even more intractable . There was clearly good reason for management to encourage people to develop skills in handling jobs on different units . It made it much easier to cover illnesses, and the manpower shortfalls due to holidays . In each refinery there was a small group of workers that were officially polyvalent, that is to say, whose job was to fill gaps in different teams as the need arose, and they had to possess the range of skills necessary to do this . But the real aim of management was to create a much more general capacity for flexibility among those who were



86

CAPITAL & CLASS

normally attached to a particular unit . This seemed, however, to have run into a number of problems . On the one hand the question of payment for new skills once more raised its head in an even more acute form, on the other there seems to have been some reluctance on the part of older operatives to actually pass on their knowledge to other people . Finally, management itself accepted a considerable degree of responsibility for failing to provide enough time for adequate training. What seemed to have happened is that the size of the workforce had to be reduced to a point at which it was difficult to spare people from their everyday work ."[551 Here the contradictory pressures of capital for the ossification of specialised competencies, for the flexibility and general reliability of labour power, and for de-manning and intensification of work ; and the forms of resistance and struggle which workers develop around these contradictions, are sharply focussed as capital attempts to respond to a crisis of accumulation . In a period of rapid accumulation, on the basis of new technology, capital in this sector had moved towards the organisation of the collective labourer as series of specialised job hierarchies comparable to those discussed by Stone and Wilkinson, but a phase of increasing international competition has shifted capitalist strategy towards the intensifcation of labour and expulsion of workers from the industry . In this context, workers' struggles over manning and relocation have gained some limited leverage, both from their command over specific forms of quasiskills and from the more general susceptibility of integrated, highly capitalintensive plant to their non co-operation or disruption . Such an analysis of the development of the labour process in chemical process production constitutes an attempt to locate the specific and uneven character of the process characterised by Braverman and others as deskilling, in relation to the exigencies of valorisation and accumulation . In that sector capital has, for a period, cultivated residual forms of expertise organised in a manner which enhances their subordination to the requirements of accumulation, as well as developing a more general ideological offensive designed to engineer the forms of `responsibility' required by capital in the context of 'capital-intensive' production . The development of the labour process in motors represents a somewhat different variant of these features of mechanisation and struggle arising from the persistent transformation of the immediate process of production in response to exigencies of valorisation and accumulation . There the introduction of flow-line production, adopted throughout the industry during the 1920s and 1930s, had a massive impact in the displacement of skilled by semi-skilled workers during that period, as capital sought to reduce the turnover time of capital, to reduce the value of labour power and to intensify labour . In the post-war period the continuing advance of mechanisation and automation in motors has brought increasing productivity and a more tightly integrated flow production without further pronounced effects on the narrow and specialised tasks of the workers :



VALORISATION AND DESKILLING

87

"the replacement of the craftsmen on direct production work by semi-skilled operators was brought about by the mass production techniques of the 1930s . Consequently, the subsequent mechanisation has had little further effect on the composition of the direct labour force . The introduction of transfer machines for example, has meant that fewer semi-skilled machine operators are required to produce any output desired ; but the machines are still tended by semi-skilled operators".[ 561 Thus the post-war valorisation and accumulation strategies of capital in motors have not created a totally homogeneous unskilled stratum of workers but a mass of semi-skilled workers embodying a limited heterogeneity of forms of training and experience . This mass of semi-skilled work tasks has constituted a terrain on which major struggles have developed between capital and labour, both around attempts at the intensification of labour and around the structuring and advancement of wages . The increasing integration and capital intensity of production, as it has interplayed with the intensification of international competition in the industry, has led to recurrent attempts by capital to intensify production . Thus the previously quoted study of labour relations in the motor industry argues that "under the less mechanised and integrated production systems . . . superficially scientific methods of labour measurement still allow considerable room for shop-floor negotiation : the 'allowances' to be added to the 'elements' of which particular operations are composed, the 'effort-rating' of ' the workers studied, and even the 'elements' themselves, may all be adjusted to make a specified work load acceptable . The mechanisation of handling, however, combined particularly with the use of automatic data processing and other control devices, has very much reduced the margin of managerial uncertainty in workload assessment-and thus also reduced the area within which the 'effort bargaining' which is a major function of union workplace organisation can operate . At the same time, the high capital costs of the new equipments puts a considerable pressure on management to work it as intensively as possible, so that its own front in bargaining is likely to be stiffened . "[571 However it is not merely a question of the reduction of management uncertainty . Such developments, in the context of relatively full employment during the post-war boom, have also generated important sources of leverage for effective workplace worker organisations which can sometimes exploit the integration and capital intensity of the plant to effectively resist intensification and to recover some porosity in the working day . Thus, as Beynon argues in his important study of conflict on the frontier of control at Ford's Halewood plant "these controls over the job gained the operative a degree of autonomy from both supervision and higher management . Through their



CAPITAL & CLASS

88

steward they were able to regulate the distribution achieve a degree of job rotation within the section, and sub-assembly workers, in particular, were able to obtain schedules . But there were quite precise limits to the workers can run the section . " [ 58 ]

of overtime, occasionally `slack' work way in which

As Beynon has emphasised such precarious counter-controls cannot be understood through an analysis of developments in the labour process alone but must be seen in the wider contexts of both the post-war development of workplace union organisation and changes in class relations beyond production . One important component of the articulation of transformations in the labour process with these developments concerns the specific character of wages struggles in motors, which have involved attempts by capital to develop forms of grading and wage payment which most effectively compel the exercise of specific dexterity and experience to maximise intensity and productiveness, and attempts by workers, both sectionally and more generally, to adopt the rhetoric of 'skills' to gain skilled wages and conditions on the terrain of semi-skilled mass production . CONCLUSION Braverman's work has not merely 'completed' Baran and Sweezy's analysis of monopoly capitalism by extending it to embrace the labour process but has performed the more substantial service of returning attention more generally among Marxists to the study of the development of the capitalist labour process . My discussion has focussed on 'deskilling' as the major theme of Braverman's own return to that study . I have argued that it is necessary to advance beyond both the spurious concreteness of the generic impulse towards deskilling, which governs Braverman's account, and the truncated mode of formal analysis developed by the Brighton Labour Process Group, towards a historically located theorisation of the transformation of the capitalist labour process within which deskilling may be adequately located as a tendency . Such a theorisation, to which this paper serves only as a preliminary contribution, would explicitly locate the forms of transformation of the labour process in relation to phases of valorisation and accumulation, and trace their articulation with class relations beyond production . Only on that basis would it appear possible to develop an analysis of the labour process which will be of real value in the formulation of working class strategy and appropriate forms of political intervention in struggles within production .

NOTES The author teaches sociology at the University of Warwick . 1 This article is a revised version of papers read at the C .S .E . 1977 Annual Conference and at a B .S .A . Industrial Sociology Group conference on "Skill and the labour process" . I have benefitted from dis-



VALORISATION AND DESKILLING

2

3

4 5 6

7

89

cussion with members of the Warwick C .S .E . and Trade Unionism groups, and from comments by Bill Schwarz and John Humphreys . Early reviews of Braverman concentrated on exposition of his analysis while more recent reviews have developed more critical assessments . Among the major reviews are Heilbroner, 1975 ; Davies and Brodhead, 1975 ; de Kadt, 1975 ; Monthly Review, 1976 ; Young, 1976 ; Jacoby, 1977 ; Schwarz, 1977 ; Lazonick, 1977 ; Nichols, 1977 ; Coombes, 1978 ; Cutler, 1978 and MacKenzie, 1977 . Among examples of this criticism see in particular Schwarz, 1977 ; Jacoby, 1977 ; Coombes, 1978 ; Nichols, 1977 ; Palmer, 1975 ; Friedman, 1977 and MacKenzie, 1977 . See in particular Schwarz, 1977 ; Lazonick, 1977 ; Jacoby, 1977 ; Coombes, 1978 and Palmer, 1975 . Schwarz, 1977, p . 162 . His discussion of economism (LMC pp . 150-151) is underpinned by assumptions concerning the capacity of capital in the monopoly sector to finance wage gains out of monopoly superprofits, which clearly articulate with the position of Baran and Sweezy-see discussion below . Braverman, 1976, p . 124 . At one point in Labour and Monopoly Capital Braverman recognises working class self-activity outside production only to counterpose to it the total domination secured by capital through and within production : "This working class lives a social and political existence of its own, outside the direct grip of capital . It protests and submits, rebels or is integrated into bourgeois society, sees itself as a class or loses sight of its own existence, in accordance with the forces that act upon it and the moods, conjunctions and conflicts of social and political life . But since, in its permanent existence, it is the living part of capital, its occupational structure, modes of work, and distribution through the industries of society are determined by the ongoing processes of the accumulation of capital . It is seized, released, flung into various parts of the social machinery and expelled by others, not in accord wtih its own will or self-activity, but in accord with the movement of capital ." (LMC p . 378)

8

LMC pp . 53-54, where the discussion of accumulation in Marx (1 976a) and Baran and Sweezy (1966) is footnoted . Braverman provides a casual reference to the predominance of absolute surplus value in the earliest stages of capitalist production (p . 45), and a brief discussion of the significance of relative surplus value in the context of commentary upon the scientific and technical transformation of the capitalist labour process (p . 70) but they do not constitute an integral part of his analysis of the degradation of work . As Braverman conceptualises deskilling in generic terms of capitalist control he has no need to elaborate an analysis of valorisation and accumulation, and merely acknowledges en passant the analysis of Baran and Sweezy (1966) . However he nowhere repudiates their concept of the surplus . Jacoby,



90

CAPITAL & CLASS

1977, p . 200 claims that "Braverman parts from Baran and Sweezy in their most 'revisionist' concept-their concept of surplus" and returns to the orthodox concept of surplus value, but this rests upon a misreading of another distinction drawn by Braverman, between his preoccupation with movements of the surplus labouring population and Baran and Sweezy's focus on the surplus . (see J acoby, 1977 p . 200, quoting LMC p . 255) 9 The analysis developed by Marx, 1976b, makes explicit the theori-, sation of the transformation of the labour process from its inherited form to a form appropriate to capital accumulation-from 'formal' to 'real' subordination of the labour process to capital-in a manner hardly visible in Capital itself . However it is only in Capital that the transformation of the labour process is effectively related to the limits and contradictions besetting specific phases of . valorisation and accumulation . 10 This is implied in Marx's caution concerning the ideological and organisational features of skill within the developed capitalist labour process : "The distinction between higher and simple labour, 'skilled labour' and 'unskilled labour' rests in part upon pure illusion, or, to say the least, on distinctions that have long since ceased to be real, and that survive only by virtue of a traditional convention ; in part on the helpless condition of some sections of the working class, a condition that prevents them from exacting equally with the rest the value of their labour power. Accidental circumstances here play so great a part that these two forms of labour sometimes change places ." (Marx, 1976a, p . 305, footnote) 11 Some commentators, . for instance Mandel in his introduction to Marx, 1976b, p . 944, identify real subordination with mechanisation and modern industry while manufacture is identified with formal subordination. While Marx clearly considers modern industry as the culmination of `real subordination' it is also clear that the manufacturing division of labour represents a form of 'real subordination' . Thus Marx, 1976b, argues that : "The real subsumption of labour under capital is developed in all the forms evolved by relative as opposed to absolute surplus value . With the real subsumption of labour under capital a complete (and constantly repeated) revolution takes place in the mode of production, in the productivity of the workers and in the relations between workers and capitalists ." (p . 1034) and "The social productive forces of labour, or the productive forces of directly social, socialised (collective) labour come into being through co-operation, division of labour within the workshop, the use of machinery, and in • general the transformation of the production by the conscious use of the sciences, of machines, chemistry, etc . for



VALORISATION AND DESKILLING

91

specific ends, technology etc ., and similarly, through the enormous increase in scale corresponding to such developments." (p . 1024 and see also the discussion on pp . 1054-1055)

12

13

14 15

This conceptualisation underlines the central significance of scale and development of a complex apparatus of collective labour as well as machinery in Marx's analysis of the mystification of the capital relation arising through the real subordination of labour and the labour process to capital . It should be noted that this usage is carried over into Capital itself, both in the organisation of the material under the heading of the 'Production of Relative Surplus Value', and in the occasional specific usage of the notion of real subordination (e .g. Marx, 1976a, pp . 448, 453, 481 and Marx, 1972, p . 236 where reference is made to "the more or less imperfect subordination of labour to capital".) The specific place of the 'intensification' of labour in the analyses of Absolute and Relative Surplus Value is ambiguous in some respects, but must primarily be located as an element of Relative Surplus Value production . See the discussion of Palloix, 1976, in footnote 23 . In this context Marx's celebrated discussion of the contradictions between specialisation and the flexible development of human competences in modern industry (Marx, 1976a, pp . 614-619) cannot be interpreted only as a contrast between capitalist reality and potential forms of the organisation of labour in a socialist society, nor only as a contrast between forced specialisation of labour powers within the capitalist factory and the crippling obsolescence of such specialisation when the labourer is thrown out of employment, but also as a contradiction besetting the capitalist organisation of the labour process itself in relation to the pursuit of valorisation . Brighton Labour Process Group 1976, 1977 . Thus they emphasise that: "It is important to note that when Marx talks of the development of the productive forces he explicitly does not refer solely to the development of the technical basis of production . The development of the productive forces that is the basis for the real subordination of labour to capital is a development of both the objective conditions of labour, and of the social combinations of labour . The capitalist labour process cannot be specified on the basis of its technological components . But also note that it cannot be specified on the basis of the relation established within it between the individual worker and the instruments of production . It can only be specified as a particular form of organisation of labour, a form which is a specific form of coercion and the realisation on an adequate basis of the objective of valorisation ." Brighton Labour Process Group, 1977, p . 6 .

16 Ibid . On deskilling and job enlargement pp . 19-20 and for a sharp statement of the argument concerning the lodging of skills within a large-scale collective labour process, p . 11 .



92

CAPITAL & CLASS

17

Ibid, p . 23 . The paper is prefaced and concluded by clear statements of the 'level of analysis' adopted . Note, however, the rather different form of abstraction, including accumulation, adopted by Palloix . 18 Thus they argue that :

19

20

21

22 23

"There is still a relationship between labour and the conditions of labour within production which provides labour with a degree of control and hence with a lever with which to enforce its class objectives which may, of course, be different from those of the fully developed proletarian labour of the mature capitalist mode of production ." Ibid, pp . 6-7 . Thus they note, on the one hand, that "capital, having a monopoly of knowledge and power over the relations between labour and the means of production, uses this power, this real domination, in order to enforce the objective of valorisation", while, on the other, they remark that "this relation of capital to labour is not a static one, but is constantly reproduced in new conditions, it is the site of constantly renewed class struggle" . Ibid, pp . 13 and 11 respectively . Indeed, despite the slogan 'valorisation in command', the extraction of relative surplus value is given the same analytical status as mechanisation or large-scale production in the characterisation of real subordination, rather than being understood as the strategic objective which is pursued through these related forms . See p . 9 . Cutler, 1978 . In addition the Brighton paper explicitly locates distinctive forms of working class demands and struggle characteristic of the phase of formal subordination, as noted above, in a manner which contradicts Cutler's claim . I cannot, within the limits of this paper, confront the underlying grounds of Cutler's criticism in the repudiation of the labour theory of value by Cutler et al . 1978 . Palloix, 1976 . All comments refer to this translation . I have abstracted what I take to be the core of Palloix's argument from a text which in translation remains sometimes rather opaque . Palloix, 1976, p. 56 . Palloix's conceptualisation of aspects of valorisation diverges from that of Marx, as sketched out earlier, in that the production of absolute surplus value is made to embrace the extension of the working day and intensification of labour/reduction of porosity while relative surplus value is identified solely with technical transformations which ultimately reduce the value of labour power . (Palloix also, somewhat confusingly, terms absolute and relative surplus value extensive and intensive surplus respectively .) Despite certain ambiguities Marx's treatment of intensification is clearly at variance with that adopted by Palloix as is shown in the following explicit formulation : "Once the capitalist mode of production has become the established and universal mode of production, the difference between absolute and relative surplus value makes itself felt whenever there is a question of raising the rate of surplus-value . Assuming that labour power is paid for at its value, we are confronted with this alternative : on the one



VALORISATION AND DESKILLING

93

hand, if the productivity of labour and its normal degree of intensity is given, the rate of surplus value can be raised only by prolonging the working day in absolute terms ; on the other hand, if the length of the working day is given, the rate of surplus value can be raised only by a change in the relative magnitutes of the components of the working day, i .e . necessary labour and surplus labour . . . this change presupposes a change in either the productivity or intensity of the labour ." (Marx, 1976a, p . 646, and see also the discussion on pp . 533-534) While this represents a clear difference of conceptualisation it is less one of substance than of analytical focus . In this context Marx clearly treats as the crucial differentiating feature of relative from absolute surplus value the fact that a transformation of the labour process is integral to both increasing productiveness and this phase of the intensification of work (thus it remains appropriate to treat porosity in the context of formal subordination as a form of absolute surplus value production), while for Palloix the dominant considerations are the distinctive manner in which productivity of labour is related to the circuit of accumulation, and the similar manner in which working class resistance may confront both the extension of the working day and the intensification of work . The implication of these different emphases is only that Palloix's discussion of valorisation and accumulation within modern industry is conceptualised in terms of the relation of absolute and relative surplus value production whereas Marx analyses the relation of intensification and productivity as aspects within the form of relative surplus value . At the same time Palloix acknowledges the co-relation of productivity and intensity which is the basis of Marx's conceptualisation : "The intensification of work involves reducing the amount of time during which labour power produces no value . It thus promotes the production of an extensive (absolute) surplus . But this form of production of an extensive (absolute) surplus, linked to mass production, is necessarily related to the production of an intensive (relative) surplus . Nevertheless, the limits of the production of an extensive (absolute) surplus are determined by the resistance of the working class to the intensification of the system of work ." (Palloix, 1976, p . 50) 24 Palloix, 1976, pp . 49-50 . The first point seems to displace Marx's discussion of the role of transient gains for individual capitals based on reduction of labour-time below the social average . It should be noted, however, that Marx sometimes treats as analogous 'exceptionally productive labour' and 'intensified labour' . See Marx, 1976, p . 435 . 25 lbid, p . 54 . 26 Mandel, 1975 . 27 For a sympathetic critique see Rowthorne, 1976 . While Rowthorne



94

CAPITAL & CLASS emphasises the value of Mandel's attempt to develop an historically located account of the complex interplay of fundamental processes implicated in the accumulation of capital he is critical of - Mandel's too ready reliance on rising organic composition/falling rate of profit arguments, both theoretically and in relation to post-war capitalist development . This he relates to an incipient technicism in Mandel's account of waves of technical innovation which, despite his treatment of the reserve army of labour, gives insufficient attention to the structural mediation of technical innovation in state and capital's strategy . As Rowthorne recognises these important criticisms do not undermine the value of Mandel's contribution as outlined in the text .

28 29

30

31

32 33

34

For brief comments on Braverman's conceptualisation of the reserve army of labour see below pp . 24-26 . See Sweezy, 1942 ; Baran and Sweezy, 1965 ; and Sweezy, 1974 . For critiques see Mandel, 1575, esp . chapter 17 ; Gamble and Walton, 1976, chapters 3-4 ; and also Rowthorne's critique of Mandel which underlines the point that the critics should not and need not rest their case on a mechanical invocation of rising organic composition/falling rate of profit arguments (see also Fine and Harris, 1976) . It is worth adding that these strictures do nothing to undermine the emphasis Baran and Sweezy place on the increasing centrality of advertising and marketing strategies for oligopolistic capitalism, or Braverman's related analysis of the elaboration of this part of the corporate apparatus and personnel, in LMC, chapter 12 . LMC, chapters 10, 11 and esp . 17 . See Beechey, 1977, who develops an analysis of the specificity of female wage labour in capitalist production . Mandel, 1975, esp . chapter 5 ; see also Rosdolsky, 1977, pp . 282-313 . As Jacoby, 1977, notes, many American socialists have adopted a `dual labour market' theory to address such systematic divisions within the working class . Most such analyses of dual labour markets have been merely descriptive taxonomies, limited to (a) the characterisation of employer strategies of labour-market segmentation designed, for example, to secure the stability of a pool of trained and experienced workers ; as (b) such strategies articulate with, and amplify, pregiven divisions within the working class . Marxian authors have made some attempt to integrate and qualify such taxonomies by locating them within the process of capital accumulation (see Gordon, 1971, and Edwards, 1975) but such syntheses have tended to identify dualism directly with the contrast between monopoly and competitive sectors of capital, and to treat hierarchisation simply as a strategy of ideological division, thus loosing sight of the dynamic and contradictions of such strategies for capital, and the terrain this provides for class struggle . Rubery (1978} provides a valuable assessment of these different approaches to the analysis of the internal differentiation of the working class, and begins to discuss the manner in which such differentiation develops in class struggle . She emphasises the central role of sectional worker organisation, but also attempts to locate that sectionalism in the interplay between (i) established forms of worker



VALOR/SAT/ON AND DESKI LL/NG

95

organisation, and (ii) the terrain of struggle afforded by capital's strategies of transformation of the labour process . (See also footnote

51 .) 35

36 37

38

39 40 41

42 43 44

45

For a vivid account of the realities of subordination inherent in the reorganisation of craft work under the auspices of capitalist manufacture, see McKendrick, 1961 . . Foster, 1974, esp . chapter 7 . Stedman-Jones, 1975, p . 65 . It should be obvious that I agree with Stedman-Jones that the notion of the 'labour aristocracy' does not, in itself, constitute an analysis, but is rather, a label for a nexus of interrelations between labour process, phases of accumulation, and working class politics and culture . Moorhouse (1978) provides a hostile assessment of attempts to develop an analysis of the 'labour aristocracy', which usefully summarises the problems, and emphasises in particular (a) the number of different accounts of this nexus on offer, and (b) the problematical character of the relation between working class politics and developments in the labour process . However, on the basis of this argument he seeks to absorb the debate into general analyses of working class sectionalism and the cultural hegemony of capital, in a manner which denies the evident significance of vertical divisions, between skilled and quasi-skilled workers and non-skilled workers, as a basis for cultural and political divisions . Hinton, 1971, esp . chapter 2 . In addition Burgess, 1975, provides a useful account of the phases of development over the whole second half of the nineteenth century, and Burgess, 1969, focusses on the transformation in engineering in mid-century . Turner, 1962, pp . 110-112 . Stone, 1973, quotation from p . 47 . Wilkinson, 1977 . Rubery (1978) provides a more explicit critique of Stone than Wilkinson along the lines suggested by his account . See also the critical comments by Palmer (1975) p . 31 . Hobsbawm, 1964, quotation from p . 170 . Samuel, 1977, quotation from p . 59 . Though lack of space precludes further discussion, it should be noted that a valuable aspect of Braverman's analysis of Taylorism is his account of the development of a corporate apparatus of planning and control (LMC esp . chapters 5, 15 and 18) . However, it is doubtful whether the notion of a shrinking elite of conceptualisers counterposed to a mass of deskilled clerical labourers constitutes an adequate basis for the analysis of that apparatus . Hobsbawm, 1964, quotation from p . 356 . See also Landes, 1969,

pp . 301-323 . 46 Sohn-Rethel, 1976, 1978 . 47 Palmer, 1975, quotation from p . 32. 48 Montgomery, 1976, and the commentary by Green, 1976, who emphasises the parochial character of the control demands of craft groups, and the preoccupation with wages and effort among the semi-skilled . 49 Palmer's discussion of Braverman has been characterised by deKadt



96

CAPITAL & -CLASS

(1976) in terms of the distinct levels of analysis at which they have worked : Braverman at the most general level of the logic of capital, and Palmer at the more particular level of specific forms of worker resistance and diverse employers' strategies . Palmer (1976) seems to accept this characterisation and equate it with the distinct preoccupations of political economists (laws of motion) and social historians (resistance and struggle of the 'losers'), adding only that the later constitutes a countervailing logic which qualifies the former . However, this concedes too much, both in general and in relation to aspects of Palmer's argument: the bases and forms of resistance must themselves be theorised in relation to the dynamic of accumulation if class (resistance and struggle of the 'losers'), adding only that the latter struggle is to be analysed as integral to the laws of motion of capital, and not be merely tacked on at the end . 50 Hyman, 1971, pp . 40-41 and p. 70 . See also Fox, 1958, pp . 359-360 for related observations on changes in the organisation of narrow skills in the boot and shoe industry . 51 Rubery (1978) offers a useful analysis of the bases of bargaining leverage among semi-skilled workers in mechanised production . She emphasises that : "the development of capitalism not only presents problems for worker control and organisation, inducing defensive tactics on the part of existing trade union organisations, but also offers new opportunities for organisation . Thus the development of machine technology may to some extent have undermined the skilled union's basis for organisation and control but, by transforming much unskilled labour into semi-skilled labour or, rather, by increasing the proportion of the labour force directly involved in the mechanised production process, it increased the bargaining power of a large section of the labour force . Semi-skilled workers were now in control of a greater volume of production, and further represented a threat to some skilled workers as the real skill differential declined, thus forcing some skilled unions to recruit semi-skilled workers, whilst in other industries organisation of semi-skilled workers proceeded independently ." Ibid, p . 30. This focus on the bargaining terrain afforded by mechanisation must clearly be seen in relation to changes in the reserve army, of labour, but appears more satisfactory than Friedman's (1977) almost total reliance on the 'drying up of the active reserve army' as a basis for analysing worker resistance among the less skilled . 52 Nichols and Beynon, 1977, quotation from p . 23 . 53 This suggests that neither deskilling nor 'responsible autonomy' (see Friedman, 1977) can adequately be analysed as generic control strategies . For a critical assessment of Friedman see Schwarz, 1978 . 54 Indeed, the authors move on so rapidly that they make little attempt to theorise their discussion of the labour process, so that, inevitably, their treatment of the tactics of worker organisation remains only



VALORISATION AND DESKILLING

97

tenuously related to that discussion . 55 Gallie, 1978, p . 80 . 56 Turner et al . 1967, chapter 3, quotation from p . 86 . The authors also note that the numbers of somewhat skilled indirect workers have increased . 57 Turner et al . 1967, p . 92 . 58 Beynon, 1973, p . 148 .

REFERENCES Baran, P . and Sweezy, P ., 1966, Monopoly Capital, Penguin, Harmondsworth . Braverman, H ., 1974, Labour and Monopoly Capital, Monthly Review Press, New York . Braverman, H ., 1976, "Two Comments", Monthly Review, 28, 3 . Beechey, V ., 1977, "Some Notes on Female Wage Labour in Capitalist Production" Capital and Class, 3 . Brighton Labour Process Group, 1976, "Production Process of Capital and Capitalist Labour Process", C .S.E . Conference Paper . Brighton Labour Process Group, 1977, "The Capitalist Labour Process", Capital and C/ass, 1 . Beynon, H ., 1973, Working for Ford, Penguin, Harmondsworth (republished by E .P . Publishing, 1975) . Burgess, K ., 1975, The Origins of Industrial Relations in Great Britain, Croom Helm, London . Burgess, K ., 1969, "Technological change and the 1852 Lockout in the British Engineering Industry", Int. J. Soc. Hist. 14, pt . 2 . Coombes, R ., 1978, "Labor and Monopoly Capital", N.L .R. 107 . Cutler, T ., 1978, "The Romance of 'Labour', Economy and Society, 7, 1 . Cutler, T . et al, 1978, Marx's Capital and Capitalism Today, Routledge Kegan Paul, London. Davies, M ., and Brodhead, F ., 1975, "Labour and Monopoly Capital : A Review", Radical America 9 . deKadt, M ., 1976, "The Importance of Distinguishing Between Levels of Generality" Review of Radical Political Economy . 7, 1 . Edwards, R .C., 1975, "The Social Relations of Production in the Firm and Labor Market Structure", Politics and Society . Friedman, A ., 1977, Industry and Labour, MacMillan, London . Friedman, A ., 1977, "Responsible Autonomy versus Direct Control over the Labour Process", Capital and Class 1 . Fine, B ., and Harris, L ., 1976, "Controversial Issues in Marxist Economic Theory", Socialist Register . Foster, J ., 1974, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London . Fox, A ., 1958, A History of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives, Basil Blackwell, Oxford . Gallie, D ., 1978, In Search of the New Working Class, Cambridge U .P . Gamble, A . and Walton, P ., 1976, Capitalism in Crisis, MacMillan, London .



98

CAPITAL & CLASS

Gordon, D .M ., 1972, Theories of Poverty and Underemployment Lexington Books, Lexington . Green, J ., 1974, "Comments on Montgomery", Journal of Social History . Heilbroner, J ., 1971, "Men at Work", New York Review of Books . Hinton, J ., 1971, The first Shop Stewards Movement, Allen Unwin, London . Hobsbawm, E ., 1964, Labouring Men, Weidenfeld, London . Hyman, R ., 1971, The Workers Union, Oxford U .P . Jacoby, R ., 1977, "Review of Braverman", Telos . Landes, D .S ., 1969, The Unbound Prometheus, Cambridge U .P . Lazonick, W ., 1977 "The Appropriation and Reproduction of Labor", Socialist Revolution, 38 . MacKenzie, G ., 1977, "The Political Economy of the American Working Class", B/S . Mandel, E ., 1975 ; Late Capitalism, N .L .B . London . Marx, K ., 1976a, Capital I, Penguin, London . Marx, K ., 1976b, "Results of the Immediate Process of Production", in Marx (1976a) . Marx, K ., 1972, Capital Ill, Lawrence and Wishart, London . McKendrick, N ., 1961, "Josiah Wedgewood and Factory Discipline", Historical Journal . Montgomery, D ., 1974, "The `New Unionism' and the Transformation of Workers Consciousness in America, 1909-1922", journal of Social History. Monthly Review, 1976, Special issue on "Technology, the Labor Process and the Working Class" . Moorhouse, H ., "The Marxist theory of the labour aristocracy" Social History . Nichols, T ., 1977, "Labour and Monopoly Capital", Sociological Review . Nichols, T ., and Beynon, H., 1977, Living with Capitalism : Class Relations and the Modern Factory, Routledge Kegan Paul, London . Palmer, B ., 1975, "Class, Conception and Conflict : The Thrust for Efficiency, Managerial Views of Labour, and the Working Class Rebellion, 1903-1922" Review of Radical Political Economy, 7, 2 . Palmer, B ., 1976, "Political Economists, Historians and Generalisation" Review of Radical Political Economy . Palloix, C ., 1976, "The labour process : from Fordism to neo-Fordism" in The Labour Process and Class Strategies, C .S .E . Pamphlet 1, London . Rodsolsky, R ., 1977, The Making of Marx's 'Capital', Pluto Press, London . Rowthorne, B ., 1976, "'Late Capitalism"' N.L.R . 98 . Rubery, J ., 1978, "Structured labour markets, worker organisation and low pay" Cambridge journal of Economics . Samuel, R ., 1977, "The Workshop of the World : Steam Power and Hand Technology in mid-Victorian Britain", History Workshop 3 . Sohn-Rethel, A., 1978, Intellectual and Manual Labour, MacMillan, London . Sohn-Rethel, A ., 1976, "The Dual Economics of Transition" in The Labour Process and Class Strategies C .S .E . Pamphlet 1, London .



VALORISATION AND DESKILLING

99

Stedman-Jones, G ., 1975, "Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution" N.L .R. Stone, K ., 1973, "The Origins of Job Structures in the Steel Industry", Radical America . Schwarz, B ., 1977, "On the Monopoly Capitalist Degradation of Work", Dialectical Anthropology, 2, 2 . Schwarz, B ., 1978, "Friedman's Frontier of Control" (mimeo) . Sweezy, P ., 1942, -Theory of Capitalist Development, Monthly Review Press, New York . Sweezy, P ., 1974, "Some Problems in the Theory of Capital Accumulation", Monthly Review . Turner, H . A., 1962, Trade Union Growth, Structure and Policy Allen and Unwin, London . Turner, H . A. et al ., 1967, Labour Relations in the Motor Industry, Allen and Unwin, London . Wilkinson, F ., 1977, "Collective Bargaining in the Steel Industry in the 1920s" in Briggs, A ., and Saville, J . (eds.) Essays in Labour History, 1918-1939. Young, B ., 1976, "Review of Braverman" Radical Science journal.

International Socialism 2 :1

Irene Bruegel

0

International Socialism

is a new quarterly journal of socialist theory produced by the Socialist Workers Party .

Institutional £5

OVERSEAS

Surface Airmail

the family

Colin Barker The State as Capital

Norah Carlin

SUBSCRIPTION RATES (FOR FOUR ISSUES)

UK AND EIRE- £3

What keeps going?

£3 .60 £4.90

International Socialism PO Box 82, London, E2 9DS

£5 .60 £6.90

Medieval Workers and the Permanent Revolution

Martin Shaw Back to the Maginot Line : Harman's New Gramsci

Ian Birchall The Spectre of Zhdanov

Chris Harman Mandel's `Late Capitalism'