Abstract
The power and scope of large-scale industry among advanced capitalist societies have it incredibly difficult for us to imagine a different mode of material production. We are all convinced that artisanship in our epoch is merely a form of bourgeois ideology, whose effect, if not intention, is to foster illusions of mobility among workers, and to create an artificial hierarchy within the labor process. The few instances of handicraft that remain in our social world are considered to be so marginal that we have learned to take for granted the mechanization of the labor process and its consequences for the transformation of the content of labor.
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Notes
For an interesting convergence on the question of autonomy of the forces of production, compare Karl Kautsky, Class Struggle, especially part IV (New York, 1971), with Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, first published as a section of his History of the CPSU (B) and subsequently reprinted in pamphlet form. In both treatments of the theory of social revolution, the concept of the irreconcilability of the forces of production and the capitalist relations of production is seen as a driving force for socialist transformation. However, the forces of production are viewed by both as subversive to capitalist relations, because they have been socialized and represent the accumulation of human labor, including its form as knowledge. In this perspective, capitalism fetters the productive forces, which seek room to develop under a system of socialized property. (Stalin referred to this process as the cunning of history, an adaptation of Hegel’s concept of the cunning of reason, which, however repressed, becomes the unifying force of historical development.)
Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971);
Alvin Gouldner, Dialectic of Technology and Ideology (New York: Seabury Press, 1976); Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press);
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977);
Jean Baudrillard, Mirror of Production (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975).
See Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Seabury Press, 1972); and
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964);
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Consciousness Industry (New York: Seabury Press. 1974), Chap. 1;
Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modem World (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).
Among the most recent work in this area, see especially Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1974); and Ralph Miliband, State in Capitalist Society (New York: Pantheon Books). The Miliband-Poulantzas debate on certain points of the theory of the state does not obviate their essential agreement on its integrative functions. Following Louis Althusser, Poulantzas expands the concept of the state to include the family and trade unions. These “ideological apparatuses” of the state function to preserve the rule of capital by penetrating the sphere of working-class activity that was once autonomous. We cannot explore the theoretical underpinnings of this view here, but it suffices to point out that the Althusserians advance a mechanism of subsumption, which is at once novel and depressing when they insist that ideology is a material practice. Since bourgeois ideas are hegemonic in capitalist society, their materialization within the public and private spheres of working-class life extends the rule of capital beyond the workplace or the institutions of repression, such as the police and courts. Miliband adopts the thesis of capitalist integration exemplified in the ability of the modern state to accommodate working-class demands for reform, even at the structural level, including the possibility that labor and socialist parties may manage the capitalist state.
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York; Monthly Review Press, 1974);
Steve Marglin, “What do Bosses Do?” in Andre Gorz, editor, The Division of Labor, (London: Harvester Press, 1976); Kathy Stone, “Origin of Job Structures in the Steel Industry” in RRPE, Summer 1974; and Andre Gorz, “Technology, Technicians and the Class Snuggle” in Gorz, ed., op. cit.
Antonio Gramsci’s “Americanism and Fordism” in Selections from Prison Notebooks, edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
Karl Marx, Contribution to Critique of Political Economy, translated by N. Stone, (Chicago: Charles Kerr Co., 1904).
See Frederick Fleron, editor, Technology and Communist Culture (New York: Praeger, 1977); particularly Andrew Feenberg’s “Transition or Convergence: Communism and the Paradox of Development,” where he argues that technology transfer does not automatically imply the convergence of capitalism and socialism, because socialism has its cultural autonomy that mediates the ideological impact of technology.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse, (London: Penguin Books, 1973).
B. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961).
Louis Althusser, For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster (New York: Vintage Books, 1970).
Georg Simmel, Philosophie Des Geides (Leipsig: 1900);
Franz Borkenau, Studies in the History of the Period of Manufacture (in German) (Paris: 1934). Simmel’s book, which has never been translated into English except fragments in several anthologies of his writings, must be rated as among the masterpieces of the theory of reification, which has influenced Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, and was itself an important addition to the critique of bourgeois culture, albeit from a non-Marxist, neo-Kantian perspective. I have not read Borkenau’s book.
Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Karl Marx, Surveys From Exile: Political Writings, volume 2, edited by David Fernbach (New York: Vintage Books, 1974). See especially part 7, p. 239, where Marx offers the only “defni-tion” of class under capitalism in his work.
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, (Boston: Beacon Press. 1964). While Marcuse seems often too impressed by the degree to which technology has become a social force sui generis, his description of the transformation of critical reason into instrumental technical thought—in which, among other things, language as discourse is pressed into the service of domination—is an important concretization of the thesis of real subsumption.
Henri Lefebvre, The Explosion (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 7.
See Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises (New York: Hill, 1973), chapter 1.
Charles Walker, Steeltown (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950);
Steve Packard, Steelmill Blues (San Pedro: Singlejack Books, 1978).
They are David Brody, Steelworkers in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960);
John Fitch, Steelworkers (reprinted, New York: Arno Press, 1969); and
William T. Hogan, Economic History of the Iron and Steel Industry in the United States (five volumes) (Lexington: D. D. Heath Co., 1971).
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© 2015 Stanley Aronowitz
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Aronowitz, S. (2015). Marx, Braverman, and the Logic of Capital. In: Against Orthodoxy. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137387189_10
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