09/28/2011

class structures generate rules of reproduction.

in capitalism, capitalists have to find and utilize labour to produce commodities that they have to sell, competitively, on the market.

workers have to find employment, and submit to the authority of capitalists for a given period of time (to some extent).

this process pits these two classes against one another, generating antagonisms.

'labor and monopoly capital' virtually started labour process theory. this was an enormously influential book.

the labour process is common to all social structures. defined as the way in which workers and means of production are put together, to produce goods. has a validity across MoP. in class societies, this can always be divided into necessary labour, and surplus labour.

but there's something distinctive about capitalism. prior to capitalism, the weight of the surplus component is limited by the necessary component; the surplus component is a residual. this is because of (1) weakly developed productive forces; (2) in all pre-capitalist societies, the guiding motif is use-values—what is produced is geared to 'needs' of producing classes [is this the best way to cash this out? shouldn't it, instead, be in terms of what producers can be forced to do? because there are always imperatives to increase surplus]

in other words, the surplus is not driven by the immediate needs of the surplus class to produce a profit—they will need military expenditure, and they will need things to consume—but neither of these imperatives place a significant weight on the direct producers. [a 'weak compulsion' argument (which is different from Brenner's arguments about feudalism, which is more of an 'incapacity to compel' argument]

in capitalism, all the emphasis is on the valorization process—the labour process is now subjugated to it.

these carries two consequences

1. now, the capitalist is not merely trying to extract surplus labour—but he's trying to extract it to the maximum level possible.
2. moreover, the capitalist wants to extract surplus at levels of efficiency that enable him to compete effectively.

in other words—capitalists try to get workers to work as long and as hard as possible in order to successfully compete.

once the capitalist takes control of the labour process and tries to extract labour at a competitive level, it generates a conflict. the drive to rationalize the labour process invariably induces a response, to resist.

this is the crucial precondition for the resort to managerial authority. managers exist for one basic reason—workers don't do what capitalists want them to do, absent being told to. workers are not fundamentally driven by the competitive logic that drives capitalists.

managers have to find ways to reduce workers' resistance to the change of the labour process and technological change—and the way they do this is by removing their control over work. one example of this, of course, is through the breaking of the monopoly of knowledge that workers have over their work (vivek arguing that breaking monopoly of knowledge is an instance of a more generic drive to seize control; otherwise unduly highlighted in the literature, instead of this more important fact of seizing control).

this is the source of 'de-skilling'. in some ways, this isn't the best term—what he means, more, is the 'breaking down' of tasks, within a workplace. as tasks are broken down, workers will require less skills, of course. BUT, this should not be mistaken as a secular tendency towards de-skilling, at the general level of the economy. Braverman's argument is cashed out at the level of the job/task, not the level of the economy.

the issue of resistance—Braverman is often accused of ignoring resistance of workers to technical change. (1) this misundertands the object of Braverman's work—he isn't predicting an inevitable outcome. he's simply trying to theorize capitalism's drive to break down the labour process. resistance introduces ineterminacy, OK; (2) moreover, empirically—the basic fact is that capitalism has won.

the goal of theory is not to make you feel better about the world. one has to understand how capitalism works; except in very exceptional circumstances, for short periods of time, capitalists win. 'if everything was contingent, we wouldn't need socialism.'

is Foucault like Braverman? first, Foucault doesn't have a theory—no explanation of where a 'disciplinary' drive comes from. for Braverman, its Capital; for Foucault, doesn't exist. second, Braverman's normative/descriptive framework has some understanding of what human flourishing is, what human interests are. this is what it means for this to be a 'degradation' of work. Foucault's entire project is driven by the denial of human interests.

in Foucault's ontology, the human agent is the consequence of power structures. whereas for Braverman, we are confronting humans, with interests, stuck in power structures.

re: racism, two distinct claims: (1) capitalism everywhere generates racism; (2) race/racism is integral to capitalism, when describing it at the highest level of abstraction.

it doesn't follow that you can abstract away from gendered/racialized identities to understand the real world. although, of course, we are staking importance in our abstract model—we think capitalism's drives exist everywhere and importantly independent of any given culture. we think it explains the world—re: race, we think it explains the terrain that generates racism (in other words, we don't give it theoretical priority—its not the 'base'), and on which we will have to fight our anti-racist struggle.

see Jane Humphries RRPE on women's oppression

abstract labour is not a different kind of labour, from concrete labour—labour is always and everywhere concrete.