Symposium on Braverman

Comments by Leo Panitch

I want to begin with a couple of comments on what Braverman has

accomplished. I think this is important because although Burawoy

began his paper and his talk with praise of Braverman, by the time he's

through with him, he's dragged him through what Marx would call the

"muck"

.

Now, all of this puts me in an odd position because I have

criticisms of Braverman's work. I was struck, in coming into this

room, by a resemblance to a court-chamber--the way we're sitting here,

the way you're sitting there. And as I read Burawoy's critique of

Braverman, I had the feeling that what was being engaged in here was

a prosecution and that willy-nilly I was being cast into the role of

the defence attorney. Therefore, you may have to excuse me if what I

say sounds like that to some extent, if I have to occasionally bring

evidence into court, that is, the odd quotation, in order to salvage

Braverman from the critique which we just heard..

In order to counter the critique, I think one has to note

Braverman's achievements, the ones that haven't been noted. First of

all, Braverman has brought us back to a proper appreciation of what

Marx meant by the tendency to emiseration. Those embourgeoisement

theorists who thought that Marx meant by this the increasing material

impoverishment of workers simply did not know what they were talking

about. On the contrary, Marx saw capitalism as constantly, through

its restless striving after the general forms of wealth, driving labour

out beyond the limits of its natural needs and producing the material

elements needed for the development of the rich individuality-

replacing natural needs with needs that were historically produced.

In other words, capital was itself constantly redefining subsistence

at higher levels. What emiseration meant for Marx in this context was

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something different. It was what Braverman describes as the degrad-

ation of work, and Marx put it extremely well in turns of capitalists

establishing "the accumulation of misery corresponding to the accumu-

lation of capital". And what he means by that is the accumulation of

wealth at one pole is therefore at the same time the accumulation of

misery expressed in Marx's terms as "the agony of toil, slavery,

ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole, i.e.

on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of

capital". That's what Marx meant by the tendency to emiseration, and

what Braverman has done is salvage this definition for our own time.

Well, Braverman also has done more than this, and one of the

ways in which people who look at Braverman have done him injustice

is that they see the book as a book on the labour process. It's much

more than that, its central core, its intent, to begin with, was to

identify the structure of the working class, and the manner in which

it had changed. If you read the first page of Braverman's introduction,

that's what he set out to do. He makes it clear that in the process

of trying to look at occupational shifts, that is, between occupations

and within occupations, he became aware of a contradiction in the

literature between an argument that went something to the effect that

modern work required higher levels of education, training, mental

effort, etc., and a simultaneous argument that work was subdivided into

petty tasks, petty operations, that are mundane, alienating, and so on.

Braverman found no attempt to reconcile those two processes. So he

began to look for a dynamic which would explain the evolution of labour

processes within occupations as well as between them, and this led him

to stress the evolution of management and technology, of the modern

corporation as well as of social structure. He found himself doing a

history of the capitalist mode of production over the last hundred

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Symposium on Braverman

years. But this does not mean that his central concern was lost in the

process. It's no accident that the last third of the book is

concerned with the mapping-out of the structure of the modern

working class, in the context of his examination of the dynamics of

proletarianization. He arrives at Part IV, at this point, and what he

gives us is something not dissimilar to the kinds of mapping we receive

from kinds of recent Marxist theoreticians like Carchedi or even Erik

Olin Wright. But unlike their work, he provides us not merely with a

mapping which is deductively arrived at, but one which is also

empirically and inductively arrived at. As a result, his mapping is

much more detailed and richer; it has meat on it if you will.

We will remember that the critique begins at the level of a

divorce between evaluation and criticism, a divorce between "science"

and critique in Braverman, with the statement that in Marx, these two

things are combined, and I think that's very true and it's an important

insight—probably the person who has given the best expression of that

insight in Marx is Norman Geras . And what he was getting at was the

argument that Marxism as a critique is not a moral critique, not an

ethical critique; it doesn't take its standpoint in that sense from a

set of values--it is scientific, and insofar as it attempts to get at

the essence of things rather than the appearance of things, it cuts

away mythology, ideology in the false sense, and establishes criticism

by counteracting mythology and ideology. His criticism is therefore

based on uncovering the essence of reality and it doesn't depend on a

moral or ethical stance. I don't think Braverman does in fact base

his criticism of capitalism on a moral stance, but bases it on his

attempt to uncover the dynamics of proletarianization in capitalism.

Moreover, I don't think one avoids the problem that Burawoy

seems to think Braverman has by stepping out of capitalism. The whole

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problematic of speaking of inside and outside of capitalism in terms of

points of view for us today is very bothersome. It's very difficult

to imagine that we, living in a capitalist society, can step outside of

capitalism when we try to define feudalism. We define those elements

of feudalism that appear to us important vis-a-vis capitalism; we never

step outside of capitalism (that seems to me an essential point in the

sociology of knowledge). Moreover, what Burawoy gives us is a very

ideal-typical definition of feudalism, one which-really I think would

apply to all pre-capitalist formations, and not to feudalism itself.

Braverman would reject an attempt to understand the contrasts between

feudalism and capitalism in ideal-typical terms; he in fact says very

clearly and explicitly in his introduction that the same productive

forces that are characteristic of the close of one epoch of social

relations are also characteristic of the opening of the succeeding

epoch. It is not a matter of craft production not being there in

feudalism and suddenly being there in capitalism--in that sense Braver-

man is both developing his point of view, if you like, from feudalism

and from capitalism. What he is talking about is not the craft worker

per se; what he is talking about is the paradox that labour is a

commodity (labour-power is a commodity) that can't be separated from

its owner. That's what he's talking about; and what capitalism has to

do in treating labour-power as a commodity is in some way attempt to

attenuate, although it can never remove, that indissoluble connection

between labour-power and the individual to whom it belongs.

A second point that Burawoy made is a critique of

Braverman for treating class as an objective rather than a subjective

category. I think that if one reads Braverman carefully, one sees that

an attack on Braverman for not seeing class as class formation is a

•traw man. Braverman makes very clear that he doesn't want to

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deprecate the importance of the study of the state of consciousness of

the working class, since it is only through consciousness that a class

becomes an actor on the historic stage

Class consciousness is that state of social cohesion
reflected in the understanding and activities of a
class or portion of a class. Its absolute expression
is a pervasive and durable attitude on the part of a
class toward its position in society. Its long-term
relative expression is found in the slowly changing
traditions, experiences, education, and organization
of the class. Its short-term relative expression is
a dynamic complex of moods and sentiments affected
by circumstances and changing with them, sometimes in
periods of stress and conflict, almost from day to
day. A class, cannot exist in society without in
some degree manifesting a consciousness of itself as
a group, with common problems, interests and prospects,
although this manifestation may for long periods be
weak, confused and subject to manipulation by other
classes. (Braverman, 1974: 29, 30).

So I think that the conception that Braverman has is very much of a

class as an historical actor. But what he is saying, is that in order

to understand and examine empirically that class, one has to begin with

a certain mapping, in order to know what to look for. Przeworski , in

his important paper on class formations, ends up by agreeing with this,

but giving us a very crude mapping—industrial workers , white collar

workers, bourgeoisie, will do. But what Braverman gives us is a rich

mapping, which marks out the paths to follow much more clearly. So

again I think that the criticism is misconceived.

There is another criticism of Braverman--he doesn't talk enough

about class struggle. Clearly, this is part of our problem, which

wasn't Braverman 's problem (he didn't live in a university). In

isolation, we have a need to shout class struggle from the rooftops in

terms of understanding society. Braverman has an understanding of

society's dynamic being composed of class struggle so deep that it

suffuses his work and he doesn't constantly have to keep crying class

struggle. I think that if you read Braverman (this is not new--many

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people have made this criticism of Braverman) this criticism can be

avoided. Rather than, as Burawoy suggests, seeing workers' responses

to Taylorism being merely impotent resistance, or simply internal

friction, Braverman makes it clear that it doesn't have that view at

all. Braverman points out that Taylorism raised a storm of opposition

among trade unions during the early part of the century, and then he

goes on to quote, after discussing that opposition, a long passage

from the International Moulders Journal in which he shows that the

moulders understood perfectly what was happening to them. When he

later speaks of internal friction, (and he doesn't use the term "mere"

friction) he first makes clear that the pace of production is decided

in a practice which' largely assumes the form of a struggle, whether

organized or not. Braverman very clearly has this image of class

struggle taking place, not only and maybe even not so much, given his

American context, at the level of the central organizations of the

unions, at the level of the National Civic Federation in the nineteenth

century, but at the level of the shopfloor in day-to-day struggle. And

it's interesting how he's able to use Taylor to make his own case in

this regard, because his quotations from Taylor are full of the class

struggle (soldiering, etc.).

Burawoy argues that Braverman doesn't have a concept of contra-

diction; at best it's only there in passing. To some extent I think

this is true, in the sense that the contradiction that Braverman

identifies apart from class struggle is the gap between potential which

exists in modern capitalism, and the actuality that we experience. But

the irony of Burawoy 's points with regard to contradiction, is that of

the eclecticism that he indicates by referring to certain neo-Marxists

who do use the concept of contradiction. He refers to Habermas and

Offe and others who have decided that the working class is not an

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element in the contradiction any longer, who identify contradiction

at the highly abstract levels of legitimacy crises in the sense that

crises then always beset capitalism. Even the best of the works based

on this, like O'Connor, give very little play to the actual class

struggle. Sure, you can identify contradictions, the question is to

what extent can you operationalize them in terms of being able to

understand whether a society will in fact evolve in a certain direction

or not. And it's interesting that the theoretical framework that

Burawoy adopts in terms of understanding capitalism and in terms of his

critique of Braverman, is that of understanding how capitalism in a

concrete way reproduces itself. I think that is very important and

it's one of the great contributions of the structuralist (Marxist)

developments. But I wonder whether, by simply looking at the way

capitalism reproduces itself, we don't fall into the same error that

Parsons or Parsons and Shils fell into. Parsons and Chils argued that

by understanding the way in which the system maintained itself, one

could also understand the conditions for change. All one can under-

stand, if the system doesn't reproduce itself, is breakdown; one

doesn't understand conditions of transformation, by simply studying

maintenance. And there's no doubt that one of the great problems with

the structuralists, even the structuralists like Poulantzas, is that

they don't establish the conditions for change in any sense. They are

simply talking, in a very functionalist way, of outcomes rather than

purpose at the centre of their analysis, of how the state comes in to

plug the gaps, the contradictions that develop in the system.

One final point on socialist machines, and then I'll shut up.

I think that in a sense Burawoy 's onto something here, in what is I

think an important section of the paper, but I'm not sure one can lay

apathy on Braverman, the kind of neutral view of technology that is

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suggested in the latter part of the paper. I don't think one can hang

on Braverman the conception that technology is neutral, that machines

are neutral. Braverman makes it very clear in the beginning of his

work that the treatment of the interplay between forces and relations

of production occupied Marx in almost all of his historical writings,

and while there is no question that he gave primacy to the forces of

production in the long sweep of history, the idea that this primacy

on a day-to-day basis could be used in a formalistic way in the analy-

sis of history would never have entered his mind. Within the

historical, analytical limits of capitalism, according to Marxist

analysis, technology instead of simply producing social relations, is

produced by social relations represented by capital.

The concrete and determinate forms of society are indeed

"determined" rather than accidental , but this is the

determinacy of the thread-by-thread weaving of the fabric

of history, not the imposition of external formulas...

Every society is a moment in the historical process, and

can be grasped only as part of that process. Capitalism,

a social form, when it exists in time, space, population,
and history, weaves a web of myriad threads; the conditions

of its existence form a complex network each of which pre-

supposes many others. It is because of this solid and

tangible existence, this concrete form produced by
history, no part of which may be changed by artificial

suppositions without doing violence to its true mode of

existence - it is precisely because of this that it

appears to us as "natural," "inevitable", and "eternal".

And it is only in this sense, as a fabric woven over

centuries, that we may say that capitalism "produced" the

present capitalist mode of production. This is a far cry

from a ready-made formula which enables us to "deduce"

from a given state of technology a given mode of social

organization. (Braverman, 1974: 21, 22).

Braverman clearly argues here that technology is a product of social

relations, and I think he is arguing, at least implicitly, that the

bringing about of socialism involves not only the changing of social

relations, but the changing of machines in the process, and his dis-

cussion of the Soviet Union yields this interpretation.

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