Symposium on Braverman
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Comments by John Porter

I cannot comment on Michael Burawoy's paper from the point of

view of any of the current "problematiques" of contemporary Marxism,

since I am not schooled in them. What little I have read does not

particularly help me in clarifying the kinds of problems that interest

me.

But when I first read Braverman, I was very much impressed and

after rereading large sections of the book for this particular task,

I am still very much impressed and I do not make that judgement in terms

of his contribution, whatever that may be, to Marxian labour economics

or Marxian sociology. Nor is it because what Braverman has said is

new. Most of this compilation of materials - studies of work, labour

force statistics and other things - we knew before. Perhaps I was

impressed because the book was an articulate reminder of facts we did

know but were prepared to overlook, and I use "we" here in the sense of

the whole gamut of followers of conventional social science, of the

post-Second-World War period. I think we were prepared to overlook

this evidence because of our overconcern for economic growth as the

raison-d'etre of industrialization, and the way we saw worker

productivity linked to economic growth. As well we believed consumption

to be one of the major goals of the industrialization process.

So convinced were we of these objectives, both those in actual

work situations and those studying them, that we overlooked much of the

change that Braverman analyses. Certainly social scientists accepted

growth and upgrading of the labour force as basic to modernism, and I

think the best illustration of that is found in every intergenerational

mobility matrix where one compares the marginals of fathers and sons,

and takes the difference as representative of progress because overall

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ALTERNATE ROUTES

the sons have done better than the fathers. The objective of the

exercise in mobility analysis is to discover how respondents have

exploited the opportunity provided by occupational upgrading. So we

ask whether or not the class structure is permeable, and to what

degree. Again, the basic assumption underlying analyses of these

father-son occupational data, on which I have been engaged myself, is

that the overall effects of industrialization have been beneficial and

progressive. Social scientists, of course, bear this burden of

oversight, or guilt depending on how severe one considers the offence

to be.

I can remember papers back in the fifties in which industrial

sociology was being condemned as "cow" sociology, and in which

industrial psychology was referred to as deep therapy on the assembly

line, so that the picture is not totally one of the social sciences

going to work for capitalist enterprise, although I would not deny for

a moment that that has been their major thrust. There have always

been critics of this direction, however.

Many of the things said about the degradation of work, or the

character of work, have been criticized through various art forms, if

not sociology, and certainly Taylorism has been subject to ridicule for

a very long time. So I would see Braverman's contribution as a

massive critique of what work has become, whether or not he made any

contribution to theory. I think the critique is particularly strong

not only because of his analysis of work in the factory, but also

because of the extent to which automation and new forms of technology

have affected the tertiary sector, as well as the application of science

and technology to the work process and the effects they have brought

about. Also, his observations (he is eclectic here) on the role of

education and how it has helped to create the illusion of upgrading

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Symposium on Braverman

of the contemporary labour force is consistent with other current

criticisms of credential ism. His appendix on occupational classifi-

cations is fascinating for anybody who has attempted to develop occupa-

tional classifications, but more importantly his analysis of the

methodology of the prevailing official ones, more than any other part

of the book calls into question the notion of an upgraded labour force.

All of these things add up to a tremendously powerful critique of how

we have looked at work.

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