Major Work by Harry Braverman

Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century.  1998 [1974] New York: Monthly Review Press

From the Publisher:
Labor and Monopoly Capital, first published in 1974, was hailed as a classic from its first day in print.  Years spent as an industrial worker gave harry Braverman rich personal insight into the labor process and the conviction to reject the reigning wisdoms of academic sociology.  Labor and Monopoly Capital is now the foundation text for many basic areas of scholarly inquiry, including critical examinations of methods of managerial control, of the relationship between technological innovation and social class, and of the eradication of skill from work.

This edition, issued in commemoration of the book's twenty-fifth anniversary, features a new introduction by John Bellamy Foster setting the work in historical and theoretical context, as well as two rare articles by Braverman: "The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century" (1975) and "Two Comments" (1976).

"Until the appearance of Harry Braverman's remarkable book, there has been no broad view of the labor process as a whole, no full-length examination of the form and feeling of the act of labor as we find it in the contemporary capitalist world....Written with great force and beauty."
--Robert Heilbroner, New York Review of Books

"The best analysis of the division of labor between the design and the execution of industrial production, which underlies all our social arrangements."
--Christopher Lasch, New York Times Book Review

"A work of the first rank, one that anyone who considers him or herself a social scientist cannot afford to pass up."
--Annals of the American

"Authority and clarity rarely found in the theoretical works of ..."
--

Table of Contents:
New Introduction 
Foreword 
Introduction 3 
1 Labor and Labor Power 31 
2 The Origins of Management 41 
3 The Division of Labor 49 
4 Scientific Management 59 
5 The Primary Effects of Scientific Management 86 
6 The Habituation of the Worker to the Capitalist Mode of Production 96 
7 The Scientific-Technical Revolution 107 
8 The Scientific-Technical Revolution and the Worker 117 
9 Machinery 127 
10 Further Effects of Management and Technology on the Distribution of Labor 163 
11 Surplus Value and Surplus Labor 175 
12 The Modern Corporation 179 
13 The Universal Market 188 
14 The Role of the State 197 
15 Clerical Workers 203 
16 Service Occupations and Retail Trade 248 
17 The Structure of the Working Class and Its Reserve Armies 261 
18 The "Middle Layers" of Employment 279 
19 Productive and Unproductive Labor 284 
20 A Final Note on Skill 294 

Appendix 1: Two Comments 311 
Appendix 2: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century 316 
 Index 326 


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