Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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Capitalist relations of production exhibit an “incessant drive to enlarge and perfect machinery on the one hand, and to diminish the worker on the other.” This dynamic reflects capitalism’s larger tendency to separate conception from execution — the work of the brain and the work of the hand. The result is a small stratum of highly trained (and handsomely paid) professionals on the one side and a swelling mass of proletarianized laborers condemned to mindless tasks on the other.
✏️ Interesting thought about capitalism. It has the affect of separating between the work of the brain and the work of the hand. Naturally, brains are the rich elite, and hands are the poor masses. 🔗 View Highlight
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Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915), the eccentric founder of the scientific management movement. From his childhood, Taylor showed signs of extreme obsessive-compulsive disorder, counting his steps and seeking ever-more efficient ways to perform the most mundane activities. “These traits fitted him perfectly for his role as the prophet of modern capitalist management,” Braverman deadpans, “since that which is neurotic in the individual is, in capitalism, normal and socially desirable for the functioning of society.”
✏️ Next, you have this guy, who started the whole movement around adding “science” to management, tracking habits, increasing worker productivity, counting their steps, etc. 🔗 View Highlight
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So long as workers directed the labor process, Taylor maintained, they would never perform “a fair day’s work” — which he defined, naturally, as the maximum amount that they could perform without injury.
✏️ Taylor’s base assumption was that workers will never perform as optimally as they can on their own, so they shouldn’t be the ones directing their own labor process. It needs to be removed from them and managed from above. 🔗 View Highlight
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his more important feat was to systematically compile the craft knowledge that had hitherto belonged to labor and transfer it to management.
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Soon, workers were left performing simplified detail work that had been decontextualized from the production process as a whole; meanwhile, management enjoyed a monopoly on the technical know-how that, historically, had been the patrimony of the skilled trades. The ongoing separation of the conception and execution of labor that characterizes production under capitalism had reached a new threshold. This process subsequently repeated itself in management, creating a handful of corner-office executives and an army of deskilled administrative assistants and middle managers.
✏️ The end result is a bit shocking in retrospect. They took the skilled knowledge and technical know-how away from the workers and gave it to the managers. Workers were made even more powerless in the process. 🔗 View Highlight
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Braverman detected signs of capitalism’s historical limits in the fact that new technology frequently reunites and automizes the steps of the labor process that the division of labor had fragmented.
✏️ New technology can help bring back hope, by allowing the workers to take the know-how and knowledge back into their own hands, and control the new labor processes. 🔗 View Highlight
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“Workers can now become masters of the technology of their process on an engineering level and can apportion among themselves in an equitable way the various tasks connected with this form of production that has become so effortless and automatic.”
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AI holds out a similar possibility of reuniting, in automated form, many of the skills and bodies of knowledge that the capitalist division of labor has pulverized in its relentless quest for control and efficiency.
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Management has always viewed the labor process as a site of struggle, and it is determined to keep hold of the reigns. If we want AI to improve rather than replace or further degrade our jobs, a reading of Braverman suggests that we must be prepared to carry the battle into the very labor process itself.