Degradation of work

My latest project at work: marxist literature on work and labour. I am not the Marx scholar I should be: I missed out on a course on Marx a few years ago, and now it is a bit overwhelming to dive into this massive body of literature on my own. The worst thing is that I don't know if this track will lead me anywhere, or if it's a dead end. Time will tell. I have to start somewhere, so now I am reading Harry Braverman's Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the 20th Century, first published in 1974. It's a good book to start with, as it does not require a lot of background knowledge about Marx and the marxist tradition. I don't know whether more experienced scholars would consider his work out-of-date or irrelevant, but for my own purposes, it has provided me with quite a few insights about "degradation of work", Braverman's foremost topic.

His book is, in essence, a showdown with a Taylorist division of labour within the setting of monopoly capitalism. "Monopoly capitalism" refers to a system dominated by the needs of capitalism, so that all other needs are relative to this one. Capital dominates over labour. Capital has gradually been concentrated into huge units (in opposition to the system of the factory-owning capitalist, who supervises his workers with his walking-stick). Within this system, supervision, control and planning is separated from "real work", the type of work which requires no skills or education. This tendency originated in Taylorism, other forms of managerialism being merely one form of the same way of conceptualizing division of labour. Blue collar work is degraded, and the same goes for white collar work, similarly deprived of skills and control. Control is allocated to fewer and fewer positions.

Braverman advocates that work could be both creative and meaningful. It is potentially so. But given a capitalist fetisch of profit maximization, working conditions, the conditions of production, will be developed without consideration of the worker's relation to her work. Or: this relation is the object of abuse and exploitation. Braverman draws on sociological work for illustrations of his points, but he also discusses various marxist texts and, naturally, he has much to say about the growing body of management literature. The book is highly critical of the modern emphasis of management, the tendency to install a split between planning of work and execution of planning. In this respect, I find the book highly relevant, even in these times of "competencies" and "life-long learning" (mostly bullshit).

If you have any doubts about the relevance of critizing management ideology, please have a look at the notoriously word-diarrhethic management literature. Most of these books try to figure out ways to transport the strategy of a business firm into the minds and labour of workers ("employees" is the word used here, and that is significant in itself). "Social relations" are a factor to be exploited. Symptomatically, management literature has very little to say about work. I've read some books on human resource management and, boy, I hope that I will never, ever, have to read such numb-spirited, poorly written, manipulative books again. Management literature very rarely looks at the way work could be an expression of doing something worth-while, something good. When this issue is discussed, it is often transformed into questions about how to best stimulate the motivation of employees - on a psychological level.

My initial impression is that much of management literature is based upon a premise according to which there is a necessary distinction between a) the market (customers, subsuppliers, price, competition) and b) how a firm should be organized ("human resource management", organizational structures, "management systems"). But more importantly, b) is understood to be dependent on a) - decisions about organizational structures will be based on the current analysis of the relation between the firm and the market. Example: there is a huge amount of writings on "project management". To a great extent, modern firms are organized into projectized units. Employees are engaged in projects, in which they develop a large set of different competencies. This trend is masqueraded as increasing self-control, increasing possibilities for development of competencies and most of all "projects" are said to signal the end of bureaucracy and corporate hierarchies. But my question is: to what extent is this an artillery of idealized pictures employed in an attempt to persuade employees that they should be happy with short-term contracts (or none at all) and that they should be satisfied with the tasks they are given because they are supposedly enjoying the luxury of "creative work"?

An even more important question: What is the relation between "projects" and the increasing tendency of outsourcing parts of the "humbler work" to third-world countries, where labour is cheaper? In many Finnish industrial (project based) firms, the tasks performed by Finnish personnel tend to be planning and monitoring of projects. Well, what happens with the work that is performed by non-Finnish project actors? Would we talk about "self-control" and "creativity" here as well? Management literature, at least, keeps quiet about this. I wonder why...

Looking at "the project-based firm" from this perspective, Braverman's perspective does not seem at all irrelevant or out-of-date. But seeing this, we need to waddle through a great deal of managerial chit-chat, waffle, guff. We are led to believe in a picture of the happy, creative, competent employee. But it may be more to the point to look at the structures that motivate managers to uphold this picture. Myopia, foggy sight, tunnel vision - I don't know which metaphor would be most fitting here.

I do not, of course, intend to say that Braverman's account is exhaustive or without flaws. But his analysis do latch on to some aspects of capitalism that tend to be obscured, forgotten or ignored.