Against Management

Against Management: Harry Braverman's MarxismEvery single day in our capitalist society, the majority of people are subject to paid employment. For most of us, work takes up more time than anything else we do, our work is in this sense the most important moment in our lives. Almost everyone works, has worked or will work, but how much creativity or pleasure do we find in our labour? For most people, for most of the time, work is repetitive and mundane. Much of it is spent counting down to Friday and the weekend. Often the best moments at work are those which subvert the labour that we do. People remember friends they make at work, talking to people on breaks or out of supervision, the day the manager was ill or on holiday, but the labour itself is rarely pleasurable. Indeed, the tedium of work is probably the single most extraordinary fact about our society. If Craig Raine's mythical Martian would ever send their postcard home, one of the first things they would notice is that billions of people voluntarily agree to spent their waking hours in effort, drudgery and toil.Part of the reason why work is tolerated is that the alternative, to be without work, is even worse. Unemployment is an even more degrading experience, boring, humiliating and debilitating. Unemployed workers are poorer, more isolated, more prone to depression than their working counterparts. To be unemployed is to be reminded permanently of the potentially-liberating character of work. Work should be purposeful, collective social labour, and although it usually is not, to point to its debased character is no comfort to those who are without. Thus there is a contradiction. On the one hand, social labour is potentially a major avenue to human self-development; on the other hand, work is actually experienced, in our sort of society, in boredom or pain.The most powerful book ever written about work is Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital. It is a sustained historical account of the different... [continues]

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