Lecture 6: The Deskilling Thesis

H. Braverman – Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974)

• The central text in what has come to be called the labour process approach.

• Context for Braverman:

❑ Braverman associated with Monthly Review journal – founded in 1949 by Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman. An influential journal but little impact on American sociology. Best known product of this school is Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital (1966). Indeed, Braverman’s analysis of work is predicated theoretically upon Baran and Sweezy’s analysis of ‘Monopoly Capital’ [ie oligopolistic, ‘organized’ capitalism.

❑ After mid-1960s increasing interest in neo-Marxism in the US – partly result of social conflicts evident in America in late 1960s which threw doubt of the utility of the structural-functionalist paradigm.

❑ In the 1970s – re-emergence of radical political economy in both the USA and Western Europe. Produced the Union of Radical Political Economists and the journal Insurgent Sociologist in USA and wide array of groups and journals in Western Europe – of which the most well known are: New Left Review, Capital and Class and Economy and Society.

• In the late 1960s in the USA two sets of ideas had emerged within the social sciences which formed the concepts against which Braverman reacted:

❑ H. Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: a German social philosopher, member of the Frankfurt school, who argued that the affluence generated by advanced capitalism had produced a mass-consumer culture that incorporated the working class into such societies. Accordingly, the working class was no longer a revolutionary class and the central foci of radical transformation lie with those groups marginalized by the capitalist process:

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