Marx, Braverman, and the Logic of Capital

Abstract

The power and scope of large-scale industry among advanced capitalist societies have it incredibly difficult for us to imagine a different mode of material production. We are all convinced that artisanship in our epoch is merely a form of bourgeois ideology, whose effect, if not intention, is to foster illusions of mobility among workers, and to create an artificial hierarchy within the labor process. The few instances of handicraft that remain in our social world are considered to be so marginal that we have learned to take for granted the mechanization of the labor process and its consequences for the transformation of the content of labor.