Answer to Question #316563 in Sociology for bae

Question

discuss the evolution of the capitalist labour process as a distinct social organisation of work.

Answer 1

The capitalist labor process is that specific form of the collective worker based on manufacture in which capital, having a monopoly of knowledge and power over the relations between labor and the means of production, uses this power, this real domination, in order to enforce the objective of valorization.

The labor process theory is a late Marxist theory of the organization of work under capitalism. According to Karl Marx, labor process refers to the process whereby labor is materialized or objectified in use-values. Labour is here an interaction between the person who works and the natural world such that elements of the latter are consciously altered in a purposive manner. The labor process theory critiques scientific management as authored by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the early 1900s and uses central concepts developed by Harry Braverman in the 1970s. Recent attempts have been made to use labor process theory to explain workers' bargaining power under contemporary global capitalism. The labor process theory has developed into a broader set of interventions and texts linked to critiquing new forms of management strategy of an exploitative nature.

In Labor and Monopoly Capital: Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, Braverman seeks to retrieve and update Marx's critiques of the capitalist labor process through an attack upon bourgeois accounts of work in the industrial society. Although Braverman's primary focus is the degradation of work in the twentieth century, which he associates with the relentless tightening of management control, Labor and Monopoly Capital also contains at least two other loosely related elements: an outline of developments in the wider organization of monopoly capitalist societies, and an examination of changes in their occupational and class structures.