A classic of our time: Labor and Monopoly Capital after a quarter-century

Monthly Review

Volumn 50, Issue 8, 1999, Pages 12-18

  Foster, John Bellamy ^a,b  

^a Monthly Review Foundation

^b UNIVERSITY OF OREGON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0002338163     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.14452/MR-050-08-1999-01_2     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. Michael Burawoy, "A Classic of Its Time," Contemporary Sociology, vol. 25, no. 3 (May 1996), pp. 296-99. All subsequent quotations from Burawoy, not otherwise referenced in the text, are to this source.
2. Peter Meiksins, "Labor and Monopoly Capital for the 1990s: A Review and Critique of the Labor Process Debate," Monthly Review, vol. 46, no. 6 (November 1994), p. 46.
3. See also John Bellamy Foster, "Labor and Monopoly Capital Twenty Years After: An Introduction," Monthly Review, vol. 46, no. 6 (November 1994), pp. 1-13.
4. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), pp. 3, 83.
5. Braverman, "Two Comments," in Rosalyn Baxandall, et al., Technology, the Labor Process and the Working Class (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), p. 123,
6. and Labor and Monopoly Capital, p. 67;
7. Marx, "Value, Price and Profit," in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 20 (New York: International Publishers, 1985), p. 146.
8. Although class has been commonly defined in Marxist theory as " relation to the means of production" it is more accurate, in terms of Marx's own theory, to see it as a relation to the process of exploitation, defining exploitation as the way in which the surplus product is extracted from the direct producer. See G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth, 1981), pp. 31-52.
9. The extent to which Thompson's notion of class started with the concept of exploitation can be seen in The Making of the English Working Class itself, where he devoted a chapter to the subject. See E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963) pp. 189-212,
10. and the related discussion in Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 76-107.
11. For Miliband's approach see Ralph Miliband, Divided Societies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 1-6.
12. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976), p. 181.
13. For a critique of the concept of Fordism see John Bellamy Foster, "The Fetish of Fordism," Monthly Review, vol. 39, no. 10 (March 1988), pp. 14-33.
14. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, p. 271.
15. It is important to recognize that Braverman's understanding of monopoly capitalism was not one restricted to the U.S. or even to the developed capitalist countries. Rather, "Monopoly capitalism...embraces the increase of monopolistic organizations within each capitalist country, the internationalization of capital, the international division of labor, imperialism, the world market and the world movement of capital, and changes in the structure of state power." Labor and Monopoly Capital, Ibid., p. 252. The theory he presented was thus global in its implications - pointing to the tendency toward a universalization of Taylorism as an outgrowth of the development of monopoly capital.