RE: RE: RE: RE: Harry Braverman (was Re: Labor: Menial vs. Noble)

["Brian Milani" <bmilani@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I tend to agree with Jim Devine when he says:
>didn't Braverman argue that the distinction between "conception" and
>"execution" was superior to that between mental and manual labor?

And Yoshie when she said:
>The opposition between manual & mental labor is primarily a
>contradiction _within_ the working class created & exploited by
>capital (read Harry Braverman's _Labor and Monopoly Capital_; buy it
>here: <http://www.monthlyreview.org/labormon.htm>), _not_ between the
>working class & capital.

But again, from a historical perspective on developing productive
forces, at least since the Depression we?ve been in a situation where
humanity could have, and should have, been in the position of
eliminating both cog-labour and class relationships.
	Capitalism artificially created both the material scarcity
and the political/economic/cultural dependence class society needs
to exist not just through waste production, but through its
division of labour which reproduced class relationships within
the working class (along with class mentalities within our minds).
Because class relationships are objectified in large organizations,
rather than being embodied in individuals, does not means they
are not class relationships.  It just means the internal/external
dynamics get more complex.
	While there are many important similarities between
Kropotkin and Schumacher, as Mat noted, Kropotkin and the
communitarian socialist tendences of the time ran counter to the
dominant industrial productive forces of the time, based in ever
more subdivided routine labour and centralization, and the
dominance of production over reproduction (or thing-production
over people-production).   Today, postindustrial potentials are
expressed primarily more decentralization, and the unleashing of
human creativity?making Schumacher essentially a postindustrial
thinker.   Today, capitalism survives not primarily by developing
the key productive forces of our time, but by suppressing them.
	This also has real implications for the sexual division of
labour in capitalism, since women could be marginized during the
industrial period by identifying them with the reproduction of
labour power.  Today, as many feminists have argued, reproduction?
or human development--is the key to the new productive forces, and so
insofar as we can redefine the tasks of economic development (in a more
qualitative way), we have, in an important sense, history on our side.
We may have to go against the tide of capitalist alienation, but
not against the primary productive forces of our age.
	
Brian Milani
Eco-Materials Project, Toronto
Green Economics Website
http://www.greeneconomics.net