ILPC 2027

2017 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Marx’s Capital, sections of which provide the original foundation for labour process theory.  This anniversary is particularly apposite in the current period when influential perspectives from Autonomist Marxism and post work theorists such as Paul Mason argue that whilst Capital was an historic achievement full of brilliant insights, it is in essence history. ‘Info goods’ are corroding value, labour is no longer the ultimate source of profit and antagonism in the employment relationship is displaced to distribution and a post-work politics. Info capitalism is strangled by its own contradictions; hence postcapitalism will be born on a tide of networked, collaborative zero cost production. The source of contemporary insight is not Capital, but the Grundrisse, in particular ‘The Fragment on Machines’.

Based on a contribution to the forthcoming Reading Capital Today: Marx After 150 Years https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0745399738/ref=tsm_1_fb_lk , this paper will offer a partial defence of the relevance of Marx’s writings on the labour process in Capital and the privileging of that terrain for understanding of contemporary economies, though not necessarily for other social relations. Nothing written a century and a half ago can be entirely timely, for example with respect to the growth of complex managerial and employment systems. However, the tools of analysis of capital-labour relations in the production process and contested terrain around control, science, technology and effort remain a vital source for critical researchers if they are prepared to simultaneously apply and innovate. In the first part of the paper we explain how this task was undertaken by Braverman, subsequent labour process theory and research community. We argue that these efforts broadened conceptions of managerial regimes and restored a focus on labour agency, whilst at the same time utilised – with benefits and limitations – a ‘narrow’ reading of Capital in that it focused on the transformation of the labour process within different accumulation regimes. The second half of the paper is taken up by an exposition and critique of current claims that production and the labour process is no longer a significant site for the creation of value and for labour-capital contradictions.  Capital remains a better guide to analysis and action in the present conjuncture than ‘The Fragment on Machines’.