I used to have my American Economic History students read almost ALL of Labor and Monopoly Capital because although it was mostly a class analysis of contemporary capitalism, it had a fantastic nugget of analysis about Taylorism and the historical introduction of same by Taylor himself and how that system of taking control of the workplace from the workers created the system that many of my fellow radical economists and historians ultimately labelled "Fordism" --- (around the same time Kathy Stone did a great study of work rules changes in the Steel Industry and Francesca Maltese did a similar one on the automobile industry --- )
emphasizing a distinction between increasing "productivity" and increasing "intensity" which bourgeois economics (and bourgeois statistics) never distinguished was an extremely important reminder from Braverman --- which found its way into many "radical" textbooks from the 1970s on .... It's been a long time since I read Capital Vol. I but my memory is there is much more empahasis on lengthening the working day as well as machine based productivity improvements --- but I bet the discussion of "concentrating" production in factories had an element of increasing worker intensity --- In response to another part of Louis' post, I remember that many American communists thought Jackson was a "good guy" --- maybe because he battled the Second Bank of the United States. My (communist) family (Abel and Anne Meeropol) had a copy of Schlesinger Junior's THE AGE OF JACKSON which was written as an attempt to suggest Jackson was a precursor of FDR ... (maybe he was in the wrong way -- both depended on Southern racists for national support!) -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#1223): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/1223 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/76672990/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES<br />#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.<br />#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.<br />#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
