Theoretical

How do we understand and analyze this? What concepts and frameworks help us see what is happening?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

The core concepts this lens builds are labor power, the labor process, exploitation and surplus value, the working day as a site of struggle, social reproduction, and the union as a contested form. It extends the analysis begun in the theoretical lens of the capitalism theme from the wage relation in general to the specific question of what happens at work and who controls it. The reading can be hard. We do it together, slowly, and we do not pretend to understand more than we do.

Anchor questions

• What exactly does an employer buy when they hire you? How is that different from buying a thing?
• Why is so much work broken into small, deskilled, repetitive tasks? Who benefits from organizing it that way?
• Where does profit come from if workers are paid for their time?
• What is the difference between a job and the work that keeps people alive and able to work? Why is one paid and the other often not?
• Is a union a threat to capitalism, a part of it, or both? What does the theory say?
• If your manager is an algorithm, who exactly are you bargaining with? What does it mean that it cannot be argued with, shamed, or persuaded?
• Braverman watched craft workers lose their skill to the stopwatch. Does that argument still hold when the job is answering calls, driving a route, or producing a feeling on demand?
• Most of the world’s workers have no employer, no contract, and no union. Is a theory of labor built on the factory wage a theory of most work, or of a brief exception?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. Read the short Marx texts first, then approach Braverman and the social reproduction readings with a group.

Foundational texts

• Karl Marx (1818 to 1883), Wage-Labour and Capital (1847). A short, accessible statement of labor power, wages, and the antagonism between capital and labor, in language meant to be spoken to workers. The best on-ramp before the harder chapters of Capital, and shared with the capitalism theme. Free: marxists.org
• Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10: “The Working Day” (1867). Marx’s analysis of the struggle over the length of the working day, showing the wage relation as a contested limit rather than a settled exchange. The direct theoretical link from capitalism in general to the fight over work. Free: marxists.org

The labor process

• Harry Braverman (1920 to 1976), Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974). The book that revived labor process theory, arguing that Taylorism and modern management deskill work by separating conception from execution. The core anchor for analyzing work itself, not just the wage. Free: libcom.org
• Michael Burawoy (b. 1947), Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (1979). Based on ten months working a Chicago engine plant, it asks why workers consent to their own exploitation and answers with a theory of how the shop floor manufactures that consent. The essential response to Braverman. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: press.uchicago.edu. Burawoy’s own retrospective essay is free: berkeley.edu
• Beverly J. Silver (b. 1957), Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870 (2003). Uses a global database of labor unrest to theorize where and why workers gain bargaining power, connecting the shape of struggle to capital’s movement across the world economy. Free: libcom.org

The labor process now: service, platform, and digital work

Braverman watched machinists lose their craft to Taylor’s stopwatch. Most people in the room do not machine anything. The question this section asks is whether his argument survives the move from the factory to the call center, the app, and the warehouse, or whether something else is going on: not the deskilling of the hand but the management of the face, the mood, and the route, by a boss who is a piece of software and cannot be argued with.

• Arlie Russell Hochschild (b. 1940), The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983). The book that named emotional labor, following flight attendants trained to produce warmth on demand and bill collectors trained to produce menace, and asking what it costs to sell a feeling. This is the service-sector answer to Braverman, who saw what management did to the hand but not what it does to the heart. Mainstream sociology rather than Marxist. Paywalled: ucpress.edu. A free hour-long discussion of the book is at talkingaboutorganizations.com
• Jamie Woodcock, The Fight Against Platform Capitalism (2021). A full open-access book on how platform work is organized and how it is fought, built from workers’ inquiry with couriers and drivers rather than from survey data. The best free anchor for algorithmic management, and the one to assign if only one item here gets read. Free, complete: fulcrum.org
• Veena Dubal, On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination (2023). Documents platforms paying different workers different amounts for identical work, personalized by algorithm, invisible to everyone including the worker beside you, so that the wage stops being a rate and becomes a slot machine. Grounded in driver interviews, and written to get the practice outlawed. Free: columbialawreview.org
• Notes from Below, The Workers’ Inquiry and Social Composition (2018). Not a study of work but a method for studying it: the people who do the work produce the knowledge of it, by investigating their own conditions in order to change them. Marx wrote a workers’ questionnaire in 1880 and this is its descendant. Read it beside the pedagogy document, because it is the closest thing in the theme to a theory of what this school is doing. Free: notesfrombelow.org

For the platform as a business model rather than a labor process, see Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism in the capitalism theme, which pairs directly with Woodcock.

Social reproduction

• Silvia Federici (b. 1942), Caliban and the Witch (2004). Reads the witch hunts and the disciplining of women’s bodies as central to the birth of capitalism, providing the historical grounding for social reproduction theory. Shared with the capitalism theme and a bridge to Gender, Reproduction, and the Household. Free PDF: files.libcom.org
• Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (1975). A short manifesto arguing that unwaged domestic work sustains the wage relation, the classic bridge text from the wages-for-housework campaign into today’s debates over care and social reproduction. Free: libcom.org
• Tithi Bhattacharya (b. 1970), What is Social Reproduction Theory? (2013). A concise explainer of how labor power is produced and maintained outside the workplace, linking struggles over care and community to struggles at work. A clear teaching entry to the framework. Free: socialistworker.org

Labor beyond the wage: the informal economy and the Global South

Everything above this section, Marx included, takes the free wage worker as the typical case. About 61 percent of the world’s employed people work informally, and they always have. This section asks the room to consider that the settled unionized wage job of the postwar North was the exception, a brief and local arrangement, and that a theory of labor built only on it explains a minority of the world’s work.

• International Labour Office, Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture (third edition, 2018). Where the 61 percent comes from, broken out by region, sex, and sector. Not a reading; a reference to take one table from and put on the wall. The ILO is a tripartite UN agency, which makes this the official count rather than a partisan one, and therefore hard to wave away. Free: ilo.org
• Mike Davis (1946 to 2022), Planet of Slums (2006). On the billion people living in slums and working informally, and on Davis’s hardest claim: that capitalism now generates surplus humanity it has no intention of ever employing. If he is right, organizing at the point of production reaches fewer people every year. Marxist and polemical, and seriously disputed on exactly this point, which is why it is here. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Pun Ngai (b. 1970), Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (2005). Ethnography of the dagongmei, the young migrant women of Shenzhen, and of the dormitory labor regime that places the working day and the sleeping body under a single management. Labor process theory written from the Chinese shop floor rather than exported to it. Paywalled: dukeupress.edu. Read Kaxton Siu, From Dormitory System to Conciliatory Despotism (2017) free instead or alongside: a short account of how the regime has changed as workers won concessions without winning independent unions. Free: madeinchinajournal.com

A note on access, because it is part of the argument. Almost all of the Global South labor theory in this section is locked behind Brill, Cambridge, and Duke, while the Northern canon above is free on marxists.org and libcom.org. That is not an accident of curation and it is not neutral. See the note on access for how to get these anyway.

The strike and the union form

• Rosa Luxemburg (1871 to 1919), The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906). Drawing on the 1905 Russian Revolution, Luxemburg theorizes the mass strike as a living process and criticizes cautious union and party leadership. A theory of the strike and the union that also opens the liberatory debate. Free: marxists.org

Films, lectures, and audio

• “Why Managers Exist (It’s Not Why You Think)” (Second Thought, 2023). Roughly 15 minutes, about 516,000 views. Traces management to control over the labor process rather than efficiency, an ideal popular entry to Braverman. youtube.com/watch?v=jnsRU3JJ_rs
• “Fundamentals of Marx: Surplus Labor and Value” (The Marxist Project, 2019). Roughly 10 minutes, about 98,000 views. A clear explainer of labor power, surplus value, and the rate of exploitation, useful for settling terms before the reading. youtube.com/watch?v=xzqm9QHls60
• “What is a gig economy?” (TED-Ed, 2022). Roughly 6 minutes, about 451,000 views. A short animated primer on gig work and precarity. A neutral explainer to open a session and then complicate with the readings. youtube.com/watch?v=OXT8xdqcAoU

A note on method

Do not try to master Braverman or Capital in one sitting. The point of the theoretical lens is to build a shared vocabulary the group can use, labor power, the labor process, surplus value, social reproduction, not to produce experts. Read short, read together, and let people name what they do not yet understand. The social reproduction readings are here for a reason: much of the most important work in any economy is unpaid, and a theory of labor that only looks at the waged job misses most of it.

Further reading

For resources behind a paywall, see the note on access.

• Callum Cant, Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy (2019). Written by a rider who took the job in order to organize it, on how an algorithm manages a workforce that never meets its boss, and how the strikes happened anyway. A free companion interview with Cant is at failedarchitecture.com. Not free: wiley.com
• Phil Jones, Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism (2021). On microwork: the refugees and unemployed paid pennies to label the data that makes automation look automatic. The argument that artificial intelligence runs on hidden human labor, largely in the Global South. A free companion interview with Jones is at digilabour.com.br. Not free: versobooks.com
• Jan Breman, Footloose Labour: Working in India’s Informal Economy (1996). Decades of fieldwork on the circulating migrant workers of Gujarat who move between village and city and never become a settled proletariat. The standard work on Indian informal labor. No free version was found; a library request item. Not free: cambridge.org
• Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the World: Essays Toward a Global Labor History (2008). Argues global labor history must decenter the free wage worker, since slaves, indentured workers, sharecroppers, and the self-employed were never the exception. The theoretical case for everything else in this section. Expensive and library-bound; request it rather than buy it. Not free: brill.com
• Liberation School (PSL), Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 (nine-class course with reading guides). A free nine-class course through Capital with per-session reading guides. Marxist-Leninist (PSL) in framing; label the standpoint and use it for the structure, which is the most usable free scaffold for reading Capital as a group. Free: liberationschool.org
• Marxists Internet Archive, Marxism and Workers’ Organisations (subject archive). The archive’s own gathering of writing on unions, councils, and workers’ organisation. A deep bench to pull primary texts from when a session wants to go further. Free: marxists.org

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially on labor theory from India and South Asia, which stayed thin here: Breman’s Footloose Labour is the standard work and no free or borrowable copy could be found. Free companion material for Breman and van der Linden would also help, since both are currently library requests only.