Harry Braverman
Harry Braverman ( born December 9, 1920 in New York; † August 2, 1976 in Honesdale, Pennsylvania) was known for his Marxist study of the devaluation of work in Taylorism The work in the modern production process. Braverman was for many years a leading and skilled workers as Harry Frankel Trotskyist operating activist and publicist. Last worked the lifelong Communist in Monthly Review publisher who in 1974 published his book. He died at age 56 from cancer.
Life
Braverman was born on December 9, 1920 in New York. At 17, he joined the Young People's Socialist Party and soon joined the newly-founded the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in.
In the 1950s, Harry Braverman was a leader of the cochranite Tendency, a flow within the SWP, which was led by Bert Cochran. Under the double pressure of the relative prosperity of the post-war period and the anti-communist hunt of the McCarthy era were banned from Cochranites to hope for a revolution. They argued that the former phase of capitalist expansion will persist for some time. Finally, the Cochranites ( Braverman included) were excluded from the SWP. They founded the American Socialist Union, for their magazine Braverman wrote regularly.
In the early 1960s, Braverman worked at Grove Press, where he proofread Malcolm X ' autobiography. He left Grove for political reasons and went to Monthly Review, where his great work appeared on the fate of the work in Taylorism: Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, (1974 ), German Work in the modern production process (1977). The book has greatly influenced the American socialist discussion and has been a bestseller for the prestigious Marxist publishing house. Harry Braverman died on August 2, 1976 to cancer caused by asbestos contamination caused by the shipyard work.
Characteristic of the work in the modern production process is " the combination of practical experience with theoretical insight " (Paul Sweezy ). In fact, Braverman brought unusually diverse work experiences for its investigation. He had learned at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a coppersmith and worked in this profession and in related activities for many years. Through his work, he came to the party socialist journalism and then to work in publishing. Braverman was editor at Grove and managing director of Monthly Review, so knew the office work and the then new computerization from personal experience.
Theoretically, Braverman oriented to Marx, since the later Marxists had contributed his view hardly anything for the analysis of the production process. In Marx's Capital, however, this wide space had taken. The defendant demise of qualified labor make other critics counter new types of qualified labor. Braverman's book remains an exception: a widely discussed written alive Marxist study of the concrete world of work.