Harry Braverman

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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 a skilled worker for many years and, as Harry Frankel, a leading Trotskyist business activist and publicist. The lifelong communist most recently worked for Monthly Review Verlag, which published his book in 1974. He died of cancer at the age of 56.

Life

Braverman was born in New York on December 9, 1920. At 17, he joined the Young People's Socialist Party and soon joined the newly formed Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party .

In the 1950s, Harry Braverman became one of the leaders of the Cochranite Tendency , a movement within the SWP led by Bert Cochran . Under the double pressures of the relative prosperity of the postwar period and the anti-communist hunt of the McCarthy era , the Cochranites refused to hope for revolution. They argued that the phase of capitalist expansion at that time would last for a long time. Eventually the Cochranites (including Braverman) were expelled from the SWP. They founded the American Socialist Union , for whose magazine Braverman wrote regularly.

In the early 1960s, Braverman worked at Grove Press , editing Malcolm X 's 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), dt. The work in the modern Production Process (1977). The book had a major impact on the American socialist discussion and became a bestseller for the respected Marxist publisher. Harry Braverman died on August 2, 1976 of cancer from asbestos contamination caused by shipyard work.

A characteristic of work in the modern production process is “the combination of practical experience with theoretical insight” ( Paul Sweezy ). In fact, Braverman brought an unusually diverse work experience to his research. He had trained as a coppersmith at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and had worked in this profession and in related activities for many years. Through his party work he came to socialist journalism and then to work in publishing. Braverman was an editor at Grove and managing director of Monthly Review, so he knew the office work and the then new computerization from personal experience.

Theoretically, Braverman was based on Marx , since in his view the later Marxists had contributed little to the analysis of the production process. In Marx's Capital, on the other hand, this had taken up a large space. Other critics oppose the lamented decline in skilled work with new types of skilled work. Braverman's book remains an exception: a widely discussed, lively Marxist study of the concrete world of work.

swell

  1. ^ Paul Sweezy, foreword. In: Harry Braverman: The work in the modern production process . Campus, Frankfurt am Main / New York, 1977, p. 8

See also

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Braverman, Harry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Frankel, Harry (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American communist and political writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 9, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH New York , USA
DATE OF DEATH 2nd August 1976
Place of death Honesdale , Pennsylvania , USA