A Half-Century of Harry Braverman’s <cite>Labor and Monopoly Capital</cite>

Harry Braverman’s arguments in his classic book Labor and Monopoly Capital presciently forecasted much of our present labor regime — and can help us move beyond it.

It is hard not to romanticize Harry Braverman. A Depression-era metalworker and committed socialist who in 1974, two years before his untimely death, published what remains one of the most powerful applications of Karl Marx’s theory of capital to American history — isn’t this the archetype of Antonio Gramsci’s organic intellectual, the worker raised to consciousness through study and struggle?

To understand how capitalism works requires journeying into “the hidden abode of production,” Marx wrote, the place where human labor power is consumed. Labor and Monopoly Capital took this idea seriously. Across twenty meticulous chapt