The Soviet Union faced catastrophe unless it could develop production and replace the ingrained traditions of the Russian peasantry with systematic habits of social labor. In this situation, the respect and even admiration of Marxists for the scientific technology, the production system, and the organized and regularized labor processes of developed capitalism was if anything heightened. If the old Social Democracy tended to view the capitalist mode of production as an immensely powerful and successful enterprise with which it was necessary to compromise, the Communists tended to view it with equal awe as a source from which it was necessary to learn and borrow, and which would have to be imitated if the Soviet Union were to catch up with capitalism and lay the foundations for socialism. We need only recall that Lenin himself repeatedly urged the study of Frederick W. Taylor's "scientific management," with an eye toward utilizing it in Soviet industry. The Taylor system, he said, "like all capitalist progress, is a combination ofthe refined brutality ofbourgeois exploitation and a number of the greatest scientific achievements in the field of analyzing mechanical motions during work, the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the elaboration ofcorrect methods ofwork, the introduction ofthe best system ofaccounting and control, etc. The Soviet Republic must at all costs adopt all that is valuable in the achievements of science and technology in this field. The possibility of building socialism depends exactly upon our success in combining the Soviet power and the Soviet Organization of administration with the up-to-date achievements of capitalism. We must organize in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out and adapt it to our ends." In practice, Soviet industrialization imitated the capitalist model; and as industrialization advanced the structure lost its provisional character and the Soviet Union settled down to an organization of labor differing only in details from that of the capitalist countries, so that the Soviet working population bears all the stigmata of the Western working classes. In the process, the ideological effect was felt throughout world Marxism: the technology of capitalism, which Marx had treated with cautious reserve, and the organization and administration of labor, which he had treated with passionate hostility, became relatively acceptable. Now the revolution against capitalism was increasingly conceived as a matter of stripping from the highly productive capitalist mechanism certain "excrescences," improving the conditions of work, adding to the factory organization a formal structure of "workers' control," and replacing the capitalist mechanisms of accumulation and distribution with socialist planning. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, p.8-9, Monthly Review Press 1998

The similarity of Soviet and traditional capitalist practice strongly encourages the conclusion that there is no other way in which modem industry can be organized. And this conclusion had already been sufficiently encouraged the tendency of modem social science to accept all that is real as necessary, all that exists as inevitable, and thus the present mode of production as eternal. The problem can be fruitfully attacked, it seems to me, only by way of concrete and historically specific analysis of technology and machinery on the one side and social relations on the other, and of the manner in which these two come together in existing societies. Such an analysis could well start with the possibility that the present mode of the organization and control of labor arose in capitalist society for reasons specific to that society, and was transferred to Soviet society and imitated by it for reasons that have to do with the specific nature of that society. Recognizing that there are very few "eternal" or "inevitable" features of human social organization in an abstract sense, such an analysis would proceed by way of an understanding of the historical evolution which produced modern social forms. And most important, such an analysis must not simply accept what the designers, owners, and managers of the machines tell us about them, but it must form its own independent evaluation of machinery and modern industry, in the factory and in the office; otherwise it will create not a social science but merely a branch of management science. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, p.11-12, Monthly Review Press 1998

Socialism, as a mode of production, does not grow "automatically" in the way that capitalism grew in response to blind and organic market forces; it must be brought into being, on the basis of an adequate technology, by the conscious and purposive activity of collective humanity. And this activity must overcome not just the customary conditions of the previous mode of production, but those of the many millennia during which class societies of all sorts have existed […] Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, p.16, Monthly Review Press 1998

Marx did, of course, give a position of primacy to the "means of production" in social evolution. But this was never conceived as a simple and unilateral determinism which "causes" a specific mode of production to issue automatically from a specific technology. Such a determinism is false to history in general, and particularly useless in confronting revolutionary and transitional epochs, with which Marx was especially concerned. In such epochs, clearly, societies exhibiting a variety of forms of social relations coexist on the basis of substantially the same technology. Marx's solution to the problem of transition turns upon his conception of the development of the productive forces within a system of social relations, until they outgrow it, come into conflict with it, and burst its bounds. This has two important implications which clash with the interpretation of Marx as a "technological determinist" wielding a simple formula. On the one hand, it means that the same productive forces that are characteristic of the close of one epoch of social relations are also characteristic of the opening of the succeeding epoch; indeed, how could it be otherwise, since social and political revolutions, although they may come about in the last analysis because of the gradual evolution of the productive forces, do not on their morrow provide society with a brand-new technology. [...] On the basis of this sketch, we would expect the technology and organization of production of early capitalism to be much closer to those of the late feudal epoch, and those of late capitalism much closer to those of early socialism, than they are to each other. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, p.13-14, Monthly Review Press 1998

The problem [of job dissatisfaction] as it presents itself to those managing industry, trade, and finance is very different from the problem as it appears in the academic or journalistic worlds. Management is habituated to carrying on labor processes in a setting of social antagonism and, in fact, has never known it to be otherwise. Corporate managers have neither the hope nor the expectation of altering this situation by a single stroke; rather, they are concerned to ameliorate it only when it interferes with the orderly functioning of their plants, offices, warehouses, and stores. For corporate management this is a problem in costs and controls, not in the "humanization of work." It compels their attention because it manifests itself in absentee, turnover, and productivity levels that do not conform to their calculations and expectations. The solutions they will accept are only those which provide improvements in their labor costs and in their competitive positions domestically and in the world market. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, p.16, Monthly Review Press 1998

Within the historical and analytical limits of capitalism, according to Marx's analysis, technology, instead of simply producing social relations, is produced by the social relation represented by capital. The capitalist mode of production is traced by Marx from its beginnings, when it "is hardly to be distinguished, in its earliest stages, from the handicraft trades of the guilds, otherwise than by the greater number of workmen simultaneously employed by one and the same individual capital, through domestic industry, the manufacturing division of labor, machinery and modem industry, and the factory system, in which the capitalist mode of production is at last fully created and the inherent social form of labor under capitalism "for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality." From this point of view, the first volume of Capital may be considered a massive essay on how the commodity form, in an adequate social and technological setting, matures into the form of capital, and how the social form of capital, driven to incessant accumulation as the condition for its own existence, completely transforms technology. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, p.14, Monthly Review Press 1998

Having created new social relations of production, and having begun to transform the mode of production, they found themselves confronted by problems of management which were different not only in scope but also in kind from those characteristic of earlier production processes. Under the special and new relations of capitalism, which presupposed a "free labor contract," they had to extract from their employees that daily conduct which would best serve their interests, to impose their will upon their workers while operating a labor process on a voluntary contractual basis. This enterprise shared from the first the characterization which Clausewitz assigned to war; it is movement in a resistant medium because it involves the control of refractory masses. The verb to manage, from manus, the Latin for hand, originally meant to train a horse in his paces, to cause him to do the exercises of the manege. As capitalism creates a society in which no one is presumed to consult anything but self-interest, and as the employment contract between parties sharing nothing but the inability to avoid each other becomes prevalent, management becomes a more perfected and subtle instrument. Tradition, sentiment, and pride in workmanship play an ever weaker and more erratic role, and are regarded on both sides as manifestations of a better nature which it would be folly to accommodate. Like a rider who uses reins, bridle, spurs, carrot, whip, and training from birth to impose his will, the capitalist strives, through management, to control. And control is indeed the central concept of all management systems, as has been recognized implicitly or explicitly by all theoreticians of management. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, p.46-47, Monthly Review Press 1998