Braverman, Harry

BRAVERMAN, HARRY (1920-1976). A notable Trotskyist who later who helped launch a 1950s magazine to connect old and new left, Harry Braverman became a famed scholar of the work process shortly before his death.

Born to a blue-collar family in New York, Braverman realized his early ambitions as a highly skilled coppersmith. He worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard for seven years until drafted into the Army where, as a sergeant, he taught pipefitting. After World War II, he worked at US Steel until pursued by the FBI and fired. His experience as a highly skilled craft worker would inform his later scholarly contributions.

During the Great Depression, Braverman joined the Youth Peoples Socialist League and then shifted, with many of the Trotskyists expelled from the Socialist Party, into the Socialist Workers Party. He wrote extensively for the Trotskyist journal Fourth International on a range of subjects.

Braverman became a leading figure within the SWP faction best known as the “Cochranites,” named for leader Bert Cochran. Resisting the rightward move of the United Auto Workers leadership of Walter Reuther, the Cochranites sought to play an expanded role in the labor Left. They also sought, in their factional publications, to create a detente with former Communist Party activists.

Expelled from the Socialist Workers Party in 1953, Braverman, Cochran and others organized the Socialist Union, hoping to escape the narrowness of the existing Left. The nascent Socialist Union, in turn, published The American Socialist, a popularly designed monthly that evolved from its narrow beginnings into a wide-ranging and eclectic publication. Its contributing editors ranged from Harlem lawyer Conrad Lynn and veteran labor journalist Harvey O’Connor, to radical historian William Appleman Williams. Its highly varied list of writers included: former Flint Sit-In strike mobilizer Genora Dollinger; British historian of socialism, G.D.H. Cole; iconoclastic journalist I.F. Stone; militant lawyer Victor Rabinowitz; civil rights leader Carl Braden; and the biographer of Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher.

The American Socialist promoted, in its final years, the formation of “New Left” clubs on a half-dozen campuses, inspired by the emergence of a New Left in the United Kingdom. This effort attracted such younger participants as David Herreshoff, a future historian of the US Left. Arguably, the magazine arrived too early for the social movements ahead, or it may have lacked the supportive backing enjoyed by other new magazines such as Dissent and Liberation.

In 1959, The American Socialist folded its subscription list and remaining resources into Monthly Review. The same year, Braverman became an editor at Grove Press. He played a key role in the publication of one of the landmark books of the period: The Autobiography of Malcolm X. By 1967, Braverman had become the director of Monthly Review Press, still in the early phase of its lengthy run as a leading leftwing publisher in the United States.

Braverman made his mark as a public intellectual with the lucid volume, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974). He drew deeply from his own factory experience, from Marx’s description of the work-process, and from the literature of Frederic Taylor and other “efficiency” experts. Turning the experts’ claims upon themselves, Braverman analyzed the degradation of workers’ own limited, but real control over their hour-to-hour labor. “Taylorism,” according to Braverman, had not been succeeded by more humane methods, as widely claimed; nor had later theorists, including the influential Elton Mayo, accomplished more than rationalizing the increased levels of exploitation. Drawing on the work of Paul Sweezy, Paul Baran and Daniel Bell among others on the Left and near Left, Braverman summed up a wide literature on the meaning of work itself. By the close of the twentieth century, Labor and Monopoly Capital had sold more than 100,000 copies in English, with many foreign editions. Although its author had not been trained in sociology, his work became a standard text in many sociology courses taught by left-leaning educators. Almost a half century after its appearance, Labor and Monopoly Capital retains a prominent place in the literature of American Marxist thinkers, read widely in the fields of economics, sociology and history. Braverman did not live long enough to enjoy his acclaim

Harry Braverman’s Writings. Marxist Internet Archives.
(https://www.marxists.org/archive/braverman/index.htm)