DAVID GARTMAN
Harry Braverman's path-blazing analysis of the capitalist labor process was hardly off the press before critics began to point out its crucial weaknessoveremphasis on a deterministic, economic logic and a corollary neglect of the impact of conscious class struggle. One would hope that subsequent Marxist analysts of the labor process would learn from his mistakes. Two recent books in this field offer evidence that they have not. Michel Aglietta's A Theory of Capitalist Regulation ~ and Michael Burawoy's Manufacturing Consent z reproduce Braverman's underestimation of the role of class struggle in shaping the development of the production process in capitalism. While neither study falls into the simplistic economic determinism of Braverman, both do fall victim to a more complex structuralist determinism due to their explicit theoretical grounding in Althusserian Marxism. If the theoretical sources are different, the results are the same. Both Aglietta and Burawoy conceptualize the development of the capitalist labor process as a basically noncontradictory realization of the laws inherent to this mode of production. The dialectical interaction of the structural logic with class struggle is not given its due.
This blindness to the dialectic of structure and struggle is not surprising, given the general tenets of the theory these works adopt. Structuralist Marxism, as developed by Louis Althusser and others, views society as a static system of social relations governed by distinctive laws of reproduction