Braverman and the Long Arc of Labor Process Theory

An Interview with Ursula Huws

Abstract

Conducting this interview sharpened my sense of responsibility as a labour researcher. I suspect that many readers of this special issue are navigating activist scholarship in and out of the academy so in this sense, I want to affirm that notions of responsibility and practices of militancy in both contexts are basically synonymous. That forcefulness emerges through what we write and how we organize, but it is necessarily underscored by our knowledge of the labour process: the social relations which workers enter into as they transform raw materials with particular technologies of production. This interview is a very condensed consequence of a longer conversation that attests to why this theorizing is best done by workers, a status held by both Braverman and Huws. Huws is among a pantheon of scholars whose intellectual and manual contributions affirm the significance of praxis in labour process theorization, not only as an academic but as a figure who comes from an intellectual tradition of the working class. From this tradition come her uncompromising commitments to feminist and Marxist analysis of the labour process and union militancy which she most significantly extended to social reproduction and digital labour.  As workers and scholars, this conversation offers a vantage from the long arc of labour process theory which profoundly displays how workers’ knowledge of the labour process is a weapon best sharpened with an analysis of capitalism and its deepening crises that are detected through reorganizations of technology and labour