Reddit mentions of Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century

Ever read Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital?

If there's a central idea that we should be able to pull as useful from Marxist thought, it's this: our industrial productivity relies on large part upon the separation of labor. This simultaneously makes work simpler, more rote and less fulfilling. It converts skilled labor into unskilled labor, in turn vastly driving down the cost of goods. It increases prosperity at the cost of a decrease in the fulfillment of the action of work itself, except for those lucky enough to pursue labor that cannot be effectively subdivided. How do we reconcile the positive effects of productivity with this conversion of human work to rote repetition?

Socialism/Communism

A People's History of the World

Main Currents of Marxism

The Socialist System

The Age of... (1, 2, 3, 4)

Marx for our Times

Essential Works of Socialism

Soviet Century

Self-Governing Socialism (Vols 1-2)

The Meaning of Marxism

The "S" Word (not that good in my opinion)

Of the People, by the People

Why Not Socialism

Socialism Betrayed

Democracy at Work

Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA (again didn't like it very much)

The Socialist Party of America (absolute must read)

The American Socialist Movement

Socialism: Past and Future (very good book)

It Didn't Happen Here

Eugene V. Debs

The Enigma of Capital

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism

A Companion to Marx's Capital (great book)

After Capitalism: Economic Democracy in Action

Capitalism

The Conservative Nanny State

The United States Since 1980

The End of Loser Liberalism

Capitalism and it's Economics (must read)

Economics: A New Introduction (must read)

U.S. Capitalist Development Since 1776 (must read)

Kicking Away the Ladder

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

Traders, Guns and Money

Corporation Nation

Debunking Economics

How Rich Countries Got Rich

Super Imperialism

The Bubble and Beyond

Finance Capitalism and it's Discontents

Trade, Development and Foreign Debt

America's Protectionist Takeoff

How the Economy was Lost

Labor and Monopoly Capital

We Are Better Than This

Ancap/Libertarian

Spontaneous Order (disagree with it but found it interesting)

Man, State and Economy

The Machinery of Freedom

Currently Reading

This is the Zodiac Speaking (highly recommend)

I probably shouldn't be recommending books that I haven't read yet myself but Labor and Monopoly Capital has been on my book list for quite some time and is supposedly very good. Maybe we'll read it at the same time.

To quote the first paragraph of the introduction to the new edition:
>Work, in today's society, is a mystery. No other realm of social existence is so obscured in mist, so zealously concealed from view ("no admittance except on business") by the prevailing ideology. Within so-called popular culture -- the world of TV and films, commodities and advertising -- consumption occupies center stage, while the more fundamental reality of work recedes into the background, seldom depicted in any detail, and then usually in romanticized forms. The harsh experiences of those forced to earn their living by endless conformity to boring machine-regulated routines, divorced from their own creative potential -- all in the name of efficiency and profits -- seem always just beyond the eye of the camera, forever out of sight.

I mean holy shit what an opening! Immediately there is so much of what's already been brought up.