Robin Murray

BLPG Elson

 

Robin Murray and the Brighton Labour Process Group, 1975-77: Some Personal Reflections

 
 

By Diane Elson

I was a member of the BLPG for two transformative years that enabled me to develop a reading of Marx and of the process of capital accumulation that underpinned much of my subsequent work as a scholar and as an activist. I learnt from Robin how to escape from the straitjacket of a ‘logic of capital accumulation’ approach whose determinism left no room for struggle; and from the closed system approach of mathematical treatments of value theory that had no place for historically developing contradictions between abstract and concrete labour. Unlike Robin, I have not preserved an archive of papers, so my reflections depend to some extent on my memories.

As I recall, the BLPG was set up as a dynamic cooperative group, in which we read a wide range of texts, wrote and shared short memos on the topic for discussion, and engaged in impassioned but constructive dialogues.  Afterwards Robin typed extensive ‘minutes’ of the meetings - though the term ‘minutes’ does not do justice to what were in practice a torrent of creative ideas that the discussion had sparked in Robin.  As well as reading and discussing, and producing collectively authored theoretical papers, the BLPG also engaged, under Robin’s leadership in politically committed empirical investigations  of the ways that the labour process was changing in two Brighton manufacturing businesses, ITT Creed, and Gross Cash Registers, and the challenges facing their workers. This combination of theoretical and empirical work was a great strength of the BLPG.

The BLPG members shared the view that it was necessary to go beyond the idea that labour was exploited by capital, to understand in detail how it was that ‘labour serves the machine and not the machine labour’.   The concept of ‘machinofacture’ featured a lot in BLPG discussion and writing but this was not a narrow concept of the production line in manufacturing, but a broader concept of a system of material transformations, discipline, and control of information.  Though the development and application of information technology was in its infancy, the BLPG drew attention to the use of computers as ‘the eyes and ears of capital, enforcing discipline’ (BLPG 1977a, p.14).  Moreover, the empirical case studies were not confined to the workers manufacturing the product on the shop floor, but also the workers in the offices on the same site.  Thus the investigation of ITT Creeds, a manufacturer of teleprinters, in the process of switching from electro-mechanical to electronic technology, also examined the jobs of clerical workers and typists, and the ways in which computerisation was transforming these jobs, doing away with the need for filing, a job mainly done by older married women, and standardising the letters produced in the typing pool by young, mainly unmarried women. 

The gender division of labour on the shop floor was also examined. As noted in Memo 1, the case study found that in electromechanical production the simpler jobs were performed by women, while the more complicated jobs were done by men.  ‘We were told that the union had insisted that jobs which had to be inspected [ i.e the more complicated jobs] should be done by men’. The other area of specialised women's work was soldering and wiring where it was claimed they had greater dexterity than the 'banana-handed’ men. Women were paid less than men for comparable work.  Only in the wiring sections did they have female shop stewards, so the union was dominated by men.  ‘Our informant, the officer in charge of trainees, told us that women were found to be much more willing to put up with repetitious jobs’.  And as the new labour process in production of electronic teleprinters reportedly would involve less skill, many more women workers were expected to be employed.

The BLPG did not further investigate the forces shaping this gender division of labour.  That was a focus of another group I belonged to while in Brighton, the Workshop on the Subordination of Women in the Process of Development based at Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex (Young, Wolkowitz and Mc Cullagh (eds.) 1981).

However,  the BLPG did recognise that capital accumulation also depended on labour processes that ‘stand in some indirect and difficult to analyse relations with the operation of the law of value……Perhaps the most important of these are (i) housework, and (ii) the very heterogeneous range of labour processes taking place under the command of the State’ (BLPG 1977a, p.24).  The role of housework was explored in the CSE domestic labour debate, and the BLPG explored the state and the labour process in a paper for the 1977 CSE conference ( BLPG1977b). Robin’s notes from the BLPG meetings in 1976-77 indicate a wide ranging rich discussion that located state activities in relation to circuits of capital, noting the significance of the power to tax, and the specificity of particular state labour processes (for example,  armed forces, utilities, education and health, for instance).  Privatisation and marketisation of utilities and public services has comprehensively transformed state labour processes since the deliberations of the BLPG. However, still pertinent is the observation in the 1977 conference paper that services like education and health and social services have low productivity and ‘labour is related to the market in only the most general way. Thus the discipline of production takes on a more arbitrary form than it does for labour processes producing particular commodities for sale’ (BLPG 1977b p. 16).  Those arbitrary forms of discipline, such as more exams for young children and school league tables, and 15 minute home visits to assist frail elderly people to get up, wash, dress, and eat,  supposedly will increase productivity, but in fact damage the quality of the experience of education and care.  This is an enduring example of ‘the irreducible contradiction between use value and exchange value as manifested in the activity of the state’ (BLPG 1977b, p. 9).  The message I take from Robin and the work of the BLPG is that the outcome of this contradiction in the operation of public services will depend on social struggle, in which scholars, trade unionists, and community groups all have a role to play.

August 2020