Brighton Labour Process Group, 1975-1976
By Hugo Radice
The Brighton Labour Process Group was set up in the autumn of 1975, following the decision of the Conference of Socialist Economists to hold its 1976 annual conference on the topic of the capitalist labour process. By 1975 the CSE had become well-established: we had around 500 members, published The Bulletin of the CSE three times a year, and held annual conferences, as well as smaller meetings linked to the growing network of working groups set up to address particular topics of interest. The labour process proved to be a popular topic across the CSE, and groups were established to work towards the conference in Bradford, Brighton, Coventry, Edinburgh, Leeds, London and Manchester, as well as network groups exploring the history of work in capitalism, and the political economy of women’s work. By April 1976 there were some 100 members taking part, and some 250 attended the conference in Coventry in July(1).
The Brighton CSE Group had grown to some 40-50 members by 1975. There was a network of small reading groups working their way through Marx’s Capital (or at least Volume 1), and we had visiting speakers such as Bertel Ollman who came to speak at plenary seminars of the group. Robin’s enthusiasm and astonishing work-rate, and his strong commitment to the democratic and collective organisation of our activities, were central to everything that we did: that included not only our political-cum-academic work, but also the much more mundane tasks, including marathon collating and stapling sessions by means of which we published the early numbers of the Bulletin of the CSE.
The Brighton Labour Process Group had a core of 10-12 members who met more or less weekly, with a similar number contributing from time to time. At the outset, our aim was to undertake a critical study of the existing literature on work and production in capitalism; the basic purpose was to develop an approach which could make sense of contemporary developments from the standpoint of labour. By the end of the year, we had put together a wide-ranging 25-30,000-word paper on “The production process of capital and the capitalist labour process” (2) which sought to situate the labour process within a much wider understanding of capitalism as a whole, including the reproduction and accumulation of capital, class relations, politics, the state and the world economy. The paper very much reflected the wider context of the 1970s, as global capitalism’s postwar boom fell apart in multiple economic, social and political crises, and the left in Britain and around the world struggled to find a way forward.
While Robin played a very full part in our work on this paper, he was still more central to a second project which got under way in November 1975. The “workers’ enquiry” approach in its modern form had been pioneered in Italy in the late 1960s, but was quickly taken up in the UK by activist intellectuals wanting to support the shop stewards’ movement in the turbulent period that had started with the 1966 seamen’s strike. Robin had already written an important study of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders for the workers fighting its closure, and workers’ control of production was very much on the radical agenda. We therefore decided to link our theoretical work to political practice in the workplace by investigating technological change at ITT Creed, a large Brighton teleprinter factory that was changing from electro-mechanical to electronic technology. Based on detailed discussion with workers at the factory, some 15,000 words of notes on ITT Creed were written up and presented at the 1976 conference (3).
In our discussions and in the writing of the two papers, the BLPG drew on the burgeoning literature that formed the basis of what came to be called ‘labour process studies’. We studied carefully the works of Gorz, Braverman, Marglin among others, as well as many empirical studies of specific workplaces and occupations. Our work also drew on the other activities and interests of Brighton CSE members: many of us were studying in depth not only Marx, but also Marxists such as Hilferding, Bukharin, Luxemburg, Lukacs and Gramsci from the early 20th century, and 1960s contributors such as Mandel, Althusser, Bettelheim, Poulantzas, and Palloix. Both Robin and I were particularly interested in the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel, who had attended the first CSE conference in 1970; in his article on ‘The dual economics of transition’ (4) we found a striking and original theory of the dynamic relationship between the labour process and the wider crisis tendencies of monopoly capitalism. A further important feature of the group was that its members had backgrounds in a wide range of academic disciplines and fields of study, including philosophy, sociology, politics, economics and history; many also drew on their first-hand knowledge of different countries and economic sectors.
After the July 1976 conference a number of the core BLPG members (myself included) left Brighton for jobs elsewhere. The group continued to meet regularly, and contributed papers to the 1977 conference on ‘Class struggle, the state and the restructuring of capital’. Sadly, the only formal publication of our work on the labour process was the article ‘The capitalist labour process’ in the first issue of the CSE’s new journal Capital & Class in 1977. (5) The first five sections of this article (pp 3-20) are essentially a lightly edited version of section 1 (pp 1-27) of the 1976 conference paper; the title and much of the final section 6, ‘The extension of machinofacture’ (pp 20-22), are likewise close to the first few pages of section 2.1 of the conference paper; and the conclusion (pp 22-24) explains that the rather general nature of the paper needs to be developed into a full analysis of how the labour process has actually developed in historical capitalism, with class struggle as the key perspective.
Both the conference paper and the ITT Creed study provide valuable insights into the purposes and preoccupations of the BLPG as a whole, and - given his inspirational role in the group - Robin in particular, in the middle years of a pretty tempestuous decade. They prefigure many of our present-day concerns about work (6), and taken together they provide an object-lesson in the importance for socialists of relating theory and analysis to the day-to-day struggles of working people.
July 2020
References
(1) For a more detailed account of the CSE in the 1970s see Hugo Radice, “A short history of the CSE”, Capital & Class 10, Spring 1980, pp 43-49.
(4) Alfred Sohn-Rethel, “The dual economics of transition”, Bulletin of the Conference of Socialist Economists I.3, Autumn 1972, pp 36-54; also in CSE Pamphlet no.1, The Labour Process and Class Strategies, London: Stage 1, 1976, pp 26-45.
(6) See e.g. Matthew Cole, Hugo Radice and Charles Umney, “The Political Economy of Datafication and Work: Towards a New Digital Taylorism?”, Socialist Register 2021.