The Brighton Labour Process Group and its approach to research
By Kate Soper
My involvement with the Brighton Labour Process Group came about in part as a consequence of my contact with Robin himself and his manifold interests and political activity. He was both a close neighbour in Brighton when I first arrived there in the early 1970s, a prime mover in our local community QueenSpark project, and a member like myself of the Brighton Capital Reading Group. But it was as a researcher and teacher in the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University whose argument and writings were a frequent reference point for those, like myself, who had come to study on the pioneering MA in Marxist Philosophy, that his influence was most felt.
The late John Mepham, who coordinated that MA and also became active in the BLPG, had us all reading (alongside the newly published Grundrisse translations) Michel Bosquet (aka André Gorz), Harry Braverman, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Christian Palloix, and Mario Tronti among others, and the transitions of the labour process, the political implications of de-skilling, the evolution and impact of various aspects of the mental-manual division of labour, and the critique of technological determinism were central concerns of the philosophy programme. In this sense, as I recall, there was an ongoing cross-fertilisation of ideas between those working primarily in economics and development studies and those focussed more on social and political theory and philosophy – and it was this interdisciplinary mediation that gave the BLPG much of its special quality and energy. Nonetheless, as others have noted, it was Robin’s move into the factory itself, as it were, in other words, the Gross Cash Register study he promoted and his investigation and interaction with workers at ITT Creed in Brighton that were all-important in providing the theoretical work of the group with an empirical anchoring and legitimation. Without Robin’s guidance and zeal in this respect, the BLPG output would have remained more speculative.
Others have offered some digest of the BLPG’s labour process theory and Robin’s key role in recording it. I would add here only a note on a couple of more general aspects of its research outlook and ethos. In its emphasis on the ways in which new technologies were developed and adopted with a view to allowing maximum capitalist control over the production process, the approach was resistant to forms of determinism still influential at the time in Marxist studies. As Diane Elson has noted, its general line was that it is labour that serves the machine and not the reverse. It thus furthered arguments on the non-neutrality of technology and the shaping impact of capitalist relations on capitalist forces of production already developed in the work of Bosquet and others, and thus contributed to the consolidation of a more dialectical understanding of the relations between relations and forces of production. This is an understanding that continues to resonate in historical materialism and radical ecological critique, informing such current studies as Andreas Malm’s on ‘fossil capitalism’ or Alf Hornborg’s on the money-energy-technology nexus.
On a rather different level, but also for me quite striking in retrospect, is the very differing conception we had within the Brighton group, and the CSE more generally, of the role and rationale of academic research, and of its responsibilities to the wider world. Conferences were more akin to the meetings of a social movement or political campaign. Individual research, undriven by considerations of accountability to the RAE or REF, was undertaken less for kudos or personal career advancement or the award of research funding, but more in the ardent, if possibly naïve, conviction that it was politically essential and could make a difference at that level. And in all this it was class analysis and class politics that were the central preoccupation – again rather different from the subsequent shift of focus in the academy to the concerns of identity politics.
August 2020