THE HIDDEN ABODE OF COMMUNISM TODAY

Paul S. AdlerUniversity of Southern Californiapadler@usc.edu

Draft version: Jan 20, 2013

INTRODUCTIONCapitalism is surely not the end of history. While Marx’s periodization — primitive

communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism — is just one of several ways of parsing human history to date, my working hypothesis is that Marx’s prognosis was correct and that, barring catastrophic collapse of our species, some higher form of social organization — more productive and more humane — will surely emerge eventually. I do not think we know much about what such a form of society would look like, but Marx’s rough sketch of communism still seems like a good place to start, even if the ostensibly communist societies of the 20th century were such primitive experiments: “socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature” (Marx 1974: Ch. 48). In some form or other, democratic planning would replace blind market mechanisms, cooperation would replace class exploitation, and the money economy would be replaced by one operating on the principle “from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs” (Marx and Engels 1959a).

At the start of the 21st century, however, the prospects for communism seem grim. The Communist regimes of the 20th century have either collapsed or mutated beyond recognition. Enthusiasm for the idea of communism has waned. Faith that its emergence is in any sense inevitable has almost disappeared. If communism’s prospects have waned, it is clearly not because capitalism has solved its basic problems: to mention just a few, we still regularly experience severe economic crises; industry wreaks ever-greater destruction on the natural environment; economic rivalries continue to fuel wars; governments in ostensibly democratic countries still function as means of class domination; workers are still deprived of control over the conditions of their work and the disposition of the surplus their labor creates. However, it has become difficult to see what social forces could lead to a communist social transformation. For many observers, it is not only the absence of vibrant communist parties that dims prospects for change, but even more disturbingly, the fragmented and deskilled condition of the working class itself.

This chapter focuses on that latter concern, and argues for a more optimistic assessment. I believe that the working class as a social force capable of leading the way toward communism is, in reality, progressively accumulating strength, albeit in a surprising place — in the heart of many firms in the advanced capitalist economies, where both work organization and worker subjectivity are evolving in a communist direction. Marx described the workplace as the “hidden abode” of profit generation (Marx 1977: Ch. 6): I will argue that the workplace is also becoming the hidden abode of communism, the context within which a communist future is taking shape.

1

This is happening, I argue, because technology and workers’ skills develop cumulatively over time. This development creates ever wider and tighter interdependence among production activities and workers, both within and across firms. To manage this interdependence, firms find that they need to reorganize work in ways that are more democratic, indeed communist. And working in such settings, workers develop subjective identities that are deeply solidaristic, and indeed communist too. This trend is masked and easily overlooked because communist cooperation is frequently undermined by capitalist exploitation and competition. However, these latter forces not only undermine the cumulative development of technology and skills, but also stimulate that development, and the net effect is that capitalism generates impressive productivity gains over time as communism begins to take shape in the work process.

These changes prepare the ground for the emergence of a communist form of society. They create a working class ever better equipped to lead to and in this new form of society, because workers are more educated, more skilled, and more experienced in leading large-scale complex undertakings. They fuel the motivation of this class to undertake this social transformation, because more sophisticated workers become more frustrated by the deficiencies of capitalism and the fetters that capitalism imposes on progress, both within firms and at the societal level. And they begin to establish the productive infrastructure of a communist society, not only because productive levels rise but also because the emerging forms of work organization already embody many communist principles.

There are, of course, several big steps involved before communism can emerge from its hidden abode and become society’s organizing principle. Debate continues on the nature of those steps, in particular whether they would be abrupt or gradual, and on the specific institutional forms that communism might take. Those debates, however, are beyond the scope of this chapter. My argument is also circumscribed insofar as I focus on the basic long-term tendencies of capitalism as a whole, and leave aside the many other determinants that shape shorter-term changes and local conditions — eddies in the flow of history. A clearer understanding of capitalism’s long-term, systemic tendencies, I argue, leads to an optimistic view of the prospects for communism.

This chapter first summarizes the general theory that supports this optimistic perspective (a version of Marxism that I earlier outlined in Adler (2007) and Adler (2012)). I then explain how this theory helps us recognize the communist tendencies of capitalist work processes. I illustrate this mutation with a sketch of changes taking place in one software services organization, and conclude with some summary propositions.

CONTEXT: CAPITALISM AS A MODE OF PRODUCTIONMy general theoretical approach is inspired by Marx. However, the optimism of my

argument contrasts with the pessimistic tone of most Marxist theory. Much 20th century Marxism, especially what has come to be known as “Western Marxism,” aimed to explain why, notwithstanding the validity of the core of Marx’s theory, communist revolution had not happened and why communism (even its first stage, socialism) had not already replaced capitalism (Anderson 1979). From about 1925 onwards — after the failure of the Bolshevik revolution to spark revolution in Europe, despite insurrections in Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria — most Marxist theorizing abandoned the elements of theory that led prior generations of Marxists to see communism as inevitable. The very idea of inevitability became anathema, castigated as teleological and therefore philosophically and politically suspect in its determinism. This view was further reinforced among the 1968 generation, when that wave of revolutionary enthusiasm ebbed. Gramsci’s maxim, “pessimism of the

2

intellect, optimism of the will” has thus presided over the vast bulk of the past century’s Marxist theorizing (Gramsci 1971).

I propose to invert Gramsci’s maxim, to advocate optimism of the intellect, notwithstanding various reasons for pessimism of the will. Communism, I argue, is taking shape within advanced capitalism, even if we don’t always see what we can do to hasten its flowering. I submit that the deterministic and teleological elements of traditional Marxist theory are theoretically fruitful, empirically plausible, and political helpful. Appropriately understood, these elements allow us to discern among the manifold changes around us today portentous developments that otherwise would go unnoticed or misinterpreted. As the cyberpunk novelist William Gibson (1999) famously observed: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” I add that one needs to wear the right kind of glasses to notice the future-in-the-present, and that Marxist theory, in the version I advocate here, provides such glasses.

The workplace is the key arena for the debate between optimistic and pessimistic versions of Marxism. It is, of course, not the only arena: there has also been debate over Western Marxism’s arguments concerning the counter-revolutionary effects of mass consumerist culture, of rising living standards, and of social welfare programs. However, recent economic crises have reminded us that the moderating power of these factors is itself contingent to a considerable extent on the state of class struggle in the workplace arena.

The essential theoretical point on which the pessimistic and optimistic accounts differ is whether the fundamental contradiction of capitalism — the primary tension driving its development and eventual supersession — is the contradiction between capitalists’ and workers’ interests and the associated class struggle, or the contradiction between what Marx calls the “forces of production” (technology and skills) and “relations of production” (the class structure of property and control over these forces of production).1 The theoretical foundations of the pessimistic interpretation lie in the centrality it accords to class struggle. The Marxist credentials of this “conflictual” version are buttressed by the Communist Manifesto’s declaration that the class struggle is the “motor of history.” In giving class struggle the fundamental role, this account refuses to accord technology, or more broadly the forces of production, the major role in the historical process. To the contrary, the rate and direction of technological change as well as many of the specific features of new technologies are, in this perspective, themselves driven by these social, class relations (e.g. Noble 2011). Goldman and van Houten (1977), for example, are explicit: “new forces of production (technology for example) are developed to strengthen existing social relations of production” (p. 110, italics in the original). The conflictual account sees capitalists’ control over technological change enabling them to deskill work and fragment the working class (e.g. Braverman 1974). On this view, if there has been no successful communist revolution, it is in large part due to capitalists’ success in disempowering workers in the workplace. In this account, any prospects for radical social change are based on the explosive potential of an increasing frustrated mass of workers —who surely must eventually rise up in revolt against the degradation of work in despotic capitalist firms and against the recurrent economic crises in anarchic capitalist markets. This perspective leaves considerable room for voluntaristic optimism of the will, but little room for any optimism of the intellect: capitalist development may make radical change increasingly desirable, but capitalist

1 Marx’s writings themselves are open to both interpretations. I have argued that this is because these writings, even Capital, mixed the analysis of long-term and shorter-term trends, and combined objective analysis with polemical advocacy (Adler 1990).

3

development simultaneously undermines the capacity of the working class to act in its own (and society’s) interests.2

Against this conflictual and pessimistic version of Marxist theory, I offer an alternative that builds on Marx’s argument that the form and direction of class conflict are themselves shaped by an even more fundamental, structural contradiction between the forces and relations of production (see Cohen 1978 for a widely acclaimed restatement, Engels 1978).3 In this version, social structure has three layers: first, an infrastructure of forces of production, composed of society’s accumulated technological know-how, which is embodied in the material means of production (tools and materials) and in workers’ productive capabilities (their knowledge and know-how); second, an economic structure of relations of production, which establishes control and property rights over these forces; and third, on top of this “base” of forces and relations of production, a “superstructure” of culture, politics, and law. Causality in the overall historical process flows both upward and downward across these layers. Indeed, it is the interplay between them that drives social-structural change. This interplay, however, is asymmetrical, and over larger social aggregates and longer time periods, causality flows primarily upwards. Causality flows primarily from base to superstructure because the exigencies of production and class structure of relations of production shape politics and culture more than vice versa. Within the base, causality flows primarily from the forces to the relations of production because the forces (knowledge, “power to”) tend to accumulate over time and because both dominant and dominated classes have an interest in that accumulation, whereas the relations (“power over”) tend merely to persist, as the dominant class fights to preserve its prerogatives.4

The cumulative advance of the forces of production renders capitalism increasingly obsolete and communism increasing likely because the forces of production advance via a process of “socialization.” In Marxist theory, an activity is socialized insofar as it comes to embody the capabilities of the larger society rather than only those that emerge in isolated, local contexts. The material and human forces of production are socialized to the extent that they embody society’s accumulated knowledge, in the increasing technological sophistication of machinery and materials and in workers’ increasing education levels. Capitalist relations of production drive firms to increase their productivity, which in turn

2 See Wright et al. (1992: 39-43), for a cogent summary of this argument against the “capacity thesis” that is at the heart of the optimistic version of Marx that I am defending.3 I call my reading “structural” but not “structuralist” since the latter label has been associated with the Althusserian school of Marxist thought and my argument bears only modest resemblance to theirs. G. A. Cohen’s version of Marx has been criticized by, amongst others, J. Cohen (1982), Elster (1985), and Levine and Wright (1980); see G. A. Cohen (1988) for elements of reply; and see Wright, Levine, & Sober (1992) for further debate.4 Even among writers sympathetic to Marx, many have abandoned this “base/superstructure” model. Structural Marxists, however, see no reason to throw the baby (a broad historical generalization with a plausible theoretical underpinning, considerable empirical validity, and useful heuristic power) out with the bathwater (the dogmatism that substitutes this generalization for the concrete analysis of concrete situations). Among those who give the base a primary role, Marxist historians who study the transition from feudalism to capitalism are divided on whether the forces of production played a primary or secondary role relative to the relations of production (e.g. Brenner 1982, Miller 1975, 1981, Milonakis 1997). I find Laibman’s (2007) resolution compelling, retaining a fundamental asymmetry between the forces and relations of production, but seeing the fundamental cause of transitions in the nature their interplay.

4

accelerates this socialization process, and in this way, engender both the material infrastructure for a superior mode of production and a social class that is increasingly capable of leading us there. In this structural/optimistic account, capitalist development produces a working class that is not only increasingly motivated to change society (because of capitalism’s fundamental limitations and persistent failures — crises, environmental destruction, war, deficient democracy, etc.), but also increasingly capable of leading this change, because it is increasingly educated and increasingly experienced in the conduct of large-scale, complex undertakings. Where the conflictual account sees capitalists trying to use technology to reinforce their domination, the structural account argues that notwithstanding that effort, the cumulative development of the forces of production presents a growing threat to the persistence of capitalist relations of production. The structural/optimistic account thus captures Marx’s insight that:

“[i]f we did not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic” (Marx 1973: 163).

The following discussion explicates this position.

The capitalist production processThe relations of production characteristic of capitalist societies derive from the

nature of the commodity (Marx 1977: Ch. 1). The commodity is something produced for sale, and as such, is best understood as a “contradictory unity” of use-value — its usefulness to the purchaser — and exchange-value — its power for the seller to command a determinate amount of money or goods in exchange.5 As a system of commodity production, capitalist relations of production have two main features. First, ownership of productive resources is dispersed among firms, which confront each other in market competition as commodity users and commodity producers. Second, alongside those who enjoy ownership of the means of production is a class of non-owners who, lacking access to means of

5 A contradictory unity is a type of “real contradiction.” Whereas a logical contradiction is a logical incompatibility between propositions in our minds, a real contradiction is a contradiction between forces in the external, observer-independent world. A contradictory unity is a real contradiction where the two poles simultaneously presuppose and oppose each other (Bottomore 1991: 93-94, Ollman 2003). The idea that the objective world embodies contradictions is rather foreign to the Anglo-American intellectual tradition: in that tradition, we often assume that contradictions obtain only between logical propositions, not between real things. Not so for Marxist theory. Take, for example, the commodity: its exchange-value and use-value poles represent a unity because they each presuppose the other: for the product to be created in the first place, the producer must believe it will have exchange-value, and to generate this exchange-value for the seller, the product must have use-value for the purchaser. At the same time, the two poles are contradictory because they oppose each other: their disjointedness can put them in conflict with each other, and this in at least two ways. First, the producer anticipates the exchange-value of the product, but does not know until she reaches the market if this hope will be realized or if, on the contrary, the effort and use-values that were consumed in producing the commodity will be wasted. Indeed, pursuit of exchange-value can destroy use-value, for example, where surplus agricultural output is destroyed, even in the midst of widespread hunger, to avoid selling it at a loss and driving down prices. Second, when production is oriented to exchange-value, there are many socially important use-values that remain under-supplied, such as a sustainable environment and healthcare, food, and shelter for all.

5

production or consumption, must sell their capacity to work (“labor power”) for a wage, as if this capacity too were a commodity on the labor market.

These two features of capitalist relations of production come together to shape what Marx calls the valorization process, the process in which the value of the capital invested in the firm is constantly expanded by extracting more “surplus labor” and hence more “surplus value.” Surplus value is the value created by labor services over and above the labor-time necessary to cover workers’ wages: it can be increased by extending the working day and/or by increasing the productivity of a given expenditure of labor. Competition between firms drives them to maximize this exploitation. The “profit imperative” is not at root the result of capitalists’ greed, but an inevitable effect of the basic structure of capitalist relations of production.

This valorization process is one pole of the contradictory unity that constitutes the capitalist production process — the labor process is the other. In the valorization process, exchange-values in the form of monetary wages, materials costs, capital investment, and sales income are combined to create money profit. In the labor process, use-values in the form of workers’ skills and effort, tools, and materials are combined to create new use-values in the form of products or services (Marx 1977: Appendix).

What, then, is the relationship between these two aspects of the production process? Marx says of this relationship:

“If capitalist direction [of work] is thus twofold in content, owing to the twofold nature of the process of production which has to be directed — on the one hand a social labor process for the creation of a product, and on the other hand capital’s process of valorization — in form it is purely despotic” (Marx 1977: 450).

Proponents of the conflictual version of Marxism can cite this passage to support the argument that the technical imperatives of the labor process are subsumed by the despotic social imperatives of valorization. Gordon (1976) proposed a linear programming metaphor: capitalist firms maximize technical efficiency subject to the constraint that exploitation be maintained. If conflictual Marxism sees a contradiction between the two imperatives, it is a notional rather than real one.6

In contrast, proponents of the structural version recall that in Marx’s dialectical theory, content and form often constitute a contradictory unity.7 In this version, valorization pressures drive capitalists to increase the productivity of the labor process, and simultaneously drive capitalists to intensify their exploitation of workers — and in doing so undermine productivity. The real contradiction here is tangible in the everyday life of the capitalist firm. Greater productivity in use-value creation in the labor process requires the

6 It may be fairer to the proponents of the conflictual version to say that they see a real contradiction but that it is in the form of what Cohen calls “development-fettering”: capitalist relations of production will block the potential development of more productive technologies (Cohen 1988). As both Cohen and Wright et al. (1992) point out, this is a considerably weaker form of fettering than “use-fettering,” where capitalist relations of production stimulate the development of forces of production but these same relations block those forces’ effective use. It is easier to see how use-fettering would generate deep social tensions; in contrast, development-fettering is less a real contradiction than a notional one.7 The real contradiction between form and content, appearance and essence, is a common theme in Marx’s work as in Hegel’s. Geras (1971) explains the pitfalls of interpreting a socially contingent form as the true content and the converse pitfalls of seeing the form as a mere illusion.

6

development of cooperation among the different types of workers and between workers, technical, and administrative personnel; but exploitation in the valorization process pits workers against managers and even against each other, and this conflictuality impairs productivity. The reality of this contradiction is experienced by many workers as profound ambivalence (Adler 2012): many “love the work, but hate the job” (Kusnet 2008).

This contradiction, however, is not static: it evolves and deepens over time. In the early phase of capitalism, capitalists took over the craft-based labor process largely as it was, and derived surplus value from lengthening the working day. Marx characterizes this form of surplus value as “absolute” and this phase as the “formal” subordination of labor to capital. Formal, because while workers were now employed by capitalists rather than working for themselves, the labor process itself was unchanged. A combination of class struggle and enlightened capitalist self-interest eventually prompted legislation limiting the length of the working day and child labor. As a result capitalists began revolutionizing the techniques of production and eliminating traditional, craft controls, opening the path to “relative” surplus value by the “real” subordination of labor to capital. The subordination is now real, because the capitalist has transformed the labor process by introducing a new, more detailed division of labor and new means of production, such that workers cannot activate the means of production alone, but can be productive only by becoming part of a “collective worker” under capitalist authority (see below).

Conflictual-Marxism alerts us to the loss of working-class power that flowed from this degradation of craft. This account sees the transition from formal to real subordination as strengthening capitalist domination by reshaping the labor process to suit capitalists’ class interests and undermining workers’ interests. However, this view ignores the benefits for the much larger number of non-craft workers associated with the transition from handicraft to modern industry and with the resulting skill-upgrading experienced by many categories of workers. On average, workers in advanced capitalist economies were considerably more educated and more skilled at the beginning of the 21st century than at the beginning of the 20th.8

Structural-Marxism incorporates these facts by interpreting the transition from formal to real subordination not as the unilateral strengthening of one class protagonist, but rather as the deepening the contradiction between labor process and valorization process, that is, between the forces of production and the relations of production. Through this prism, the skill upgrading of large masses of previously unskilled workers comes into focus as more significant than the deskilling of a small number of craftsmen.9 It is true that these

8 Notwithstanding the popularity of the deskilling and skill polarization arguments among conflictual Marxists (e.g. Braverman 1974), the evidence of a broad long-term skill upgrading trend is overwhelming (Spenner 1988, Form 1987, Attewell 1987, Handel 2000, Felstead et al. 2007, Spitz Oener 2006, Adler 2007)‐ . There is a strong causal link between industry’s growing need for skills and workers’ increasing education levels, even if other factors also play an important role in determining trends in educational attainment (Goldin and Katz 2009).9 My argument in this chapter focuses on the advanced capitalist economies, but it is not difficult to extend it to the rest of global economy, along the lines suggested for example by Warren (1980). With the globalization of markets (a.k.a imperialist expansion), masses of workers in “developing” countries are drawn from traditional rural agriculture into capitalist urban industry. While there are real costs for these workers associated with this transition, the evidence — in indicators of mortality, morbidity, income, women’s opportunities, and education — overwhelmingly supports Marx’s optimistic interpretation

7

crafts were often in the forefront of the 19th century workers’ movement; but the transition from handicraft to modern industry pushed the workers’ movement to reinvent itself on a much larger and firmer foundation. Focusing only on the class struggle, it is easy to miss the deeper and more progressive import of the advancing forces of production, and easy to adopt political positions that, with hindsight, can be recognized as retrograde in their defensiveness.10

The socialization of productionThe Marxist theory of history is dynamic. Specifically: the development of the forces

of production under feudalism prompted the emergence of capitalist relations of production. Once in place, these relations multiplied the available “free labor” and unleashed market competition, and under these conditions valorization pressures greatly accelerated the further development of the productive forces via capital accumulation and innovation. Eventually, the maintenance of the prevailing relations will come into contradiction with continued technological progress — fettering rather than encouraging the further progress of the productive forces — and pressures will therefore mount for the creation of a new social structure, one that is better able to support increases in productivity and well-being (Marx 1859: Preface).

of the long-run effects of this transition on the wellbeing of workers in developing countries. Workers in the more advanced countries (the imperialist center) may experience painful “adjustment costs” in this globalization process, but capitalist development is not a zero-sum game: these costs are far outweighed by the benefits to workers in developing countries; even modest social-democratic measures in the developed economies can open up new opportunities for retraining and reemployment for these displaced workers; and this globalization leads towards a globally integrated working class, which greatly improves prospects for communism. 10 A century ago, these were burning issues, expressed as a critique of craft unions and their defense of a “workers’ aristocracy” (Lenin 1917, Kautsky 1901, Perlman 1922). The issue is an enduring one. To take a somewhat more recent example: left-wing unions in France in the 1970s opposed the introduction of computers into insurance and banking industries, arguing that they would deskill work by automating many complex calculation functions that were the province of highly skilled employees. In reality, the effect was to eliminate a considerable number of menial filing tasks, to improve working conditions for most of the affected workers, to lower the cost and expand the range of services the industries provided, and create more jobs at medium and high skill levels. Instead of gaining strength by engaging management in serious negotiation over how best to manage this technological transition so as to maximize the benefits to workers and society, unions lost credibility in the eyes of workers by appearing to stand opposed to real progress (Adler 1988).

8

As noted above, the key mechanism here is the “socialization” of production.11 In colloquial terms, socialization refers to the transfer of ownership from the private to the public sector, and in psychology, socialization is commonly construed as the process whereby people new to a culture internalize its knowledge, norms and values. The structural-Marxist concept of socialization sees both public ownership and psychological internalization as forms of a more general phenomenon, where activities are increasingly intertwined with the larger society rather than isolated in their local, private contexts (e.g. Marx 1973: 705, 1977: 1024).

Objective socializationValorization pressures stimulate socialization of the material elements of the forces

of production (i.e. the means of production, as distinct from the human elements) at both a global and an enterprise level. At the global level, firms’ pursuit of profit leads to the emergence of increasingly differentiated, specialized branches of activity that are conjoined in an increasingly interdependent global economy (Engels 1978, van der Pijl 1998). This represents socialization insofar as any specific producer gains access to an ever-widening set of increasingly specialized suppliers of materials, equipment, and technologies. However, this is an indirect form of socialization, because that access is mediated by market exchange.

At the enterprise level, valorization stimulates socialization in a more direct form — as consciously managed, rather than market-mediated, interdependence. Under the profit imperative, firms develop techniques for coordinating operations of ever-greater scale and complexity. Engels (1978) characterized this evolution in these terms:

“Before capitalist production, i.e. in the Middle Ages. […] the instruments of labor — land, agricultural implements, the workshop, the tool — were the instruments of labor of single individuals, adapted for the use of one worker [… The bourgeoisie transformed these productive forces] from means of production of the individual into social means of production, workable only by a collectivity of men. The spinning-wheel, the hand-loom, the blacksmith’s hammer were replaced by the spinning-machine, the power-loom, the steam-hammer; the individual workshop, by the factory, implying the cooperation of hundreds and thousands of workmen. In like manner, production itself changed from a series of individual into a series of social acts.”

Over the past century, the average size of firms and establishments has grown enormously (for data on recent decades, see Henly and Sánchez 2009), and their labor

11 Marx’s ideas on socialization have rarely been used in recent decades. This gap is arguably due to the embarrassment of twentieth-century Marxists in dealing with the evidence that capitalist development could continue to foster further development of the forces of production, when these Marxists wanted to assert that capitalism was already obsolete (Adler 2007). A search of the compendium of Marxist writings on the Marxists Internet Archive (http://www.marxists.org/index.htm) and via journal search engines reveals that when the term “socialization” appears in Marxist discourse, it has been used almost exclusively to refer to the shift to public ownership. Very little has been written about the socialization of the forces of production — although Nelson (1990: 211) points in this direction, as do Mandel (1968: 170ff), Florida and Kenney (1993: 304-5) and Howard and King (2008) — and virtually nothing has been written about this phenomenon at the enterprise level nor about the subjective aspects that so impressed Marx. The Italian writers in the “autonomist” tendency such as Negri (1989), have perhaps been the most active in using Marx’s ideas of socialization; but their appropriation of Marx is highly selective.

9

processes have been transformed, with the result that the effective subject of production is no longer the individual worker but the “collective worker” (Gramsci 1971: 201, Marx 1977: 464, 468-9, 544, 644, 945). The collective worker is the entire collectivity of more or less specialized workers as well as the associated technical and managerial staff, cooperating to produce use-values. Firms develop a range of management techniques to orchestrate this cooperation (see Marx, 1977: Ch. 13).

Objective socialization is also evidenced in the firm’s conscious application of science and technology developed outside the firm. Production relies progressively less on forms of knowledge that are tacit and locally generated and disseminated, and more on forms that are explicit, codified, and globally generated and disseminated. Craft and traditional forms of know-how are progressively replaced by science and engineering, and as a result of the “public goods” aspects of these latter, relatively codified forms of knowledge (i.e. their non-excludability and non-rivalrous use), new production techniques advance and diffuse far more rapidly. The collective worker is mobilized in systematic process and product innovation efforts that leverage this pubic, socialized knowledge (Marx 1977: 616-7).

Subjective socializationThe socialization of the material elements of the forces of production is intimately

tied to the socialization of the human elements — workers’ capacities and self-understandings. As the objective structure of production is socialized, workers’ identities change. The objective socialization of the forces of production pulls workers out of the local isolation of what Marx called “rural idiocy” (Marx and Engels 1959b) and “craft idiocy” (Marx 1955). Marx’s use of the term idiocy derives from the Greek idiotes, denoting an asocial individual isolated from the polis (Draper 1978: Vol. II, 344ff.). This socialization connects workers indirectly via market ties as their exchange activity shifts from the purely local to the regional and then global economy. And they become interconnected directly as their production activity shifts from small-scale farming and handicraft to large-scale facilities in industrialized farming, manufacturing, and services. The idiotes is thereby transformed into a directly “social individual” (Gould 1978, Marx 1973: 704-6) — an individual whose socialized nature is not only an abstract theoretical fact, but is also experienced subjectively in higher education levels, which give greater access to and mastery of society’s accumulated know-how, and in the greater breadth of social ties, created by participation in the practical activity of an expanding collective worker.

This shift transforms workers’ “self-construals” — their understanding of themselves and their relations with others — pulling workers away from dependent or independent self-construals towards more interdependent ones (adapting Markus and Kitayama 1991). Cohen (1974) provides a compelling gloss of Marx’s (1973:158) analysis of this historical evolution of subjectivity. In pre-capitalist forms of society, the individual is “engulfed” by social structures that afford only “undifferentiated unity.” Interpersonal relations are primarily conditioned by social status rather than individual choice. Self-construals here are “dependent.” Under capitalism, the individual emerges, but only in the “alienated” form of “differentiated disunity.” Social structures afford individual differentiation, but at the cost of the dissolution of traditional communities. Here, self-construals are “independent.” In a communist society, individual differentiation will truly flourish, because it will be part of a social structure that affords “differentiated unity.” Individuals will play differentiated roles, but they will be mobile between these roles and they will collectively govern their common destiny. They will be neither (engulfed) dependent nor (alienated) independent but genuinely interdependent. This transition to an

10

interdependent self-concept is, I submit, already progressing under capitalist conditions as the objective conditions of productive activity are socialized.

Socialization of relations of productionThe two previous sections describe how valorization pressures stimulate

socialization of the material and human forces of production. This in turn stimulates progress — albeit timid and constrained by the overall dominance of society by the capitalist class — towards the socialization of capitalist relations of production at a more macro-societal level.

This socialization takes two main forms. First, to reprise the political-science meaning of socialization, the state takes over a growing mass of “general interest” tasks — tasks in which the market tends to fail — such as funding general-purpose R&D, education, infrastructure, unemployment and health insurance. These steps towards socialization represent the “creeping socialism” that Hayek (1944) denounced. The recent rise of neo-liberalism has slowed this trend, but it is striking how little it has been reversed.

At their most fundamental, these steps reflect the advancing socialization of the forces of production, since their impetus lies in their productivity benefits; but this development is often mediated by class struggle: the proximate cause of the expansion of the state is often popular political pressure.

Second, we also see signs of socialization in relations of production within the business sector itself, as growing areas of the economy find themselves under increasingly planned, conscious control rather than coordinated only by the blind, ex post mechanism of the competitive market. Specifically: ownership shifts from the individual to the corporate form; corporate ownership is progressively centralized in the hands of fewer capitalists; and these corporations begin to coordinate, sometimes illicitly in cartels, sometimes legally under regulated conditions, and increasingly often in alliances, supply-chain partnerships, and industry-wide standards-setting associations. Financial markets and larger institutional investors assume increasing importance in the flow of investment, rationalizing the allocation of capital at the societal and even international levels. In these ways, capitalist relations of production are partially socialized. Only partially, of course, because the ultimate criterion guiding their behavior is still private profit rather than social utility, and the disjunction between private profits and social utility is often substantial. These steps towards socialization in the business sector also reflect, at their most fundamental, the advancing socialization of the forces of production, since their profitability is in considerable measure a function of superior productivity.

FetteringValorization pressures do not only stimulate socialization but also simultaneously

fetter it by blocking and distorting it. The tendencies towards socialization co-exist with equally deep-seated counter-tendencies that flow from the persistence of the basic matrix of capitalist relations of production.

This fettering has several dimensions. Instead of a broadening association of producers progressively mastering their collective future, socialization appears — at least at first — in the form of intensified coercion by quasi-natural laws of the market over firms and intensified domination by corporate bureaucracies over workers within firms. Efforts to strengthen and broaden the collective worker within and between firms are stimulated by valorization pressures; but these same valorization pressures often force firms to break the fabric of cooperation with workers and with partner firms. Valorization pressures steer much technology development into profitable but socially wasteful ends, and away from

11

unprofitable but critical social needs. Capitalist relations of production allow ideas in the form of science and technology to be appropriated as private intellectual property, when they would be more effectively generated and disseminated under public and collegial control. The crises that are endemic to a market-based economy periodically stall the socialization tendencies and indeed they have done so in recent decades in several regions of the world. While the cumulative advance of the forces of production has prevailed over these counter-tendencies in the long run, the persistence of the basic matrix of capitalist relations acts as a powerful fetter on this progressive evolution.

Deepening contradictions and increasing probability of systemic changeOptimism is warranted nevertheless. Over time, the direct costs and the opportunity

costs of fettering increase, and so do the resulting social strains. At the same time, the socialization of the forces of production creates a broader mass of people who are (a) increasingly cognizant of and offended by such costs, (b) increasingly able to take on the task of forging a new form of society that eliminates those costs, and (c) increasingly able to take on the leading roles in this new society. The potential for systemic change — change that would propel society beyond its capitalist form and towards communism — therefore increases over the longer term.

Our optimism, however, should be cautious, because capitalist relations of production also carry risks beyond fettering. The profit imperative engenders not only economic cycles and financial instability, but also wars and ecological destruction that threaten human (and other forms of) life on the planet. These latter risks are serious. They justify Rosa Luxemburg’s (1971) maxim: “socialism or barbarism.” In the structural version of Marxism, the balance between stimulating and fettering shifts toward the latter as capitalism matures, increasing the likelihood of radical change in social structure toward communism; but barbarism is an ever-present alternative.

FOREGROUND: COMMUNISM IN ITS HIDDEN ABODEIn the previous section, we saw how socialization transformed the subject of

productive activity from an individual into a collective worker. In this section, I argue, first, that if it is to function effectively in the labor process, this cooperative worker must form a real “community” — that is, a collectivity with some shared identity, norms, and values. Second, this community is taking an increasingly communist form.12

12 Community is an important but little discussed thread running through much of Marx’s work (Springborg 1986, Mahowald 1973, Sayer 1990, Megill 1970). Engeström (1987) makes a strong case for a Marxist anthropology in which community figures as a key element of the transhistorical labor process, mediating (along with material and symbolic tools) the subject’s activity and the object of that activity. Nevertheless, inspired by Marx’s critique of civil society in capitalism, many Marxists are dismissive of any suggestion that community is operative in our societies today. Indeed, so rigorous is this rejection that Marxism has been left largely without a theory of community or civil society: this dimension of our lives is absent from most Marxist theorizing, lost in an indeterminate space between the economic base and the superstructure of state and ideology. As noted by Burawoy (2003), Gramsci and Polanyi stand as rare exceptions. Burawoy’s article designates this missing object as “society” but the term is too broad because society is often taken as the broader construct encompassing the entire social systems, inclusive of state, economy, civil society, family. Burawoy uses “civil society” as a synonym, but the latter too is confusing: for some writers, it includes the economic sphere, while for others it is distinct from both state and economy, and there is debate too over whether it includes the family or only refers to

12

The collective worker as a communityThe emergence of capitalism is a process of loosening the individual’s bonds with

community. In capitalist societies, the individual is emancipated — and alienated — from community. Community is replaced by mere instrumental association and class exploitation. Community here assumes great ideological prominence, precisely to compensate for its disappearance as society’s material foundation. By contrast, communism would be a reassertion of community, in a higher form and on a vastly expanded, global, scale. Communism is the “free association of producers” — the re-emergence of community as a condition of production and as society’s overarching organizing principle, displacing market and state. As Marx says in his famous letter on the Russian peasant communes, communism will represent “a superior form of the ‘archaic’ type of collective property and production” (Marx 1989).

However, if we look more closely at capitalism, we see that community figures here too — disguised only very lightly, as the collective worker discussed above. This collective worker must function as a real community if it is to support the cooperation essential to the complex, interdependent labor process that characterizes modern industry. Workers’ reluctant compliance with management authority might suffice to ensure profitability in some settings with very simple production processes or with exceptionally low labor costs relative to the industry average. However, in most settings the profitable operation of the capitalist production process requires the active cooperation of workers, their engagement in mutual adjustment and problem-solving. (That is why the “work to rule” type of strike is so effective.) And such cooperation can only proceed on the basis of some real bond of shared identity, norms, and values.

Managers, too, function as part of this collective-worker community insofar as they play a productive role as technical experts and as coordinators. Of course, they also play an exploitative role; and the latter often undermines the former, just as within the broader society class divisions often undermine civil society. Indeed, the cohesion of this labor-process community is in constant tension with the imperatives of capitalist valorization. However, this tension reflects the real contradiction between the labor process and the valorization process in capitalist production. Even as exploitation (in the valorization process) undermines the collective worker community’s cohesion, the imperatives of effective use-value creation (in the labor process) constantly impel firms to recreate that community.

The emergence of a new type of community in the collective worker: value-rational, collaborative, and communist

If community is constantly recreated within the capitalist labor process, what type of community could that possibly be? After all, Marx — along with a host of other observers — is surely correct that capitalist development progressively destroys the traditional bonds of community — the Gemeinschaft bonds that Tönnies famously contrasted with the instrumental, individualistic Gesellschaft ties that constitute capitalist civil society (Tönnies 1957).

To resolve this apparent paradox, I propose a detour via Max Weber (1978). Weber, one of the foundational figures of sociology as a discipline, was deeply influenced by Marx, even if opposed to his ideas on some key points. Weber is particularly useful in the present context, because he provides us with a more nuanced typology of community forms than Tönnies, and each of these types promises a rather different type of cooperation.

the sphere of public life.

13

Weber identifies four modes of social action — traditionalistic, affectual, instrumental-rational and value-rational — and four corresponding forms of community. I argue, first, that the labor process in modern capitalist industry is increasingly reliant on value-rationality and its distinctive, collaborative type of community (building on Adler 2012, Adler and Heckscher 2006, Adler, Kwon, and Heckscher 2008). Second, I will argue that value-rational, collaborative community is the distinctively communist form of organization and the matrix within which a communist psychology can form.

Traditionalistic community. Traditionalistic action aims to preserve established ways of doing things, either as habit or as sacred rituals. A community built around this type of action is homogeneous and stable, but also hierarchical, conformist, and inward-focused. Self-construals here are dependent. This is the core of Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft. In the history of the collective worker under capitalism, this type predominated in “putting out” and “internal contracting” arrangements, both of which often exploited patriarchal familial relations. Moreover, this traditionalistic type of community persisted in 20th century corporations, where capitalists and their hired managers attempted to build — and often succeeded in building — traditionalistic bonds of loyalty with subordinates.

Charismatic community. Affectual action is action oriented by emotional goals. When affectual ties are mobilized for purposive action on a larger scale, it is through the power of charisma to galvanize a community. Charismatic community is based on an emotional commitment to the ideals articulated and exemplified by visionary leaders and to these leaders themselves (Kalyvas 2002). It is not uncommon today in high-tech start-ups led by a technology or design “guru”: these organizations may be either autocratic or democratic, but are often based on such an emotional bond. (Salaman (1977) offers a nice example of the autocratic variant; Steve Jobs at Apple also exemplified it.) As Weber argued, charismatic community is by nature somewhat ephemeral, being so dependent on an inspiring leader: sooner or later, it inevitably mutates via routinization into one of the other types of community.

Contractual community. Instrumentally-rational action is, like traditionalistic action, focused also on means rather than ends — in both types, the ends are given and taken for granted — but unlike traditionalistic action, it applies rational criteria to its choice of means. This is the type of action that gives rise to Tönnies’ Gesellschaft — an association of instrumentally-rational individuals with self-interest as their taken-for-granted ends. Here, self-construals are independent. Whereas many writers see Gesellschaft as the antithesis of community by virtue of its manifold contrasts with Gemeinschaft, Weber suggests that it is more fruitful to see it as a type of community because it too requires some shared values and norms. It has two variants, which operate in symbiotic relation in capitalist societies — market and bureaucracy. This contractual type emerges in the history of business organizations with scientific management and incentive wages: these encouraged a shift within the collective worker towards more individualistic, instrumentally rational relations.

A considerable body of research has documented both the strengths and the limitations of organizations relying on the contractual type of community. For any individual firm, or indeed among firms that are interdependent, neither market nor bureaucracy nor any combination of the two afford much capacity for innovation or flexibility. As a result, for much of the 20th century, this contractual form coexisted with affectual and traditionalistic ties in the workplace. These latter, Gemeinschaft elements gave human flesh and operational flexibility to the hard skeleton of Gesellschaft.

In recent decades, driven by intensified international competition, structural crisis tendencies, neo-liberal policies, and growing individualism, many firms in advanced

14

capitalist societies have abandoned these Gemeinschaft bonds, rejecting any obligation of loyalty towards their workers. Adopting a hard, contractual, “low road” model, these firms have earned super-profits as they modularized their products and outsourced component production to low-cost regions. This model, however, is self-limiting and tends to exhausts itself, because eventually wages rise in these developing parts of the world; moreover, it was never viable for many of the more geographically constrained firms, nor for firms that needed internal resources for flexibility and innovation. As a result, alongside the low-road firms, we see a growing number of firms searching for a more robust, “high road” model for their labor process (Appelbaum, Gittell, and Leana 2008).

Such a model would need to support cooperation across the boundaries between specialties, functions, professions, hierarchical authority levels, and organizational units. It would need to bring together people who do not share bonds of loyalty or charismatic allegiance. And it would need to ensure cooperation where tasks are too uncertain in their means or ends to give much traction to contractual market or bureaucratic principles.

Collaborative community. This kind of cooperation requires a value-rational form of action, where action is ends-oriented and continuously informed by rational discussion of that shared purpose. This type of action is contrasted with means-oriented action, whether traditionalistic or instrumentally rational, and with affectual action, which is ends oriented but not rationally so. This type of action corresponds to community in the form Weber called “collegial.”

Weber, however, was skeptical that such collegiality could effectively govern large-scale, complex, purposive activity, because it lacks a mechanism for authoritative coordination.13 Under the norms of value-rationality, participants orient their action towards the end-value in whatever way seems to each of them the most appropriate. It is easy to see how collectivities relying on value-rationality can function effectively on a small scale, but more difficult to see how larger-scale collegial organizations could ensure speedy decisions, efficient implementation, or complex coordination.

I argue that in the century since Weber formulated his argument, humanity has developed a considerable body of “organizational technology” that enables organizations to overcome these limitations of the collegial form, and thereby to socialize the labor process and support the work of the collective worker in large-scale enterprises. We see the results of this century of progress in organizational technology in many parts of capitalist industry today, where a host of new techniques are used to “scale up” value-rationality and mobilize large, complex organizations around use-value creation, such as: kaizen, process mapping, brainstorming, participatory meeting management, Quality Function Deployment, Balanced Scorecard, 360 degree evaluation, procedures for decision-making with multiple stakeholders, and project management. Together, these form a variant of value-rational community — one we can call “collaborative” — that is far more robust than the collegial variant.

Given the contradictory unity of the labor process and valorization process, it is inevitable that capitalist management will attempt to use these techniques to buttress exploitation rather than socialization. However, to see only this aspect of the situation is to

13 The idea that value-rationality can constitute the basis of a robust community has been discussed by several sociologists as “Weber’s missing fourth type” (alongside traditionalistic, charismatic, and contractual/legal-rational) and has been associated variously with cooperatives (Rothschild and Russell 1986), ideologically driven political parties (Willer 1967), constitutionally-governed democracies (Spencer 1970), and autonomous professional organizations (Satow 1975).

15

miss the “use fettering” that such exploitative uses represent, and thereby overlooks the resulting tensions — the deepening real contradiction — within industry. To compete effectively, many firms find that they must use these techniques in a collaborative way, to mobilize sizeable cross-functional (and sometimes cross-organizational) teams around use-value goals; to facilitate the movement of people between such teams; to sustain value systems that emphasize contribution to the shared use-value purpose; and to help workers manage their lateral interdependencies.

Collaborative, value-rational community is, I submit, communist work organization forming in the heart of capitalism. This is surely, at least in rough outline, what large-scale labor processes would look like when governed by a free association of producers coming together to help meet a social need. It is neither traditionalistic Gemeinschaft nor contractual Gesellschaft, but a dialectical supercession of both, a form that we might call Genossenschaft (comradeship, partnership, cooperative). We can characterize this dialectical synthesis along four dimensions.14 In summary:

* In its norms, a synthesis of universalism and particularism: formalized procedures are used to ensure universal diffusion of best practices, and systematic ways of tailoring those procedures facilitate their adjustment to particular circumstances.

* In its values, a synthesis of individualism and collectivism: the paramount value here is the individual’s ability to contribute creatively to the community’s shared purpose.

* In its authority structure, a synthesis of hierarchy and participation: bureaucratic hierarchies are used to ensure organization-wide consistency, but policy setting, decision making, management styles, and staff functions accord workers increasingly substantive participation rights.

* In its economic structure, a synthesis of differentiation and integration: people have both the capabilities and the incentives they need both to play differentiated roles and to contribute actively to the integration of their specialized tasks in pursuit of their shared purpose.

These features of value-rational, collaborative, Genossenschaft community are not widespread in industry today, but they are visible in at least partial form in numerous innovative organizations (Heckscher and Adler 2006, Heckscher 2007, Adler, Kwon, and Heckscher 2008). Given the coexistences of socialization with valorisation pressures, it is hardly surprising that these manifestations of collaborative community prove to be precarious. The thesis advanced here is not that this new form of community is the new foundation of industry today, but rather that it is emerging as the new configuration of one pole of a real contradiction, of which the other pole remains capitalist valorisation. The latter has not changed, but the change in the former means that the fundamental structural contradiction of capitalism is deepening and the form of the class struggle is evolving.

14 This presentation is based on the four elements of Parsons’ (1971) AGIL schema. Values and norms constitute the inner dimensions of community. Authority and economic structures can be seen as external buttressing elements without which no form of community can successfully reproduce itself. Parsons is not often invoked in Marxist discussions; but I follow Mouzelis (1995) in finding these elements of Parsons useful for Marxist theory.

16

Collaborative Community: An Illustration from Software ServicesIn this section, I illustrate this dynamic with some material from a case study of a

firm in the software services industry. (Here I build onAdler (2006) and on earlier case studies by Greenbaum (1979) and Kraft (1984).) I will not focus on “open source” software, which has given rise to a large literature inspired by Marxist ideas but represents only a tiny sliver of the software industry. I focus instead on one company in the much larger and more prosaic part of the industry that builds customized, large-scale, integrated systems. Changes in any one firm are of course not statistically representative in any sense. The purpose of this section is merely to show how structural-Marxist theory can provide lenses through which we can discern more clearly the communist tendencies in the evolution of the collective software worker.

I focus on a key innovation reshaping the labor process of software development — the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). The CMM explicitly targets the craft model that predominated in the early years of software production, replacing it with a process that was much more standardized and formalized, with much more specialization of roles and management control. As software systems grew larger and more complex, the craft model faltered, and the proportion of projects that failed to meet their goals or failed entirely rose dramatically (Gibbs 1994, Lieberman and Fry 2001). In the 1980s, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), based at Carnegie-Mellon University, developed a model of a more reliable software development process, releasing a preliminary description in 1987 and the first official version (version 1.1) in 1991. (Similar initiatives emerged in Europe under the aegis of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as SPICE.) The development of the CMM is a nice example of socialization at work: its development was an industry-wide learning process. A broad community of industry people — over 1000 — helped review successive drafts (Paulk 1995a). The software CMM was subsequently complemented by CMM tools for systems engineering, people management, and software acquisition. In 2000, several of these were integrated into a broader tool called CMM-Integration. My research focused on the software CMM.

This CMM distinguishes five successively more “mature” levels of process capability, each characterized by mastery of a number of Key Process Areas (KPAs) — see Exhibit 1. Level 1 represents an ad hoc, craft approach. Level 2 represents the rationalization of the management of individual projects. At Level 3, standard processes are defined and used for the organization’s entire portfolio of projects. Levels 4 pushes rationalization even further, specifying mechanisms for quantifying the performance of the development process. Level 5 specifies systems for assuring the continuous improvement of that process. The philosophy underlying this hierarchy was inspired by Crosby’s (1980) five stages of TQM maturity (Humphrey 2002).

[put Exhibit 1 about here]Early CMM assessments revealed a startlingly “immature” state of software process

consistent with the dominant craft model: 80% of the 132 organizations assessed during 1987-1991 were found to be at Level 1, and less than 1% at Level 5. Over the subsequent years however, there appears to have been significant shift, although it is difficult to tell given the changing and unrepresentative nature of the sample composed of organizations that volunteer for evaluation. Of the 1124 organizations assessed between 1998 and August 2002, 19% were at Level 1 and 7% at Level 5 (Software Engineering Institute 2004).

The case study focuses on a large, U.S.-based professional services firm, which I will call GCC. GCC was one of the largest software services firms in the world. Major players in this industry include Accenture, IBM, EDS, and CSC. At the time of my study, GCC’s total sales

17

exceeded $9 billion, and it employed around 60,000 people. My study explored the changing production process in four of its units producing software systems for government clients. At the time of my study, two of these units (called “programs” at GCC) were at Level 5 (I will call them Programs A and C) and two at Level 3 (Programs B and D). The following paragraphs characterize the evolution of their collective software workers’ labor process community using the four dimensions introduced in the previous section.

Norms: Synthesizing Universalism and ParticularismAs the collective worker community becomes more socialized, the norms that shape

its work practices are no longer those of a craft. Through formalization and standardization, these norms become universalistic, publicly available and debatable, social instead of private. However, under pressure to accommodate the uncertainties and context-sensitivity of an advanced labor process, these universalistic norms must be somehow synthesized with an appropriate degree of particularism. The following paragraphs trace this evolution at GCC.

In the early history of software, traditionalistic craft norms prevailed. GCC interviewees described the particularistic norms and the ad hoc organization of work that they experienced in Level 1 organizations prior to joining GCC in terms very similar to Kraft’s characterization of programming in the 1960s: “Programmers (and analysts) followed a logic and procedures which were largely of their own making” (1977, p. 56). Developers learned the “tricks of the trade” from their more senior colleagues. There was a degree of collegiality here, but the collective worker was severely limited in its breadth and in the scale and complexity of tasks it could master. A veteran programmer described work in that period thus:

“No one knew what was going on — certainly not the managers. But even the programmers and systems analysts were confused. There were no standards for doing anything — coding, testing, documenting — they were all done the way each person felt like it, or in fact, they were not done at all. [...] Programmers never documented what it was their program was to do. It was the same with setting up testing procedures and test data. When the whole system was put together, we never knew if it really worked because nothing got written down.” (Greenbaum, 1979: 73-7)

Early efforts to bring this unruly process under control led at first to universalistic contractual bureaucratic norms — ones that many developers experienced as alienating and coercive (the assessments on this score by Kraft 1977 and Greenbaum 1979 are echoed by Friedman and Cornford 1989, Prasad 1998, Beirne, Ramsay, and Panteli 1998). This seems to have been the case at GCC too. The initial experience with a highly formalized development process was top-down, oriented to conformance. According to one manager, the formalized process “was supposed to make coding a no-brainer.” The results were not very satisfactory from either a labour-process or a valorisation-process point of view: these early steps afforded little relief from escalating error rates and schedule and budget overruns.

Over time, and under performance pressure, formalized procedures became progressively more elaborate, but simultaneously evolved toward a synthesis of universalism and particularism. Universalism: developers at GCC were increasingly aware that their effectiveness was not only the result of their own individual effort and skill and of informally shared tricks of the trade, but also the result of a social, rather than private, accumulation of working knowledge embodied in formalized, standardized processes. In the words of one developer:

18

“When I got here I was kind of shocked. Right off, it was ‘Here are your Instructions.’ ‘So what does this tell me?’ ‘It tells you how to do your job.’ I thought I was bringing the know-how I’d need to do my job. But sure enough, you open up the Instructions, and they tell you how to do your job: how to lay the code out, where on the form to write a change request number, and so on. I was shocked. But I can see the need now. Now I’m just one of 30 or 40 other people who may need to work on this code... Now I can see that it makes things much easier in the long run. ...By the time we see the Instructions, they’ve been through a lot of revision and refinement. So they’re pretty much on target.”

Particularism: the formalization and standardization of work norms were extensive, but served primarily as tools to guide work and accordingly adjusted to fit the particular circumstances, rather than as universal rules used to control employees assumed to be recalcitrant and unreliable. Through a formalized “Tailoring Cycle,” software development standards and procedures (known as “S&Ps” in Program A) were modified for each project with the participation of the developers themselves. As one project manager put it:

“People have to be a part of defining the process. We always say that ‘People support what they help create.’ That’s why the Tailoring Cycle is so important. As a project manager, you’re too far away from the technical work to define the S&Ps yourself, so you have to involve... your key people. ...It’s only by involving them that you can be confident you have good S&Ps that have credibility in the eyes of their peers.”

Values: Synthesizing Individualism and CollectivismIn the earlier history of software, programming resembled a craft, not only in the

lack of formalized, standardized techniques but also in the widely shared values celebrating individual autonomy. Greenbaum (1979) quotes one programmer:

“After you’ve been doing it for a while, coding gets boring. Especially after they divide up the project into so many modules that you don’t know what you’re doing relative to the whole system. So partly it’s to preserve our sanity — we do things our own way and don’t document it. Anyway, documenting is the most boring part of all.” (1979: 75)

As noted above, early efforts to bring software production under greater managerial control and improve the reliability of the software production process took a contractual bureaucratic form, imposing universalistic standards, defined by experts, on programmers who were now merely hired staff. Many organizations, including GCC, experienced difficulty maintaining loyalty among increasingly alienated programming staff (see accounts in Greenbaum 1979, Kraft 1984).

However, by the time of my study some two decades later, many developers at GCC expressed very different values, representing a synthesis of individualism and collectivism:

“Developers want above all to deliver a great product, and the process helps us do that. What I’ve learned coming here is the value of a well thought-out process, rigorously implemented, and continuously improved. It will really improve the quality of the product. In this business, you’ve got to be exact, and the process ensures that we are. You have to get out of hacker mode!”

What mattered to these developers was now not so much their individual autonomy as their ability to contribute effectively to a shared purpose — the use-value of their product. One interviewee expressed it this way:

19

“Think of bridge-building. Back in the eighteenth century, there were some very beautiful bridges built, but quite a few of them collapsed because they were designed by artists without any engineering understanding. Software is like bridge-building. Software developers think of software as something of an art, and yes, you need that artistry, but you better have the engineering too. Developers often don’t like the constraining rules, but the rules are necessary if you want to build complex things that have to work together. If you have only two or three people, you don’t need all these rules. But if you have hundreds of people, the way we have here, then you need a lot of rules and discipline to get anything done.”

Another developer presented an assessment that was particularly interesting because her experience of a relatively mature process was recent:

“A more mature process means you go from freedom to do things your own way to being critiqued. It means going from chaos to structure. It’s a bit like streetball versus NBA basketball. Streetball is roughhousing, showing off. You play for yourself rather than the team, and you do it for the love of the game. In professional basketball, you’re part of a team, and you practice a lot together, doing drills and playing practice games. You aren’t doing it just for yourself or even just for your team: there are other people involved […]. You have to take responsibility for other people — your team mates — and for mentoring other players coming up.”

Most strikingly, developers at GCC were not resentful of the documentation burden they shouldered — typically one of the loudest complaints of developers in less mature organizations (e.g. Hodgson 2004). (Documentation is written text that accompanies the code and explains how it operates and how to use it.) Writing documentation was now seen as a natural part of one’s job, since that job was interdependent with others for whom the documentation would be essential. Developers’ sense of collective interdependence extended to an imagined relationship with previous and future developers and with other people who were working on the code. Numerous developers offered assessments similar to this one:

“I think that our process — and even the paperwork part of it — is basically a good thing. My documentation is going to help the next person working on this code, either for testing or maintenance. And vice versa when I’m on the receiving end.”

Authority: Synthesizing Hierarchy and ParticipationWhen programming resembled a craft, hierarchical control was limited, as we saw

above, and software organizations had few specialized staff functions. In response to the productivity and quality problems created by reliance on the craft model, especially in larger projects, software organizations attempted to assert hierarchical management control over methods and policies, creating new staff functions to design and impose these control systems. But this shift from traditionalistic craft to contractual bureaucracy did not yield the desired performance improvements. As a result, management’s approach evolved towards a synthesis of hierarchy and participation. In the words of one manager:

“The first phase, in the late 1980s, was conformance. We had developed our standard process — a big fat set of requirements and standards — and most managers felt that it was just a matter of ensuring that people were implementing it. The second phase, in the early 1990s, was enlightenment. This phase coincided with our big TQM push. We started getting working-level people

20

involved in improving things. The third phase, running between about 1994 and 1998, was empowerment. The word might sound trite to some people, but we had the process framework, and we had the involvement, so we were really ready to delegate more autonomy down to the projects and the tasks.”

This new, collaborative synthesis of hierarchy and participation was visible at GCC in four aspects of the authority structure: policy-setting, decision-making, management style, and staff roles.

Policy-setting. The GCC programs had process improvement teams that brought together managers and employees, to work as peers in exploring ideas to improve the effectiveness of the labor process. Participation in these teams was more widespread in the more mature programs. In the two Level 5 programs, around 20% of the total developer staff were actively involved at some time in the course of a given year in various process improvement teams, whereas in the two Level 3 programs, the proportions were approximately half that.

Decision-making. The socialization of the authority structure was also visible in the bottom-up influence in situational decision-making. The formalization of work procedures provided superior-subordinate relations with objective points of reference outside the dyadic interpersonal relationship. Several interviewees argued that this gave the subordinate more power. One commented:

“Before I came to GCC, I worked for one of the most autocratic managers you can find. It was always, ‘And I want that report on my desk by 5 p.m. today,’ with no explanation or rationale. Compared to that kind of situation, an organization with a more mature process leaves a lot less room for a manager to arbitrarily dictate how you should work and when work is due. And a more mature process also means that there are more formal review points, so any arbitrary autocratic behaviour by a manager will become visible pretty quickly.”

Management style. Managers at GCC were acutely aware that autocratic styles of management would cripple the collaboration the labour process needed. One manager said:

“By and large, we haven’t had too much difficulty bringing our managers around to this more collaborative approach. But we choose our project managers with an eye to their commitment to collaboration too. We did have a problem with one staff person. He had a very difficult relationship with the project people he was supposed to be helping. We got a lot of complaints that he was trying to force the projects to conform to his idea of how they should function. We tried to counsel him and get him to work in a more cooperative way. But he just wouldn’t ease up. Eventually we just had to let him go. And we had quite a battle with one program manager when he wasn’t picked to head a new project: we felt he just wasn’t enough of a team manager.”

Aware of this issue, management built systems to ensure that managers with coercive styles would be rapidly identified and their behaviour rectified. A manager commented:

“We didn’t initially have any questions on the employee survey about your boss. Frankly, people were worried that managers might retaliate. But now we do, and we find the data very useful in surfacing management problems. The earlier rounds of the survey did show some big communications problems in some groups. Counselling often helped, and in some cases, we moved people out to other positions.”

21

Staff functions. As GCC’s development process became more mature, new staff functions such as Quality Assurance, Configuration Management, and Process Engineering emerged. By collecting and analysing data from the line organization’s project work, these staff units could identify best practices and package them into models and standards for use by the developers. The overall structural configuration was thus characterized by powerful, specialized staffs, but these staffs worked in a largely supportive manner, rather than dictating requirements to the line organization as assumed in many accounts of bureaucracy.

Quality Assurance (QA) illustrates the new staff/line relations. In the past, QA was often remote from the daily work of developers, arriving on the scene at the end of the work cycle to audit the output. Staff/line relations were notoriously antagonistic. QA’s role evolved with greater process maturity to (a) a greater focus on process quality rather than only product quality, (b) greater responsibility for infusing process rather than only auditing it, and (c) a closer and more collaborative relation with the line departments. One QA staff person put it this way:

“The process forces people out of their functional or module silos and into structured communication across those boundaries. QA for example gets a defined place in our reviews and our process improvement cycle. But QA is not a policeman! QA is there to help the project — help you identify the processes you need, tailor existing ones to your needs, learn that process, and do a check to see if you’re using it. If I find a problem, it’s my job to help the project work out how to address it and how I can help.”

Economics: Synthesizing Differentiation and IntegrationThe economic dimenion of community encompasses both capabilities and

incentives. In the early, craft years of programming, developers’ capabilities were broad, task specialization and horizontal functional differentiation were very limited, and developers enjoyed high levels of autonomy, task variety, and task identity (versus fragmentation). Greenbaum (1979, pp. 64-5) quotes a veteran programmer thus:

“I remember that in the [nineteen-] fifties and early sixties I was a ‘jack of all trades.’ As a programmer I got to deal with the whole process. I would think through a problem, talk to the clients, write my own code, and operate the machine. I loved it — particularly the chance to see something through from beginning to end.”

As software grew in scale and complexity, the division of labour became more complex, and capabilties became more specialized. The depth of this specialization and the rate of technological change in the industry led to increased training and education levels among developers.

Specialization, however, also led to coordination problems. Conflict was notoriously common in the relations between “systems engineering” — the function responsible for analysing customer requirements — and “software engineering” — responsible for translating those requirements into code. This conflict has often been construed as an effort to assert management control, and as reflecting Taylorism’s split between conception and execution, since the former was often seen as more-skilled, while the latter function was subject to efforts to simplify, deskill, and routinize (Greenbaum 1979: 68 ff., Pettigrew 1973).

In the subsequent years, as the software development process became more mature, the status and skill levels of the two functions became more equal; there was considerable elaboration of various integrative mechanisms; and the coordination across groups became

22

more rigorous and more collaborative. Mutual indifference or rivalry was replaced by active cooperation. One interviewee summarized the changes thus:

“We actively work this issue [cross-department coordination between systems engineering and design engineering] in a variety of ways. First with reviews: we now try to establish requirements peer reviews, which include at least one representative from software engineering, on our projects. Second, with some clarification mechanisms: in addition to the reviews, software engineers review the requirements as part of the receipt/estimation process. […] Third, with requirements detail: we’ve found that the level of specificity of requirements can vary significantly from author to author, even within the same larger systems engineering group. Not surprisingly, there are fewer communication or understanding issues when the requirements are more detailed and consistent. Fourth, with teamwork: we’ve actively tried to promote the enhanced communication through using Integrated Product Teams comprising system and software engineers and test engineers. This has worked well when the group leadership skills are strong, facilitating communication and resolution of issues. Fifth, by location: we’ve also used co-location of systems and software engineers. This has enabled quick and easy communication — chats over the cubicle wall.”

This transition — from reliance on the formal hierarchy for integrating differentiated subunits to a more active engagement of everyone in that integration task — was also visible in relations between programming and testing functions. In the words of one interviewee:

“Process means that people play more specialized, defined roles, but also that these specialists get involved earlier and longer as contributors to other people’s tasks. If we analysed the way a coder uses their time, and compared it with comparable data from, say, fifteen years ago, we’d find the coder doing less coding because of more automated tools. They’d be spending more time documenting their code, both as it was being built and afterwards in users’ guides. They’d be spending more time in peer reviews. And they’d be spending more time in design meetings and test plan meetings. As for testers […] now the testers are more involved in system concept definition and requirement definition activities.”

As concerns the incentives aspect of community’s economic dimension, this synthesis of differentiation and integration was supported by performance measurement and incentive systems that were designed to encourage everyone to work toward the goals of both the organisation as a whole and their subunit rather than only their subunit. Moreover, these goals were framed in both use-value and exchange-value terms rather than only in exchange-value terms. In less mature organizations, performance measures focused on subunit exchange-value variables such as cost and expected completion dates: these simplistic measures rewarded individual “heroics” rather than collaboration and discipline. As GCC programs grew in maturity, performance measures (and the associated incentives and promotion opportunities) expanded to include a broader range of metrics designed to encourage alignment with best practices in software management — rather than rewarding only end-results — and designed to reward performance at the team and organization levels — rather than only at the individual level.

Collaboration versus ValorisationAs shown in the previous section, valorisation pressures characteristic of the

prevailing capitalist relations of production stimulate the socialization of labour process

23

community, driving it from traditionalistic craft Gemeinschaft, via contractual bureaucratic Gesellschaft, to collaborative value-rational Genossenschaft. However valorisation pressures at the same time limit and distort socialization and collaboration. The limiting and distorting effects were visible at GCC in two main ways: within the organization, the pursuit of economic profit sometimes conflicted with the pursuit of technical performance; and competitive rivalry sometimes undermined collaboration between organizations.

First, GCC managers understood that process maturity required a high level of employee participation; however, the authority structure expressed not only a productive, coordination function but also the exploitative, valorization relation. As a result, the authority structure was only partly aligned with the use-value requirements of software quality. One manager said:

“As I see it, GCC is a corporation, and that means it’s run for the benefit of the major stockholders. So top management is incentivized to maximize dollar profits. Quality is only a means to that end, and in practice, quality sometimes gets compromised. I used to be a technical person, so I know about quality. But now I’m a manager, and I’m under pressure to get the product out — come what may. I just don’t have time to worry about the quality of the product. I have a manager of software development under me who’s supposed to worry about that.”

The contradiction between profit (exchange-value) and quality (use-value) was a source of frustration because it created a gap between the discipline demanded by mature process and the funding that senior management made available for the support functions and computer tools required by such maturity. One interviewee said:

“One key challenge [in pursuing process improvement] is maintaining buy-in at the top. Our top corporate management is under constant pressure from the stock market. The market is constantly looking at margins, but Government business has slim margins. That doesn’t leave much room for expenditures associated with process improvement — especially when these take two or three years to show any payoff.”

Second, the socialization of the labour process, as discussed above, involves a broadening of the collective worker across firms; but this productive exigency was in contradiction with the persistence of market competition at the core of the prevailing relations of production. One engineer described the tension in these terms:

“The biggest problem here has been the customer and getting their buy-in. At [Program A], our customer grew towards process maturity with us. Here [at Program B], we started with a less mature client. Some of the customer management even told us that they didn’t want to hear about QA or our quality management system — they saw it as wasteful overhead. When you bid a project, you specify a budget for QA and so forth, but if they don’t want to pay, you have a resource problem. […] On the Y2K project, the customer kept changing standards and deadlines. Basically, we were dealing with a pretty process-immature customer, and that made it difficult for us to build our process maturity.”

The process maturity effort within GCC also reflected this contradiction. On the one hand, pressures to conform to the CMM were sometimes helpful in prompting desired technical changes within GCC. On the other hand, part of the CMM effort was clearly “ceremonial,” and to that extent could lead to a decoupling between formal process and daily practice (as described by Meyer and Rowan 1977). However, this contradiction, evolved over time as socialization progressed: while in the two Level 3 Programs many

24

interviewees commented that changing the process documentation did not always reflect changes in the way work was actually done, in the two Level 5 Programs there were no such comments, even in response to probing in interviews, and despite the fact that the Level 5 requirements were far more comprehensive and detailed.

Program A illustrates how these competitive capitalist relations of production in turn undermined collaboration within GCC itself. Due to unforeseen changes in their customer’s priorities, Program A’s volume of work had been reduced, and the valorisation imperative forced GCC to cut its workforce from over 1600 to some 460. The result was a collapse of morale: the response rate to the annual employee attitude survey fell from an average of over 50% in prior years to 37% in 1997 and 15% in 1998-9. Even though these layoffs were managed under unusually compassionate policies, and even though these surveys revealed a very high rate of agreement (albeit among the dwindling proportion of respondents) with the item “I am treated fairly and understand why Program A is downsizing,” engagement in process improvement activity declined. As one interviewee noted:

“It’s hard to convince people that improving the process will help us get or keep business. We had a world-class process, and look what happened to us! Jobs in an organization like this depend a lot more on the vagaries of contracting than on our process excellence.”

Deepening the Contradiction, Reshaping the Class StruggleViewed in longer perspective, the socialization/valorisation contradiction evolved in

form — deepening, rather than dissolving it. In the earlier period of the software industry, valorisation pressures stimulated efforts to replace craft with bureaucratic structures, as software organizations struggled to master the challenges of managing larger, more complex, software projects. However, these efforts were stymied by both technical and social factors. Technically, the industry lacked some key elements of the requisite technical infrastructure. They also lacked a viable management model because they saw rationalization in essentially coercive terms — as we saw in the excerpt quoted above, “supposed to make coding a no-brainer.” Not surprisingly, software firms found their efforts blocked by programmers who saw this rationalisation as a weapon against their autonomy. This is illustrated by Greenbaum’s quote from a programmer in the 1970s:

“What kind of job security would we have if we wrote everything down they way they wanted us to? We didn’t like it when things got too out of control, but on the other hand would you see to it that your job was so standardized that it could be done by a monkey?” (Greenbaum 1979: 75)

The result was that coercive bureaucracy largely failed to solve the intensifying software crisis.

Over the subsequent period, however, the CMM evolved as an organizational technology, and now functioned less as a coercive weapon and more as an enabling tool (see Adler and Borys (1996) on the enabling/coercive distinction). As such, the collective software worker could embrace it as a way to master their collective task, and it appears from the excerpts I have quoted above that it was accepted in just this way by many developers at GCC. As a result, the nature of conflict in the software production process shifted from those created by individualistic developers defending their autonomy to those created by the fundamental structure of the capitalist enterprise and its subordination to the profit imperative. Developers were now increasingly conscious that the key issue facing them was not how to preserve their individual autonomy or craft control, but a deeper one — of how to deal with the fetters on productive advance created by the capitalist form of

25

enterprise. This awareness was expressed in comments such as these from numerous interviewees:

“We could do better at capturing and using lessons learned. We have all the vehicles for doing it — presentations, newsletters, databases. But it takes time. And there are so many competing priorities. In the end, it’s all about profit and meeting schedules!” (laughs).

CONCLUSIONThe main thesis of this article can be summarized in three ideas. First, under

capitalist relations of production, the labor process becomes more complex and interdependent — more “socialized” — and as a result, the individual worker is replaced by a collective worker. Effective use-value production requires a real bond of community within this collective worker. As the labor-process evolves, this community evolves towards a value-rational, collaborative form.

Second, insofar as the collective worker of the capitalist labor process takes this value-rational, collaborative form, it prefigures a “free association of producers” — it is communism taking shape in the heart of capitalism. It both embodies a rough sketch of a future society and more importantly it creates new and broader forms of interdependence that will help workers in their efforts to create that future. It implies a progressive evolution in workers’ cognitive and social resources and in their self-understanding.

Third, the emergence of collaborative, communist community coexists in a real contradiction with the persistence of capitalist valorization pressures. We therefore rarely see collaborative community in the pure form, and where it does appear, it is precarious because it is constantly at risk of being undone by exploitation, market competition, and the concomitant periodic crises.

Several further points should be noted in conclusion. First, value-rational action and the collaborative, communist type of community are not entirely new. Until recently, however, they have appeared primarily outside the sphere of capitalist production — in cooperative endeavors shielded from competitive and exploitative pressure, such as various social and political movements, producer and consumer cooperatives, artistic groups, and universities — and isolated pockets within capitalist production — notably in some corporate R&D laboratories. My claim is that the communist type of community is becoming more important in the heart of capitalist production — and that this is portentous. Driven by the exigencies of capitalist production, communist community has developed considerably, embracing much larger and much more heterogeneous collectivities, and elaborating sophisticated institutional structures for managing interdependent work- and decision-processes. With its appearance within capitalist production, there is now a far more powerful force driving the development and diffusion of communist community, albeit simultaneously limiting them too.

Collaborative, communist community in its fully developed form would not, of course, be only an intra-firm phenomenon. Capitalist development affords grounds for optimism here too, insofar as interfirm relationships shift from purely arms’ length competition to include collaboration in the form of “partnerships” and “co-opetition” (Brandenburger and Nalebuff 1997). Marxists often scoff at the idea that any real community might be operative in market relations among capitalist firms: they point to the asymmetries of power that typically characterize these relations, to their instrumental purposes, and to their precarious, short-lived quality. The structural-Marxist account highlights the contradictory character of these relations: they are indeed expedient and

26

provisional means of advancing competitive interests; but at the same time competitive pressure and the evolving scale and complexity of the productive forces drive firms to build cross-firm collaborations and to expand the collective workers’ self-regulation capacity to span these inter-firm spaces. In so doing, they lay the material foundation for the emergence of an interconnected community among these firms’ workers.

Finally, communist community among workers is forged not only in the labor process, but also in struggle against capitalist relations of production, in the form of collective solidarity in opposition to domination and exploitation. As Marx and Engels argued in the Communist Manifesto, capitalist development brings workers together in larger firms. Given the exploitative nature of relations of production, they attempt to form unions and parties to defend their interests, and advances in communications technologies facilitate this struggle. Recent decades have seen a decline in union density across almost all the advanced capitalist economies. Progressives lament this decline and I share this dismay. However, these unions have often been based on inadequate forms of community, and their decline may clear the way for a welcome reconstitution. In many unions, community had a strong traditionalistic foundation. Many younger workers do not recognize themselves in such organizations, and they are manifestly ill-suited to a more mobile workforce and globalized labor process. In other unions, a charismatic model predominated, and this model, as I noted earlier following Weber, is by nature ephemeral. In yet others, community took a contractual form as merely instrumental for individual protection: this kind of “business unionism” is even less effective as an instrument of class solidarity. New forms of worker association are needed to meet today’s challenges. The development of collaborative community within the labor process may offer a new foundation for these new forms.

References

Adler, P.S. 2012. "The ambivalence of bureaucracy: From Weber via Gouldner to Marx." Organization Science no. 23 (1):244–266.

Adler, P.S., and C. Heckscher. 2006. "Towards collaborative community." In The Firm as a Collaborative Community: Reconstructing Trust in the Knowledge Economy, edited by C. Heckscher and P.S. Adler, 11-105. Oxford, New Yrok: Oxford University Press.

Adler, Paul S. 1988. "Automation, Skill and the Future of Capitalism." Berkeley Journal of Sociology no. 33:1-36.

Adler, Paul S, SW Kwon, and C Heckscher. 2008. "Professional work: The emergence of collaborative community." Organization Science no. 19 (2).

Adler, Paul S. 1990. "Marx, machines, and skill." Technology and Culture no. 31 (4):780-812.Adler, Paul S. 2006. "Beyond hacker idiocy: A new community in software development." In

The Firm as a Collaborative Community: Reconstructing Trust in the Knowledge Economy, edited by C. Heckscher and P.S. Adler, 198-258. New York: Oxford University Press.

Adler, Paul S. 2007. "The future of critical management studies: A paleo-Marxist critique of labour process theory." Organization Studies no. 28 (9):1313-1345.

Adler, Paul S., and Bryan Borys. 1996. "Two Types of Bureaucracy: Enabling and Coercive." Administrative Science Quarterly no. 41 (1):61-89.

Anderson, Perry. 1979. Considerations on Western Marxism. London: Verso.

27

Appelbaum, E., J.H. Gittell, and C. Leana. 2008. "High-Performance Work Practices and Sustainable Economic Growth." Barack Obama’s presidential transition team. Available at www. employmentpolicy. org/topic/23/research/high-performance-workpractices-and-sustainable-economic-growth-0.

Attewell, Paul. 1987. "The Deskilling Controversy." Work and Occupations no. 14 (3):323-346. doi: 10.1177/0730888487014003001.

Beirne, M, H Ramsay, and A Panteli. 1998. "Developments in computing work: control and contradiction in the software labour process." Workplaces of the Future:142ñ62.

Bottomore, Tom B. 1991. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. London: Blackwell.Brandenburger, A.M., and B.J. Nalebuff. 1997. Co-opetition: Crown Business.Braverman, Harry. 1974. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the

Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review.Brenner, R. 1982. "The agrarian roots of European capitalism." Past & Present (97):16-113.Burawoy, M. 2003. "For a sociological Marxism: the complementary convergence of Antonio

Gramsci and Karl Polanyi." Politics & Society no. 31 (2):193-261.Cohen, G. A. 1978. Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense. Princeton: Princeton University

Press.Cohen, G. A. 1988. History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from Marx. New York: Oxford

University Press.Cohen, Joshua. 1982. "Review of G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History." The Journal Of

Philosophy no. 79 (253-73).Crosby, PB. 1980. Quality is free. New York: McGraw-Hill.Draper, Hal. 1978. Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution. New York: Monthly Review Press.Elster, Jon. 1985. Making Sense of Marx. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.Engels, Friedrich. 1978. "Socialism: Utopian And Scientific." In The Marx-Engels Reader,

edited by Robert C. Tucker, 683-717. New York: Norton.Engeström, Yrjö. 1987. Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to

development research. Helskinki: Orienta-Konsultit.Felstead, A., D. Gallie, F. Green, and Y. Zhou. 2007. Skills at Work, 1986 to 2006. Oxford and

Cardiff: ESRC Centre on Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance.Florida, RL, and M Kenney. 1993. Beyond Mass Production: The Japanese System and its

Transfer to the US. New York: Oxford University Press Form, W. 1987. "On the degradation of skills." Annual Review of Sociology:29-47.Friedman, AL, and DS Cornford. 1989. Computer Systems Development: History Organization

and Implementation: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York, NY, USA.Geras, N. 1971. "Essence and appearance: aspects of fetishism in Marx's Capital." New Left

Review no. 65 (1-2):69-85.Gibbs, WW. 1994. "Software's chronic crisis." Scientific American no. 271 (3):72-81.Gibson, William. "The science in science fiction": NPR interview, Nov 30, 1999 1999. Available

from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1067220.Goldin, C.D., and L.F. Katz. 2009. The race between education and technology: Harvard

University Press.Goldman, Paul, and Donald R. Van Houten. 1977. "Managerial strategies and the worker: A

Marxist analysis of bureaucracy." The Sociological Quarterly no. 18:108-125.Gordon, David. 1976. "Capitalist efficiency and socialist efficiency." Monthly Review no.

24:19-39.Gould, Carol. 1978. Marx’s Social Ontology: Individuality and Community In Marx’s Theory Of

Social Reality. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.Gramsci, A. . 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. London:

Lawrence and Wishart.

28

Greenbaum, J. M. 1979. In the name of efficiency. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Handel, M. 2000. Trends in direct measures of job skill requirements. Working Paper no.

301. Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Jerome Levy Economics Institute.Hayek, Friedrich. 1944. The road to serfdom. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press.Heckscher, C. 2007. The Collaborative Enterprise. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Heckscher, C, and PS Adler. 2006. The Firm as a Collaborative Community: Reconstructing

Trust in the Knowledge Economy. New York: Oxford University Press.Henly, S.E., and J.M. Sánchez. 2009. "The US establishment-size distribution: secular changes

and sectoral decomposition." Economic Quarterly no. 95 (4):419-454.Hodgson, DE. 2004. "Project work: the legacy of bureaucratic control in the post-

bureaucratic organization." Organization no. 11 (1):81.Howard, MC, and JE King. 2008. "Karl Marx and the decline of the market." Journal of the

History of Economic Thought no. 30 (02):217-234.Humphrey, WS. 2002. "Three process perspectives: organizations, teams, and people."

Annals of Software Engineering no. 14 (1):39-72.Kalyvas, A. 2002. "Charismatic Politics and the Symbolic Foundations of Power in Max

Weber." New German Critique:67-103.Kautsky, K. 1901. "Trades Unions and Socialism." International Socialist Review no. 1 (10).Kraft, P. 1984. Programmers and managers: The routinization of computer programming in

the United States: Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. Secaucus, NJ, USA.Kusnet, David. 2008. Love the Work, Hate the Job: Why America's Best Workers Are Unhappier

Than Ever. New York: Wiley.Laibman, D. 2007. Deep history: a study in social evolution and human potential: SUNY Press.Lenin, V.I. 1917. Imperialism: The highest form of capitalism. Moscow: Progress Publishers.Levine, Andrew, and Erik Olin Wright. 1980. "Rationality and class struggle." New Left

Review no. 123:47-68.Lieberman, H, and C Fry. 2001. "Will software ever work?" Communications of the ACM no.

44 (3):122-124.Luxemburg, R. 1971. The Mass Strike: The Political Party And The Trade Unions, And The

Junius Pamphlet. New York: Harper & Row.Mahowald, M.B. 1973. "Marx's Gemeinschaft: Another Interpretation." Philosophy and

Phenomenological Research:472-488.Mandel, Ernest. 1968. Marxist Economic Theory. London: Merlin.Markus, Hazel R., and Shinobu Kitayama. 1991. "Culture and the self: Implications for

cognition, emotion, and motivation." Psychological Review no. 98 (2):224-253.Marx, K. 1989. "First Draft of Letter To Vera Zasulich (written: March 1881)." In Marx Engels

Collected Works, 346. New York, NY: Progress Publishers.Marx, K., and F. Engels. 1959a. Critique of the Gotha programme. Moscow: Foreign

Languages Publishing House.Marx, Karl. 1859. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by S. W.

Ryazanskaya. 1970 ed. New York, NY: International Publishers.Marx, Karl. 1955. The Poverty of Philosophy. Moscow: Progress Press.Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by

Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Marx, Karl. 1974. Capital, Vol. III. London: Lawrence & Wishart.Marx, Karl. 1977. Capital, Vol. 1. New York: Vintage.Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1959b. "The communist manifesto." In Marx and Engels:

Basic Writings on Politics And Philosophy, edited by Lewis S. Feuer. New York.Megill, K.A. 1970. "The community in Marx's philosophy." Philosophy and Phenomenological

Research:382-393.

29

Meyer, J. W., and B. Rowan. 1977. "Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony." American Journal of Sociology no. 83:340-363.

Miller, R.W. 1975. "The Consistency of Historical Materialism." Philosophy & Public Affairs no. 4 (4):390-409.

Miller, R.W. 1981. "Productive Forces and the Forces of Change: A Review of Gerald A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense." The Philosophical Review no. 90 (1):91-117.

Milonakis, D. 1997. "The dynamics of history: Structure and agency in historical evolution." Science & Society:303-329.

Mouzelis, N. 1995. Sociological theory: what went wrong? London: Routledge.Negri, Antonio. 1989. Marx beyond Marx: Autonomedia.Nelson, RR. 1990. "Capitalism as an engine of progress." Research Policy no. 19 (3):193-214.Noble, D.F. 2011. Forces of production: A social history of industrial automation. Piscataway,

New Jersey: Transaction Publishers.Ollman, Bertell. 2003. Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method. Champaign IL: Univ. of

Illinois Press.Parsons, T. 1971. The system of modern societies. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Paulk, M.C. 1995a. The Evolution of the SEI's Capability Maturity Model for Software,

Software Process: Improvement and Practice. Software Process: Improvement and Practice, 3-15.

Paulk, M.C. 1995b. "How ISO 9001 compares with the CMM." Software, IEEE no. 12 (1):74-83.

Perlman, S. 1922. A history of trade unionism in the United States: The Macmillan Company.Pettigrew, AM. 1973. "Occupational specialization as an emergent process." Sociological

Review no. 21 (2):0.Prasad, Monica. 1998. "International Capital on "Silicon Plateau": Work and Control in

India's Computer Industry." Social Forces no. 77 (2):429-452.Rothschild, Joyce, and Raymond Russell. 1986. "Alternatives To Bureaucracy: Democratic

Participation In The Economy." Annual Review of Sociology no. 12:307-328.Salaman, G. 1977. "An historical discontinuity: From charisma to routinization." Human

Relations no. 30 (4):373.Satow, R. L. 1975. "Value-rational authority and professional organizations." Administrative

Science Quarterly no. 20 (4):526-531.Sayer, D. 1990. Capitalism and modernity: An excursus on Marx and Weber: Routledge.Software Engineering Institute. 2004. Process maturity profile of the software community,

2004 mid-year update. .Spencer, Martin. 1970. "Weber on legitimate norms and authority." British Journal of

Sociology no. 21 (2):123-134.Spenner, K. I. . 1988. "Technological change, skill requirements, and education: The case for

uncertainty." In The impact of technological change on employment and economic growth, edited by R. M. Cyert and D. C. Mowery, 131-184. Cambridge MA: Ballinger.

Spitz Oener, A. 2006. "Technical change, job tasks, and rising educational demands: Looking‐ outside the wage structure." Journal of Labor Economics no. 24 (2):235-270.

Springborg, P. 1986. "Politics, Primordialism, and Orientalism: Marx, Aristotle, and the Myth of the Gemeinschaft." The American Political Science Review:185-211.

Tönnies, Ferdinand. 1957. Community and Society. N.Y.: Harper & Row.van der Pijl, K. . 1998. Transnational classes and international relations. London: Routledge.Warren, Bill. 1980. Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism. London: Verso.Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and society. Edited by Gunther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley

CA: University of California Press.

30

Willer, David E. 1967. "Max Weber's Missing Authority Type Source." Sociological Inquiry no. 37:231-239.

Wright, E. O., A. Levine, and E. Sober. 1992. Reconstructing Marxism: Essays on explanation and the theory of history. London: Verso.

31

Exhibit 1: The Capability Maturity ModelAdapted from (Paulk 1995b)

Level Focus and description Key Process Areas

Level 1: Initial

Competent people and heroics:

The software process is ad hoc, occasionally even chaotic. Few processes are defined, and success depends on individual effort and heroics.

Level 2: Repeatable

Project management processes:

Basic project management processes are established to track cost, schedule, and functionality. The necessary process discipline is in place to repeat earlier successes on projects with similar applications.

* software configuration management

* software quality assurance

* software subcontract management

* software project tracking and oversight

* software project planning

* requirements management

Level 3: Defined

Engineering processes and organizational support:

The software process for both management and engineering activities is documented, standardized, and integrated into a standard software process for the organization. All projects use an approved, tailored version of the organization’s standard software process for developing and maintaining software.

* peer reviews

* intergroup coordination

* software product engineering

* integrated software management

* training program

* organization process definition

* organization process focus

Level 4: Managed

Product and process quality:

Detailed measures of the software process and product quality are collected. Both the software process and products are quantitatively understood and controlled.

* software quality management

* quantitative process management

Level 5: Optimizing

Continuous process improvement:

Improvement is enabled by quantitative feedback from the process and from piloting innovative ideas and technologies.

* process change management

* technology change management

* defect prevention

32

33