While at the national or international scale the working class "lives a social and political existence of its own" it remains "the living part of capital", the means by which capitalists accomplish the dual process of production and valorization. As a result, its "...occupational structure, modes of work, and distribution through the industries of society are determined by the ongoing process of the accumulation of capital. [The working class] is seized, released, flung into various parts of the social machinery and expelled by others, not in accord with its own will or self-activity, but in accord with the movement of capital". In /LMC/ Braverman is primarily concerned with understanding the "shape given to the working population by the accumulation process" and deliberately eschews a treatment of workers' subjectivity, of the "class for itself" and its "consciousness, organization, or activities" (p. 18). TODO: reference to note at the end of book about political import, marxism as "combat tool". Braverman's approach would be faulty if working class agency played a significant role in altering labor processes or occupational structure. There is good reason to believe that in the period he was writing, it did not, but we shouldn't rule out the possibility. Did unionization at WU impact engineers' decisions?

Braverman quotes E.P. Thompson approvingly as a corrective to one common misunderstanding of Marx's conception of class, seen in left-wing agitational pamphlets and academic sociology alike: "`It', the working class, is assumed to have a real existence, which can be defined almost mathematically - so many men who stand in a certain relation to the means of production... If we remember that class is a relationship, not a thing, we cannot think in this way". This is from the preface of /The Making of the English Working Class/ another section of which, though not quoted by Braverman, captures well the notion of class on display in /LMC/:

#+BEGIN_QUOTE

By class I understand an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. I emphasize that it is an historical phenomenon. I do not see class as a “structure,” nor even as a “category,” but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.

More than this, the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomize its structure. The finest-meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or of love. The relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context. Moreover, we cannot have two distinct classes, each with an independent being, and then bring them into relationship with each other. We cannot have love without lovers, nor deference without squires and laborers. And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born—or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not. We can see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups undergoing similar experiences, but we cannot predicate any law. Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never just the same way.

#+END_QUOTE

For Thompson and Braverman, class analysis ought not take a snapshot view of a firm or, a fortiori, a society and partition it into disjoint sets. Those who, on this reading of Marx, are unsatisfied with two classes (bourgeois/proletarian) are only compounding error by the addition of others, such as the "professional-managerial"[fn:1] or "coordinator"[fn:2] classes in socialist thinking or the non-proprietary "middle class" of popular politics in the U.S.

Acoording to Braverman, the class structure of society as a whole can only be understood by first examining the "polarity" of capital and labor within each firm and the changes in labor processes this tends to engender. His analysis takes up where Marx left off.