ABSTRACT
The contemporary idea of "the labor process" is based on Marx's distinction between labor and labor power. The analysis of the labor process is literally the centerpiece of Marx's Capital volume 1. The labor process involves the processes of producing commodities and surplus value. In the labor process human labor is purposively combined with raw materials and tools to create useful objects and surplus value. In the 1930s the Italian trade union and communist leader Antonio Gramsci examined Fordism as not just a new way of organizing the labor process but a new way of organizing society. Gramsci concepts were not influential in the English-speaking world until the 1970s when The Prison Notebooks were first translated. In the midst of the heightened worker militancy of the late 60s and 70s a number of books emerged on the labor process. The most influential was Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital.
