ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with some of the most important, e.g. technology and the social and institutional forms of capital. Certainly the technology of electronics offers exceptionally abundant possibilities for development of process and product innovations, but this is a permissive factor rather than a driving force, in the sense that it offers less resistance to the pressure of the law of value than more technically restricted industries. This may seem a fine point but confusion on this issue supports wider misconceptions about the expansionary potential of high-technology industry. Interest in the labour process was largely awakened by Harry Braverman’s eloquent but flawed Labor and Monopoly Capital and this has coloured the way industry as a whole is seen by many on the Left. Time economies are relevant to each stage of the circuit of industrial capital, not just to direct production but to research and development, marketing, customer service and administration.
