ABSTRACT The deskilling thesis has long anchored debates in labor process theory (LPT), yet its deterministic framing has faced sustained critique. This paper revisits these debates by theorizing skills as a contested terrain of capitalist development. First, it traces the intellectual trajectory from Marx's analysis of the division of labor to Braverman's account of Taylorism, and to subsequent critiques that have emphasized worker consent, institutional mediation, and alternative paradigms such as flexible specialization and high‐performance work systems. Second, it situates skills within the contradictory dynamics of global capitalism: outsourcing and global value chains polarize labor between high‐skill core functions and low‐skill peripheral work, while technological change simultaneously generates new expertise and routinizes existing capacities. Comparative evidence from East Asia shows how various developmental skill formation regimes mediate these tensions in distinct ways. Third, drawing on the Chinese case, the paper argues that labor control often functions less through the erosion of existing competences than through the systematic blocking of skill formation, creating a structural low‐skill equilibrium. Together, these insights reaffirm the centrality of skills to LPT and highlight how factory regimes, state institutions, and global production networks jointly shape the possibilities and limits of skill development under contemporary capitalism.
Xu et al. (Sun,) studied this question.