Working for Wages: The Roots of
Insurgency
Martin Glaberman and Seymour Faber, General Hall Inc: New York,
1998
"At this time, as for a very long time now, the class struggle
consisted in more or less short- lived and scattered actions. Now and
then sudden outbreaks of resistance, tough but quickly broken by
order of the union bigshots, made it possible to think that the other
forms of struggle could appear - then everything would collapse back
again into apathy.
"The chiefs and chieflings of the parties and the trade unions
loudly deplored this apathy, without permitting anyone to inquire in
public whether this apathy was not itself at once the basis of their
position as bureaucrats and the consequences of their dirty work -
legal , patriotic, electoral, and so forth. And then there were the
little political groups, the groupuscules, preaching in the desert
conceptions a half-century old and more."
--- the Mass Strike in France Informations
Correspondence Ouvrieres
This description of the class struggle in France, written by a
small now-defunct organisation neatly describes the apparent state of
class struggle outside of periods of open resistance. To an untrained
eye the picture appears to be of idyllic class peace, and then
apparently from nowhere near insurrectionary movements can appear. It
is often wrongly supposed by academic Marxists and sociologists that
class is a thing.' A tidy formula according to which income and
education allow the user of this formula to sort individuals into
neat little packages. But class', whatever else it might be, is
not a thing, it is a social relationship, and because humanity makes
for an inexact science, class is a leaky package. According to some,
these leaks' prove class does not exist.
Martin Glaberman and Seymour Faber have spent many years of their
lives involved in activities based around the premise that class does
exist, and at the heart of the working class there is the creative
potential to create a new world. In their book Working for Wages
Glaberman and Faber begin with this proposition and, following the
book's subtitle - the roots of the insurgency - map the origins of
and power of the working class' resistance to capitalism
In the preface to the book, the authors explain that their
intention is to fill a vacuum: to probe the source of why working
people rebel against work and what the possible outcome of their
struggles might be. Written in simple and straightforward language
Working for Wages serves as a very readable introduction to the ideas
that Glaberman has helped to expound for over half a century; first,
as part of the Johnson-Forest Tendency and later its successor
organisations including Bewick Publishing, and through such pamphlets
as "Punching Out" and "Be His Payment High or Low."
"The question is not what goal is envisaged for the time being
by this or that member of the proletariat, or even the proletariat as
a whole . The question is what is the proletariat and what course of
action will it be forced historically to take in conformity with its
own nature."
---- Marx: The Holy Family
Many people who argue against Marx's theories of class struggle
ask why do the workers appear to accept capitalism? Why are they not
in permanent revolt against this system? The question is a good one,
but it reveals more about the people who ask the question than those
who answer it . Let's put it this way.
Marx wrote in The Manifesto of the Communist Party that under
capitalism the worker is "compelled to face with sober senses, his
real condition of life, and his relations with his kind." What seems
like acceptance is often shrewd awareness of the possibilities and
limits of struggle at a given time. Glaberman once told me a story
which sheds some light on this matter. In the 1940's unions came to
try to organise a small light manufacturing plant in Detroit. On a
number of occasions organising drives were launched, but after the
votes were held, the drives were defeated. According to most
sociological and traditional leftist readings, the workers were
backward.' Yet another interpretation is possible. The workers
knew the union and the advantages it would bring to them; however,
the workers also knew the drawbacks. The union meant slightly better
wages, benefits and job security. The union also meant the speed-up.
Perhaps because they were women workers whose reliance on their
husbands' larger paycheque afforded them a greater measure of
freedom, they chose to maintain a measure of control over their
workplace over a larger paycheque. Backwardness or class
consciousness?
The point is, as Glaberman and Faber document through a wealth of
anecdotal evidence, although work is a facet of every worker's
existence, there is also the constant struggle on the job to assert a
measure of control and to resist the employers' agenda This
resistance takes many forms: absenteeism, sabotage, strikes, wildcats
and in exceptional cases the establishment of workers councils.
Viewed in this way, it is not workers who cause strikes; rather it is
the bosses' inhumanity and the workers' desire to humanise their
surroundings that make for industrial conflict. While the authors are
careful not to exaggerate every strike, every disruption of
production, as the potential crises that could overthrow capitalism,
they are also aware that these conflicts are part of the same
chain.
The point Marx made over and over again is that the working class
is revolutionary or it is nothing. On the face of it, this assertion
is empirically hard to accept. Worldwide the labour and socialist
movements appear to have been in retreat for several decades. In the
United States defeated, and betrayed struggles serve as a litany of
indictments of the failures of the official leaders of the working
class: PATCO, P-9, Greyhound, Staley, Caterpillar, Detroit, the list
goes on and on. Yet it is a mistake to see the workers movement as
merely that section of the working class organised within the trade
unions or worse still the union leadership. In chapters entitled "The
war on the job" and " Work As Play or Making Work Human" Glaberman
and Faber demonstrate the class struggle is an ongoing and never
ending struggle within the world of work. As Marx put it the
oppressor and the oppressed, stand "in constant opposition to one
another, [carrying] on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open
fight..." As in Marx's time, now today. Despite the seeming route of
the traditional working class organisations, the class struggle
continues unabated.
Another common objection is the predominance of racist and sexist
ideas, the whole-scale belief in religion, and other socially
conservative ideas that seem to belie any possible revolutionary role
for the working class. The authors however point out that the if one
were to examine the attitudes of the Russian working class in 1917,
one would find religious obscurantism, sexism, anti- Semitism,
illiteracy and countless other backward' ideas. Was the
abandonment of these reactionary attitudes a prerequisite to
revolutionary action? Of course not.
This latter objection that it is the ideas in the head of the
working class rather than its social being, leads many on the
left' to argue that without the intervention of a vanguard
party to issue orders to the class and direct the revolution, there
can be no revolution. The authors quite correctly point to
significant movements of the class in the twentieth century that
disprove the traditional leftist interpretations. In Hungary in 1956,
a massive demonstration organised by dissident students and
intellectuals created a momentum which overthrew the state and set up
workers councils across the country. The leftist who whines the
reasons for the defeat of the revolution was the absence of the
vanguard party and not the massive counter revolutionary efforts of
the second most powerful nation on earth cannot be taken seriously.
The events in France in the spring of 1968 were not sparked by
economic crises or the party paper, but by unhappiness among
students, because of, among other things a prohibition on female
students visiting male dorm rooms at the university. In what seemed
like the blink of an eye, ten million workers were on the streets.
While neither of these titanic struggles were ultimately successful,
the creative potentialities of working people were amply
demonstrated. The key point that Glaberman and Faber return to again
and again is a portrait of the worker as a living, breathing human
being rather than the idealised proletarian of leftist mythology.
It is perhaps a poor critic who complains about things which are
not in a book rather than things which are, but perhaps the
weaknesses of the book are in what has been left out. The authors
state that their book is intended to fill a gap with "a study
insurgencies" and the book is clearly intended to have a timeless
quality about it. Nevertheless, it is striking that much of the
anecdotal evidence on workers strikes and workplace struggles date
from the 1970's and seem to end in the early 1980's. While I am not
of the opinion that the last twenty years of history has meant the
end of history or of class struggle, it would have been useful to
look at the way that class struggle has changed or been re-channelled
in light of the capitalist assault on working people under the
Reagan, Bush and Clinton presidencies.
A second point is the question of globalisation. In the 1960's and
70's Detroit was the centre of a radical workers movement that led
every would be Marxist-Leninist vanguard scurrying to set up branches
there. Thirty years later and Motor City has fallen on hard times.
Vast numbers of jobs have been exported to different sectors of the
globe. While globalisation is often presented as a vast unstoppable
juggernaut, something which in my opinion in a tremendous
exaggeration which often exposes just how vulnerable capital is,
occupying a seventy year old factory when production is about to be
shifted thousands of miles away is a good question for working
people. Of course, this might sound like faulting someone in 1932 for
writing about the state of the working class and then criticising
them for not predicting the sit-down strike. One of these tactics may
now include the use of new technological communication. A few years
ago when I was living in Calgary, I participated n a solidarity tour
with members of the Women of the Waterfront group, women whose
husbands were striking Liverpool dockers ironically resisting
globalisation and casualisation of their industry. Even though the
strike was ultimately lost, the solidarity efforts which organised
hot-cargoing and solidarity action across the globe were largely
organised through email and Internet communications.
But these small quibbles and certainly not reason to prevent
someone from buying the book. The biggest complaint about this book
however, is the price. For some mysterious reason the publisher has
listed this under- 200 page book for $26.95 (over $40 Canadian),
making it a luxury item for many. This atrocity can be partially
overcome by ordering the book directly from Bewick Editions (POB
14140, Detroit, MI, 48214, USA) for $20 including postage.
N. F.
June 2000
This article, minus the quote from ICO and Marx originally
appeared in Z , September 2000. This version is the
original
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