Terry Irving was
invited to address the Sydney Historical Research Network in March 2017, as
part of a session on ‘Histories of Class Now’. The other speakers were Hannah
Forsyth and Elizabeth Humphrys. Each of them was asked to say something about
their current research. A revised version of his address, followed by a note on
sources, will appear in Journal of
Working Class Studies, vol. 1, No. 2, June 2017.
HISTORY AND THE WORKING CLASS NOW: THE COLLECTIVE
IMPULSE, TUMULT AND DEMOCRACY
by Terry Irving
They’re
talking about class again, the liberal commentators
in the commercial media, and not in the sense of the ‘class envy’ that
defenders of neo-liberal austerity scream about when their privilege and power
are challenged. No, it’s class as rupture. They are talking about the
manifested anger of working people affected by ten years of global economic
crisis. They note the rising tide of militant resistance – strikes,
occupations, riots - in China, India, Bangladesh and other cheap labour
countries where capital was supposed to be safe from grasping unions; they are
astonished to discover that the number one division in society in the US is not
race but rich versus poor, that globalization has cleaved the country into two
hostile classes, and that young people, the precariat of the future, prefer to
rally behind Bernie Sanders rather than Hillary Clinton. In the UK, public
intellectuals, in the wake of Brexit and rank and file Labour support for
Jeremy Corbyn, are noticing again that most Brits, disgusted by ruling class
greed, still regard themselves as working class; and turning to Australia, we
are told that ‘class is the new black’, and that it is realigning parliamentary
politics.
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| Terry Irving |
So class is part of the zeitgeist again, as
it was in the 1970s when Raewyn Connell and I conceived a study of class
structure in Australian history. By the time we published in 1980, that moment
was over. That was when the twin
‘turns’ were foisted upon us all – the neo-liberal turn of Thatcher and Reagan
which inflicted misery on the global working class, and the cultural turn of
post-modernity which saw a generation of liberal scholars burbling on about the
terrible injustice of failing to recognise minority identities – mostly among
privileged people like themselves – while globally the great mass of workers,
6.3 billion according to ILO in 2015, 25% of whom earned two dollars a day or
less, was suffering actual material deprivation.
Meanwhile, the damage
caused by identity politics was growing. Instead of exploitation in common,
liberal thinkers looked for multiple oppressions. Instead of justice they
privileged recognition. Instead of practising solidarity as activist
intellectuals, informed by an understanding of the history of class struggle,
they retired to academia and built abstract models of intersectionality. At the
centre of this zeitgeist of ‘commercial scholarship’ as Werner Bonefeld calls it, there was the idea of difference. It
destroyed the language of class, pushing white workers into ‘an “identity” of white nationalism’,
while leaving the rapaciousness of global corporations unchecked. It was the
discourse that underpinned the strategy of corporate liberals, like Hillary
Clinton – of putting together a coalition of separate identity groups - and it
failed, but even had she won, the needs and desires of working people would
have been ignored. In a series of essays in a recent Harper’s Magazine under the heading ‘Trump – A Resister’s Guide’
the young writers agree that the time has come to dump identity politics. So,
today it seems this shameful phase in the history of capitalist social sciences
and humanities is coming to an end.
What liberals fail to understand is that
racism and sexism, for example, are, like class, destructive inequalities. They
deserve to be analysed historically as products of the dynamics of capitalism,
just as class is analysed. So when we talk about the identities of women and
Aborigines we need to see them as expressions of the practices of women and Aborigines, reflecting as well as
constituting the gender and racial dynamics of capitalism. Their identities
should not be understood as bundles of detached ideas, with no material
moorings. This is the mistake that liberal stratificationists make when they
talk about studying the intersection of class, gender and race. In historical
studies, this identitarianism results in a one-sided focus on the mental world
of discourses and signs, ignoring the material world of exploitation and
inequality, and the class perspective of eradicating them. So, as in
contemporary politics, it plays right into the hands of the ruling class.
But we all make mistakes. When we wrote Class Structure in Australian History Connell
and I were trapped in our zeitgeist. As we wrote recently, our book was
produced at a time when the organized working class was in a militant mood.
‘Strikes reached an all-time high in 1974, and between 1968 and 1974 the wages
share of national income increased by almost 10%’ (Irving and Connell, 2016,
4). Although we recognized that the
working class was ‘a highly complex structure’, when we wrote of ‘workers’
power' we associated it with the kind of organized militancy that tried to
prevent the export of pig-iron from Port Kembla to Fascist Japan in 1938. And
we firmly fixed the flag of socialism to the remobilization of that working
class in that kind of struggle, and assumed without question that the
parliamentary state would continue to be a focus of political activity as the
working class remobilized.
Today in Australia we are in a very
different moment. Unions are smaller and corralled by the state,
social-democratic corporatism has succumbed to neo-liberalism, revolutionary
parties are as sectarian as ever, organized labour militancy is rare, and
parliamentary democracy has been ‘hollowed out’. Consequently it is not
surprising that the study of class is different, responding to different forms
of struggle and a different kind of working class. Briefly, those differences
are: (i) the working class has become global; (ii) work is precarious even in
the core capitalist economies; (iii) the class struggle has broken out of its
institutionalized straight-jacket and is now increasingly tumultuous and on the
streets; and (iv) workers – especially those who are young, well educated and
precariously employed – are a key component of a radical democratic movement,
refusing representation by the political class and flirting with horizontalism
and other alternative models of politics.
As a
result we’re rethinking our theoretical positions,
we scholars of working class history. In the presence of the awakening working
class of the Global South it is not enough to embrace transnational histories,
as if the nations on different sides of the ‘trans’ were commensurate. Imperial
relationships were clearly never of that kind. And, it is impossible now to
imagine labour progressing through ever-stronger organisation and deeper
penetration of the state to socialism, let alone social democracy. The abject
submission of organized labour in the capitalist heartlands to neo-liberalism
has dealt the final blow to that faded – not to speak of unintelligent and
deceptive - vision of postponed liberation.
Among the theoretical developments, there
are three that I find compelling, and I can sum them up in three words:
informal, porous and autonomous, each of them describing an approach to the
study of the global working class.
Informal labour is labour that is
unregulated and precarious. It is now an increasing condition of labour markets
under the sway of neo-liberalism in the countries of the North Atlantic tier,
Japan and Australasia, but it has always been a feature of labour in the Global
South. Jan Breman and Marcel van der Linden argue that, as informal labour
extends its reach, the ‘West’ is becoming like the “Rest’ of the world. Trade
unionism and collective bargaining, seen by earlier theorists and labour
movement activists as the typical forms of working class engagement with
capital, and the acme of class formation for less mature working classes in the
South, must now be recognized as atypical historical phenomena, confined to
just a few countries for just a few decades. Can labour replace this
‘classical’ model? Breman and van der Linden see new forms of collective action
emerging in response to the spread of informal labour.
Their work raises another question. In the
West, prior to those few decades, is there a history of precarious labour
relationships and informal collective behaviour in the working class? Should
Western labour historians be looking for instances of workers striking without, or prior to, the involvement of a union, or striking
in defiance of a union? Should we be looking for the go-slow, sabotage,
organized pilfering, customary insolence etc on the part of workers? And if so,
should we conceptualize working class collectivism in a different way, a way
that releases it from the submerged teleology that dominated labour history in
its formative period.
In Australia we have tended to date the
origins of the working class to the unions formed after the gold rushes. My
book, The Southern Tree of Liberty,
put a dint in this lazy view by restoring working people to the story of
representative government in the years before 1856, their contribution made
possible by decades of grass roots organization to obtain political rights and
economic independence. I relied for part of the argument on articles by Michael
Quinlan. Now his book, The Origins of Worker Mobilization: Australia 1788-1850, is about to appear. Having seen the manuscript I can say that this is
a truly path-breaking study of the collective impulse among workers, with
important pointers for the global historiography of labour.
The novel aspect of his study is that
it reveals the extent of informal, that is non-union, collective organisation
among workers, both convict and free. Certainly there were a handful of
organizations pursuing collective bargaining, but their members were more
likely to experience worker power outside of those organizations. When I read
the manuscript Quinlan had discovered 1370 instances of worker mobilization;
now he tells me that the number has risen to over 6000 (he is still entering
recently discovered data), and he estimates there are another 2000 instances to
document. This staggering figure is the result of Quinlan’s three decades of
digital computation of evidence of strikes, court actions, go-slows, demonstrations,
mutual insurance schemes, petitions, mass abscondings, sabotage, political
meetings etc, gained through painstaking reading of convict conduct records,
police gazettes, court bench-books and colonial newspapers. When historians now
talk about this period, how can they not call it a period of class struggle?
When they talk about the coming of self-government how can they ignore its
meaning for workers who had been struggling to gain some self-government in
their lives since 1788 (yes 1788 – there were three instances of collective
resistance by convict workers that year)?
Quinlan hopes his book will ‘act as a
counter point to cultural/identity analysis that seems to have forgotten class
as the critical category of social determination in capitalism (and you don’t
need to ignore women, migrants or non-Europeans to do this)’. With that in mind
we can answer questions about the meaning of workers’ actions - such as
supporting a new constitution for the colonies - by revealing their material
situation as well as their discursive world. Workers wanted parliamentary
self-government to mean tight control of their representatives. They wanted
legislation for an eight-hour day, land reform, and restricted immigration.
That was what the ‘right’ to self-government meant to them, not just something
philosophical, or a practice, such as voting, empty of content.
Turning now to porosity: by this term I
mean the fact that workers were not typically defined by a life-time spent in a
particular kind of labour – say waged, or unfree, or domestic, or
self-employed. Rather, workers have always participated in various kinds of
commodified and un-commodified labour, for the boundaries within and between
them were porous. There have been several theoretical paths to this insight.
Andrea Komlosy has produced a global history of work since the time of
Classical Greece and Rome. Although her book is not yet translated from German,
we can follow her argument from other sources, including her chapter in a book edited by Jurgen Kocka and Marcel van der Linden, Capitalism: The Re-emergence of a Historical
Concept. She insists that working class history shows a blurring of the
distinction between free and unfree labour, and warns that labour history’s
blindness to non-waged work, assuming the primacy of the commodity form of
labour, is leading us into intellectual and political dead ends. Consequently
we need a more differentiated form of workers’ history.
Another approach can be found in the work
of Marcel van der Linden, of the International
Institute for Social History. In his influential paper, ‘Conceptualising the
World Working Class’, he constructs a typology of the forms of labour
commodification and concludes that in capitalist society the boundaries between
‘free’ wage labourers and other workers are ‘vague and gradual’:
In the first place there are extensive
and complicated grey areas full of transitional locations between “free” wage
labourers and slaves, the self-employed and the lumpenproletarians. Secondly,
almost all subaltern workers belong to households that combine several modes of
labour. Thirdly, individual subaltern workers can combine different modes of
labour, both synchronically and diachronically. And finally, the distinction
between different kinds of subaltern workers is not clear-cut. The implications
are far-reaching. Apparently there is a large class of people within
capitalism, whose labour power is commodified in various ways.
On the basis of this typological analysis, Van der Linden speaks of a
class of subaltern workers rather than the working class. ‘It is the historical
dynamics of this multitude’ that labour and social historians should try to
understand. Those dynamics of course include how subaltern workers make
themselves into a historical subject, a class, a process that typological
analysis cannot, and does not aim to, grasp.
It is a process that autonomist Marxism places at the centre of its
analysis. This is a strand of Marxist theory associated particularly with the
theorist Antonio Negri who drew on his experiences as an anti-authoritarian
Communist in the Italian operaismo
movement of the 1960s and 70s.
The Australian historian and political scientist, Verity Burgmann, has
recently promoted this strand of Marxist theory to labour historians, in an
article in International Labor and
Working Class History (no. 83, Spring 2013), and to political scientists in
her just published book, Globalization
and Labour in the Twenty-First Century. Autonomism is the latest in a long
tradition of Marxist critiques of economic determinism, starting with Gramsci
in the 1920s and including J-P. Sartre, and E.P. Thompson. Amongst recent
historians, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker are often cited as contributing
to this anti-determinism through their book, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and
the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
(2000). Burgmann argues that although the earlier Marxist ant-determinism recognized
the agency, subjectivity and class consciousness of the working class, it still
worked with the ‘classical’ or ‘second international’ understanding that
capital accumulation and exploitation shaped the existence of the working
class. Workers might have agency but they would always be reactive.
But autonomist Marxism, in Burgmann’s
words, ‘is more far-reaching’. Negri and his comrades placed ‘labor at the very
beginning of the labor-capital dialectic. Labor can exist independently of
capital, but capital needs to command labor to ensure profit; therefore
capitalist development does not occur due to internal momentum but in reaction
to labor’s tendency to unloose itself from capital.’ History written from an autonomist
perspective would place labour history within the internal history of the
working class, a process of composition (as it becomes a class for itself), of
decomposition (as the ruling class seeks to disrupt working class solidarity),
and re-composition (as the working class fights back by developing new forms of
struggle).
These three paths all point in the same
direction: towards a history that takes the working class, not the labour
movement, as its subject. We need to move from labour history to working class
history. A history of informal mobilization widens the understanding of worker
power, showing that it can be expressed collectively in many ways. Unlike
labour history it would not produce studies that are merely institutional
(ignoring the fleeting and peripheral) or social (if that means exclusive of
social labour) or cultural (if that means exclusive of culture’s material
context). The focus of working class history would be political, finding the
common element of power in those studies. A history of subaltern labour that recognizes
that commodification takes many forms would make working class history global
as well as open to current responses by workers to precarity and uncertainty.
And last, a history that adopts an autonomous perspective on the working class
and its relation to capitalism would banish the idea that society is ‘an order’
and that the working class is subordinate. Capitalist exploitation and
domination produce disorder, a dynamic of social struggles that is open-ended
and complex. Working class history would approach capitalism as itself
constructed historically through social struggles.
A working class history of this kind is
already discernible in the development of ‘Working Class Studies’ in the United
States. This new field has emerged because of the manifest limitations of
labour history and industrial relations. It asked: what about the 85% of
workers in the US that were not in unions? What about working class culture,
obscured by the nonsense that the US is a middle class country? Integrating
historical research into broader social analysis, it aims to study society
through the lens of class, especially the working class, for as the title of
one of the area’s seminal books indicates, Michael Zweig’s America’s Best Kept Secret, the US is a country with a working
class majority.
Class, as Zweig insists, is about power not
income, and using that insight the working class majority, he says, might
organize to ‘achieve political influence and social strength’. He doesn’t
specify how and what form their influence might take, but nonetheless working
class studies is clearly partisan, conceiving, as the context for the future
development of the field, a working class social movement. There are now three
centres of working class studies, in New York, Ohio and Texas, a Working Class
Studies Association, and an Association of Working Class Academics. Outside of
this movement, but perhaps influenced by it, radical academics in the US are
publishing noteworthy books on the history of class, eg Barbara Jensen, Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in
America, (2012) and Nancy Isenberg, White
Trash. The 400-Year Untold Story of Class in America (2016).
The renewal of intellectual energy in class studies (and I'm including working
class history under that heading) can be seen in journal publishing over the
last few years. I want to mention five. The Working Class Studies Association
publishes The Journal of Working Class Studies, edited from the
University of Technology Sydney by Sarah Attfield and Liz Guiffre. The blurb
for its first issue, on 'Popular Revolt and the Global Working Class' makes two
significant points. It defines the popular forces broadly as the 'working
class, poor and other disenfranchised people', and it positions the journal as
a response to the current crisis. This year, Working USA, has rebadged
itself as the Journal of Labour and Society in order to focus on 'labour
as a force for economic and social justice'. The new journal, Radical
Americas, welcomes 'scholarship which takes a radical approach' and which
moves away from the emphases of the cultural turn. Slightly older, dating from
2012, is the journal, Workers of the World, published by the
International Association for the study of Strikes and Social Conflict. Finally,
there is Critical Historical Studies, that proclaims itself as working
'in the tradition of historically-reflexive approaches to capitalism', based on
'a critical appropriation of Marx'. It is notable I think that none of these
journals has a national focus, none of them align themselves with traditional
labour history, each of them offers a way for scholars to feel part of current
large-scale transformations and movements, and all of them suggest a shift away
from discourse analysis to political economy, or, to echo the title of the new
book edited by Jurgen Kocka and Marcel van der Linden, to the re-emergence of
capitalism as a historical concept.
My current project, ‘Fatal Lure: Politics,
Democracy and Gordon Childe’, sits within a wider project to rethink the
history of democracy in Australia. It begins from the observation that, when
power and resources are distributed unequally, it is those who have less power,
and less of the world’s goods, who have the greater interest in democracy – if
by that term we mean popular self-rule. Accordingly, my project looks for
expressions of that interest, constructing a history of democracy that focuses
as much on the democracy-driven struggles of working people, and the radical
intellectuals who supported them, as on the constitution-making and liberal
individualism of those using politics to defend their power and wealth.
Distinguishing between democracy as
utopian, fleeting and rebellious, and democracy as ‘being ruled’ through the
alienating routines and institutions of electoral politics and representative
government, such a history would discover the episodes of mass action aiming to
hold representatives accountable, the moments when upsurges of popular protest
turned representation into delegation, and the forms of bottom-up democracy
that popular movements developed in the process. Such a history would seek to
reveal the continuing struggle of ideas between radical democracy and liberal
democracy, the reactionary and defensive tendencies of liberal democracy and
the creative and liberating potential of radical democracy.
A decade ago I wrote a book, The Southern Tree of Liberty, about the
radical democratic movement that sought popular control of parliamentary
‘representatives’ in the period before 1856. My next book deals with
Australia’s second bite at radical democracy, in the 1910s, when workers,
socialists, pacifists and feminists rebelled against both the failure of state
organizations – parliaments, political parties and trade unions - to respond to
their needs, and the top-down model of governance in those bodies.
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| Gordon Childe |
The book is built around the first life of
Gordon Childe, a life of socialist politics and ambivalence about the state.
For ten years, until his early thirties, as a pacifist and socialist he
organized, lobbied, made speeches, provided advice to leaders, and wrote for
the labour press. His political activism culminated in his becoming a political
minder and researcher for the Labor Premier of New South Wales. At the end of
his life, Childe described himself escaping ‘the fatal lure of politics’ by
returning to the study of archaeology in the mid-1920s. But the phrase may also
be used to describe the suspicion of parliamentary politics that he shared with
radical political activists of the 1910s.
In the 1910s the radical desire for
self-government touched diverse communities and movements, putting them on a
collision course with the state. Thirty four thousand families refused to allow
their sons to take part in the compulsory military training scheme between 1912
and 1914. Radical feminists, scornful of the supposed benefits to women of
accessing the state through the suffrage, widened their attack on patriarchy to
include employment and the patriarchal family. In the labour market a wave of
strikes by militant workers saw defiance of both employers and union officials.
An unexpected feature of this militancy was that it extended to workers not
usually thought of at that time as ‘working class’ – clergymen, sportsmen,
artists, journalists, newspaper boys, university students, caddies at golf
clubs, waitresses, bookmakers, medical doctors, nurses, taxi-cab drivers, and
many more ‘atypical’ workers.
Within the sphere of the state we encounter
the better-known instances of revolt. Angry members of the Labor Party forced
its officers to expel a Prime Minister, a Premier and many leading
parliamentarians. Freedom-loving voters twice defied the Prime Minister to
defeat referenda aiming to introduce conscription. In the interests of
self-government, rebellious residents of Darwin, led by the Australian Workers
Union, forced the departure of the unpopular administrator of the Northern
Territory.
These struggles were fraught with violence.
During food riots in Melbourne radical women fought on and off with police and
scabs for almost six weeks. Workers on strike routinely roughed up scabs, while
unemployed workers fought with police in Brisbane, Melbourne and Townsville. In
Adelaide, Brisbane, Darwin, Kalgoorlie, Broken Hill, Townsville and Fremantle there
were days, sometimes weeks, when militant workers controlled the streets.
Sabotage was common, and workers in Sydney, Darwin, Melbourne and Townsville
stole guns. Workers used firearms to defend themselves during demonstrations in
Kalgoorlie, Townsville and Brisbane. Two men died, and hundreds were injured,
some shot in the back by police. In 1918 a counter-revolution began when
proto-fascist violence broke out. Organized by former AIF officers linked to
the Commonwealth Investigation Branch, secret armies of ex-servicemen attacked
left-wing gatherings, newspaper offices and halls for the next four years.
In the midst of this turbulence radical
thinkers were trying out alternative ideas about democracy. In a series of
lectures for the Workers’ Educational Association in 1918, Gordon Childe set
out to derive a political philosophy for the labour movement by presenting a
history of ideas that showed political thought moving away from the centrality
of the state. Labour’s political philosophy, he implied, should be
anti-statist. In Brisbane a few weeks later state school-teachers discussed
their right as workers to control the education system and its syllabus. In
intellectual circles, Guild Socialism’s pluralism and diffused approach to
sovereignty was well known. Militant unions, already influenced by syndicalism,
were encouraged by Childe and other socialists to demand workers’ control in
their industries. There were conferences on industrial democracy in several
states under the auspices of the WEA. In response the Labor Governments in New
South Wales and Queensland seriously considered the idea of appointing workers’
representatives in management to head off more radical demands. But the appeal
of industrial democracy was hard to diminish. As dissatisfaction with Labor’s
parliamentarism grew it found expression in the formation of industrial labour
parties, and these in turn led to the formation of a Communist party in 1921
that was not ‘bolshevized’ by Stalinism until the early 1930s.
Finally, to return to the invitation that
led to this address, how is my project an expression of ‘the history of class’
now? In as much as democracy has always been an arena of class conflict my
project is necessarily a history of class, with the qualification that it views
this conflict through the eyes of working people and labour intellectuals. It
has benefited by my discovery of Childe’s resistance to determinist Marxism and
my earlier exposure to Thompson’s insistence that the working class makes
itself. While concerned about Autonomist Marxism’s contribution to the drift
away from political economy I am able to acknowledge its boost to the radical
purpose of history writing: in the interests of resistance, self-activity and
restoring the commons. When I returned to the study of the 1840s I was struck
by the strength of the impulse to collective action, including among workers
not formally organized, and in a range of labouring situations. This interest
continued into my study of the 1910s. In both periods I discovered a range of
violent episodes glossed over by liberal historians. The collective impulse,
tumult and democracy are what I write about, and I think they are pretty
central to the history of class now.
