Inquérito aos Trabalhadores: Uma Genealogia

Asad Haider e Salar Mohandesi 27 de setembro de 2013

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Conhecimento exato e positivo: questionário de Marx

Em 1880, o La Revue socialiste solicitou a Karl Marx envelhecido que redigisse um questionário
para circular entre a classe trabalhadora francesa. Chamada “Inquérito aos Trabalhadores”, era
uma lista de exatamente 101 perguntas detalhadas, perguntando sobre tudo, desde as refeições
até os salários e a hospedagem. 1 Em uma análise mais detalhada, parece haver uma progressão
na linha de questionamento. O primeiro trimestre, mais ou menos, faz perguntas aparentemente
desinteressadas sobre o comércio, a composição da força de trabalho empregada na empresa e
as condições gerais da loja, enquanto o último trimestre geralmente muda para questões políticas
mais explícitas sobre opressão, "associações de resistência". e greves.

O questionário começou com algumas reflexões preferenciais sobre o projeto como um

todo. Essas quinze linhas, basicamente, representavam basicamente um único
princípio: aprender com a própria classe trabalhadora . Somente a classe trabalhadora poderia
fornecer informações significativas sobre sua própria existência, assim como somente a própria
classe trabalhadora poderia construir o novo mundo. Mas por trás dessa simples chamada havia
uma série de motivações, objetivos e intenções complexas, fazendo com que a investigação dos
trabalhadores - esse desejo aparentemente modesto de aprender com os trabalhadores - fosse
um projeto altamente ambíguo, multifacetado e indeterminado desde o início.
At its most rudimentary level, workers’ inquiry was to be the empirical study of workers, a
commonly neglected object of investigation at the time. “Not a single government, whether
monarchy or bourgeois republic, has yet ventured to undertake a serious inquiry into the position
of the French working class,” Marx lamented. “But what a number of investigations have been
undertaken into crises – agricultural, financial, industrial, commercial, political!”

Since these other forms of investigation – like those endless government inquiries into this or that
crisis – simply could not produce any real knowledge of the working class, some new form of
investigation had to be developed. Its objective, as those hundred questions reveal, would be to
amass as much factual material about workers as possible. The goal, Marx wrote, should be to
acquire “an exact and positive knowledge of the conditions in which the working class – the class
to whom the future belongs – works and moves.”

Of course, even in Marx’s time, health inspectors and others had already begun to undertake this
kind of investigation into the world of the working class. But not only were these official
investigations unsystematic and partial, they treated workers as mere objects of study, in the
manner of the soil and seeds of those well-investigated agricultural crises. What set worker’s
inquiry apart from these other empirical studies was the belief that the working class itself knew
more about capitalist exploitation than anyone else. It is the “workers in town and country,” Marx
thought, who “alone can describe with full knowledge the misfortunes from which they suffer.”

With this brief intervention, Marx established a fundamental epistemological challenge. What was
the relationship between the workers’ knowledge of their exploitation, and the scientific analysis of
the “laws of motion” of capitalist society? In Capital, he devoted many pages to documenting the
labor process, yet this seemed to be part of a logical exposition which began with the critical
exposition of value, an abstract category of bourgeois political economy. He nevertheless
maintained in his 1873 afterword that “In so far as such a critique represents a class, it can only
represent the class whose historical task is the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production and
the final abolition of all classes – the proletariat.” 2 Louis Althusser, in his famous Preface to the
French translation, suggested that this meant that Capital could only be understood from a
specifically proletarian viewpoint, since that is “the only viewpoint which makes visible the reality of
the exploitation of wage labour power, which constitutes the whole of capitalism.” 3 Yet Marx’s own
view remains unclear. Was workers’ inquiry a means of accessing the proletarian viewpoint? Was
it simply the workers’ participation in generating a universal knowledge?
What is abundantly clear is that Marx had a high estimation of the autonomous activity of the
working class. Not only would workers provide knowledge about the nature of capitalism, they
would be the only ones who could overthrow it: only the workers in town and country, “and not
saviors sent by providence, can energetically apply the healing remedies for the social ills which
they are prey.” This practice of workers’ inquiry, then, implied a certain connection between
proletarian knowledge and proletarian politics. Socialists would begin by learning from the working
class about its own material conditions. Only then would they be able to articulate strategies,
compose theories, and draft programs. Inquiry would therefore be the necessary first step in
articulating a historically appropriate socialist project.

The practice of disseminating the inquiry also represented a step towards organizing this project,
by establishing direct links with workers. “It is not essential to reply to every question,” Marx wrote.
“The name of the working man or woman who is replying will not be published without special
permission but the name and address should be given so that if necessary we can send
communication.” For some, this attempt to forge real contacts with the workers was in fact a
genuine intention of the project.

Of course, Marx mentions nothing about building organizations in this short article. However, he
would later indicate that research and organization had a close relationship. In 1881, just a year
after penning this questionnaire, Marx received a letter from a young socialist who wanted to know
what he thought about the recent calls to refound the International Workingmen’s Association.
Marx revealed that he was opposed to this project. The “critical juncture” for such an association
had not arrived, and attempting to form one would be “not merely useless but harmful,” since it
would not be “related to the immediate given conditions in this or that particular nation.” 4

So any organization had to be tied to concrete historical conditions. We can conclude from Marx’s
enthusiastic response to La Revue socialiste that he granted a strategic role to research; in this
specific conjuncture, inquiry was a more appropriate measure than launching an organization, and
was perhaps even its precondition.

Marx died a few years after this first stab at inquiry, never receiving a single response. But the
project would have a remarkable afterlife in the following century. As we pull away from Marx’s
original blueprint to survey the much longer history of workers’ inquiry, it is hard not to notice the
remarkable instability of this practice. Though nearly every example touches the coordinates first
developed by Marx, inquiry has been polysemic and contradictory. This introduction will survey its
development as a way of investigating its underlying questions.
Raising Consciousness: The Johnson-Forest Tendency

While figures like Pierre Naville and Simone Weil had earlier published firsthand accounts of
factory life, Marx’s project was only truly reincarnated in 1947, when the Johnson-Forest Tendency
released a short pamphlet called The American Worker. Named after the pseudonyms of its two
principal theorists, CLR James (J.R. Johnson), the Trinidadian author of The Black Jacobins, and
Raya Dunayevskaya (Freddie Forest), Leon Trotsky’s onetime assistant, the Johnson-Forest
Tendency first emerged in 1941 as an oppositional current within the Trotskyist Workers’ Party. In
1947, the year they sponsored their first inquiry, this marginal though respected current left the
WP over what was then known as the “Negro Question.” While the Workers’ Party argued for a
single, broad, multiracial movement organized under the slogan “Black and White, Unite and
Fight,” the Johnson-Forest Tendency countered that the black community had its own specific
needs, which could not be peremptorily subsumed under such a homogenizing movement, and
along with other oppressed minorities should struggle for its own autonomy. 5

In 1951, after breaking from Trotskyism altogether, the Johnson-Forest Tendency formed
Correspondence, with a newspaper of the same name. 6 Correspondence, whose first issue was
released that November, was to be a new kind of paper. Principally written, edited, and distributed
by workers themselves, it was intended to serve as a forum in which workers could share their
own experiences. Reflecting the Tendency’s continued emphasis on the primacy of autonomous
needs, each issue was deliberately divided into four sections – for factory workers, blacks, youth,
and women – so that each sector of the broader working class would have its own independent
space to discuss what concerned them most. The hope was that in writing about their lives,
workers would come to see that their problems were not personal, but social. A 1955 editorial titled
“Gripes and Grievances” stated the purpose of the paper: “When millions of workers are
expressing the same gripe about their job, the foreman, the union, and the company, it is no
longer a gripe, it becomes a social problem. That gripe or grievance no longer affects just this or
that individual, it affects all of society.” 7 The objective of the paper, then, was to make people
realize the universality of their seemingly particular experiences, by providing a space where they
could be disseminated. Drawing an analogy to polio, which, they claimed, was once considered a
personal problem before being accepted as a social concern, the editors argued that the whole
point of Correspondence was to change public attitudes on decisive questions. The goal of the
workers’ paper, to put it another way, was to raise consciousness.
This newspaper was in many ways a logical continuation of the Tendency’s earlier efforts at
inquiry. The first and perhaps most famous of these was The American Worker. Grace Lee Boggs,
a co-author of the pamphlet, recalls that it first began as a diary. When Phil Singer, an auto worker
employed in a New Jersey GM plant, began to discuss the frustrations of the rank and file at the
factory, CLR James suggested that he write his thoughts down in a diary. 8Sections of it were later
assembled into a coherent piece, and paired with a theoretical essay by Grace Lee Boggs. The
first part of the pamphlet, now attributed to Paul Romano, Singer’s pseudonym, became a kind of
self-reflexive ethnographic investigation into the conditions of proletarian life in postwar America.
The second part, attributed to Ria Stone, Boggs’s party name, consciously drew on the concrete
experiences documented in the first part in order to theorize the content of socialism in a world
changed by automation, the assembly line, and semi-skilled labor.

When Socialisme ou Barbarie later translated the pamphlet into French, they called it the “first of
its genre.” 9 A worker was describing, in his own voice and explicitly for other workers, his
conditions of exploitation in a way that theorized the possibility of its strategic
overthrow. 10 Singer’s account represented both research into the changes in the labor process, as
well as a political practice aimed at raising the consciousness of his co-workers. He steadily
moved from static descriptions of exploitation in the factory to a dynamic consideration of the new
forms of struggle that had emerged out of those forms of exploitation. Surveying the contradictions
in the workplace, the various points of contestation, and signs of proletarian disgust with
management, bureaucracy, and even unions, Singer pointed to the wildcat strike, with workers’
self-management as its content, as the new form of struggle in the postwar period.

While Phil Singer provided the first example of this new kind of workers’ inquiry, Grace Lee Boggs
laid out the Johnson-Forest Tendency’s theoretical problematic. She drew heavily on a passage
from Capital that described how the “partially developed individual,” who was restricted to “one
specialized social function,” had to be replaced in large-scale industry by the “totally developed
individual” who could adapt to varying forms of labor. 11 Reading this in light of Marx’s earlier
works, principally the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which Boggs herself was
the first to translate into English, she took this to mean that modern industry in postwar America
had now realized the complete alienation of human nature.

According to Boggs, capitalism was to be understood as the progressive alienation of humanity’s

natural powers into the things it produces. Eventually, however, this process will reach a point
where all of humanity, all of its social essence, has been fully alienated into the means of
production. But this thoroughgoing dehumanization of the indiviual, she argues, is at the same
time the potential humanization of the world in its entirety. It is at that point that the objective
conditions will finally be ripe to reclaim those powers, recover human essence, and definitively
reconstitute the individual as a universal being. In her words, “Abstract labor reaches its most
inhuman depths in machine production. But at the same time, it is only machine production which
lays the basis for the fullest human development of concrete labor.” 12

“The essential content of productive activity today is the coöperative form of the labor process,”
Boggs concluded. In “the transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of labor only
usable in common” and “the economising of all means of production by their use as the means of
production of combined, socialized labor,” capitalist production had reached the point where it was
now implicitly already socialist. However, the realization of this implicit socialism was blocked:

The bourgeoisie maintains a fetter on this essentially social activity by isolating

individuals from one another through competition, by separating the intellectual
powers of production from the manual labor, by suppressing the creative
organizational talents of the broad masses, by dividing the world up into spheres
of influence.

This conflict between the invading socialist society and the bourgeois fetters
preventing its emergence is part of the daily experience of every worker.” 13

Interestingly, this concept had emerged in a pamphlet that James, Dunayevskaya, and Boggs
wrote the same year, with the title The Invading Socialist Society – a polemic against Trotskyists
who did not share their view that the USSR represented a new form of capitalism. The pamphlet
elaborates on some of the theoretical presuppositions of The American Worker, in which Boggs
had defended “the distinction between abstract labor for value and concrete labor for human
needs.” For Boggs, Marx’s definition of “value production” was “production which expanded itself
through degradation and dehumanization of the worker to a fragment of a man,” which in its use of
machinery “degrades to abstract labor the living worker which it employs.” Concrete labor was
instead directed towards needs, “the labor in which man realizes his basic human need for
exercising his natural and acquired powers.” 14

In The Invading Socialist Society, the authors argued that value production was clearly at work in
Russian “state capitalism,” just as it was in the United States, and they elaborated on the “dual
character” of labor Boggs had described in the other pamphlet:
 Labor’s fundamental, its eternally necessary function in all societies, past,
present and future, was to create use-values. Into this organic function of all
labor, capitalist production imposed the contradiction of producing value, and
more particularly surplus-value. Within this contradiction is contained the
necessity for the division of society into direct producers (workers) and rulers of
society, into manual and intellectual laborers.

The managerial revolution, in this conception, was simply an expression of value production and
the class division between manual and intellectual labor. If this class division and this kind of
alienating labor process could be observed in Russia, there was only one conclusion: the state
bureaucracy extracted surplus value from Russian workers, and was in fact a capitalist class.

The proletariat, they went on to argue, had been disabused of all the illusions of bureaucratic
vanguards, which had simply instituted a new form of capitalism, and reformism, which limited
itself to contesting the distribution of surplus-value. Now the proletariat had “drawn the ultimate
conclusion”: “The revolt is against value production itself.” The invading socialist society, for
James, Dunayevskaya, and Boggs, could be observed in this realization. 15

The political motivation of this theory may have been understandable, but it led the group to use
Marx’s categories in a way that dissolved their historical specificity. Two decades earlier I.I. Rubin,
at the close of a period of relatively free debate in the Soviet Union, had explained in a lecture at
the Institute for Economics in Moscow that a “concept of labour which lacks all the features which
are characteristic of its social organisation in commodity production, cannot lead to the conclusion
which we seek from the Marxian standpoint.” In his elaboration of Marx’s concepts Rubin asked
directly whether the value-form could be observed in a planned economy, in which some social
organ had to equate labor which produced different things and was undertaken by different
individuals. While this social equation was often described as “abstraction” in some general sense,
Rubin distinguished it from Marx’s concept of abstract labor. In all historical epochs, Rubin
conceded, human beings have engaged in a physiological expenditure of effort to reproduce their
conditions of existence. But Marx’s value theory set out to explain certain historically
specific characteristics of capitalist commodity-producing societies. In such societies the labor of
individuals, as concrete labor which produces use-values, is not “directly regulated by the
society” – in contrast to a society in which social equation is done on the basis of the planned
allocation of those use-values. 16
In commodity-producing societies, labor is only socially equated when the products of individual
laborers are “assimilated with the products of all the other commodity producers, and the labour of
a specific individual is thus assimilated with the labour of all the other members of the society and
all the others kinds of labour.” And crucially, this social equation only happens “through the
equation of the products of labour”; labor “only takes the form of abstract labour, and the products
of labour the form of values, to the extent that the production process assumes the social form of
commodity production, i.e. production based on exchange.” When commodity owners in capitalist
societies engage in production, they do so seeking to “transform their product into money and thus
also transform their private and concrete labour into social and abstract labour,” since they depend
on the market for their conditions of existence. It is through the mediation of the market that these
private labor expenditures take on a social form. 17

From the vantage point of Rubin’s intervention, the Johnson-Forest Tendency had ended up
aligning itself with those Soviet economists who believed that value was a transhistorical category,
reducible to the social equation of labor that would exist in any society and necessarily take the
same form in socialist planning as it did in a capitalist market. Their attempt to show that the
USSR, despite its planning of production and consumption, competed on the world market and
therefore had the characteristics of a huge capitalist enterprise, simply dodged the question of the
exchange of the products of labor as an expression of the market dependence of individuals.

Of course, Rubin did not address the question of whether the planning organ of a socialist society
was a party bureaucracy, a workers’ council, or anything else. While this distinction would certainly
be of political significance, it has no bearing on the questions of abstract labor and value. In its
understandable drive to criticize the oppressive character of work in the USSR, the Johnson-
Forest Tendency had lost grip on its own critical concepts, and above all, by reducing the value-
form to alienation in the labor-process, completely muddled the distinction between abstract and
concrete labor. In this regard inquiry had a tense relationship to Marxist theory; shifting towards
the documentation of workers’ experience, the subjective experience of the shop floor, the
Johnson-Forest Tendency accepted and inverted the orthodox economic worldview of their
adversaries, leaving it more or less intact.

And by accepting the transhistorical conception of the categories of labor and value, socialism
itself took on transhistorical characteristics. It was a telos already contained in the origin, in human
nature which alienated itself in machinery. The task of socialists was to uncover it by casting aside
the capitalist fetters. According to this view, socialism would not have to be constructed; it would
have to be realized. We can identify a kind of double meaning to this term: on the one hand,
socialism as an inherent tendency would have to be made “real,” or actual, and on the other hand,
socialism could be actualized only when those workers currently engaged in these embryonic
socialist relations gradually came to recognize, or “realize,” that socialism already constituted the
very essence of postwar capitalism.

This conception of socialism was a commentary on Singer’s experiences insofar as workers’

inquiry was the means of this realization. It was through inquiry that workers would come to
“realize” that socialism was already there, hidden in their everyday lives, waiting to burst forth. In
circulating these inquiries, other workers with similar experiences would come to the same
realization, sparking a dialogue over their universal experiences. In this way the workers would
become conscious of themselves as a revolutionary class. The principal task of the organization,
first as the Johnson-Forest Tendency, and then as Correspondence, would be to facilitate this
coming-to-consciousness by creating a space where connections or “correspondences” between
different workers could be made.

Inquiry, then, was the cornerstone of this project. Grace Lee Boggs had theorized it, and Phil
Singer had provided the first concrete example. The American Workerwould therefore emerge as
a kind of paradigm. In 1952 Si Owens published Indignant Heart: A Black Worker’s Journal, under
the pseudonym of Matthew Ward. It was much longer, in fact practically a book, and was explicitly
autobiographical. It told the story of how a young black worker moved from the cotton fields of
Tennessee to the automobile plants of Detroit and became a militant, a radical force within the
United Automobile Workers of America. In 1953 “Arthur Bauman,” the pseudonym of an
anonymous student, recounted his story to Paul Wallis in what would become Artie Cuts Out, a
narrative, again in the style of Singer’s The American Worker, about high school students in New
York. Also that year, Correspondence’s bestselling pamphlet, A Woman’s Place by Marie Brant
(Selma James) and Ellen Santori (Filomena D’Addario), made its first appearance. What Singer
did for factory workers, Owens for black workers, and Bauman for the youth, James and D’Addario
sought to do for housewives. A Woman’s Place discussed the role of housework, the value of
reproductive labor, and the organizations autonomously invented by women in the course of their
struggle.

Following Singer’s model and Boggs’s theoretical frame, all of them drew on the everyday
experiences of the author in order to rigorously investigate the social conditions of a particular
class figure; they then used that inquiry to theorize how that fragmented social group might come
together as a collective political subject. The objective in all of these – as it would later be for
the Correspondence newspaper – was to show how seemingly personal experiences were
actually social. The underlying assumption of these inquiries was that what one particular worker
felt somewhere is very similar to what another might feel elsewhere, and that these shared
experiences, these common ways of living, can provide the groundwork for collective action. 18

Of course, it should be noted that neither The American Worker nor any of these other texts ever
called itself a workers’ inquiry. Indeed, they could just be called worker narratives, or perhaps even
testimonies. 19 But they should all still be seen as representing an iteration, or at least a variation,
of the project Marx laid out in 1880. The Tendency was quite familiar with Marx’s 1880
article. 20 Boggs had read it, and made an explicit reference to it in a footnote in her section of The
American Worker. 21 And despite significant differences, these inquiries, especially The American
Worker, reproduced many of the intentions, motivations, and objectives of Marx’s original project.
In fact, reading Marx’s questions alongside The American Worker, it seems as though Singer had
provided Marx with the first, comprehensive response to his questionnaire – it was just several
decades late.

But Singer’s response took a form that Marx did not anticipate. Marx imagined that workers would
offer line-by-line answers to his questionnaire. “In replies,” he made sure to specify, “the number of
the corresponding question should be given.” Singer, however, did not produce a neat list of
bulleted responses; he crafted these raw answers into a literary narrative. This was perhaps the
most distinctive feature of all the inquiries sponsored by the Johnson-Forest Tendency – and
perhaps one of the main reasons why they were never formally called “workers’ inquiries.”
Workers’ inquiry, in this variation, was specifically a subjective narrative account, not a response
to a questionnaire.

This innovation in the genre of inquiry, however, amplified tensions already embedded in the
original project. On the one hand, the narrative form worked to advance inquiry as a form of
proletarian self-activity. Although Marx made it clear that knowledge of the working class could
only be produced by workers themselves, his original project seemed to foreclose the space for
any kind of creative expression, demanding mechanical answers to prefabricated questions.
Singer’s narrative model allowed workers to raise their own unique voice, express themselves in
their own language, with their own idioms, ideas, and feelings, and even pose their own questions.

On the other hand, although privileging the narrative form might have amplified the power of
workers’ inquiry as a means of self-activity, it had the potential to undermine another of aspect of
that project, what Marx called the acquisition of “an exact and positive knowledge of the
conditions” of the working class. The openness of the narrative form exaggerates a tendency to
slip from measured generalization to untenable overgeneralization. By trying to fuse his
subjectivity with that of the rank and file as a whole, Singer ends up attempting to legitimize
himself as a reliable mouthpiece for all the workers in his factory: “Their feelings, anxieties,
exhilaration, boredom, exhaustion, anger, have all been mine to one extent or another.” 22 But as
the text proceeds, Singer quietly goes from “their feelings are mine” to “my feelings are theirs,”
leading the reader to believe that Singer’s personal experiences, desires, and opinions are
actually those of the GM rank and file itself – if not those of the entire American working class. His
experiences, or those of some workers at his particular plant, are presented as the experiences of
all workers everywhere.

Allegedly common daily experiences are then generalized to universal political attitudes: “The
workers feel that strikes merely for wages do not get them anywhere.” 23 This is a problem shared
by all the narrative accounts, since they all replicate Singer’s model. In A Woman’s Place, for
example, Selma James wrote, “The co-authors of this booklet have seen this in their own lives and
in the lives of the women they know. They have written this down as a beginning of the expression
of what the average woman feels, thinks, and lives.” One first wonders whether there is such a
thing as an “average woman,” free from the complicating dimensions of region, class, race,
sexuality, and so forth; but even if this uneasiness is set aside, one is still left to ask whether
James’s own unique experiences are enough to access “the average.” In fact, James introduces
another innovation that extends the reach of her generalizations. Her inquiry begins in the third
person, but after only a few pages abruptly shifts to the second person. The pattern quickly
repeats itself: “Everything a housewife does, she does alone. All the work in the house is for you to
do by yourself.” 24

This kind of homogenization supports, and is in fact supported by, a decontextualization of

experience. Nearly all of these inquiries, with the slight exception of Indignant Heart, go to great
lengths to detach their narrative from a specific locality. There is nothing in The American
Worker revealing where Singer actually works; the same goes for A Woman’s Place. 25 If one of
the primary objectives of workers’ inquiry is to rigorously study the conditions of exploitation at
specific points of production, to produce a positive and exact knowledge of the working class, it
must specify the boundaries of its investigation. Though factories in postwar America might have
had some commonalities, they were wildly different, each with its distinct conditions of production,
power relations, and demographics.
A closely related problem is the deliberate modification of information, in a way that often alters the
meaning of the accounts. One immediate example results from the use of pseudonyms. Nearly
everyone in the Johnson-Forest Tendency had one, and most had several; in fact, there were so
many fake names in circulation, Boggs recalled that there were times when they themselves didn’t
even know who was who. 26 This was partly a holdover from Trotskyist practices, but more
seriously a security measure against McCarthyism; at one point Correspondence had as many as
75 infiltrators, and CLR James would later be deported because of his activities with the group. 27

But despite the justifications for the practice of assuming pseudonyms, they provided a cover for
ambiguous authorship. A Woman’s Place was signed by two women, both under pseudonyms, but
was actually written only by Selma James. As James later recalled, she wrote the book by jotting
down ideas on scraps of paper, then dropping them into a slit made in the top of a shoe box. She
later sat down and pieced together the ideas into a draft. After she shared the draft with the group
and her neighbors, and made some revisions, CLR James told her to include Filomena
D’Addario’s signature so that the latter could speak about it to the public with some legitimacy. 28 It
turns out that a piece which claims to have been written by two women, and in fact tries to
convince its readers that it was constructed from the experiences of two different women, was
actually written by one.

But the most serious trouble is in Indignant Heart. Of all the accounts, this is the only one to give
precise details about places, and so, at first glance, seems to break with the model developed by
Singer. In actual fact, however, though the book is largely accurate regarding Owens’ later life in
the North, it deliberately distorts his place of birth, setting his childhood in southeast Tennessee
rather than in Lowndes County, Alabama. In the 1978 reprint, which included a second part
picking up where the original 1952 text left off, Owens justified this by reminding his readers of the
“vicious McCarthyite witch hunt,” adding that “few who did not go through that experience of
national repression of ideas can fully understand the truly totalitarian nature of McCarthyism and
the terror it produced.” 29 Less convincing, however, is his claim that these changes “do not take
anything away from the truth of the experiences described,” and that what he wrote about his early
years “could be true of almost all Blacks” living in the Southern United States. 30

In other words, the rewriting of the facts is rationalized by the assumption of a homogeneous and
universal experience. But Alabama is not Tennessee, and such a drastic move compromises the
scientific character of the piece; it becomes more like historical fiction, and less a concrete inquiry
into specific conditions of exploitation. An inquiry into the world of the working class threatens to
degenerate into a kind of travel diary; close, meticulous, militant investigation tends to be replaced
with entertaining stories about the mystery, exoticism, and strangeness of an unknown world.

Perhaps even more troubling, Si Owens did not actually write Indignant Heart. Constance Webb,
another member of the group, and James’s onetime lover, did. Correspondence championed a
practice which Dunayevskaya later called “the full fountain pen” method – though it is perhaps
better known as amanuensis. Intellectuals would be paired with workers who might be
uncomfortable writing their experiences; they would listen as the workers recounted their story,
write them down on their behalf, and then have these workers revise the written documents as
they saw fit. It was Webb, then, who recorded the story, made revisions, edited the drafts, and
pieced it all together into a coherent whole. 31 It was in many ways just as much her book.

But the leadership, in this case largely Dunayevskaya, and not the authors, decided how the book
should appear. Dunayevskaya insisted that it be called Indignant Heart, after a quotation by
Wendell Phillips, over the protest of both Owens and Webb; and, even more seriously, she
decided to publish it all under the single name of Matthew Ward. 32In an odd way, Correspondence
had deliberately effaced its conditions of production, making it appear as though a single author
had written the book by himself, which was far from true. Yet one of original aims of
Correspondence’s inquiries had been to honestly reconcile the tensions between intellectuals and
workers. Why hesitate in admitting that Indignant Heart had been, at its very core, a work of
collaboration? Why go to such lengths to make the text look like an example of raw proletarian
experience, rather than a mediated production?

Finally, all these inquiries imbricate the descriptive with the prescriptive. They draw limited
conclusions based on the analysis of observable phenomena while simultaneously making
declarative statements about what reality should actually look like. The trend was first set by
Singer, who concluded the first part of The American Worker by announcing that the workers’
frustration with the incentive system amounted to “no less than saying that the existing production
relations must be overthrown.” 33 In the same way, James ends her own inquiry, “Women are
finding more and more that there is no way out but a complete change. But one thing is already
clear. Things can’t go on the way they are. Every woman knows that.” 34 Surely not all women
actually thought this in 1953. And surely James knew this, just as Singer was well aware that most
workers did not want to overthrow existing production relations. These statements can only really
be understood as performative – not descriptions of existing situation, but declarative moves
seeking to transform what the text has already described. For a tradition which grounded itself in
the raising of consciousness, these statements about the consciousness of workers, disseminated
to those workers themselves, sought to become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Though all four of these inquires certainly engage in scientific analysis, taking note of new forms of
production, exploitation, and resistance, these observations only seem to serve as the literary
background for an unfolding narrative, rather than serving as incisive observations into a particular
point of production. All the tensions explored above work to seriously diminish the specific
research value of these texts. But it is important to recognize that they only become problems if
one continues to prioritize the research function of workers’ inquiry. If, however, the objective is to
build class consciousness, then the distortions of the narrative form are not problems at all. They
might actually be quite necessary. With these narratives, the tension in Marx’s workers’ inquiry
– between a research tool on the one hand, and a form of agitation on the other – is largely
resolved by subordinating the former to the latter, transforming inquiry into a means to the end of
consciousness-building.

Building the Circuit: Socialisme ou Barbarie

These American experiments in workers’ inquiry resonated quite broadly, becoming an explicit
reference point for one French group in particular. Socialisme ou Barbarie followed a remarkably
similar trajectory to that of its American equivalents – the two groups were in contact, sharing their
discoveries, translating each other’s work, and even co-authoring a book at one point. It began as
the “Chaulieu-Montal Tendency,” an internal current within the French section of the Trotskyist
Fourth International, named after the pseudonyms of its principal animators, Cornelius Castoriadis
(Pierre Chaulieu) and Claude Lefort (Claude Montal). Like the Johnson-Forest Tendency in the
United States, the Chaulieu-Montal Tendency soon found itself opposed to the official Trotskyist
movement, prompting a split in late 1948. About twenty militants left to form a new organization,
Socialisme ou Barbarie, with a new journal of the same name. The first issue was released in
March of the following year. 35

Like Correspondence, Socialisme ou Barbarie placed a great deal of emphasis on the notion of
proletarian experience. For both these groups, socialist theory and strategy, even the very content
of socialist project itself, could only be derived from the everyday experiences of the working class.
Daniel Blanchard, a former member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, has reflected on the organization’s
conception of a socialist society: it would be “not the result of either utopian dreaming, or of an
alleged science of history, but of the creations of the workers movement. The proletariat is, by its
practice, the perpetual inventor of revolutionary theory and the task of the intellectuals is limited to
synthesizing and systematizing it.” 36

In this regard Socialisme ou Barbarie contested the French Communist Party (PCF) which held
that socialism had to be brought to the working class from the outside. For both Correspondence
and Socialisme ou Barbarie, on the other hand socialism actually came from withineveryday
proletarian experiences. But these groups agreed that workers are largely socialized by capitalism,
and therefore still marked by capitalist ideology, at least to some degree. Since almost no one was
free of capitalist thinking, socialist consciousness would not spontaneously burst forth, even
though it was always lurking below. Capitalist ideology still had to be combated; and some other
mechanism was required to allow this latent consciousness to appear.

That mechanism was workers’ inquiry. So while the Johnson-Forest Tendency was the first to
recode workers’ inquiry in the form of the worker narrative, Socialisme ou Barbarie explained why:
the worker narrative could express the proletarian experience in such a way as to make its
embedded socialist content appear.

Socialisme ou Barbarie adopted this specific form of workers’ inquiry – inquiry as narrative account
– from Correspondence almost readymade. The group set about translating The American
Worker, which appeared serially in the first eight issues of its homonymously titled journal. These
militants hailed the pamphlet as a new, revolutionary kind of writing; Philippe Guillaume introduced
it with the declaration that “the name Romano will stay in the history of proletarian literature, and
that it will even signify a turning point in this history.” 37

Workers’ inquiry, in this early French context, therefore took on roughly the same form that it did
with the Americans, with The American Worker again setting the paradigm. It not only formed the
empirical ground for Claude Lefort’s “Proletarian Experience,” Socialisme ou Barbarie’s most
serious theorization of inquiry, but would also spawn a number French inquiries modeled on
Singer’s account. The first came in 1952, when Georges Vivier, a young worker at Chausson,
began a series on proletarian life titled “La vie en usine” (Life in the Factory). The most famous of
these narratives, however, were the diaries of Daniel Mothé, the nom de guerre of Jacques
Gautrat, a machinist at Renault-Billancourt. 38 His writings, which first appeared in the pages
of Socialisme ou Barbarie, attracted so much attention that an edited version was soon published
by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1959 under the title Journal d’un ouvrier 1956-1958 (Journal of a
Worker). It was received well enough to prompt the publication of a second diary, called Militant
chez Renault (Militant at Renault), by Les Éditions du Seuil in 1965.
There would be a second moment in this transnational circulation. By the time Correspondence
split from the official Trotskyist movement to become its own distinct entity, the group decided to
further revolutionize the form of workers’ inquiry: worker narratives became a workers’ paper. The
workers’ paper was to be a more dynamic form of inquiry, where different sectors of the working
class could not only share their experiences with similar kinds of workers, but could in fact
exchange those experiences with each other through letters to the editors.

Socialisme ou Barbarie certainly had some reservations about the theoretical assumptions
underpinning the Correspondence project, but the group was sufficiently inspired by the model of
the workers’ paper to sponsor one of its own in France. Just as The American Worker had created
a new genre of writing, so too, they believed, did Correspondence stand for an entirely new kind of
publication. “It represents a profoundly original effort to create a journal for the most part written by
workers to speak with workers from the workers’ viewpoint,” they wrote in 1954. “It must simply be
acknowledged that Correspondence represents a new type of journal and that it opens a new
period in revolutionary worker journalism.” 39 So just as Socialisme ou Barbarie was inspired
by The American Worker to sponsor its own worker narratives, so too was it prompted to support
the formation of a workers paper along the same lines as Correspondence.

But although both groups used the workers’ narrative and the workers’ paper as a means of
accessing the proletarian experience, there was still at least one significant difference. For
Correspondence, socialism already existed embryonically in proletarian experiences, which simply
had to be expressed and shared with other workers. It was enough to provide a forum in which to
circulate these experiences; the “invading socialist society” would emerge on its own.

Socialisme ou Barbarie remained skeptical. Cornelius Castoriadis would comment many years
later, if “you talk about the invading socialist society,” then you “keep the apocalyptic, messianic
streak; the idea that there is a definite end to the road, and unless everything blows up we are
going there and we are bound to end there, which is not true.” 40 For Socialisme ou Barbarie, the
development of socialism was not an irresistible force, but the very question to be answered.
While there were certain elements, rudimentary, inchoate, fragmented, that could be found in
proletarian experiences, they could not be activated simply through writing, or even the sharing of
that writing with other workers. Some in Socialisme ou Barbarie even believed that these elements
could not be properly articulated into a coherent socialist project until they had been reworked
through theory.
So the buried elements recovered by inquiry had to be politicized before socialism could see the
light of day. These differences immediately put into question the potential function of militant
intellectuals. For Correspondence, the role of intellectuals was ambiguous. Their goal was to
provide the space for worker experiences to be shared, even if this resulted in a potential
ventriloquism, as in the case of Constance Webb and Si Owens. As a 1955 editorial called “Must
Serve Workers” put it, “The primary task of any individual who comes to a working class
movement from another class is to put behind him his past and completely identify and adapt
himself to the working class… The function of the intellectual is to aid the movement, to place his
intellectual accomplishment at the disposal of the workers.” 41

Indeed, the very structure of the organization was determined by this belief. Grace Lee Boggs later
recalled in her autobiography that the group tried to ground itself on Lenin’s notion that the best
way to combat the bureaucracy of the “first layer” of intellectuals was to develop the “third layer” of
the workers. 42 Correspondence divided itself into three layers: “real workers” in the first,
“intellectuals” who were now employed in jobs traditionally done by “workers” in the second, and
the “real intellectuals” in the third. As an evidently disgruntled former member recalled:

The real proletarians were put in the first layer, people of mixed status, like
housewives, in the second, and the intellectuals were put in the third. Our
meetings consisted of the now highly prestigeful first layer spouting off, usually
in a random, inarticulate way, about what they thought about everything under
the sun. The rest of us, especially we intellectuals in the third layer, were told to
listen. 43

In contrast to this, Socialisme ou Barbarie claimed that worker experiences had to be interpreted
and developed, and this opened up space for a different role for intellectuals. The larger space
that Socialisme ou Barbarie accorded to theoretical production forced it to more directly, and
perhaps more contentiously, interrogate the relationship between workers and intellectuals,
especially as it related to the practice of workers’ inquiry.

But to understand the problems raised by the workers’ paper, we have to go back to 1952 and an
unsigned article by Claude Lefort titled “Proletarian Experience.” 44 Hidden within their daily
experiences, Lefort claimed, lay basic, perhaps even universal, proletarian attitudes: “Prior to any
explicit reflection, to any interpretation of their lot or their role, workers have spontaneous
comportments with respect to industrial work, exploitation, the organization of production and
social life both inside and outside the factory.” 45 To access these attitudes, which for Lefort formed
the very ground of the socialist project, militants had to collect accounts of proletarian experiences.
Indeed, learning about the experiences of the working class, and inquiring into its daily life, had to
be a fundamental aspect of any revolutionary organizations. “Socialisme ou Barbarie would like to
solicit testimonies from workers,” he announced, “and publish them at the same time as it accords
an important place to all forms of analysis concerning proletarian experience.” 46

Since those attitudes, however, remain latent, and because they are necessarily partial,
testimonies must not only be collected, but actually interpreted. And therein lay the real problem:
who had the right to interpret these accounts? Lefort concluded his programmatic essay with
exactly this question, which he answered with another:

Who will reveal from beneath the explicit content of a document the intentions
and attitudes that inspired it, and juxtapose the testimonies? The comrades of
Socialisme ou Barbarie? But would this not run counter to their intentions, given
that they propose a kind of research that would enable workers to reflect upon
their experience? 47

For the moment, these questions were not so pressing, since Socialisme ou Barbarie remained on
the margins, and inquiry on the scale imagined by Lefort a mere proposal. But they became a
practical concern in May 1954, when a workers’ paper actually emerged in France. It all began at
Renault-Billancourt, an automobile plant in the suburbs of Paris. A monster of a factory, employing
some 30,000 workers, it was also a legendary site of proletarian militancy, and widely considered
a Communist stronghold. But by the 1950s, the Party slowly began to lose its grip, increasingly
coming under fire from more radical elements, like the Trotskyists. It was in this context that, in
April 1954, a breakthrough arrived when a few workers from one of the factory shops circulated a
leaflet on wage levels. It was warmly received by other workers, and, encouraged by this
enthusiastic reception, a few workers decided to launch an independent, clandestine, monthly
paper called Tribune Ouvrière. 48

“What we want,” announced the first issue of the workers paper, positioning itself against both the
Renault management and the PCF leadership, “is to end the tutelage that the so-called workers’
organizations have exercised over us for many years. We want all problems concerning the
working class to be debated by the workers themselves… What we suggest is to make of this
paper a tribune in which we ask you to participate. We would like this paper to reflect the lives and
opinions of workers. It’s up to you to make this happen.” 49
Socialisme ou Barbarie quickly supported the paper, offering it financial backing, helping to
distribute it, and even publishing extracts of the paper in its own review. But the exact relationship
between the two publications – the one a clandestine paper written, edited, and managed by
factory workers, the other a theoretical journal almost entirely produced by intellectuals – was
ambiguous, and, at times highly divisive. Some saw the workers’ paper as an independent venue
for the raw voice of the working class, whatever it might have to say, and therefore only loosely
allied with the theoretical project carried out by Socialisme ou Barbarie; others wanted to formally
integrate it with Socialisme ou Barbarie, hoping the workers’ paper could introduce the rigorous
ideas of the group to a broader proletarian audience.

In 1955, Tribune Ouvrière began running into difficulties. The collective had not really grown,
workers by and large seemed indifferent to the paper, and the editorial board remained tiny, with
no more than perhaps 15 workers. Part of this general lack of interest stemmed from logistical
challenges. The editorial team had minimal funding, and couldn’t afford to charge high prices,
since none of the workers would buy an expensive paper. It was also very difficult to distribute. As
a clandestine paper, it could only be circulated from hand to hand. And its meetings could not be
organized out in the open, making it very difficult to establish long-term relations with interested
readers.

But there were also other, perhaps more fundamental problems at play. Daniel Mothé used the
opportunity to write a programmatic piece on the meaning of the workers’ paper, spending a
significant portion of the article discussing the relationship between workers and intellectuals. It
should be noted at the outset that Mothé was not really a “neutral” observer. The only one to have
a foot in both organizations, Mothé was one of the principal animators behind the paper as well as
member of Socialisme ou Barbarie since 1952 – he therefore had a vested interest in “solving” the
vexed relationship between the two publications. 50 It’s highly significant, moreover, that Mothé
published his long piece about Tribune Ouvrière in Socialisme ou Barbarie.

In contrast to Correspondence, which he directly mentioned in his piece, Mothé argued that a
workers’ paper, though entirely written by workers themselves, still had to participate in some kind
of dialogue with militant intellectuals – in fact, this had to be its primary function. For Mothé there is
a clear division of labor, determined by the capitalist mode of production itself, which cannot be
willfully ignored. Revolutionary politics has to take account of this division, rather than wish it
away. Mothé builds on this observation to construct a dichotomy between two ideal types: the
worker on the one hand, and the militant intellectual on the other. They are primarily distinguished,
he says, by their training, suggesting that “if the formation of the revolutionary militant is a
formation that is almost exclusively intellectual,” especially during a period in which “revolutionary
minorities” have been uprooted from the working class, the “political formation of workers is, on the
contrary, almost exclusively practical.” This practical formation was both acquired in the
experience of struggle and became the basis of new methods of struggle. The key problem is to
find a way to link these two distinct poles, to create a form that can fuse the “immediate
experience of the workers and the theoretical experience of revolutionary militants.” 51

Mothé argued that each pole had to play a unique function that was nevertheless dependent on
the other. The revolutionary militant articulates revolutionary theory, imparts that theory to the
working class, and combats false ideas. 52 The “essential elements” of that theory, however, are
themselves drawn from the lived experiences of the working class. They form a reciprocal
relationship: “In this sense, if the working class needs the revolutionary organization to theorize its
experience, the organization needs the working class in order to draw on this experience. This
process of osmosis has a decisive importance.” 53

The keystone of this relation, Mothé argued, is precisely the workers’ newspaper. The real function
of the workers’ paper is to mediate between these two poles. It is the means through which
workers can express their everyday experiences, which can then be theorized by revolutionary
militants. Militants can then read these accounts, sift through them for latent political tendencies,
and work their rudimentary insights into revolutionary theory. At the same time, one assumes, the
paper can serve as the vehicle through which these newly developed theories will then be
transmitted back to the working class.

Mothé’s model, however, posed as many questions as it answered. To begin with, there was the
imprecise notion of experience, and the questionable assumption that, at base, all proletarian
experiences articulated a set of universal attitudes. The Johnson-Forest Tendency and Claude
Lefort both shared this supposition. Indeed, in “Proletarian Experience,” Lefort went so far as to
write:

Two workers in very different situations have in common that both have endured
one or another form of work and exploitation that is essentially the same and
absorbs three-quarters of their personal existence. Their wages might be very
different, their living situations and family lives may not be comparable, but it
remains the case that they are profoundly identical both in their roles as
producers or machine operators, and in their alienation.
Even if one limits the working class to factory workers, which Lefort seemed to do, such a claim
reduces the heterogeneity of the working class to a shared human essence: workers are
everywhere the same because they have all alienated their universal creative powers into the
things they produce. But such a conception prevents us from grasping the many forms that labor-
power assumes, the plurality of ways it is put to work, and the diverse processes through which it
is exploited.

All this leads one to wonder who these “workers” Mothé keeps talking about really are. If
revolutionary militants must draw on proletarian experiences, do these include those of
housewives and farmworkers? Must revolutionary militants draw on all these experiences, or is the
experience of only one sector sufficient, and if so, which will speak for all the rest? Mothé’s
unstable terminology exposes his preference. The piece begins by drawing a distinction between
“revolutionary militants” and “workers,” but Mothé soon speaks of “revolutionary militants” and
“vanguard workers.” The slip signals his prioritization of one kind of worker over the others.
Indeed, for Mothé, as with most Socialisme ou Barbarie, when they spoke of the working class,
they really meant the industrial working class, particularly at the automobile factories; but even
more specifically, their ideal figure, their constructed vanguard, was semi-skilled laborers. It is
important to observe that while Socialisme ou Barbarie sought to bypass the whole notion of the
vanguard party by going directly to the working class, even its most “anarchistic” elements, like
Lefort, remained encased in the general problematic of vanguardism: the vanguard element was
no longer outside the class, but within it.

Mothé added a further qualification to this reduction. The worker must not only be the most
politically conscious of his class, but must also be capable of expressing his experiences in such a
way that they could be theorized. This required not only a high degree of general literacy, as well
as a fair share of confidence, but also some fluency in a more challenging political lexicon. “In this
sense,” Mothé clarified, “those workers most suitable for writing will be those who are at the same
time the most conscious, the most educated but also those who will be the most rid of bourgeois
or Stalinist ideological influence.” 54 So Mothé wanted a worker who could not only reflect on his
situation and transcribe it into a narrative that mimicked the natural oral culture of the average
worker, but who would also be free of all non-revolutionary ideology. It’s no surprise then, that
Mothé, and much of Socialisme ou Barbarie, only found one worker who fit the bill: Daniel Mothé
himself. 55
The synecdochic substitution of a single politically conscious male factory worker for the working
class as a whole marks a significant step back from the positions developed by the Johnson-
Forest Tendency, and later Correspondence, which had identified at least four distinct segments of
the working class: industrial workers, blacks, women, and youth.

Perhaps the shakiest part of Mothé’s model, however, had to do not so much with the first step in
this process – from workers to intellectuals – but the second, from intellectuals to workers. Mothé
spent a great deal of time discussing the first process, but very little on the second. This was
largely because this second process proved to be contentious among both the revolutionary
militants of Socialisme ou Barbarie as well as the factory workers who formed the editorial core
of Tribune Ouvrière. 56

Some were strongly supportive of “returning” socialist ideas to the working class. Castoriadis was
the first to argue, as early as June 1956, that the group had to create a separate “workers’ paper”
aimed explicitly at the working class, not just in Paris, but all of France. It was imperative, he
thought, to introduce more workers to Socialisme ou Barbarie’s theoretical work, and to sharpen
the theory itself, since the need to engage with a broader audience, and therefore write more
accessibly, would push the militants to work in a more “concrete” way, avoiding abstractions and
paying greater attention to developments in the class struggle.

This proposal was rejected. Some, like Mothé, accepted Castoriadis’ theoretical position
wholeheartedly, and agreed with the necessity of such paper, but felt it was impractical due to the
lack of resources, and the fact that the paper probably would not find a ready audience, given that
it did not already enjoy strong links with the wider working class in France. Moreover, Mothé had
seen firsthand, through his work with Tribune Ouvrière, just how difficult it was to operate a
“workers’ journal” in even one factory, let alone all of France, as Castoriadis hoped.

Others, like Henri Simon and Claude Lefort, opposed the paper on theoretical grounds,
highlighting once again a major division over the vexed “organization question.” Simon asked to
what extent the paper would actually be a workers’ paper if it were forcibly repurposed to transmit
revolutionary theory to workers. 57 How would this be any different from the other “worker”
newspapers, such as those sponsored by the PCF, which they so harshly criticized?

In a similar vein Lefort, who had always opposed the imposition of any kind of “direction” onto the
autonomous movements of the working class, decried Castoriadis’s proposed paper as “an
operation from above.” As he put it, “Chaulieu has decided to have this paper at any cost, even
though there is no working-class public in which to diffuse it, and even fewer workers to actively
take part in it.” 58 To be sure, Lefort was never opposed to the notion of a workers’ paper, not even
to organization or theory as such. But his conviction that everything had to flow organically from
the working class itself translated into a deep suspicion of programs: whatever the intentions
behind the drafting of such a document, and even if it were elaborated in reference to the class, a
program would always end up ossifying into an exterior form, ultimately straitjacketing working-
class spontaneity. Such a stance, which implied an extremely circumscribed role for militants, was
antithetical to Castoriadis’ position, already revealing an irreconcilable difference between the two
principal theorists behind the journal. And it was precisely workers’ inquiry, in the form of the
paper, that revealed it most strikingly. Though both rallied around workers’ inquiry, each had a
very different objective in mind. For Lefort, the object of inquiry was universal proletarian attitudes;
for Castoriadis, it was the rudimentary content of the socialist program.

Although the proposal was defeated, the matter exploded into full view again in 1958. De Gaulle’s
coup created an entirely new situation. The established Left seemed paralyzed, a wave of new
recruits flooded into Socialisme ou Barbarie, and many, led by Castoriadis, believed the time had
finally come to transform the group into a revolutionary organization, complete with a line, and a
popular paper like the one he had proposed back in 1956. 59 A split took shape along the old fault
lines, and in September, the minority, led by Lefort and Simon, left to form Information et Liaisons
Ouvrières (Worker Information and Connections, ILO). 60

One of the very first actions of this reinvented Socialisme ou Barbarie was to create a new
paper, Pouvoir Ouvrier, in December of that year. The form of the paper reflected Mothé and
Castoriadis’s goals, initially divided into two sections: a political one, which published simplified
versions of the theories developed in its parent organization, and another, titled “La parole aux
travailleurs” (loosely, The Workers’ Turn to Speak), which published worker testimonies in the
tradition of Paul Romano.

Arguing for the strategic necessity of the paper, Castoriadis elaborated his conception of the
relationship of the intellectual and the worker in “Proletariat and Organization, Part 1,” written in
the summer of 1958 as the split with Lefort’s faction was taking place. While Mothé’s model of the
paper had been something like a transmission belt, moving forward then backwards between
workers and intellectuals, as if at the flip of a switch, in this text Castoriadis provides a more
dynamic image, more like a circuit. Militants do not simply disseminate their theories among
workers in order to convert them to socialism, they submit their theories for verification.
Revolutionary theory will “have no value, no consistency with what it elsewhere proclaims to be its
essential principles,” Castoriadis argued, “unless it is constantly being replenished, in practice, by
the experience of the workers as it takes shape in their day-to-day lives;” it was this process which
would allow the workers to “educate the educator.” 61 This meant that Socialisme ou Barbarie,
which had hitherto been an exceedingly “intellectual” review, had to rethink its practice. “The task
the organization is up against in this sphere,” he continued, “is to merge intellectuals with workers
as workers as it is elaborating its views. This means that the questions asked, and the methods for
discussing and working out these problems, must be changed so that it will be possible for the
worker to take part.” Revolutionary theory had to be more accessible, the organization had to
become more disciplined, and its composition had to change:

Only an organization formed as a revolutionary workers’ organization, in which

workers numerically predominate and dominate it on fundamental questions,
and which creates broad avenues of exchange with the proletariat, thus allowing
it to draw upon the widest possible experience of contemporary society – only
an organization of this kind can produce a theory that will be anything other than
the isolated work of specialists.

Like Mothé, he argued that militants had to “extract the socialist content in what is constantly being
created by the proletariat (whether it is a matter of a strike or of a revolution), formulate it
coherently, propagate it, and show its universal import.” 62 Theory must flow from the “historic as
well as day-to-day experience and action of the proletariat,” and even “economic theory has to be
reconstructed around what is contained in embryo in the tendency of workers toward equality in
pay; the entire theory of production around the informal organization of workers in the factory; all
of political theory around the principles embodied in the soviets and the councils.” But then it
would be up to militants to extract “what is universally valid in the experience of the proletariat,”
work this up into a general “socialist outlook,” then propagate this outlook among the workers
whose experiences served as its very condition of possibility (214).

Castoriadis had attempted precisely this in the third part of his “On the Content of Socialism,” also
in 1958. After criticizing the bureaucratic Bolshevik experience and then imagining a councilist
management of society in parts one and two, he turned in the last part to the analysis of the labor
process at the level of the enterprise. The content of socialism is the “privileged center, the focal
point” without which there is only “mere empirical sociology.” The content of socialism could only
be demonstrated in the “proletariat’s struggle against alienation” (156).
The main contradiction of capitalism, Castoriadis argued, lay in the definition of the exchange of
labor-power, understood as the tension between the “human time” of the laborer and the
rationalization imposed by management. There can only be a temporary balance of forces
between the two, the worker resigning to a compromise establishing a certain pace of work, which
must be dissolved and reinvented when the manufacturing process is transformed by new
machinery. Taylorism’s function was to reduce the heterogeneity of human time to the “ ‘one best
way’ to accomplish each operation,” standardizing the procedures of work and determining an
average output against which wages could be determined – management’s attempt to the
eliminate the possibility of wage conflicts (159-60).

But Taylorism’s “one best way” could not possibly account for the reality of the work process,
undertaken by individuals with multiplicities of “best ways” – with their own gestures and
movements, their their own forms of adaptation to their tools, their own rhythms of execution.
The collectivity of individuals on the shop floor would have to undertake its own form of
“spontaneous association” against the rationalization of management, even to fulfill management’s
goals (163).

Here the concept of the “elementary group,” the “living nuclei of productive activity,” drawn
from The American Worker and the journals of Mothé as much as from industrial sociology,
became decisive (170). 63 Each enterprise, Castoriadis wrote, had a ” double structure,” its “formal
organization” represented in charts and diagrams, and the informal organization, “whose activities
are carried out and supported by individuals and groups at all levels of the hierarchical pyramid
according to the requirements of their work, the imperatives of productive efficiency, and the
necessities of their struggle against exploitation” (170). The distinction between the two was not
merely a question of “theory versus practice,” of an illusory boss’s ideology against the messy
reality of the shop floor, as some liberal sociologists would have it. It represented the real struggle
by which management attempted to encompass the entire production process.

Against the “separate management [direction]” of the bureaucracy, the elementary group
constituted “the management [gestion] of their own activity” (169-70, 171). The opposition between
the two, Castoriadis argued, was the real character of class struggle, the formal organization
coinciding with the “managerial stratum” and the informal organization representing “a different
mode of operation of the enterprise, centered around the real situation of the executants.” This
struggle between “directors and executants” characterized the capitalist workplace, beginning at
the level of the elementary group and extending across the whole enterprise. Since the “position of
each elementary group is essentially identical to that of the others,” the coöperation between the
groups leads them “to merge in a class, the class of executants, defined by a community of
situation, function, interests, attitude, mentality” (171).

If industrial sociology from management’s perspective was unable to recognize this class division
in the workplace, and therefore got lost in theoretical abstraction, the same went for Marxists
whose concept of class did not begin with “the basic articulations within the enterprise and among
the human groups within the enterprise.” Their ideology blocked them from “seeing the
proletariat’s vital process of class formation, of self-creation as the outcome of a permanent
struggle that begins within production” (172).

This ideology had direct political consequences. For Castoriadis, even wage demands were
nascent expressions of the struggle by which the informal organization of the executants tended
towards an attack on the capitalist management of production. If Marxist parties and unions
attempted to restrict the content of these struggles to the bureaucratic management of income
redistribution, this could only reinforce the directors/executants division. “To the abstract concept
of the proletariat corresponds the abstract concept of socialism as nationalization and planning,”
Castoriadis wrote, “whose sole concrete content ultimately is revealed to be the totalitarian
dictatorship of the representatives of this abstraction – of the bureaucratic party.” For the workers’
struggle to truly realize itself, it would have to go further towards the workers’ self-management of
production (172).

Without this thoroughgoing transformation of society, capitalism would continue on its current
course, with the “tremendous waste” generated by its irrational production process. Each
enterprise unsteadily tried to balance between the decomposition of executants into atomized
individuals, and their reintegration into new unified wholes corresponding to a newly rationalized
production process (172-3). But the managerial plan is inevitably unable to establish a hierarchy of
tasks that reflects the real requirements of production – while management is unaware of the
reality of the process on the shop floor, the executant is separated from the plan and uninterested
in the results, prone to taking shortcuts (175). Only “the practice, the invention, the creativity of the
mass of executants,” the collectivity of the elementary group, can fill the gaps in management’s
production directives (176).

But despite Castoriadis’s affirmation of the creativity of the executants in the production of
commodities, their role in the production of theory was precipitously declining. As Simon, Lefort,
and others had feared, the workers’ narratives increasingly became a mere ornament in Pouvoir
Ouvrier. Confirming this worrisome trend, in November of 1959 the group voted to shift the
emphasis of the journal even more towards the “political” section. By the spring of 1961 the
separate section titled “La parole aux travailleurs” had vanished completely. 64The paper therefore
ended up only fulfilling the second function outlined by Mothé – transmitting revolutionary theory to
the working class. But without the first function – expressing proletarian experiences – Pouvoir
Ouvrier simply became another vanguardist publication, indistinguishable from the various papers
Mothé had originally criticized.

To be fair, it seems that the disappearance of “La parole aux travailleurs” was in large part the
result of a lack of worker narratives. Indeed, this problem cut across the splits in Socialisme ou
Barbarie. Whatever the differences between Lefort’s, Mothé’s, and Pouvoir Ouvrier’s conceptions
of inquiry and the relation between workers and intellectuals, all were dependent on a steady
stream of worker accounts. But to their chagrin, they found that workers’ simply did not want to
write. 65

It’s significant here that all of these models imagined workers’ inquiry in the same way: not the
questionnaire, as Marx suggested, but the written testimony initiated by Romano. Lefort had gone
as far as to explicitly criticize the “statistically-based” strategy of workers posing “thousands of
questions” to each other, since these would result in mere numerical correlations and would be
unable to bring out the “systems of living and thinking” of “concrete individuals.” Even worse, a
“question imposed from the outside might be an irritant for the subject being questioned, shaping
an artificial response or, in any case, imprinting upon it a character that it would not otherwise
have had.” 66 But it is hard not to wonder if the dearth of worker responses has to do with this
specific form of inquiry. Though worker narratives might allow workers to express themselves
more organically, they are nonetheless much more difficult to compose than responding to a
questionnaire.

Just as Pouvoir Ouvrier saw itself moving away from its original goals, Information et Liaisons
Ouvrières also ran into some difficulties. Unlike the majority of Socialisme ou Barbarie, which
asserted the necessity of a formal party, complete with a kind of central committee, the ILO
minority had advocated a more decentralized structure, based on autonomous worker cells, where
everything could be openly discussed. The core of the group would be these cells, based in
various firms, and the role of ILO would not be to disseminate ideas from above, as Pouvoir
Ouvrier would soon do, but to circulate experiences, information, and ideas between these various
cells. It was to be something of a network, providing links between different workers, very much
along the lines of Correspondence. Whereas Pouvoir Ouvrier wanted to propagate the socialist
project among workers, ILO, Lefort later recalled, aimed to “distribute a bulletin as unprogrammatic
as possible attempting primarily to give workers a voice and to aid in coördinating experiences in
industry – that is, those experiences resulting from attempts at autonomous struggle.” 67

It should be noted that the minority which split off to form ILO was less united by a common
perspective than by its general opposition to the majority that pushed for a party. It’s therefore
unsurprising that this new group of about twenty would soon run into its own internal differences. A
fissure began to appear between the principal animators of the group: Lefort, who wished to
combine the authenticity of the workers’ voice with some kind of theory, felt that Simon not only
wanted to abandon all signs of direction, orientation, and party line, but even interpretation and
theory as such. He would later reflect:

The essential thing was that these people speak of their experience in everyday
life. In a sense [Simon] was absolutely correct. We all thought that there was an
evil spell of Theory detached from, and designed to mask, experience and
everydayness. But it was still a matter of experience as actual experience and
everydayness, not banality. Experience is not raw; it always implies an element
of interpretation and opens itself to discussion. Speech in everyday life tacitly or
explicitly refuses another speech and solicits a response. For Simon, the speech
of the exploited, whoever he might be, whatever he might say, was in
essence good. He knew like all of us that the dominant bourgeois or democratic
discourse weighs heavily on the speech of the exploited. This knowledge did not
weaken his conviction. The speech of the exploited was sufficient unto itself.
Essentially, he said that a person speaks about what he sees and feels; we
have only to listen to him, or better yet record his remarks in our bulletin, which
is our raison d’être. 68

Lefort, who left the group in 1960 (prompting them to rename themselves Informations et
Correspondance Ouvrières, ICO), argued that no matter what, some kind of interpretation will
always slip into inquiry, even if only in the selection of texts, the order in which they would be
published, and so forth. To deny this was to deceive oneself.

In other words, the original project of workers’ inquiry broke down on both sides. Pouvoir
Ouvrier became another vanguardist journal, indistinguishable from a Trotskyist paper, trying to
educate the working class through simplified renditions of esoteric theories developed without
reference to the concrete experiences of the working class. On the other, ICO tricked itself into
ignoring the role of intellectuals, only to find itself immobilized, chasing after some pure proletarian
experience untarnished by theoretical interpretation.

As for Castoriadis, he broke with his own group in 1962. His reflections on these debates had
produced an even more drastic effect: Castoriadis had come to the conclusion that Marxism as a
theory had been definitively disproved. “Modern Capitalism and Revolution,” first written between
1959 and 1961, had been published before he left with the disclaimer that its “ideas are not
necessarily shared by the entire Socialisme ou Barbarie group” (226). Drawing on his day job as
professional economist for the OECD, Castoriadis drew up a devastating balance sheet for Marxist
theory. In the context of the postwar boom, Marxists were continuing to claim that capitalism,
through structural unemployment and the increase in the rate of exploitation, was impoverishing
and pauperizing the worker. But in reality, the system had yielded full employment and wages
were growing more rapidly than ever, leading to a massive expansion of consumption which both
provided a steady source of effective demand and represented a major rise in the standard of
living of the working class. Marxist militants had exposed themselves as worse than useless;
unions had become “cogs in the system” which “negotiate the workers’ docility in return for higher
wages,” while politics “takes place exclusively among specialists,” the supposed workers’ parties
dominated by bureaucrats (227).

As Lefort himself had suggested, the proletarian experience that Socialisme ou Barbarie’s inquires
had attempted to reach would have to be counterposed to the rigid determination of economic
laws. “For traditional Marxism,” Castoriadis wrote, “the ‘objective’ contradictions of capitalism were
essentially economic ones, and the system’s radical inability to satisfy the working
class’s economic demands made these the motive force of class struggle.” But underlying this
premise was an “objectivist and mechanistic” fallacy which reinforced the notion that specialists
and bureaucrats who could understand history’s “objective laws” would be responsible for the
analysis of capitalist society and the “elimination of private property and the market.” Stuck within
this fallacy, traditional Marxists could not even explain their own fixations; they failed to grasp that
wages had increased because they were actually determined by class struggle, and the demands
put forth by wage struggles could be met as long as they did not exceed productivity increases
(227).

Like the Johnson-Forest Tendency, Castoriadis argued that the contradiction of capitalism had to
be located in “productionand work,” and specifically in terms of the “alienation experienced by
every worker.” But unlike his stalwart Marxist predecessors, Castoriadis recognized that this
theory was incompatible with the language of value, and rejected “economic” definitions of class.
The opposition between directors and executantsthoroughly replaced the one between owners of
the means of production to non-owners. This had major implications for the view of capitalist
development itself: the “ideal tendency” of “bureaucratic capitalism” would be “the constitution of a
totally hierarchized society in continuous expansion where people’s increasing alienation in their
work would be compensated by a ‘rising standard of living’ and where all initiative would be given
over to organizers” (229). This project, however, was prone to the contradiction of bureaucratic
rationality, “capitalism’s need to reduce workers to the role of mere executants and the inability of
this system to function if it succeeded in achieving this required objective.” The contradiction, then,
was that “capitalism needs to realize simultaneously the participation and exclusion of the workers
in the production process” (228). This inherent tendency of capitalism could “never completely
prevail,” since “capitalism cannot exist without the proletariat,” and the proletariat’s continuous
struggle to change the labor process and the standard of living played a fundamental role in
capitalist development: “The extraction of ‘use value from labor power’ is not a technical operation;
it is a process of bitter struggle in which half the time, so to speak, the capitalists turn out to be
losers” (248).

The experience of this struggle, and the inadequacy of reformism within it, had shorn the
executants of any delusional faith in “objective” contradictions as the guarantee of bureaucratic
organizations. Now the proletariat could finally recognize that the true revolutionary horizon was
“workers’ management and the overcoming of the capitalist values of production and
consumption” (230).

In other words, the demands of this movement would not be at the level of wages, which
represented the alienated substitute for a motivation driven by creative work. The source of
motivation required for social cohesion no longer lay in “signifying” activities, but solely in the
pursuit of income. Even the classical careerist goal of promotion in the hierarchy of the
bureaucracy ultimately led to higher income (276). But since personal income cannot lead to
accumulation – it cannot make a worker a capitalist – “income therefore only has meaning through
the consumption it allows.” Since consumption could not rest solely on existing needs, which were
“at the point of saturation, due to constant rises in income,” capitalists had to generate new needs
through the introduction of new commodities, and the alienated culture of advertising which
embedded them in everyday life (277).
Yet the increase in output which was required for a constantly rising level of consumption could
only be ensured through the automation of production, capitalism’s attempt at “the radical abolition
of its labor relation problems by abolishing the worker” (283). And this is the context in which the
“wage relation becomes an intrinsically contradictory relation,” since a rapidly developing
technology, as opposed to the static technology of previous societies, prevented management
from settling on any permanent means for the “stabilization of class relations in the workplace,”
and prevented “technical knowledge from becoming crystallized forever in a specific category of
the laboring population” (260). The whole history of class struggle within capitalist production could
be understood in these terms. The introduction of machinery in the early 19th century was met
with the primordial acts of industrial sabotage. Despite the defeat of its Luddite beginnings, the
workers’ struggle continued within the factory, leading to the introduction of piecework, wages
based on output. Now that “norms” of production were the primary line of struggle, capitalism
fought back with the Taylorist scientific management of norms. The workers’ resistance to
management yielded the ideological responses of industrial psychology and sociology, with their
goals of “integrating” workers into alienated workplaces. But it was impossible, even by these
measures, to suppress the fundamental antagonism of workers towards the production process –
in fact, in the most advanced capitalist countries, with the highest wages and the most “modern”
method of production and management, the “daily conflict at the point of production reaches
incredible proportions” (264).

According to Castoriadis, the traditional Marxist conception was unable to comprehend this
historical process. For Marxism, “capitalists themselves do not act – they are ‘acted upon’ by
economic motives that determine them just as gravitation governs the movement of bodies” (262).
But history proved that the ruling class adapted its strategies according to its subjective
experience of class struggle, learning that wages can buy the workers’ docility, that state
intervention can stabilize the economy, and that full employment can prevent the revolutionary
upheaval which would result from a repetition of 1929 (269-70).

So the new revolutionary critique of society had to shed the distraction of the objectivist theory and
directly denounce the irrational and inhuman results of bureaucratic management and alienated
work. And capitalist development had rendered the overcoming of alienation definitively possible,
since at the technical level “the entire planning bureaucracy already can be replaced by electronic
calculators,” and on the social level the irrationality of the bureaucratic organization of society had
been completely unveiled (299).
Just as Castoriadis drew up a balance sheet of “traditional Marxism,” we can now evaluate this
particular moment of rupture. The new theory of class was expedient for an analysis of the
planned economy of the Soviet Union as “bureaucratic capitalism,” formulated in dialogue with the
Johnson-Forest Tendency. Castoriadis radicalized their claim that capitalism emerged from
relations on the shop floor, rather than ownership of the means of production. 69The rational kernel
of this theory was clear: the process which began with the Bolshevik enthusiasm for Taylorism, the
adoption by the Russian bureaucracy of forms of organization of the labor process pioneered by
capitalist management and sociology, shattered the Second International philosophy of history.
The advancement of the productive forces, whether they were privately or publicly owned, had
become an element of the rationality which governed ever more complex forms of social
stratification.

However, Castoriadis’s new theory was subject to the same blindspots as his predecessors,
unable to explain class relations in their unity with exchange relations. The question of
technological development itself poses fundamental questions about his analysis. While
Castoriadis correctly criticized the identification of the development of the productive forces with
the political project of socialism, he did not explain how this process was situated within the social
relations of capitalism. Technological development was an expression of the rationality of
management; while Castoriadis brilliantly outlined the contradictions of this rationality at the level
of the enterprise, the underlying system-wide questions of Marx’s analysis, to which each volume
of Capitalhad been devoted, were now left unanswered. If technological development is
a wasteful process, why does a profit-seeking enterprise undertake it? How is it able to make large
expenditures in fixed capital, in expensive machinery, and continue to reproduce its ongoing
conditions of production? In Castoriadis’s analysis, technological development is practically the
result of a lack of motivation, which can only be overcome through the expansion in consumption
that is enabled by technological development and its augmentation of output. We now lack the
theoretical resources to understand whyproduction has become the end of human existence, or
what “maximum production” would mean – as though the capitalist’s goal were to own more things
rather than to make more profits.

Just as fundamental was the question of this system’s basic preconditions. While Castoriadis
explained capitalism as the fullest expression of alienation and reification, it was by no means
clear how these phenomena were specific to capitalism, and what they had to do with the
economic dynamics he was so quick to dismiss. Underlying management’s attempt to direct labor-
power towards the maximum possible output was the fact that capitalist management
was compelled to exploit labor-power to the most profitable extent – and that workers were equally
compelled to sell their labor-power in exchange for a wage. What accounted for this compulsion?

If these questions were somehow incompatible with the analysis of the capitalist enterprise, this
would not only invalidate Marxism – it would make the capitalist nature of the enterprise
inexplicable. But by starting from inquiries into the transformation of the labor process, and shifting
to a historical account of the logic of capitalist development, Socialisme ou Barbarie had served as
an indispensable foundation.

Science and Strategy: Operaismo

The influence of Castoriadis, Lefort, Mothé and others from Socialisme ou Barbarie was quite
apparent in the Italy of the early 1960s. Toni Negri, for instance, recalls how Socialisme ou
Barbarie, “the journal that Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort published in Paris,” became
“my daily bread in that period.” 70

Direct links, in fact, had already been established. In 1954 Danilo Montaldi, who had earlier been
expelled from the Italian Communist Party (PCI), translated “The American Worker,” not from the
original English, but from the French translations that appeared in Socialisme ou Barbarie. He
traveled to Paris that year, meeting the militants of Socialisme ou Barbarie and initiating an
exchange with none other than Daniel Mothé, whose diary he would later translate into Italian.
Montaldi would maintain these connections, returning to Paris in 1957, and again in 1960, to
strengthen ties with Castoriadis, Lefort, and Edgar Morin, among others. 71

Montaldi not only played an indispensable role in the transmission of the ideas of Socialisme ou
Barbarie into the Italian context, he put them into practice, conducting his own brand of workers’
inquiry. These practically unprecedented investigations, which relied on a plurality of methods,
from narrative to sociological inquiry to oral history, resulted in a series of highly influential
publications: “Milan, Korea,” an inquiry into southern immigrants living in Milan, Autobiografie della
leggera, and finally Militanti politici di base.

Montaldi proposed an entirely different way of seeing things. The objective of inquiry was to
uncover the everyday struggles of the working class, independently of all the official institutions
that claimed to represent it. Yet as Sergio Bologna recalls, Montaldi’s careful histories rejected
mythical tributes to spontaneity, opting instead for rich descriptions of “microsystems of struggle,”
the political cultures of resistance that made seemingly spontaneous movements possible. 72 This
new focus on buried networks and obscured histories would have tremendous ramifications.
In addition to his own investigations, Montaldi organized a group in Cremona called Gruppo di
Unità Proletaria. Lasting from 1957-1962, it brought together a number of young militants, all
united by their desire to discover the working class as it really was, beyond the frigid world of party
cards. One of these young militants was Romano Alquati.

Alquati, trained as a sociologist, would be a pivotal figure in the formation of the journal Quaderni
Rossi, the initial encounter of heterodox militants from the Italian Socialist Party and the Italian
Communist Party which would found operaismo, or “workerism.” Quaderni Rossi began with a
debate over sociology, whose use by the bosses had yielded new forms of labor management and
discipline, but had also generated invaluable information about the labor process. While a critical
Marxist appropriation of sociology was on the agenda, its relation to Montaldi’s workers’ inquiry
was not entirely clear. Some in Quaderni Rossi – the “sociologist” faction surrounding Vittorio
Rieser – believed that this new science, though associated with bourgeois academics, could be
used as a basis for the renewal of the institutions of the workers’ movement. Others, including
Alquati, felt sociology could only be, at best, an initial step towards a specifically militant
collaboration between researchers and workers, a new form of knowledge which would be
characterized as “coresearch.” 73

Alquati’s inquiries would prove to be fundamental in the development of workerism’s economic

analysis. Steve Wright has brilliantly traced the break which can be observed between Alquati’s
“Report on the ‘New Forces,’” a study of FIAT published in the first issue of Quaderni Rossi in
1961, and the 1962 study of Olivetti. In the first text, along with the two others published that year
on FIAT, Alquati operates, interestingly enough, within the problematic established in Socialisme
ou Barbarie. 74 The “new forces” at FIAT were the younger generation, brought in to work the
recently installed machinery that had deskilled more experienced professional workers.
Management imposed hierarchies within the workforce – a division of labor separating technicians
and skilled workers from the majority, along with divisive pay scales. But this process of
rationalization was subject to the contradictory irrationality Castoriadis had described; and it gave
rise to forms of “invisible organization” resulting from the fact that management was constrained to
give executants responsibility while at the same time trying to repress their control. Alquati also
drew political conclusions reminiscent of his French precursors: the workers were unconvinced by
the reformism of the official workers’ movement, and instead expressed interest in workers’
management, in an end to the alienating process of work.
Alongside Alquati’s text in the inaugural issue of Quaderni Rossi, Ranziero Panzieri, the founder of
the review, published a highly influential article called “The Capitalist Use of Machinery: Marx
Against the Objectivists.” Written after Alquati’s “Report,” it reflected on the themes raised by
Alquati, referring throughout to the workers “studied in the present issue of Quaderni Rossi,” while
pushing towards a new framework. Panzieri, who had not only written the introduction to the Italian
edition of Mothé’s diary, but was also the Italian translator of the second volume of Capital, was
not prepared to drop Marx’s language in favor of that of directors and executants:

the worker, as owner and seller of his labour-power, enters into relation with
capital only as an individual; coöperation, the mutual relationship between
workers, only begins with the labour process, but by then they have ceased to
belong to themselves. On entering the labour process they are incorporated into
capital. 75

For Panzieri, the means by which this incorporation took place was machinery, in the passage
from manufacture to the developed level of large-scale industry. Citing Marx’s remark that in the
capitalist factory, “the automaton itself is the subject, and the workers are merely conscious
organs,” Panzieri’s target was the labor bureaucracy’s enthusiasm for technological
development. 76 According to this orthodox position, technological development represented a
transhistorical force, determining the progressive movement through modes of production. To
drive down the Italian road to socialism, the Italian worker would have to submit to the automatons
in the automobile factories. 77

It is significant that while Panzieri made many of the same historical observations as Castoriadis,
he defended them as discoveries internal to Marx’s theory. The same went for the rising standard
of living. According to Panzieri, “Marx foresaw an increase not just of the nominal but also of the
real wage”: “the more the growth of capital is rapid, the more the material situation of the working-
class improves. And the more the wage is linked to the growth of capital, the more direct becomes
labour’s dependence upon capital.” 78 For this reason, though now in agreement with Castoriadis,
Panzieri considered wage struggles a function of the unions’ bureaucratic incorporation of labor
into capital; only by directly attacking capital’s control and replacing it with workers’ control could
technological rationality be subjected to “the socialist use of machines.” Indeed, for
Panzieri, Quaderni Rossi’s inquiries showed that the workers were already coming to this view.
However, he still warned against drawing any directly political conclusions: “The ‘new’ working-
class demands which characterize trade-union struggles (studied in the present issue of Quaderni
Rossi) do not directly furnish a revolutionary political content, nor do they imply an automatic
development in that direction.”

When Alquati’s own investigations turned from FIAT to Olivetti – from a factory that made cars to
one that made calculators and typewriters – he was able to draw on and build upon Panzieri’s
analysis of technology. In the title “Organic Composition of Capital and Labor-Power at Olivetti,”
Alquati definitively brought the discourse of workers’ inquiry back into the language of Marxist
economic analysis, and implicitly suggested a new concept: class composition.

While the seeds of class composition can be already observed in the “Report on the ‘New
Forces,’” insofar as Alquati attempted to describe the material existence of the working class, its
behaviors and forms of interactions and organization, the earlier inquiry had treated machinery
purely as a means by which directors reduced workers to executants. Deskilling was simply a way
to break the will of the executants, and new machinery an instrument in this process. Now, in the
inquiry at Olivetti, the increasing organic composition of capital was seen from the working-class
viewpoint as the recomposition of labor-power, the transformation of the very forms of worker
coöperation. Technology, in this sense, represented the field in which the social relations of class
were embedded, but as part of a dynamic process in which the conflict between the extraction of
surplus value and workers’ insubordination shaped the process of production. Directors were not
mere parasites; while it was true that executants informally organized their concrete labor, the
function of management was to plan and coördinate this labor within the valorization process.
Workers’ struggles would have to articulate forms of political organization that responded to this
technological recomposition, and in this context self-management would no longer be adequate –
except as the workers’ self-management of the struggle against the capital relation.

If these inquiries resulted in the beginnings of a new scientific problematic, and an enthusiastic
embrace of new forces, then inquiry turned out to be more politically divisive than the participants
had realized. After the riots of Piazza Statuto in 1962, when workers attacked the offices of the
Unione Italiana del Lavoro (UIL) in Turin, Quaderni Rossi would be torn apart by internal
disagreements. 79 While Tronti, Alquati, Negri, and others believed that this represented a new
phase of the class struggle, an opportunity to break with the increasingly untenable strategy of
collaboration with the unions, Panzieri saw it as a political impasse. Unconvinced that autonomous
workers’ struggles could advance a lasting organizational form – even if the form of the unions had
been exhausted – Panzieri thought that a renewed emphasis on inquiry and sociological research
would be required before any movement could emerge.
This political difference was, significantly, also a theoretical one. At an editorial meeting at the end
of 1963, Panzieri remarked that an essay of Tronti’s was

for me a fascinating resume of a whole series of errors that the workers’ Left can
commit in this moment. It is fascinating because it is very Hegelian, in the
original sense, as a new way of re-living a philosophy of history. It is precisely a
philosophy of history of the working class. One speaks, for example, of the
party, but in that context the concept of the party cannot be deduced or forced
in; one can only deduce the self-organisation of the class at the level of neo-
capitalism. 80

In January of the following year, this essay would launch the new journal Classe Operaia, formed
by Tronti’s faction. His controversial essay would famously announce, in the lines which have now
become the inescapable catchphrase of workerism: “We too have worked with a concept that puts
capitalist development first, and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the
problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and start again from the beginning: and the beginning is
the class struggle of the working class.” 81

In the fall of that year, the last of his life, Panzieri spoke at a Turin seminar called “Socialist Uses
of Workers’ Inquiry,” alongside the “sociologist” faction that had remained with Quaderni Rossi.
Here he argued for “the use of sociological tools for the political aims of the working class,” and in
doing so presented a kind of counterpoint to “Lenin in England.” In his intervention, published the
following year in Quaderni Rossi, Panzieri defended the anti-historicist character of inquiry,
claiming that Marx’s Capital itself had the features of a sociological analysis:

In Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and other early writings the
point of comparison is alienated being (“the worker suffers in his very existence,
the capitalist in the profit on his dead mammon”) and the critique of political
economy is linked to a historical and philosophical conception of humanity and
history. However, Marx’s Capital abandons this metaphysical and philosophical
outlook and the later critique is levelled exclusively at a specific situation that is
capitalism, without claiming to be a universal anti-critique of the one-sidedness
of bourgeois political economy.

Workers’ inquiry as a scientific practice had to be elaborated on this basis – by advancing its own
one-sidedness in response. For Panzieri, Marxist sociology “refuses to identify the working class
with the movement of capital and claims that it is impossible to automatically trace a study of the
working class back to the movement of capital.” 82

But what was the meaning of this one-sidedness? Panzieri had indicated his distaste for Tronti’s
grandiose inversion, and this was indeed a pertinent criticism, presaging the increasing distance of
workerist theory from the concrete practice of inquiry over the course of the 1960s and 1970s.
However, Panzieri was unable to propose a new political approach; while he had tied the practice
of inquiry to a Marxist economic analysis, he was unable to bring this theory to bear on the real
political activity that was beginning to emerge, and which would characterize over a decade of
class struggle to follow. Recently Tronti has reflected on this split:

Panzieri accused me of “Hegelianism,” of “philosophy of history.” This reading,

and the accusation that underlies it, will often return; after all, Hegelianism was a
real factor, it was effectively there, always had been; while this idea of a
“philosophy of history” absolutely did not… Ours was not a theory that imposed
itself from outside on real data, but the opposite: that is, the attempt to recover
those real data, giving them meaning within a theoretical horizon. 83

Indeed, workerism would, for its entire history, be tortured by the tension between “philosophy of
history” and “real data”; this lives on in today’s “post-workerism.” But these are the risks taken by
those whose eyes are on the “theoretical horizon.” It is important to note that Alquati, who did not
share Panzieri’s views on the incompatibility of research and insurrection, split from Quaderni
Rossi and joined Classe Operaia. His conception of inquiry was a militant and political one.

For this reason Tronti’s theoretical synthesis, in his 1965 essay “Marx, Labor-Power, Working
Class,” has to be reexplored. This essay makes up the bulk of Workers and Capital (1966), with
only a couple concluding sections translated into English. Unlike the rest of the book, which
consists of articles written for Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia, this hitherto unpublished essay
is a long and continuous argument, developed on the basis of Tronti’s Marxology and historical
analysis. While this leads us to a certain digression, we believe it is the indispensable basis for
rediscovering the theory of class composition that Alquati’s practice of inquiry suggested, while
also developing this theory in a way that takes Panzieri’s warning seriously.

Though Tronti’s classical workerist inversion is widely known and cited, less is known about the
process of theoretical elaboration that led to it. Throughout Workers and Capitalthe primacy of
workers’ struggle is described as a strategic reversal which attempts to identify and advance
the political character of Marx’s theoretical development, with the experience of 1848 and the
political writings preceding the scientific economic analysis. 84 In a sense, this represented a new
object of inquiry. No longer was the goal, as it was for the Johnson-Forest Tendency or Socialisme
ou Barbarie, to discover universal proletarian attitudes, or even the content of socialism, but to
access a specifically political logic which emerged from the working-class viewpoint – a
consequence of the difficult relation between strategy and science represented by Marx’s
theoretical practice.

Despite what seems to be an affirmation of some purported working-class identity, Tronti did not
seek to defend, in the manner of the Johnson-Forest Tendency and Socialisme ou Barbarie, the
dignity of labor. On the contrary, the guiding principle of the “refusal of work” meant returning to
Marx’s own critique of the ideology of the workers’ movement: “When Marx refused the idea of
labor as the source of wealth and took up a concept of labor as the measure of value, socialist
ideology was beaten for good, and working-class science was born. It’s no accident that this is still
the choice” (222). 85

Marx had tirelessly repeated that “labor is presupposed by capital and at the same
timepresupposes it in its turn” – in other words, the owner of capital presupposes labor-power,
while labor-power presupposes the conditions of labor. On its own, Tronti wrote, “labor creates
nothing, neither value nor capital, and consequently it cannot demand from anyone the restitution
of the full fruit of what ‘it has created’” (222). But since socialist ideology had extended to new
theories of labor and class, it would be necessary to “clear the field of every technological illusion”
which tried to “reduce the productive process to the labor process, to a relation of the laborer to
the instrument as such of his labor, as though it were an eternal relation of man with an evil gift of
nature.” Just as treacherous was “the trap of the processes of reification,” which started with the
“ideological lament” of machinery’s mortification of the worker and quickly moved to propose “the
mystical cure for the class consciousness of this worker, as if it were the search for the lost soul of
modern man” (203).

Instead, recognizing that the “working class is the point of historical departure for the birth and
growth of capitalism,” Marx’s path was to “start from capital to arrive at logicallyunderstanding the
working class” (230). Consequently, it was necessary to affirm that the capitalist viewpoint could
attain the status of science. In fact, capitalist science would be superior to socialist ideologies,
which were still trapped in the view that “only the working class, in particular in the persona of its
representative officials, is the repository of real science (of real history etc.), and that this is the
science of everything, the general social science also valid for capital.” It would be better to
recognize that “in the reorganization of the productive process of a large factory, there is at least
as much scientific knowledge as in the Smithian discovery of productive labor that is exchanged
for capital” (172). To want to know more about capitalist society from the working-class viewpoint
“than the capitalists themselves” was a “pious illusion,” and “every form of workers’ management
of capital proves to be necessarily imperfect with relation to a directly capitalist management.” The
workers’ path was not a perfected management, but destruction of capitalism by revolution. “So
from the viewpoint of the capitalists,” Tronti argued, “it is completely correct to study the working
class; only they are capable of studying it correctly. But the ideological smog of industrial sociology
will not succeed in cancelling the death sentence that it represents for them” (230).

In this regard research from the working-class viewpoint would be distinct from capitalist sociology,
since its findings would be oriented towards the organization of this destruction. This indicates the
question of “political composition”; as Tronti wrote, “the theoretical research we have conducted on
the concepts of labor, labor-power, working class, becomes nothing more than an exercise on the
path to the practical discovery of a conquest of organization” (259). This specific line of research,
which emerges from workers’ inquiry and, in the history of workerism, sometimes strays quite far
from it, requires a separate investigation. For the time being, we will dwell on the concepts of
labor, labor-power, and working class, insofar as they complement and systematize the findings of
workers’ inquiry and the category of class composition.

Before even asking what it means to say that the working class drives capitalist development, we
have to ask what it means to say class, and indeed this is the absolutely central question of
Tronti’s theoretical elaboration. For Tronti the theory of class cannot be restricted to the point of
production, and does not even necessarily begin there. Its exposition begins with Marx’s point in
volume 2 of Capital: “The class relation between capitalist and wage-labourer is thus already
present, already presupposed, the moment that the two confront each other in the act M-L (L-M
from the side of the worker).” 86 Indeed, Tronti will affirm that “for Marx it is beyond doubt that the
class-relation already exists in-itself [an sich] in the act of circulation. It is precisely this which
reveals, which brings out, the capitalist relation during the production-process” (149). 87

His analysis pursues the lines of Marx which follow:

Money can be spent in this form only because labour-power is found in a state
of separation from its means of production (including the means of subsistence
as means of production of labour-power itself); and because this separation is
 abolished only through the sale of labour-power to the owner of the means of
production, a sale which signifies that the buyer is now in control of the
continuous flow of labour-power, a flow which by no means has to stop when
the amount of labor necessary to reproduce the price of labour-power has been
performed. The capital relation arises only in the production process because it
exists implicitly in the act of circulation, in the basically different economic
conditions in which buyer and seller confront one another, in their class
relation. 88

What can it mean that a theoretical tradition so known for its focus on the point of production starts
with a theory not only of value, but of class, that is centered on exchange? Helmut Reichelt has
commented on the choice faced for economic form-analysis between, on the one hand, labor as a
“quasi-ontological category” which presents “substantialised abstract human labour as the
substance of value”; and on the other hand, an account of the specifically capitalist social
processes which constitute the “validity [Geltung]” of human activity as abstract labor, and the
natural form of products as values – in other words, the determination of what is counted as labor
in exchange. 89 For Reichelt this is the basis of Marx’s advanced theory of value, and we can also
observe Tronti following this thread: “Concrete labor realizes itself in the infinite variety of its use
values; abstract labor realizes itself in the equality of commodities as general equivalents” (124).

In an adventurous reconquering of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, against their humanist appropriation,

Tronti argued that Marx’s early writings on alienation represented an initial and incomplete theory
of abstract labor, arising from the separation characteristic of private property. 90 But this account
would only be truly developed in Capital. While for Castoriadis Capital amounted to little more than
economic objectivism, it raised the fundamental question of the commensurability assumed in
exchange – which, as Reichelt points out, is central to the “double character” of “the wealth of
bourgeois society”: “a mass of a multitude of use-values that as homogenous abstract quantities
can at the same time be aggregated into a social product.” 91 The value relation is meant to explain
the form of “equal validity” which allows different products to be rendered equivalent in
exchange. 92

A theory of class relations specific to capitalist society, then, cannot neglect to explain how the
ability to work can possibly be part of a system of exchange: how labor-power can be exchanged
for a wage, inserted into a system of circulation in which commodities are rendered equivalent
according to their values. But this question can only be answered within the context of
a historical analysis which opens onto the definition of class. Abstract labor is constituted in
exchange, but the typical exchange of capitalism is money/labor-power; so how does this
constitutive class relation arise, in which owners of money and owners of labor-power confront
each other on the market, and what is its relation to the process of capitalist development?

For both Lefort and Castoriadis, relying on the Communist Manifesto, capitalism’s precondition
was the bourgeois revolution. For Lefort, the bourgeoisie had to be understood as constituting “a
homogeneous group with a fixed structure” which had “common interests and horizons”; the
proletariat, on the other hand, reduced to its atomized economic functions, would have to unify
itself through its struggle against the bourgeoisie. 93 Capitalism represented the reshaping of
society according to the bourgeoisie’s collective interest.

For Tronti, starting from the forms of generalized exchangeability characteristic of capitalism, such
an account of the bourgeoisie was simply impossible. For a system in which the typical, defining
exchange was money/labor-power, the starting premise had to be the constitution of a class with
nothing to sell but labor-power, the free laborer constrained economically but not legally to sell
labor-power in exchange for a wage. This, for Tronti, was the constitution of the proletariat: “the
properly historical passage from labor to labor-power, that is from labor as slavery and service to
labor-power as the sole commodity able to submit wealth to value, able to valorize wealth and
thereby produce capital” (139). But the proletariat had to enter into exchange not with a class, but
with individual capitalists, whose only “collective” interest was their shared drive to compete with
each other:

The historical point of departure sees in capitalist society the workers on one
side and the capitalist on the other. Here again is one of the facts which
imposes itself with the violence of its simplicity. Historically we can speak of an
individual capitalist: this is the socially determined figure which presides over the
constitution of capitalist relations of production. As such, at least in the classical
development of the system, this historical figure does not disappear, it is not
suppressed or extinguished, but only organizes itself collectively, socializing
itself so to speak in capital, precisely as the class relation. On the other hand
we cannot speak of the isolated workerat any historical moment. In its material,
socially determined figure, the worker is from his birth collectively organized.
From the beginning the workers, as exchange values of the capitalist, come
forth in the plural: the worker in the singular does not exist (232-3).
In this regard the individual capitalist persists, and continues to engage in the market exchange
which characterizes capitalism. But the capitalist class is “always something else more or less
than a social class. Something less, since direct economic interest has not ceased and perhaps
will not cease to present itself as divided on the capitalist side. Something more, because the
political power of capital now extends its apparatus of control, domination, and repression beyond
the traditional forms taken by the State, to invest the whole structure of the new society” (233).

Once labor-power is exchanged for the wage, Tronti argues, introducing a terminological
distinction into Marx’s categories, the proletariat is recomposed as working class: as labor-power
which is coöperative, collective within the labor-process. This ongoing process of socialization of
labor is the first source of relative surplus value; it will later require technological development for
its further growth. Here Tronti develops the point implicitly suggested by Panzieri; but while the
latter started with the individualworker whose labor-power was integrated into the factory plan,
Tronti identifies a process of class recomposition. 94 Between the proletariat and the working
class Tronti sees “the same historical succession and the same logical difference as that which we
have already found between the seller of labor-power and the producer of surplus value” (161).

The struggle for a normal working day, for Marx so fundamental in the logical exposition of relative
surplus value, manifests the class struggle in terms which also framed the proletariat: the struggle
to reduce a heterogeneous mass to the commodity labor-power, and the refusal to be reduced to
it. This refusal is what drives capital to act in its collective interest; in this struggle capital
constitutes itself politicallyas a class, which became an absolute imperative in the moment of
1848. Marx’s writings on 1848 show “the encounter and the superimposition of the abstract
concept of labor with the concrete reality of the worker.” At this point, Marx could supplement his
earlier, intuitive reflections on abstract labor with discovery of the peculiar characteristics of the
labor-power commodity: “the labor-power commodity as working class” (161).

It was not enough, however, to conclude that waged workers first constituted themselves as a
class when they became sellers of labor-power and were thus incorporated into capital. It was
imperative not to “fix the concept of the working class in one unique and definitive form, without
development, without history.” Just as the “internal history of capital” had to include “the specific
analysis of the varied determinations assumed by capital in the course of its development,” against
the easy transhistorical assumptions of a “historical materialist” teleology, an “internal history of
the working class” would have to be “reconstruct the moments of its formation, the changes in its
composition, the development of its organization according to the varied determinations
successively assumed by labor-power as productive force of capital, and according to the
experiences of different struggles, recurring and always renewed, with which the mass of workers
equip themselves as the sole adversary of capitalist society” (149).

And indeed this account of the dynamic historical transformation and reconstitution of labor-power
was required by the social relation of surplus value, and the unity of circulation with the process of
production: “The history of diverse modes in which productive labor is extracted from the worker,
that is, the history of different forms of production of surplus-value, is the story of capitalist society
from the working-class viewpoint” (170). This is precisely because of the twofold character of
labor, Marx’s most treasured discovery, in which both aspects were decisive. While one could not
derive the abstract character of labor from the level of use-value and concrete labor – that is, this
was not a matter of abstraction as a psychological effect of factory time-management – the
valorization of value could not take place without the use-value of labor-power:

labor, the utilization of labor-power, is workers’ labor, a concrete deployment, a

concretization of abstract labor – abstract labor which finds itself already in its
turn reduced to the rank of commodity, and which realizes its value in the wage.
Therefore the step where abstract labor overturns itself and takes the concrete
form of the worker, is the process of consumption of labor-power, the moment
where it becomes in action what it was only in potential, the step of the
realization of the use-value of labor-power, if we may. What was already present
in the operation sale/purchase as a class relation pure and simple, elementary
and general, has definitively acquired from this point on its specific, complex,
and total character (166).

This complex and total character is implied by the coöperative and collective form of the working
class. Unless individual labor-powers are brought into association, they cannot “make valid [far
valere], on a social scale, the special character of the labor-power commodity in general, that is to
say cannot make abstract labor concrete, cannot realize the use-value of labor-power, whose
actual consumption is the secret of the process of valorization of value, as a process of production
of surplus-value and therefore of capital” (205).

Within this process we can glimpse the theoretical location of the concept of class composition:
“The sale of labor-power thus provides the first elementary stage, the simplest, of a composition
into a class of waged workers: it is for this reason that a social mass constrained to sell its labor-
power remains the general form of the working class” (149). But this remains an elementary stage,
since as Marx concluded in his chapter on the working day, “our worker emerges from the process
of production looking different from when he entered it”; entering as seller of labor power (“one
owner against another owner”), the worker leaves knowing that the production process is a
relation of force, and that for protection “the workers have to put their heads together and, as a
class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier by which they can be prevented
from selling themselves and their families into slavery and death by voluntary contract with
capital.” 95 For Tronti this difference is “a political leap”: “It is the leap that the passage through
production provokes in what we can call the composition of the working class or even
the composition of the class of workers” (202).

We are now in a position to understand why the working-class struggle, for Tronti, comes first in
the history of capitalist development. Capitalist development has to be understood as a process of
exchange in which the valorization of value is driven by the sale and purchase of labor-power. It is
only in the socialization of labor-power within the labor process that proletarians take the
associated form of working class, in the realization of the use-value of their labor-power by the
individual capitalist. And only the resistance of their reduction to the labor-power commodity can
compel individual capitalists, who compete on the market, to form a cohesive class:

The particularity of labor-power as a commodity faced with other commodities

coincides therefore with the specifically working-class character that the
production process of capital takes on; and, inside of this, with the concentration
of a working-class initiative in the class relation, that leads to a leap in the
development of the working class and to the subsequent birth of a class of
capitalists (166).

Within the context of this broad economic and historical theory, we are in a position to close the
lengthy digression and return to workers’ inquiry. Workerism’s scientific discovery was to push the
practice of inquiry away from the humanist problematic of experience towards a value theory
which was able to reinterpret Marx’s critique of political economy and put it to use. It implied a
political practice which affirmed shop floor passivity and wage struggles as expressions of a
nascent power of refusal of work.

We can now understand that workers’ inquiry was an investigation into the composition of the
working class, as the historical body which, separated from the means of subsistence and reduced
to the sale of its labor-power, had to be formed into a socialized productive force within a process
of constant expansion – the expanded reproduction of the class itself, and its recomposition in
ever more technologically advanced labor processes.

To close this genealogy we described a significant moment of rupture, the discovery of a concept
which opens new paths of scientific and political experimentation. But it was a theory which
emerged from a specific historical moment. “We all have to be born some day, somewhere,”
Althusser remarked, “and begin thinking and writing in a given world.” 96 Tronti began with
the hegemony of the factory to show how the class antagonism could be thought together with
capitalism’s laws of motion, in a way that his predecessors had failed to do. 97 Yet despite their
theoretical underdevelopment, the Johnson-Forest Tendency had understood that proletarian life
exists beyond the factory, that it encompasses a childhood in the cotton fields, afternoons in the
kitchen. And just as feminists in Italy would challenge the hegemony of the factory as a masculine
blindspot, Italian workerism would also have to respond to changes in capitalist development
which they had not predicted: global economic crisis, the restructuring of production, and the
decline of factory hegemony. Attempts to develop this theoretical problematic still have to respond
to this historical challenge, and navigate around Panzieri’s warning – the risk of lapsing into a
philosophy of history supported by the ontologization of labor.

Although the introduction of class composition identified capitalism with industrial labor, and the
social world created by the postwar boom, at the same time it provided a method which could
today be used to trace the constitution and transformation of labor-power in the context of uneven
development and global crisis. 98Tronti confesses that his and his comrades’ fixation on the
industrial working class now presents itself as an unresolved problem: “I have come to the
conviction that the working class was the last great historical form of social aristocracy. It was a
minority in the midst of the people; its struggles changed capitalism but did not change the world,
and the reason for this is precisely what still needs to be understood.” 99 We suggest that inquiry
will be the first step in understanding.

References

1. ↑ Karl Marx, “Enquête ouvrière” and “Workers’

Questionnaire” in Marx-Engels Collected
Works vol. 24. (New York: International
Publishers, 1880). The English version at
marxists.org has only 100 questions; this is
because Marx asks two separate questions
about the decrease in wages during periods
 of stagnation, and their increase in periods of
prosperity (questions 73 and 74), and in this
English version the former is omitted.

2. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, trans. Ben

Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1976), 98.

3. ↑ Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (New

York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 65.

4. ↑ “Marx to Domela Nieuwenhuis In The

Hague,” available online at marxists.org.

5. ↑ Kent Worcester, CLR James: A Political

Biography (New York: State University of New
York Press, 1996), 55-81; Paul Buhle, CLR
James: The Artist as Revolutionary (New York:
Verso, 1988), 66-99.

6. ↑ For a brief, but excellent introduction to the

history of the newspaper, see “Introduction
to Part 1” in Pages from a Black Radical’s
Notebook: A James Boggs Reader, ed.
Stephen M. Ward (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 2011), 37-41.

7. ↑ “Gripes and Grievances,” Correspondence,

vol. 2, no. 2 (January 22, 1955), 4.

8. ↑ Grace Lee Boggs, “CLR. James: Organizing in

the USA, 1938-1953,” in CLR James: His
Intellectual Legacies, ed. Selwyn Cudjoe and
William Cain (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1995), 164. Paul Buhle,
on the other hand, explictly claims that Grace
Lee actually wrote the text, in, Buhle, CLR
James, 90.

9. ↑ Ph. Guillaume, “L’Ouvrier american par Paul

Romano,” Socialisme ou Barbarie no. 1
(Mars/Avril 1949), 78.

10. ↑ It is significant that Singer was not addressing

this to philanthropists, bourgeois specialists,
 or even sympathetic intellectuals. This was
for workers. “I am not writing in order to gain
the approval or sympathy of these
intellectuals for the workers’ actions. I want
instead to illustrate to the workers
themselves that sometimes when their
conditions seem everlasting and hopeless,
they are in actuality revealing by their every-
day reactions and expressions that they are
the road to a far-reaching change.” Paul
Romano and Ria Stone, The American
Worker (New York, 1947), 1.

11. ↑ Marx, Capital vol. 1, 618; Romano and

Stone, The American Worker, 52.

12. ↑ Romano and Stone, The American Worker,

47-48.

13. ↑ Romano and Stone, The American Worker,

57.

14. ↑ Romano and Stone, The American Worker.

15. ↑ CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace

Lee Boggs, “World War II and Social
Revolution” in The Invading Socialist Society,
available online at marxists.org.

16. ↑ I.I. Rubin, “Abstract Labour and Value in

Marx’s System,” Capital & Class 2 (1978). See
Rubin’s admirably concise definition:
“Abstract labour is the designation for that
part of the total social labour which was
equalised in the process of social division of
labour through the equation of the products
of labour on the market.”

17. ↑ Rubin, “Abstract Labour and Value.”

18. ↑ “The rough draft of this pamphlet was given

to workers across the country. Their reaction
was as one. They were surprised and gratified
to see in print the experiences and thoughts
which they have rarely put into words.
 Workers arrive home from the factory too
exhausted to read more than the daily
comics. Yet most of the workers who read
the pamphlet stayed up well into the night to
finish the reading once they had started.”
Romano and Stone, The American Worker, 1.

19. ↑ In his introduction to the French translation

of “The American Worker,” Philippe
Guillaume called it “proletarian documentary
literature.” For more on this, see Stephen
Hastings-King, “On Claude Lefort’s
‘Proletarian Experience,’” in this issue.

20. ↑ “A Worker’s Inquiry” was first published in

the United States by The New International in
December 1938.

21. ↑ She wrote: “See, ‘A Workers’ Inquiry’ by Karl

Marx in which one hundred and one
questions are asked of the workers’
themselves, dealing with everything from
lavatories, soap, wine, strikes and unions to
‘the general physical, intellectual, and moral
conditions of life of the working men and
women in your trade.’” Romano and
Stone, The American Worker, 59.

22. ↑ Romano and Stone, The American Worker, 1.

23. ↑ Romano and Stone, The American Worker,

12.

24. ↑ Selma James, “A Woman’s Place” in The

Power of Women and the Subversion of the
Community (London: Falling Wall Press,
1972), 58, 64.

25. ↑ It is only Martin Glaberman’s 1972 preface to

the pamphlet which finally reveals that Phil
Singer worked at General Motors factory in
New Jersey.

26. ↑ Quoted in Rachel Peterson,

“Correspondence: Journalism,
 Anticommunism, and Marxism in 1950s
Detroit,” in Anticommunism and the African
American Freedom Movement: “Another side
of the Story,” ed. Robbie Lieberman and
Clarence Lang (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009), 146. As if to dramatically
confirm this, Boggs’s own pseudonym, Ria
Stone, is often misidentified as Raya
Dunayevskaya.

27. ↑ Peterson, “Correspondence,” 146.

28. ↑ Selma James, Sex, Race, and Class – The

Perspective of Winning: A Selection of
Writings, 1952-2011 (Oakland: PM Press,
2012), 13-14; Frank Rosengarten, Urbane
Revolutionary: CLR. James and the Struggle
for a New Society (Mississippi: University of
Mississippi Press, 2008), 89.

29. ↑ Charles Denby [Si Owens], Indignant Heart: A

Black Workers’ Journal (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1978), xi. This edition was
attributed to Charles Denby, Owens’s more
common pseudonym, and the one he used
for most of his article in Correspondence. It is
also significant that Owens still wrote under a
pseudonym in 1978, even though
McCarthyism had clearly passed.

30. ↑ Denby, Indignant Heart, xi.

31. ↑ Peterson, “Correspondence,” 123.

32. ↑ Constance Webb, Not Without Love:

Memoirs(Lebanon, NH: University Press of
New England, 2003), 266.

33. ↑ Romano and Stone, The American Worker.

34. ↑ James, “A Woman’s Place,” 79.

35. ↑ For an excellent introduction to the group in

English, see Marcel van der Linden,
 “Socialisme ou Barbarie: A French
Revolutionary Group (1949-1965),” Left
History vol. 5, no. 1, 1997. Republished at
http://www.left-dis.nl/uk/lindsob.htm.” For a
general history, see Philippe
Gottraux, “Socialisme ou Barbarie”: Un
engagement politique et intellectuel dans la
France de l’après-guerre (Paris: Editions Payot
Lausanne, 1997).

36. ↑ “From Workers’ Autonomy to Social

Autonomy: An interview with Daniel
Blanchard by Amador Fernández-Savater,”
available online at libcom.org

37. ↑ Philippe Guillaume, “L’Ouvrier Americain par

Paul Romano,” Socialisme ou Barbarie no. 1
(Mars/Avril 1949), 78; translated in this issue
of Viewpoint.

38. ↑ For more on this fascinating figure, see

Stephen Hastings-King’s forthcoming book on
Socialisme ou Barbarie.

39. ↑ “Un journal ouvrier aux Etats-

unis,” Socialisme ou Barbarie, no. 13 (jan-
mars 1954): 82.

40. ↑ Cornelius Castoriadis, “CLR James and the

Fate of Marxism,” in CLR James: His
Intellectual Legacies, ed. Selwyn Cudjoe and
William Cain (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1995), 287.

41. ↑ “Workers and Intellectuals,” Correspondence,

vol. 2, no. 3 (February 5, 1955): 4.

42. ↑ Grace Lee Boggs, Living For Change: An

Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1998), 67.

43. ↑ An anonymous ex-member of

Correspondence quoted in Ivar Oxaal, Black
 Intellectuals Come to Power (Cambridge:
Schenkman Books, 1968), 78.

44. ↑ For a detailed discussion of Lefort’s take on

this problem, see Stephen Hastings-King, in
this issue.

45. ↑ Claude Lefort, “Proletarian Experience,”

translated in this issue.

46. ↑ Lefort, “Proletarian Experience.”

47. ↑ Lefort, “Proletarian Experience.”

48. ↑ For a fascinating account of this paper by a

militant closely involved in its development,
see Henri Simon’s contribution to this issue.

49. ↑ “Que voulons-nous?” in Tribune Ouvrière no.

1 (mai 1954), reprinted in Socialisme ou
Barbarie nos. 15/16: 74.

50. ↑ Mothé was one of the few workers in the

group, which led many to put him on a kind
of pedestal. As Lefort has recalled “Mothé’s
proposals, often very rich but sometimes also
confused, carried weight for many because
he was supposed to ‘represent’ Renault.
Mothé was conscious of the role he was led
to play and while he took advantage of it, he
was also exasperated by it. The climate would
have been very different if we had had more
workers among us.” “An interview with
Claude Lefort,” Telos 30 (Winter 1976-77):
178. This lack of workers in the group might
have been a reason for the shortage of
worker narratives that constantly plagued
Socialisme ou Barbarie. This also marks a
significant difference between
Correspondence and Socialisme ou Barbarie.
The first was overwhelmingly working-class.
In 1954 it boasted a membership of 75
workers and only 5 self-described
intellectuals; see The Correspondence
Booklet (Detroit: Correspondence, 1954), 1.
 In contrast, Socialisme ou Barbarie’s
membership largely consisted of intellectuals
or students.

51. ↑ Daniel Mothé, “Le problème d’un journal

ouvrier,” Socialisme ou Barbarie no. 17
(juillet-septembre 1955), 30; translated in
this issue of Viewpoint.

52. ↑ Mothé often uses the term “revolutionary

ideology” instead of revolutionary theory.

53. ↑ Note how Mothé substitutes “revolutionary

organization” for “revolutionary militants.”
This seems to suggest that, according to this
model, the organization can be composed
only by militants. This might be a reflection of
the situation Socialisme ou Barbarie found
itself in: a group that happened to be
composed almost entirely of intellectuals is
turned into theoretical type.

54. ↑ Mothé, “Le problème d’un journal

ouvrier,” 47.

55. ↑ These stringent qualifications exacerbated

the major problem facing this project: the
unwillingness of most workers to write. More
on this below.

56. ↑ The editorial core of Tribune Ouvrière was

already wracked by internal ideological
disputes. Although he supported a closer
relationship between the two journals,
Mothé did not want to turn Tribune
Ouvrière into a political journal, in other
words, he opposed the idea that the journal
should communicate overtly political ideas to
the workers, and held that it should primarily
be a space where workers could discuss their
experiences. Gottraux, “Socialisme ou
Barbarie”, 67
57. ↑ For more on Henri Simon’s stance on inquiry,
the workers’ paper, and this broader
experience, see his contribution to this issue.

58. ↑ Gottraux, “Socialisme ou Barbarie”, 86.

59. ↑ For more on this conjuncture, see “Interview

with Castoriadis,” Telos 23 (Spring 1975), 135.

60. ↑ For more on this split, Marcel van der Linden,

“Socialisme ou Barbarie: A French
Revolutionary Group (1949-1965).” For a
brief analysis from the perspective of a
militant who was involved, see Henri Simon,
“1958-1998: Communism in France:
Socialisme ou Barbarie, ICO and Echanges,”
available online at libcom.org

61. ↑ Daniel Blanchard saw a perfect illustration of

this in the relationship between Mothé and
Castoriadis: “Whereas the Leninist
organizations kept the manual and
intellectual workers strictly separated in
specific roles (the latter educating the former
in any case), in SouB we devoted special
efforts—which were often unsuccessful—to
abolish this separation. For example, the
relationship between Daniel Mothé and
Castoriadis was an interesting example of the
collaboration of a very intelligent worker, as
Mothé was, and a theoretician like
Castoriadis. The ideas that Castoriadis
elaborated helped Mothé to understand his
own reality in the factory. And Mothé was
then able to analyze his experience in a very
concrete way that in turn nourished the
theoretical labors of Castoriadis; Blanchard,
“Autonomy.” Henri Simon has also
commented on this pairing, but from a more
critical perspective: “In Socialisme ou
Barbarie, there was a kind of harmony
[osmose], symbiosis Mothé/Castoriadis.
There was almost always placed side by side
in Socialisme ou Barbarie a theoretical article
by Castoriadis and a concrete article by
Mothé. Mothé saw the factory through the
theoretical lenses of Castoriadis”; “Entretien
 d’Henri Simon avec l’Anti-mythes (1974),”
available online at
raumgegenzement.blogsport.de.

62. ↑ Cornelius Castoriadis, Political and Social

Writings, Volume 2, 1955-1960: From the
Workers’ Struggle Against Bureaucracy to
Revolution in the Age of Modern
Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988), 213. Further
references to this collection are given in the
text.

63. ↑ For a fascinating autobiographical account of

the phenomenon, see Stan Weir, “The
Informal Work Group” in Rank and File:
Personal Histories by Working-Class
Organizers, ed. Alice and Staughton Lynd,
expanded edition (Chicago: Haymarket
Books, 2011).

64. ↑ Gottraux, “Socialisme ou Barbarie”, 120-121.

65. ↑ Indeed, it appears that Pouvoir Ouvrier never

really learned the lessons of Tribune
Ouvrière; Castoriadis found himself writing
another article, this time in Pouvoir Ouvrier,
in which he tried, yet again, to theorize why
workers simply were not writing. See
Cornelius Castoriadis, “What Really Matters”
in PSW 2, 223-5.

66. ↑ Claude Lefort, “Proletarian Experience.”

67. ↑ “Interview with Lefort,” 179.

68. ↑ “Interview with Lefort,” 183.

69. ↑ See “The Relations of Production in Russia”

in Political and Social Writings, Volume
1, 1946-1955: From the Critique of
Bureaucracy to the Positive Content of
Socialism, trans. and ed. David Ames Curtis
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
 1988), and our commentary in “Deviations,
Part 1: The Castoriadis-Pannekoek Exchange.”

70. ↑ Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri, In Praise

of the Common (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 2008), 54.

71. ↑ Danilo Montaldi, Bisogna sognare. Scritti

1952-1975 (Milano: Colibrì, 1994).

72. ↑ Sergio Bologna and Patrick Cuninghame, “For

an Analysis of Autonomia – An Interview with
Sergio Bologna,” available online at
libcom.org

73. ↑ Montaldi himself had believed that sociology,

as Steve Wright recounts, “could help in the
development of revolutionary theory”;
see Storming Heaven: Class Composition and
Struggle in Italian Autonomist
Marxism(London: Pluto Press, 2002), 21-25.
On the division within Quaderni Rossi, see
Marta Malo de Molina, “Common Notions,
part 1: workers-inquiry, co-research,
consciousness-raising,” trans. Maribel Casas-
Cortés and Sebastian Cobarrubias of the
Notas Rojas Collective Chapel
Hill, eicp (2006). Finally, for more on
coresearch or conricerca, and the influence of
both Montaldi and another of Alquati’s
precursors, Alessandro Pizzorno, see Guido
Borio, Francesca Pozzi, and Gigi Roggero,
“Conricerca as Political Action” in Utopian
Pedagogy: Radical Experiments Against
Neoliberal Globalization, ed. Mark Coté,
Richard J.F. Day, and Greig de Peuter
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).

74. ↑ See Wright, Storming Heaven, 46-58; the

texts themselves are collected in Romano
Alquati, Sulla Fiat (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1975):
“Relazione sulle ‘forze nuove.’ Convegno del
PSI sulla FIAT, gennaio 1961”; “Documenti
sulla lotta di classe alla FIAT”; “Tradizione e
rinnovamento alla FIAT-Ferriere.” A partial
translation of the 1962 text, “Organic
Composition of Capital and Labor-Power at
 Olivetti,” is presented in this issue. For a very
perceptive analysis of Alquati’s Olivetti text,
and the trajectory of inquiry in general, see
Wildcat, “The Renascence of Operaismo,”
available online at libcom.org

75. ↑ Raniero Panzieri, “The Capitalist Use of

Machinery,” trans. Quintin Hoare, available
online at libcom.org.

76. ↑ Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 544.

77. ↑ Since the further development of the

orthodox position was that collaboration
between the unions, the state, and the
employers, represented the displacement of
competition towards planning, and therefore
a step towards socialism, Panzieri also made
the argument that planning represented the
necessary social extension of capital’s
despotism in the factory. “The basic factor in
this process is the continual growth of
constant capital with respect to variable
capital”; as machines grew more numerous
than workers, capital had to exercise an
“absolute control,” imposing its rationality of
production upons workers, and through the
growth of monopolies extending its plan
“from the factory to the market, to the
external social sphere” (“Capitalist Use of
Machinery.”) This thesis would be the subject
of Panzieri’s last major essay, “Surplus Value
and Planning,” in issue 4 of Quaderni
Rossi(translated by Julian Bees and available
online at zerowork.org). In this sense, while
Panzieri’s argument represented a
sophisticated theoretical advance and had a
worthwhile political function, it also
contained a certain reification of the features
of postwar capitalism, and lost some of its
clarity on the nature of capitalist exchange
relations. Interestingly, this essay was
followed in Quaderni Rossi with Marx’s so-
called “Fragment on Machines” from
the Grundrisse.
78. ↑ Panzieri, “Capitalist Use of Machinery.”

79. ↑ See Wildcat, “Renascence of Operaismo,” for

some interesting comments on Piazza Statuto
in the context of workers’ inquiry.

80. ↑ Quoted in Robert Lumley, “Review Article:

Working Class Autonomy and the
Crisis,” Capital and Class 12 (Winter 1980):
129; also discussed in Wright, Storming
Heaven, 58-62. Lumley considers Tronti’s
intervention to be “a theoretical and political
regression”; as we will try to demonstrate
below, we disagree with this assessment.

81. ↑ Mario Tronti, “Lenin in England,” available

online at libcom.org.

82. ↑ Raniero Panzieri, “Socialist Uses of Workers’

Inquiry,” trans. Arianna Bove, eicp (2006).

83. ↑ Tronti, Noi operaisti, quoted in Adelino

Zanini, “On the Philosophical Foundations of
Italian Workerism,” Historical Materialism 18
(2010): 60.

84. ↑ Mario Tronti, Operai e capitale (Turin:

Einaudi, 1966), 128, 179, 209-10, 220, 256.
Translations from this text are ours, with the
invaluable help of Evan Calder Williams,
unless otherwise noted. We also profitably
consulted the French translation by Yann
Moulier-Boutang and Giuseppe Bezza,
available online at multitudes.samizdat.net.
Further references to the original Italian are
given in the text.

85. ↑ Here of course Tronti recalls

Marx’s Critiqueof the Gotha Programme.

86. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 2, trans. David

Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1978), 115;
Tronti quotes this passage in Operai e
capitale, 144-5.
87. ↑ This is also quoted in Zanini, “Philosophical
Foundations,” 50. Zanini’s is one of the few
texts in English which addresses Tronti’s
economic analysis.

88. ↑ Marx, Capital, Volume 2, 115; second

sentence quoted by Tronti, Operai e capitale,
148-9.

89. ↑ Helmut Reichelt, “Marx’s Critique of

Economic Categories,” trans. Werner Strauss
and ed. Jim Kincaid, Historical Materialism15
(2007): 11. It is worth noting that workerism
was not always able to successfully navigate
between the two; while Reichelt’s “quasi-
ontological category” refers to the
conception which understands abstract labor
as expenditure of physiological energy,
measurable in calories, workerism would at
times be captivated by labor as the “living,
form-giving fire,” which is at times suggested
in Tronti’s assessment of the Grundrisse as “a
more advanced book” than Capital.
(Tronti, Operai e capitale, 210; translated in
Murphy 339). The Grundrisseplayed an
ambiguous role in the history of workerism,
providing new theoretical energies while also
obscuring the ruptures in Marx’s economic
thought. Future research will have to draw
these distinctions clearly, especially to move
beyond the Grundrisse’s problematic of
“capital in general”; see Michael Heinrich,
“Capital in General and the Structure of
Marx’s Capital,” Capital and Class 13:63
(1989).

90. ↑ This argument is presented throughout the

introduction to the essay, pages 123-43, with
attention to a range of Marx’s other early
manuscripts.

91. ↑ Helmut Reichelt, “Social Reality as

Appearance: Some Notes on Marx’s
Conception of Reality,” trans. Werner
Bonefeld, Human Dignity, eds. Werner
Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 40. Reichelt ends
 this article (65) with comments on the
category of class which, in contrast to
Tronti’s, do not manage to incorporate
Marx’s close attention to the historical
constitution of the proletariat, and its
recomposition in the labor process.

92. ↑ Reichelt, “Marx’s Critique,” 22.

93. ↑ Lefort, “Proletarian Experience”; see also the

somewhat different argument, which refers
to waged labor and technological
development alongside the bourgeois
revolution, in Castoriadis, “Modern
Capitalism and Revolution,” 259-60.

94. ↑ Compare to Raniero Panzieri, “Surplus Value

and Planning”: “The relationship between the
workers, their coöperation, appears
only afterthe sale of their labour-power,
which involves the simple relationship
of individual workersto capital.” It is worth
noting that while Panzieri’s 1964 account was
based on the displacement of competition by
planning, Tronti’s description of “the plan of
capital” a year earlier in Quaderni Rossi had
represented it as the highest level of
development of the socialization of
capital still mediated by competition, in the
individual capitalist’s pursuit of profits higher
than the average: “Individual enterprises, or
entire ‘privileged’ productive activities, along
with the propulsive function of the whole
system, constantly tend to break from within
the total social capital in order to
subsequently re-compose it at a higher level.
The struggle among capitalists continues, but
now it functions directly within the
development of capital.” Planning
represented the extension of capital’s
despotism to the state, not a new phase
displacing competitive capitalism: “The
anarchy of capitalist production is not
cancelled: it is simply socially organized.” See
“Social Capital,” available online at
libcom.org, and the original collected
in Operai e capitale, 60-85.
 95. ↑ Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 415-6.

96. ↑ Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben

Brewster (London: Verso, 1969), 74.

97. ↑ Introduced in “Factory and Society” in the

second issue of Quaderni Rossi (1962),
collected in Tronti, Operai e capitale, 39-59;
see also Sergio Bologna, “The Factory-Society
Relationship as an Historical Category,”
available online at libcom.org (translation of
“Rapporto società-fabbrica come categoria
storica,” Primo Maggio 2, 1974).

98. ↑ For an account of the workerist attempt to

develop the theory of money and class
composition in the context of the economic
instability of the early 1970s, see Steve
Wright, “Revolution from Above? Money and
Class-Composition in Italian Operaismo” in
Karl Heinz-Roth and Marcel van der Linden,
ed., Beyond Marx (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

99. ↑ Mario Tronti, “Towards a Critique of Political

Democracy,” trans. Alberto Toscano, Cosmos
and History, 5:1 (2009): 74.

Asad Haider is an editor of Viewpoint and author of Mistaken Identity: Anti-Racism and the
Struggle Against White Supremacy (Verso, Spring 2018).

Salar Mohandesi is a founding editor ofViewpoint and a postdoctoral fellow in History at Bowdoin
College.

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