denning, representing global labor

7/27/2019 Denning, Representing Global Labor

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Representing Global Labor

Michael DenningArise, you prisoners o starvation!Arise, you wretched o the earth!

For justice thunders condemnation.

A better worlds in birth.

No more traditions chains shall bind us.

Arise you slaves, no more in thrall!

The earth shall rise on new oundations.

We have been naught, we shal l be all.

Tis the nal confict;

Let each stand in his place

The international working class

Shall be the human race.

The Internationale

These are the common U.S. lyrics to The Internationale, which was

written in 1871 by the Communard poet Eugne Pottier ater the all o

the Paris Commune.1 Pottier, born in 1816, was one o the revolutionary

Parisian artisans o 1848, an admirer o Proudhon, a riend o Courbet,

a leader in the Paris Commune who subsequently went into exile in the

United States. His poem was set to music in 1888 by a member o a Li lle

workers chorus, Pierre Degeyter. By 1910, it had been adopted as the

anthem o the international workers movement. It later served as an

anthem o the Soviet Union, but it has been translated into many lan-

guages and sung around the world. It was banned in many parts o the

world in the early years o the century; it was sung by Wobblies in the

Lawrence textile strike and by the International Brigades in the Spanish

Civil War; and it was the source o Frantz Fanons most amous tit le.

I begin with The Internationale because it stands as one o the rst

great popular representations o global labor.2 Somewhere in the middle

o the nineteenth century one might mark it rom the amousManifesto

of the Communist Party o 1848, written by Pottiers German contempo-

raries Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, with its nal lines: Proletarier

aller Lnder, vereinigt euch! (Proletarians o all countries, unite!)

Social Text92, Vol. 25, No. 3, Fall 2007

DOI 10.1215/01642472-2007-008 2007 Duke University Press


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126 Michael Denning

(superimposed over a classic Walter Crane image in g. 1, the cover o an1895 German pamphlet) or perhaps rom the moment o the organization

o the International Working Mens Association in 1864, the Internationale

that Pottier reers to in the chorus o the song people began to see the

workers o the world as constituting an interconnected global labor orce

sharing a common situation.

By the beginning o the twentieth century, this notion o an interna-

tional working class was a powerul imaginative construct, even i it was

in many ways a ction. What had actually emerged or the rst time were

powerul national labor movements, uniting socialist and labor parties,

trade and industrial unions, and a variety o working-class mutual aidsocieties and voluntary associations. But the songs o the movement not

only Pottier and Degeyters LInternationale, but the ot-translated

Italian song Bandiera Rossa, as well as Solidarity Forever, written

by the U.S. Wobbly Ralph Chaplin in 1915 marked the beginning o

an era that arcs rom the rst imaginings o a world working class to the

triumph o that representation o labor in the social democratic, laborist,

Figure 1. Walter

Cranes International

Solidarity o Labour,

1889. From Cartoons

for the Cause. Here

used as the cover to

a German pamphlet

o 1895 with the

nal lines rom the

Communist Manifesto.

Courtesy o the

International Institute

o Social History,

Amsterdam,

www.iisg.nl


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Representing Global Labor 127

and communist visions o the twentieth century to the crisis o represent-

ing labor in the late twentieth century, a crisis that is imaginative as well as

organizational, cultural as well as political. Indeed LInternationale and

Solidarity Forever seem to be throwbacks to an era that is long past. Not

only had in the words o a celebrated essay by the pioneering historian

o labor, Eric Hobsbawm the orward march o labor halted, but labor

seemed a curious anachronism.3

How do we understand the ading o this representation at a moment

when a global labor orce seems to corporate employers and international

nancial institutions more palpable than ever? This essay, which is part

o a larger book I am writing on workers o the world, on what might be

called the workers century, is about the project o representing global

labor imaginatively, cultural ly, politically. I want to suggest that the

representation o global labor required, historically, two crucial break-

throughs: a new abstraction o labor, o work, and the invention o work-

ers as a category; and a new sense o the globe, o the international. Inthe second part, I will argue that there are two dominant contemporary

representations o global labor, one gured by the photographs o Sebas-

tio Salgado and the other by the graphs and pie charts o the World Bank

report. Though both are powerul, even inescapable, neither resolve the

imaginative crisis o the gure o labor. In the nal part, I address this

sense o imaginative crisis that has led many contemporary thinkers to

reject the very categories o labor and laborer as inadequate. It is

neither possible nor desirable simply to revive the old labor hymns, but

neither can we avoid the reality o the worldwide accumulation o labor.

A refection on the constitution o the category o workers is, I suggest,a necessary moment in any subaltern account o workers o the world,

o the international division o labor.

Abstracting Work, Imagining the Globe

The frst breakthrough was in representing work. This was a break-

through o the new discourse o political economy, and the story is per-

haps best told by that avid student o political economy, Karl Marx, in

the rst drat o his introduction to the book that would become Capital.He writes in 1857,

Labour seems a quite simple category. The conception o labour in this

general orm as labour as such is also immeasurably old. Nevertheless,

when it is economically conceived in this simplicity, labour is as modern

a category as are the relations which create this simple abstraction. . . . It


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128 Michael Denning

was an immense step orward or Adam Smith to throw out every limiting

specifcation o wealth-creating activity not only manuacturing, or

commercial or agricultural labour, but one as well as the others, labour in

general. . . . Now, it might seem that all that had been achieved thereby was

to discover the abstract expression or the simplest and most ancient relation

in which human beings in whatever orm o society play the role o

producers. This is correct in one respect. Not in another. Indierence towardsany specic kind o labour presupposes a very developed totality o real kinds

o labour, o which no single one is any longer predominant. . . . Indierence

towards specic labours corresponds to a orm o society in which individuals

can with ease transer rom one labour to another, and where the specic kind

is a matter o chance or them, hence o indierence.4

I begin rom Marxs great insight that the apparently simple category

o labor just work, not weaving, tailoring, welding, teaching, cook-

ing, driving, typing is the product o a society that itsel is able to see

these indierently, as versions o the same kind o activity, reducible to amultiplier so many dollars and cents per hour. For not only does labor

become a new kind o abstraction, the product o the new economic rela-

tions o capitalism, but so does the category o the worker or laborer to

name the masses o wage earners in these new relations.

These new workers began to represent themselves as such not only

as weavers, welders, teachers, and cooks, but as workers and they rep-

resented themselves and were represented by others, socially (through

unions, mutual aid, and riendly societies, as well as through inormal

social networks), politically (through labor parties rom the Workingmans

Party in Philadelphia in 1832 to the Workers Party in Brazi l a century anda hal later), and cultural ly (in novels, songs, lms, government statistics,

sociological studies, autobiographies, newspapers, and so on).

The second great breakthrough was the imagination o an interdepen-

dent globe, a world economy that was truly connected. It is not clear exactly

when such a popular globalism emerges; most o the work on the nineteenth

century is the story o nationalizing populations, turning peoples whose

allegiance was to village or town into national citizens through schools and

armies. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had seen the emergence

o the motley crew that Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Redikker write

o in The Many-Headed Hydra, a shipboard proletariat o sailors, slaves,and pirates who circulated radical ideologies rom port to port. But the

worldwide system o migratory labor that develops in the nineteenth cen-

tury with the steamship the proletarian mass migrations rom Europe

and the Asian contract labor migrations combined with the series o

imperialist wars made transoceanic connections a part o daily lie in the

new industrial cities, company towns, and industrial plantations.


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However, in this case, the great theoretical breakthrough was made

not by Marx or anyone o his generation but by Rosa Luxemburg, a hal-

century younger. For Marxs generation, the international o workers was

experienced as the migration o artisans across Europe and to the settler

colonies, looking or work and or political reuge. Marx himsel, though

not an artisan, lived in the world o migrant German artisans in Paris,

Brussels, and eventual ly London (he also thought seriously o joining the

German artisan diaspora in New York). As a result, the international o

workers meant two things, and one can see this in the actual day-to-day

work o the First International in the 1860s: frst, cross-border strike

support; and second, rhetorical support or the struggles o oppressed

nationalities particularly the I rish, the Poles, and (in a slightly dierent

way) the antislavery Union orces in the U.S. Civil War combined with

material support or the community o transnational political reugees

and exiles.

But i this is the activist meaning o the international, Marx also beginsto imagine the international theoretically ater his arrival in London, the

capital o the British Empire, where he begins a crash sel-education in

imperialism. Though the major ocus o Capital is national England

is its chie illustrat ion Marx begins to sense a global working class

through the vehicle o a global industry: the texti le industry, where a com-

plex global division o labor unites the growing and processing o abrics,

where cotton links Manchester with Charleston, Cairo, and Calcutta, the

Irish immigrant actory women o Manchester with the Arican American

slaves o the plantation South and the dispossessed handloom weavers o

colonial India.But a uller sense o a global capitalism does not emerge until the early

twentieth century, when the extraordinary young postcolonial intellectual

Rosa Luxemburg a Polish Jewish woman who leaves Warsaw as teenage

activist, acing arrest, to study or a doctorate in Zurich and then become

a leader o the German socialist par ty in Berlin rewrites Marxs Capital

in an extraordinary way. For the third and greatest part o her masterwork

The Accumulation of Capital(1913) is the rst account o capitalism as

global proletarianization: as the dispossession o handcrat workers and

subsistence agriculturalists around the world. I wont summarize the ull

theoretical argument, but let me cite the concrete examples in her narrativeto show how Marxs earlier account o the enclosures o the commons in

England has been radical ly globalized by Luxemburg.

Luxemburg sees three aspects o this global proletarianization: rst,

the struggle o capital against what she calls the natural economy in

which her examples are the British in India, the French in Algeria, and the

opening o China during the opium wars. The second moment is the

Though the

major ocus

oCapital is

national

England

is its chie

illustration

Marx begins to

sense a global

working class

through the

vehicle o a

global industry:

the textile

industry.


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130 Michael Denning

struggle against the commodity economy by which she means the strug-

gle against an independent peasant and handicrat economy. Here she has a

chapter on the U.S. plains and the post Civil War revolution in American

agriculture, where the struggle against the natural economy o the Red

Indians is ollowed by a struggle against the commodity economy o the

plains armers (which led to populist revolt); her other example is South

Arica, where again the dispossession o the native peoples is ollowed by

British capitalist war against the Boer settlers. The third moment is the

competitive struggle o capital on the international stage or the remain-

ing conditions o accumulation: the moment o imperialism, the stage

o lending abroad, railroad constructions, revolutions, and wars where

she uses the example o British capital in Latin America and Egypt and

o German capital in Turkey to analyze the eects o oreign debt and

oreign capital investment.5

Though Luxemburgs argument became the ocus o a long and

now-exhausted debate, her powerul and original mapping o the globaldivision o labor was not developed in subsequent work. For most o the

twentieth century, labor was imagined through the lens o the nation. The

very enranchisement o organized workers as citizens o parliamentary

nation-states and racially structured colonial empires led to the national-

izing o labor. I the socialist and labor parties invented the working

class as a political actor, as Donald Sassoon has argued,6 they invented it

as a national working class. Analytically, a methodological nationalism

has inormed most analysis o workers; rom Engels own The Condition of

the English Working Class in 1844 to E. P. Thompsons great study o 1963,

The Making of the English Working Class, the nation ramed the understand-ing o the working class.

By the end o the twentieth century, the emergence o something called

globalization made the notion o a global labor orce more palpable: the

Harvard Business Review published the study Global Work Force 2000 :

The New World Labor Market in 1991. It seemed that the era o global-

ization created or the rst time a world labor orce, a global working class.

The massive migration o the peasantry to global barrios and avelas and

ghettos not least in the United States and the extraordinarily rapid

industrialization o the worlds South has led to a vast remaking o the

working classes; one economist has said that the global Souths industri-alization took place in hal the time, at twice the growth rates, and with

ve times the Norths population in the nineteenth century.7 Moreover,

the eroding or end o the state policies that constituted particular national

working classes with their citizen workers the welare states and iron

rice bowls o the social democracies and the peoples democracies o mid-

By the end o

the twentieth

century, the

emergence o

something called

globalization

made the notion

o a global labor

orce more

palpable.


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century has thrown the national ly constituted parties and unions o the

labor movement in crisis.

But how have we gured this world labor orce, this global working

class? What are the mental maps, the imagined narratives that enable us

to comprehend such an abstract ion?

Global Work Force 2000

The nal decade o the twentieth century saw two powerul attempts to

represent the worlds workers as a whole: the remarkable photography

project o Sebastio Salgado, the exhibition and subsequent book titled

Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age, and the World Banks land-

mark report o 1995, Workers in an Integrating World. Both were widely

noticed; both were controversial. I am less concerned with their adequacy

as representations the debates over Salgados aesthetics or the WorldBanks prescriptions than with the way their implicit narratives one

a vision o a receding industrial world, the other a vision o workers on

the move are symptoms o the dominant contemporary imaginations

o the worlds workers.

Photographing workers and orms o labor around the world between

1986 and 1992, Salgado provides powerul representation o a global work-

ing class that is a contradictory synthesis o retrospect ion and prophecy. (I

you have not seen Salgados work, you can view a number o the images at

Salgados Web site [www.terra.com.br/sebastiaosalgado/]; go to h is The

Majority World: Three Photo Essays and choose Workers. Most o thephotographs I discuss below are on the Web site.) Not only does Salgado

revive the ormal conventions o midcentury black-and-white documentary

photography, but he also casts the work in a retrospect ive mode; it is, he

says, a arewell to a world o manual labor that is slowly disappearing,

the story o an era the industrial era that is coming to an end.8

The works division into six sections refects the divisions o the indus-

tria l economy: part 1 is on the plantation production o agricultural com-

modities (or example, on the rst two pages o the Web photo essay, there

are images o tea plantation workers in Rwanda in 1991 and o sugar cutt ing

brigades in Cuba in 1988); part 2 ocuses on the slaughtering o animalsor mass-produced ood (on the third page o the Web photo essay, there

are images o shellsh shermen in Spain in 1988 and o slaughterhouse

workers in South Dakota in 1988); part 3 depicts the actory production

o industrial metals (iron, steel, lead, magnesium) and means o transport

(bicycles, scooters, automobiles, t rains, and ships) (on pages 4 6 o the


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132 Michael Denning

Web photo essay, there are images o auto workers in India in 1989 90 and

o shipbuilding in France in 1990); parts 4 and 5 ocus on the extraction

o coal, gold, and oi l (pages 7 9 o the Web photo essay include images o

coal miners in Bihar, India, in 1989 and o oil workers in Kuwait in 1991);

and part 6 photographs the building o grand public works (tunnels, dams,

canals) (pages 10 11 o the Web photo essay include images o women

canal workers and dam workers in India in 1989 and tunnel workers in

Europe in 1990).

Salgados workers are not service sector workers: there are no wait-

resses or dishwashers, no janitors or department store clerks. Recalling his

childhood encounter with the great steel complexes o Minas Gerais,

he writes that to this day, steel making is or me an almost religious

experience. And the high priest o this institution called production is

the steelworker. For me, the mills are like huge, powerul gods who rule

the rightening production o metal that dominates our system.9 Like

the rest o us, Salgado is captured by a childhood sense o what workerslook like.

Moreover, the grand oppositions o the age o three worlds seem

to have structured the initial project: Salgado ater all was trained as a

development economist in So Paulo and Paris in the late 1960s and early

1970s, when the power and prestige o radical Latin American dependency

theory was at its height. As a result, one is not surprised by the ocus on

aspects o what is oten called the old international division o labor:

the plantations and mines that produce the third worlds primary com-

modities or the world market sugar, tobacco, tea, oil, sulur; nor is

one surprised by the juxtapositions o labor in capitalist and communistsocieties the opening sequence on sugarcane in Brazil and Cuba, part 3s

pairings o textile mills in Bangladesh and Kazakhstan and o shipyards

in France and Poland. The project was conceived beore the collapse o

the European Communist states, and rhetoric o three worlds persists in

its introduction: The planet remains divided, the rst world in a crisis o

excess, the third world in a crisis o need, and at the end o the century,

the second world that built on social ism in ruins.10

Perhaps the images that most dramatically draw us to the past are the

amous images o the masses o mud-soaked men digging or gold in Serra

Pelada, Brazil (see the rst image in the Web photo essay). You cantlocate it in history, the critic Arthur Danto wrote o them, youre aston-

ished that anything l ike that could happen in the contemporary world.11

The gold images are perhaps the ones most circulated, and they were the

rst ones taken (in 1986); but they are, I would suggest, unrepresentative

o the entire project.

Salgados portrait o the worlds workers is not completely retrospec-


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These images

o workers

surrounded by

the products o

their labor piles

o jute bags in

Bangladesh, o

hot dogs in South

Dakota, or o

bicycle rames in

China restore

the material basis

o our apparently

virtual world.

tive, nor is it exhausted by the images and ideologies that he inherited rom

the age o three worlds. Despite his raming narratives, the photographs

assert the immediacy and contemporaneity o the work being done. Most

o his images do not draw on the classicizing gaze, turning the gestures

o labor into composed still lives o muscle and metal, as in the Dunkirk

urnace image on page 4 o the Web photo essay. Rather, most o his

images o work capture everyday moments: moments o repetitive rou-

tines, o exertion, o rest (note the image o the metallurgical workers in

the Ukrainian sauna on page 4 o the Web photo essay).

I these are not photographs o the age o heroic industrialism, like

Charles Sheelers images o a cathedral-like River Rouge, neither are these

the images o deindustrial ization that dominated U.S. lm and photogra-

phy o the rust belt: emptied actory buildings with broken windows and

padlocked ences waiting or restoration as condominiums and estival

marketplaces, like Jim Wests classic image o a closed Cadillac plant in

Detroit (see http://jimwestphoto.com/set_economic.html). Rather, theseimages o workers surrounded by the products o their labor piles o jute

bags in Bangladesh, o hot dogs in South Dakota, or o bicycle rames in

China restore the material basis o our apparently v irtual world.

Moreover, the photographs create a powerul sense o a world labor

orce. Salgado does not divide his photographs into frst, second, and

third world, nor even into North and South. Nor does he link countries

and products in ways that would accent a divide between the technologies

o an automated, computerized North and a South built on manual labor.

The only U.S. workers photographed as part o the project were South

Dakota meatpackers, and the book ends by juxtaposing massive publicworks projects: the Channel Tunnel in Europe and the Narmada Dam in

India. It is not that Salgado misses the dramatic inequalities across the

globe; nor does he sentimentally construct an encompassing Family o

Man. The rhythm that develops across the our hundred photographs is

built on the aces and heads o the laborers: aces and heads sometimes

open and clear in portraits, sometimes obscured or cut o by the machines

and materials o the labor process (or example, in the image o an auto-

mobile assembly line in Calcutta in 1989), and oten covered by a variety

o rhyming goggles, masks, turbans, and hard hats.

A remarkable contrast to Salgados photos can be seen in the seconddocument rom the mid-1990s that also marked the discovery o a global

working class: the World Bank report o 1995, Workers in an Integrating

World. On its cover (g. 2) was Eight Builders, a 1982 painting o con-

struction workers by one o the centurys great proletarian artists, Jacob

Lawrence; inside was a remarkable portrait in graphs, tables, pie charts,

and anecdotes o the worlds workers.


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134 Michael Denning

The World Bank report reminds us that the representation o labor has

long been an activity o what one might call the labor apparatuses o the

national and colonial state, a central part o those biopolitical regimes thatregulate bodies and populations. The creation o ministries and depart-

ments o labor in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved not

only the polit ical struggles over the legal regulation o labor relations the

legal status o unions, str ikes, and boycotts as well as the state regulation

o wages and hours but also the amassing o statistics about the labor

market and o testimonies in ront o legislative committees. The earliest

o these representations o labor were the amed blue books o the

British actory inspectors there were more than 300 books produced by

140 inspectors in the two decades ater the Factory Act o 1833. These

representations o workers enabled Marx to write Capital.12 Within ahal century, not only had other governments ollowed this path, but the

International Labor Organization (ILO) which was ounded in 1919 as

part o the League o Nations and continued in Geneva, later becoming

part o the UN began to collect worldwide statistics, imagining a global

labor orce.

Figure 2. Cover o 1995

World Bank report

Workers in an Integrating

World, with cover art by

Jacob Lawrence


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The representational work o these labor apparatuses cannot be

underestimated; their censuses and standard-o-living surveys created

the categories through which we stil l think about work. For example, the

ILO helped codiy the divide between the agricultural, industrial, and

service sectors, a categorization in which the service sector was never

really theorized but was a residual category. Yet the debates and polemics

about the apparent transormation marked by the shit rom industrial

to service work depend on this crude measure. Similarly, Harry Braver-

man called attention to the reication o skill levels with the long-lasting

divide between skilled, unsk illed, and semi-skilled, a category that was

created, in the United States, by the census bureau to account or the new

machine operators and assemblers in the mass production plants. Much

o the debate about deskilling depended on these categories; recent work

in labor studies has shown not only that the denition o skill is a cultural

product, but also that workers have continually ought over the classica-

tions o particular jobs.In another way, the testimonies o workers beore legislative committee

hearings orchestrated by union leaders and populist politicians, to be

sure nevertheless mark a crucial moment when working people repre-

sented themselves to the state.

Thus the World Bank report is a vital stake in the way a global labor

orce is being represented. Though its general perspective and its policy

recommendations neoliberalism with a human ace were predictable,

its representation o the global labor orce set the parameters o debate and

discussion or much o the last decade.

What is the picture o the worlds workers that the World Bank givesus? First, it oers a history, a narrative built on the existence and ailure

o two alternatives to the present: the central ly planned economies o the

communist world and the postcolonial import substitution economies. It

is an account o the shit rom what I have called the age o three worlds

to the single integrating world. However, and this is the second point,

they see the world stil l divided into three, no longer ideologically but eco-

nomically: higher, middle, lower income. In 1995, they wrote, the worlds

labor orce was made up o 2.5 billion men and women, almost twice as

many as in 1965.13 About 60 percent o the worlds workers were in low-

income countries; another quarter was in middle-income countries; thehigh-income countries made up 15 percent o the total. When they divide

this by sector agriculture, industry, service, unemployed, not in labor

market they nd that a third o the worlds workers are not in the labor

orce. This is urther elaborated in an extended discussion o what they

see as household labor decisions: who works, how much (labor hours


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136 Michael Denning

and the controversy over the trajectory o labor hours), and where (the

issue o migration).

Their general conclusion is that world inequality is increasing, that we

are seeing divergence, not convergence, and they have several dramatic

representations o the distribution o earnings across the world to show

this. For example, the pay ratio o engineers to women textile workers is

eight to one in Nairobi and three to one in Frankurt. This dramatic di-

erence in internal wage rates is then amplied internationally: the pay

ratio o German to Kenyan engineers is seven to one, that o German to

Kenyan women textile workers is eighteen to one.14

To put names to these numbers, the report opened with our minia-

ture narratives o the worlds workers, which metaphorically account or

three-quarters o the worlds workers: Duong, a Vietnamese rice armer

(Workers like Duong, laboring on amily arms in low- and middle-

income countries, account or about 40 percent o the worlds labor orce);

Hoa, a garment actory worker in Ho Chi Minh City (Wage employeeslike Hoa, working in the ormal sector in low- and middle-income coun-

tries, make up about 20 percent o the global labor orce); Franoise, a

Vietnamese immigrant in France working as a waitress (Franoise and

other service sector workers in high-income countries account or about

9 percent o the global labor orce); and Jean-Paul, a now-unemployed

French garment worker (Workers in industry in high-income countries . . .

make up just 4 percent o the worlds labor orce).15

This World Bank story epitomizes the narrative o the worlds working

class that has come to dominate the last decade. Unlike Salgados linking

o workers by their place in the industrial division o labor plantations,mines, and manuacturing the World Bank links them through a geog-

raphy o jobs, a labor chain that implicitly links Duong with Jean-Paul

through the processes o internal labor migration rom rural agriculture to

urban manuacturing (Hoa is Duongs symbolic daughter) and interna-

tional labor migration rom ormer colony to ormer colonizer (as Franoise

is Hoas symbolic sister), as well as the implied export o garment indus-

try jobs rom Toulouse to Ho Chi Minh City, rom Jean-Paul to Hoa.

So ar, the key imaginative orm by which this new reality o a world

labor orce has been captured is the story o people moving across borders

to nd work: though transnational migrant workers make up only about2 percent o the world labor orce, they have become the gures by which

we can imagine the transormations. One thinks o Gregory Navas great

lm o 1984, El Norte, which ollows a Guatemalan brother and sister as

they pass through the underworld o a rat-inested sewage tunnel to cross

the border between Mexico and Cal iornia; or o Xavier KollersJourney of

Hope (1990), which tells the tale o a Kurdish amily rom Turkey crossing


13/22


Thus, the World

Bank report

would not lead

us to conclude

that workers are

disappearing;

deindustrialization

is actually

industrial

relocation, as

working classes

are being remade

and recomposed.

the Alps in winter; or o Adrian Caetanos Bolivia (2001), with its narra-

tive o the migrant Peruvian restaurant worker in Buenos Aires. Indeed,

Salgados own work testies to this imaginative shit; in the late 1990s, he

ollowed his Workers project with the photographic workMigrations.

Thus, the World Bank report would not lead us to conclude that

workers are disappearing; deindustrialization is actually industrial relo-

cation, as working classes are being remade and recomposed. More-

over, recent studies would suggest here the World Bank report is less

helpul that worker sel-organization and militancy has not, as is oten

thought, declined or disappeared. As the important work o the World

Labor Research Group at the Braudel center in Binghamton has shown,

labor unrest rose around the world in the 1980s and 1990s, ollowing the

shit in manuacturing, and the industrial revolution in the South. Indeed,

by the end o the century we see what one labor historian has called an

unprecedented world-wide action a coordinated global work stoppage

by dockworkers in 1997.16

Nevertheless, though the twentieth century may have been the work-

ers century, hardly anyone thinks the twenty-rst century will be a century

o the worker. What constitutes this crisis o labor? What is wrong with the

notion o work or labor, with the gure o the worker or the laborer? Why

does it seem that we now need a new representation: the multitude, the

subaltern? Even the scholarly representation o labor labor history is

in crisis, challenged by new orms o subaltern studies.

The Crisis of the Figure of Labor

The crisis o labor has many aspects. First and oremost, it has appeared

as a political crisis, a crisis o the social movement that constituted itsel

on the basis o the gure o the worker, the labor parties and trade unions

that emerged in the epoch o Pottier and Degeyters LInternationale.

Union membership has fuctuated wildly over the course o the last cen-

tury, with moments o accelerating growth alternating with periods o

collapse. Socialist and labor parties grew more steadily and held their

ground Goran Therborn and Donald Sassoon both suggest that they

reach the height o their power in the late 1970s but rarely achieved sta-ble majorities o the voting population; they were caught in the dilemma

that Adam Przeworski identifed: in order to gain electoral majorities,

they had a tendency to move away rom the workerist ideologies o their

core constituency to broader populist and nationalist appeals; but that

move away rom workerist ideologies weakened the allegiance o their

core constituents.17


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138 Michael Denning

A century

ater The

Internationale,

labor was oten

seen as an

interest group,

not a fgure or

the whole o

toiling humanity.

More important, the articulation between the movement institutions

and specic groups o workers ree, independent producers, workingmen

earning a amily wage, enranchised (which is to say male, white, native-

born) citizen workers, skilled cratworkers, or, by the mid-twentieth cen-

tury, ormal sector mass-production workers in the commanding Fordist

industries meant that the unions and parties o labor not only adopted

the racial, gender, and national ideologies o those workers but were unable

to see the toil o unwaged, unree, unski lled, unwhite, undocumented, and

unmale toilers as labor, or to see them as workers.

Thus rom the beginning o the labor movement, there were challenges

to its capacity to represent the prisoners o starvation, the wretched o

the earth, by its sibling social movements: the womens movement, the

anticolonial and anti-imperial national movements, the antislavery move-

ment, and the subsequent movement o postslave communities. These

social movements or civil, social, and cultural citizenship oten avoided or

reused the gure o labor. Though Fanon adopted the phrase les damnsde la terre rom The Internationale, he did it to highlight the ailure o

the promise that the international working class would be the human race:

Generally speaking, he writes in the nal pages oThe Wretched of the

Earth, the European workers did not respond to the call. The act was that

the workers believed they too were part o the prodigious adventure o the

European Spirit.18 A century ater The Internationale, labor was oten

seen as an interest group, not a gure or the whole o toiling humanity.

This political crisis o the labor movement is not my central concern

in this essay. It has been recognized by labor movement activists or more

than two decades, and its resolution depends on the success or ailure othose activists to recreate a movement that wins the allegiance o working

people around the globe.

Rather, I would like to address the imaginative crisis, the sense that the

innocuous second hal o that last sentence working people around the

globe is not so innocent, but is an inadequate, superseded gure, a mis-

leading abstraction that comes bundled with a host o suspect connotations

about work and workers. What is wrong with these terms? There are two

dierent indictments that complement each other. First, workeris said to be

too specic a gure, too ull o metaphoric connotations. To say workeris

to conjure up a specic body: the white, male, manual laborer o the classicWobbly poster working in the large actories o the metal-working indus-

tries, l iving in a heterosexual household in the working-class tenements o

the smoke-lled industrial cities, and drinking at the neighborhood tav-

ern, bar, pub, or ca (see Fig. 3). The result o a century o the cultural

enranchisement o labor has been to create such a powerul iconography

that it now seems not only exclusive but tradit ional and conservative. The


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iconography o the blue-collar workingman rom Andy Capp to ArchieBunker to Homer Simpson is that o a lovable authoritarian, patriarchal

but henpecked, always singing that those were the days.

This is not the only image that workerbrings to mind. The iconogra-

phy o labor has, one might say, an entire holy amily, whose second most

common gure is the sweatshop daughter, the swarthy, sultry, and seduced

mil l girl, eternally victimized, rom the Irish seamstresses o the 1840s in

Manchester and New York to the Jewish and Italian shirtwaist makers o

the early twentieth century to the Mexican and Malaysian maquiladora

workers o the late twentieth century. The World Banks narrative o Jean

Paul, Hoa, and Franoise is another version o this iconography.Here we are caught in the ull contradictions o guration itsel. On

the one hand, powerul ideologies those narratives we tell ourselves in

order to make sense o an incomprehensible social totality, those cogni-

tive maps by which we gure where we are depend on richly elaborated

metaphors, giant characters: as John Lennon once sang, a working-class

hero is something to be. The creation o working-class heroes has been

Figure 3. Cover o

Abner E. Woodru,

The Advancing

Proletariat(Chicago,

IWW Publishing

Bureau, 1917).


16/22

140 Michael Denning

an extraordinary cultural revolution, a revaluing o ordinary lives, so that

tragedy is no longer the monopoly o royal houses but is the stu o ple-

bian amilies. Similarly, the invention o labor as a political actor in state

politics municipal and then national is one o the central accomplish-

ments o the labor movement.

On the other hand, the very materialization o labor in specifc

working-class heroes reduces and reies the original promise o the meta-

phor to embody not a single worker but the entire dispersed wretched o

the earth. So it is that the most powerul terms that have been created to

replace the overly rich gure olaborare not the gures o equal metaphoric

richness the people, women, citizen, consumer,gay, or the various nation-

alities but are those terms that attempt to repel any positive content: the

subaltern, which, in the words o Ranajit Guhas 1981 preace to Subaltern

Studies, is a name or the general attribute o subordination . . . whether

this is expressed in terms o class, caste, age, gender, oce or any other

way or the multitude, which is, in the words o Michael Hardt and AntonioNegri, a set o singularities . . . a social subject whose dierence cannot

be reduced to sameness, a dierence that remains dierent.19

One or another o these terms may well prove to be empty enough

to encompass les damns de la terre ; it is worth recalling, however, that

this emptiness was the precise useulness o the term proletarian when it

was adopted by the French and German communists o the 1830s and

1840s. Long beore the advancing male proletarian o the IWW posters,

proletariat was derived rom a Roman census term that meant one who

contributes nothing to the state except ospring; in the early nineteenth

century it reerred to the lowest stratum o poor and propertyless reemen;the term oten meant living in pauperism.20 Labor itsel was an abject

category whose negative connotations working girl long carried the

connotations o prostitution were later transgured: think o the curious

rhetoric o knights o labor and ladies o labor in the 1880s and 1890s.

The other objection to work and labor as categories is that they are

too abstract, that they reduce the tremendous variety and meanings o

human act ivity to a notion o abstract labor. Perhaps the most powerul

version o this argument has been made by Dipesh Chakrabarty, a labor

historian the author o the classic study o jute mill workers o Bengal,

Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890 1940 who develops acrit ique o the very concept o labor. Work and labor, he writes, are

words deeply implicated in the production o universal sociologies. Labor

is one o the key categories in the imagination o capitalism itsel. In the

same way that we think o capitalism as coming into being in all sorts o

contexts, we also imagine the modern category work or labor as emerg-

ing in a ll kinds o histories. . . . Yet the act is that the modern word labor,


17/22


as every historian o labor in India would know, translates into a general

category a whole host o words and practices with divergent and dierent

associations.21 This universa l sociology which he shared ailed to

make sense o the hathiyar puja, the worship o tools, a common estival

in north Indian actories: Like many o my colleagues in labor history, I

interpreted worshiping machinery an everyday act o lie in India, rom

taxis to scooter-rickshaws, minibuses, and lathe machines as insurance

policy against accidents and contingencies. That in the so-cal led religious

imagination (as in language), redundancy the huge and, rom a strict ly

unctionalist point o view, unnecessarily elaborate panoply o iconography

and rituals proved the poverty o a purely unctionalist approach never

deterred my secular narrative.22

Chakrabarty extends this critique o universal sociologies o work to

Marxs concept o abstract labor itsel, arguing in a manner parallel

to Lisa Lowe in her Immigrant Acts that the abstract labor o Marx is,

like the abstract citizen, a particular instance o the idea o the abstracthuman the bearers o rights, or example popularized by Enlighten-

ment philosophers. I wont try to summarize Chakrabartys brilliant

and persuasive interpretation o Marxs theory o abstract labor. But the

diculty he points to and it is similar to the zero-work argument o

autonomist Marxism is that to speak the words work and laboris already

to be speaking the vernacular o capitalism, the language o commodi-

ties, the idiom o political economy. To invoke workers as the gure or

an emancipated humanity is already to accept the logic o capitalism. For

Chakrabarty, an analytical history speaks o workers and work through

the abstract ing categories o capital this would be a labor history. Healso holds out a second history, a subaltern history, which beckons us to

more affective narratives o human belonging where lie orms, although

porous to one another, do not seem exchangeable through a third term o

equivalence such as abstract labor. The subaltern, he writes, is that

which constantly, rom within the narrative o capital, reminds us o other

ways o being human than as bearers o the capacity to labor.23

In many respects, Chakrabarty is right, and even Marx recognized

this. It is worth recalling that the central meaning o communism or

Marx was never the state ownership o the means o production, or even

workers control o production, but the dramatic reduction o the workingday. And the labor movement itsel recognized it: only rarely was worker

or laborerused as a sa lutation. The early labor movement adopted citizen

rom the French Revolution the minutes o the First International are

ull o Citizen Marx the communist movement adopted comrade, and

the trade union movement adopted brotherand sister.

Nonetheless, as many critics have argued, the labor movement oten


18/22

142 Michael Denning

did nd itsel committed to the political economy o capitalism, to a vari-

ety o productionisms that made an absolute virtue o work: trade unions

that ound themselves disciplining work orces and enorcing no-strike

pledges; militants who saw womens entry into wage labor as a necessary

step in the emancipation o women; anarcho-syndicalists whose notions

o workers control celebrated labor as central to manliness; Stakhanovite

communists or whom voluntary work brigades were necessary to the

building o socialism. The contrary traditions that, in Chakrabartys

words, remind us o other ways o being human than as bearers o the

capacity to labor movements or sexual, spiritual, or cultural transor-

mation have always seemed somewhat suspect to the reality-principle

o the labor movements.

In the ace o these critiques, should we abandon the gure o labor? I

think this is neither desirable nor possible. The ongoing search or a term

empty o connotations that could capture the experience o the dispos-

sessed will always be in tension with the ullness o guration. So there isan unavoidable dialectic between the imagination o new empty names to

stand or the incomprehensible and unimaginable totality that is toiling

humanity, the subaltern, the multitude, and the necessity o powerul and

reductive gures to map our relation to other people joined to us by this

global division o labor. We know well the dangers o taking the part or

the whole, but it is dicult to imagine the whole without those metonymic

devices (like the transnational migrants who are a tiny percentage o the

worlds workers). There have been moments where certa in specic groups

o workers did play disproportionate roles in helping to dene, shape, and

trigger oppositional movements.Moreover, this crisis o the gure o labor does not signal an end to

work or to workers. Rather it marks a reconguration o the shape o work

and workers. Despite the heroic attempts to create stable and long-lasting

organizations and narratives to represent working people, there is no stable

working class under capitalism. The term working class, properly under-

stood, Harry Braverman wrote in his classic Labor and Monopoly Capital,

never precisely delineated a specied body o people, but was rather an

expression or an ongoing social process. . . . the working class as it exists

[is] the shape given to the working population by the capital accumulation

process.24 Thus a capitalist economy continually reshapes workplaces andthe working population; it destroys old industr ies and old work orces while

drawing new workers rom around the globe and moving workplaces to new

regions. As Gareth Stedman Jones once noted, the phrase the making o

the English or any other working class is misleading; a working class

is no sooner made than it is unmade and remade. 25 Or, to put it in the


19/22


Insoar as states,

corporations,

and international

fnancial

institutions

continue to

represent and

exploit a global

labor orce, it

is necessary to

engage in the

contest over

representing work

and workers.

language o the Ital ian autonomist thinkers, the process o class composi-

tion is always a process o decomposition and recomposition.

It is perhaps not surprising that the representations o labor oten seem

more solid and enduring than the labor process itsel. We remain caught

in the class maps we inherited rom amily, school, and movies. No mat-

ter what our position in the class structuring o the population, our class

images are usually a generation behind the realities o class ormation,

behind the orces o capitalism that are reshaping the working popula-

tion. Unortunately, this is oten true o the images held by the political

representatives o labor, the leaders and militants o labor part ies, unions,

and associations.

However, insoar as states, corporations, and international nancial

institutions continue to represent and exploit a global labor orce, it

is necessary to engage in the contest over representing work and workers,

creating new and more adequate metaphors as well as new organizations. I

the notion o a global labor movement seems utopian, with only a handulo actions by dockers to point to, it is worth remembering that a century

ago any national labor movement seemed just as unlikely.

One o Marxs central dialectical insights was that capital was just

another name or labor, that accumulation o capital is thereore mul-

tiplication o the proletariat.26 Similarly, since the working class is the

shape capital gives to the working population, the other, more abstract,

name or workers o the world is the international division o labor, a

concept that emerged out o anti-imperialist dependency theory. Without

rehearsing the scholarly controversies over the attempts to dene the old

and the new international divisions o labor, let me suggest that the concepto the international division o labor continues to be a key gure to capture

the unity and division o the global labor orce. Iworkers of the worldcan

lead us to an unrefective assumption o working-class solidar ity, the inter-

national division o labor reminds us o the structured hierarchy between

waged and unwaged work, ormal and inormal sectors, and o the various

ways we divide labor, in practice, in social science, and in popular thought.

The etish o the wage orm has long concealed the hidden abode o

domestic labor, reiying the totality o subaltern lie into apparently dist inct

worlds o workplace and household. Seeing the world working class as the

international division o labor (and vice versa) avoids the alse concretenesso the proletariat it does not equal industria l workers or ormal-sector

wage earners and the alse abstractness o homogenized labor.

It also enables us to resist a sense that there is a single trajectory toward

a homogenization o workers, toward a global unity or necessary solidarity.

It is understandable that the union and party politics o workers alliance


20/22

144 Michael Denning

constantly tempts militants to read a necessary logic o all iance into capital-

ism, imagin ing that one could move easily rom the social construction o

abstract labor in a capitalist economy to the actual reduction o dierences

among workers in the ormation o specic historical working classes.

But the central dynamic o working-class lie under capitalism is nei-

ther a secular trend toward homogenization, nor an innite prolieration

o dierences, but the dialectic between, to use Marxs words, competition

and association. The same orces that create the conditions or competi-

tion among workers (wage labor rests exclusively on competition between

the laborers, Marx writes in theManifesto) also create the condit ions or

association.27 But the reverse is also true. The orms o lie and struggle

o the unwaged, the unemployed, the inormal, the unrepresented are as

central to this dialectic o competition and association as are the lives and

struggles o those capital deems workers.

To the command o neoliberal globalization workers o the world,

compete we must answer with that old slogan o the global justice move-ment: workers o the world, unite. But in doing so, we need to put it in

new words, new songs, new gures o that yet unimagined, unrepresented

collectivity.

Notes

1. U.S. version o Eugne Pottier and Pierre Degeyter, LInternationale, in

Pete Seeger and Bob Reiser, Carry It On! A History in Song and Picture of the Work-

ing Men and Women of America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 97.

2. This was written as one o the Working Group on Globalization and

Cultures working papers on transnational cultural studies, and I want to thank

my collaborators in the Working Group (www.yale.edu/laborculture/wkg.grp_

GC.html). I also want to thank the respondents to earlier versions delivered in

Michigan, Johannesburg, Seattle, and Tepoztln: John Beck, Lisa Fine, Jyotsna

Singh, Bridget Kenny, Jon Hyslop, Achille Mbembe, Nikhil Singh, Reinaldo

Romn, Nichole Sanders, Elliott Young, Kristina Boylan, and Victor Macas.

3. Eric Hobsbawm, The Forward March o Labour Halted? Marxism

Today, September 1978, 279 86.

4. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage Books,

1973), 103 4.

5. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (New York: MonthlyReview, 1964), 419.

6. Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The Western European Left

in the Twentieth Century (New York: New Press, 1996), 7.

7. A. Singh, quoted in Ronaldo Munck, Globalisation and Labour: The New

Great Transformation(London: Zed Books, 2002), 107.

8. Sebastio Salgado, Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age (New York:

Aperture, 1993), 6.


21/22


9. Ibid., 13 14.

10. Ibid., 7.

11. Cited in Julian Stallabrass, Sebastio Salgado and Fine Art Photojournal-

ism, New Left Review, no. 223 (1997): 132.

12. David MacGregor, Hegel, Marx, and the English State (Toronto: University

o Toronto Press, 1996), 218.

13. World Bank, Workers in an Integrating World(World Development Report

1995) (New York: Oxord University Press, 1995), 9.

14. Ibid., 11.

15. Ibid., 1.

16. For the work o the World Labor Research Group, see Special Issue on

Labor Unrest in the World-Economy, 1870 1990, ed. Beverly J. Silver, Giovanni

Arrighi, and Melvyn Dubosky, Review 18, no. 1 (1995); and Beverly J. Silver,

Forces of Labor: Workers Movements and Globalization since 1870 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2003). On the dockworkers action, see Kim Moody,

Workers in a Lean World(London: Verso, 1997), 249.

17. Goran Therborn, The Lie and Times o Socialism, New Left Review,

no. 194 (1992): 17 32; Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism; Adam Przewor-

ski, Paper Stones: A History of Electoral Socialism (Chicago: University o ChicagoPress, 1986).

18. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New

York: Grove Press, 2004), 237.

19. Ranajit Guha, Preace reprinted in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakra-

vorty Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxord University Press,

1988), 35; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in

the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 99.

20. Hal Draper, Karl Marxs Theory of Revolution: Volume Two (New York:

Monthly Review, 1978), 131.

21. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 2000), 76.

22. Ibid., 78.23. Ibid., 52, 71, 94.

24. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly

Review, 1974), 24, 27.

25. Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1983), 179 238.

26. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin,

1976), 764.

27. Karl Marx, Political Writings, Volume 1: The Revolutions of 1848, ed. David

Fernbach (New York: Random House, 1973), 79.


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denning, representing global labor

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