Wednesday, September 11, 2024

Towards a Genealogy of Right Workerism: Notes on the Origin of Bizarro World





 At the end of a summer with at least a little time to read books not directly connected to teaching or writing I picked up Melinda Cooper's Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance and Stéphane Legrand's Ayn Rand: Femme Capital. The first I had been meaning to get to since it came out, and the second has lingered on my shelf for awhile. I was always curious what a French philosopher who has worked on Marx and Foucault would say about the very American (and anti-Marxist) phenomena of Ayn Rand.

Reading both of them at the same time helped me think about a question that I have been thinking about and writing about for awhile. It is something that I sometimes refer to as "right workerism," the way in which work and the virtues of work appear less and less to be the terms of some contestation of capitalism than its strongest pillar of support. All of this leads to the inverted and bizarro world in which it is the right that positions itself as defending the worker, while the left is seen as synonymous with a parasitic dependent. This parasite is not identified with capitalists, but with everyone from "welfare queens" to "public workers." Those people who work in the public sphere are seen to be not truly workers, since their status, wages, and protections stem from unions and political organization, and, even more paradoxically, business owners, or capitalists, are seen to be the true workers, even the creators of work itself. As Etienne Balibar describes this situation, The capitalist is defined as worker, as an ‘entrepreneur’; the worker, as the bearer of a capacity, of a human capital.”

The second chapter of Cooper's book gives something of a genealogy of this reversal, by focusing on the particular role of the construction worker in articulating a representation of the working class. This genealogy has a few key moments. One of the first was the "hard hat riots" of 1970 in which a group of construction workers attacked student antiwar demonstrators. This visible moment of a vocal minority took place against a larger backdrop of a silenced majority, as Cooper argues, "polling data consistently showed that blue collar workers were more opposed to the war then the college-educated middle class--after all, their sons were more likely to be serving there." It was not just the war, Cooper situates the image of the conservative blue collar worker against the revolutionary challenges to not only wages, but the organization of work itself. 

"From the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, who refused to take orders from the ostensibly progressive United Auto Workers, to flight attendants, secretaries, and domestic workers, this was an era of unprecedented organizing on the part of those who had been relegated to the margins of the Fordist labor contract. Industrial unions were even beginning to form promising new alliances with the New Left Student movement, despite the inauspicious experience of the 1970s hard-hat riots." 

Cooper, like Chamayou, situates neoliberalism as a new form of governmentality against the interregnum of contestation and disorder. Integral to this new form of governmentality is the fragmentation of any solidarity, any unity of workers, as workers. This fragmentation took purchase in the existing divisions of society, divisions of race, gender, and nationality, but also in the instituted division of the working class. As Cooper argues public and private workers had both different demographic make ups, different levels of organizing, and different wage pressures. The basis for this division was institutionalized during the extension of labor protections in the middle of the twentieth century, but it was further driven asunder in the struggles over taxes and inflation. It is one particular worker, that of construction that stands as not just the symbol of a different worker politics, but a different idea of worker struggle. 

"It was in the construction sector, however, that the dividing lines between traditional employment and small business ownership were truly blurred. For much of the twentieth century it was common practice among specialized trades workers and journeymen to alternate between unionized employment on large construction sites and off-season work as sole traders on small residential projects. This resulted in an ambiguous class position very different from that of industrial wage worker. Labor historians note that "in large enterprises, the distinction between owner-manager and employee worker became ever clear as the rift between them widened. But for carpenters these distinctions remained blurred, for decades longer. Unlike an industrial worker, a carpenter often owned the tools of his trade. There was considerable fluidity between working as an employee and becoming the owner of a small construction business. In some ways, many construction workers were more like small businessmen than industrial laborers."

"Ironically, it was this hybrid class status that had conferred on the building trades their unique bargaining power throughout much of the twentieth century. As holders of a specialized skill set who could readily withdraw their labor by setting up shop on their own, tradesmen were able to demand consistently better working conditions than industrial workers. This helps explain both their exemplary position within the midcentury union movement and their recurrent tendency to eschew solidarity with other workers. As unionized workers, building tradesmen had the power to extract wage concessions that other workers could only dream of, yet their part-time status as small owner-managers also created a sense of distance from the rest of the working class. Ultimately, the ambivalent class position of building trades workers would be used against them in particular, as it was in the construction sector that the instrument of legal misclassification would be wielded most ruthlessly as a tool of wage suppression."

It is Reagan who in some sense played both sides against the middle, stressing the unique status of construction workers as aspiring small businesses in order to subject them to more exploitation. Many people know the story of Reagan firing the striking air traffic control workers, pitting public workers against private workers, but I did not known about his long history espousing the ideal of the independent contractor to further atomize the working class. There are some interesting passages in Cooper's book on Reagan's longstanding interest in the status of the independent contractor, stemming from his years in Hollywood. As Cooper writes, "In reaching out to blue-collar workers, Reagan addressed them first and foremost as taxpayers and made every effort to downplay their connections with other wage workers. With government spending now coded as inflationary and biased toward the "unproductive" public-sector employee. Reagan sought to persuade his audience that tax cuts, not direct spending, were the best way to restore the blue-collar wage." 

Reagan's rhetoric created both new commonalities between trade workers and small business owners, while exacerbating divisions between public and private workers. It also fundamentally changed the strategy of workers, moving them away from the collective strategy of organizing to an individual strategy of hustling. The ideal of the independent contractor promises individual freedom but what it offers is collective disenfranchisement, stripping the collectively gained protections of workers and cutting them off from their collective power. As Cooper writes, 

"There can be no doubt that Reagan's paeans to small-scale entrepreneurial freedom played to the real aspirations of blue-collar wage workers. Yet the more he insisted on the effective identity between the worker and the small business owner, the more elusive the transition became for those who started out as wage dependents. The long-term effect of the Republican war on labor was to multiply the number of workers toiling under the direct authority of small business owners and sharpen the class divide between them, making it increasingly difficult of the misclassified workers to assert their bargaining power qua wage workers, let alone accede to the position of owner manager."

As with Reagan's welfare queen this is a myth that long outlasted his presidency. The idea that the true worker is an independent worker, and thus in some sense that the true worker is a capitalist enterprise  of one, has longstanding effects on our image and ideal of work. It posits a different strategy and a different subjectivity than worker solidarity, one predicated on not just self interest, but on pitting worker against worker. The struggle against taxes is also a struggle against those workers whose wages are paid by taxes. 

Yves Citton has described the period from the Reagan into the present as one of the attenuation of class struggle. Class struggle is still lived experienced, in increased worker hours, dwindling wages, and loss of job security, but class struggle ceases to be the way people represent or thematize either their condition, their insecurity, or their strategy, their struggle. We could say that a corollary of this way of thinking is that the attenuation of class struggle leads to a displacement of struggle. We get pseudo class struggles pitting private workers against public workers, tax payers against teachers and so on. 




It just so happens that I was reading Stéphane Legrand's Ayn Rand: Femme Capital at the same time as Cooper's book. I do not recall why or how I picked up this book. I was curious what Legrand, a philosopher that I know of primarily from his  work on Foucault and Marx, would have to say about Rand. Rand has always been weirdly fascinating to me even though I could never make it through any of her books, or, more to the point, she is fascinating to me because I could never make it through any of her books. It has always seemed strange that such a flatfooted propagandist elicited such cult like following. It just so happened that Legrand's book functioned as interesting complement to Cooper's. If Cooper showed the politics, the policy, that worked to produce the worker as human capital, as investor in themselves, Legrand shows how Rand made this seem sexy, made it seemed like a rebellion to some kind of dominant sense. 

Legrand's book is in part on the person Rand, part on her novels, and part on the people who have made her into a religion, up to and including Paul Ryan. As Legrand writes about the mediocrity referre above, "Ayn had this rare capacity, in her novels as in her life, to transfigure mediocrity into greatness, to operate a narrative transubstantiation which--as the ritual of the mass is supposed to change the most noxious swill into the blood of God--leads us to venerate as the paradigm of the great man a comedian of his own ideal, a ridiculous, capricious and narcissistic type who in the real world would be treated with a mixture of irritation and amusement." Despite Rand's absolute hostility to dialectical thinking, and her attempt to make tautology the center of her own philosophy and politics, A=A, the individual is self interest, one can see a strange dialectic in her thought in which what is culturally dominant, selfishness, is treated as rebellious, and the impersonal and abstract imperatives of capitalism are made into the pinnacle of humanity. 

Tautology is not entirely accurate as Legrand argues Rand's thought could be considered its own strategy of the "sive," after Spinoza's famous Deus sive Natura, God, that is nature. 

"If one prefers, Spinoza does not demonstrate that nature is divine--which would amount to adding a supplementary property to the idea of nature--he dissolves the concept of divinity into that of nature (in the philosophical scientific sense of the term, not the birds and the bees)--which in fact amounts to removing a whole series of properties which are traditionally attributed to it (personality, emotions, free will, transendence...). The concepts of morality and egoism (or capitalism) in Rand are in the same relation." 

The formulation of Rand's thought is "egoism that is morality." Such a definition strips morality of all that is generally meant by the term, such as an imperative or an ought, making it less an ideal than a justification. 

Oddly Spinoza might offer one way of thinking about what made Rand possible. Abstract ideals, even the ideal of rationality itself, need particular figures, particular representations in order to make them imaginable. This is what Rand did, created an image, a myth, to make capital, an impersonal system of domination, seem to be the expression of individual qualities. Here again we see a reversal of Spinoza's strategy, where Spinoza equated God and nature to de-anthropomorphize the former Rand equates capitalism to morality, egoism or capitalism is morality, to give the former flesh and blood, to make it a person. To cite Legrand again, "Where Chaplin in Modern Times fifty years earlier, utilized his iconic, charismatic, and recognized character to give body and visibility to the impersonal powers at work in the capitalist enterprise and society that crushes bodies and souls, make its inhumanity apparent, Rand does an absolutely inverse operation, personalizing and humanizing it..."

There is much more that could be said about both of these books. What strikes me is the way in which policy and mythology, politics and poetics, appear as two sides of the same relation, necessarily supplementing and reinforcing each other. Could we have had Reagan without Rand or Rand without Reagan. The order and connection of ideology is the same as the order and connection of exploitation. Or, maybe this is just what happens when you read two books at the same time at the end of the summer. 

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