Workers of the World, Divide! Work and the Constitution of the People

 

Pictures from Princeton (where this paper was presented)

This might be the worst place to begin, but in February Marjorie Taylor-Greene stated the following about the Department of Government Efficiency's cuts of the jobs of government workers across a broad swath of office and programs, from USAID to the NOAA, “Those are not real jobs producing federal revenue, by the way. They're consuming taxpayer dollars. Those jobs are paid for by the American tax people, who work real jobs, earn real income, pay federal taxes and then pay these federal employees." This is a terrible place to begin, because as is often case during the Trump years, we have a statement which seems so outlandish, so beyond the pale of what generally counts as political discourse, that it is tempting to discount it entirely as hyperbole if not insanity. However, I would like to argue that this extreme point can be situated in a broader logic that is at the core of right wing populism, both here in the US, and elsewhere. This core is what I would call “right workerism,” a claim for the virtues of work, for both the individual, people are worthwhile because of their ability to work, and as the constitution of the people, the people, the nation, is defined as a nation of workers. I am calling this right workerism, to contrast it , in the sharpest terms possible with left workerism, in which work, labor, functions as a point of antagonism between workers and capitalists. Work no longer functions as a point of division, between capitalists and workers, exploiter and exploited, but draws new lines of demarcation between “true” and “false” workers. I will return to this point, but first I would like to situate Representative Greene’s statement within this a larger logic, offering both a historical genesis and a conceptual genesis of right workerism.

The history does not begin with Trump or the last two tumultuous months, but can be trace further back to Ronald Reagan it not Nixon. In saying this I am following the history that Melissa Cooper puts forward in Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance. As Melinda Cooper argues, one of the central aspects underlying Reagan’s presidency was the way in which he effaced the division between workers and capitalists, while driving a wedge between those workers in the private sphere and those in the public sector. With respect to the former, Reagan, as Nixon before him, made construction workers his central figure of workers, precisely because of their proximity to independent contractors. As Cooper writes,

"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."

 The construction worker and with it the hard hat,  became an image of the worker, precisely because such workers could dream of their independence from the wage relation, dream of becoming capitalists or at least independent contractors. The proximity to capital, to capitalists, was also a marker of a distance to other kinds of workers, such as factory workers, who, over the course of the sixties and seventies, proved to be both too militant and too diverse. The hard hat, and with it the construction worker, became the particular image of work, precisely because of the way that it divided such workers from not only factory workers, but more importantly workers in the public sector. 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."

What Reagan offered was an imaginary identification in place of real solidarity. The supposed independence and freedom of an independent contractor was aspirational at best, and an illusion, an “imaginary relation to the real conditions,” at worst, to use Althusser's term. The idea that anyone could become their own boss, and thus some themselves as a boss or potential boss,  made possible legislation that made working conditions more precarious, reducing pay for all workers and increasing insecurity and precarity. 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."

We can once again see in Reagan’s presidency a fundamental shift in the mythocracy, to use Yves Citton’s term, transformations of the images and ideas that we use to make sense of the world. Citton focuses on the way in which Reagan famously gave us the “welfare queen,” a figure that still haunts the rightwing imagination, but we could argue that the division that Reagan also contributed to the right wing imagination by replacing the class divide between workers and bosses, wage labors and capitalists, with a tripartite division between “blue, white, and pink collar,” a division that is both immediately recognizable and effaces the class divisions constitutive of the labor process. The blue collar became the "real worker" and the one who could immediately identify with the fantasy of becoming their own boss, this figure appears again and again, remember "Joe the Plumber" during the Obama campaign? Creating a nation of temporarily embarrassed millionaires, or billionaires to adjust for inflation, takes work. 

These historical transformations have their condition of possibility the nature of work itself. There is a fundamental polysemy of the very notion of work, to paraphrase Aristotle, work is said in many senses. It is difficult to unify the different and disparate activities undertaken, the different tasks, under one concept. Here, to take another philosophical reference, we could say that it is Spinoza that provides a way of thinking about both the multiple senses of work, and their relation to both the universality of the concept and the particular nation of the imagination. As Spinoza argues, universal terms like “man” are less clear concepts than points of confusion. As Spinoza writes,

Those notions they call Universal, like man, horse, dog, and the like have arisen from similar causes, namely because so many images (e.g., of men) are formed at one time in the human body that they surpass the power of imagining—not entirely, of course, but still to the point where the mind can imagine neither slight differences of the singular [men] (such as the color and size of each one, etc.) not their determinate number, and imagines distinctly on what they all agree in, insofar as the effect the body (EIIP40schol)

This leads to an unstated division with respect to the universal term itself. What is presented as a universal, is actually the site of multiple competing particulars, shaped by the particular way in which individuals have been expected. As Spinoza writes with respect to his example “man,”

For example those who have more often regarded men’s stature with wonder will understand by the word “man” an animal or erect stature. But those wo have been accustomed to consider something else, will form another common image of men—for example that man is an animal capable of laughter, or of a featherless biped, or a rational animal (EIIP40schol).

Returning to the concept of work, we could say that there are not only different senses, some which stress the physical difficulty, others stress that an activity can be performed for payment, a wage, while others stress the anthropological demand to produce the necessities of existence, all of which lead to conflict and disagreement. The phrase “everyone must work” can be taken in different senses as an economic imperative, work is how one makes a living in our society; an anthropological imperative, human beings need to work, transform their environment in order to survive; or as an ethical imperative, work is a necessary condition for self-respect and standing in society. These different senses of the imperative have different demands, and our operative at different times in different manners, but all of that specificity is elided in the assertion “everyone must work.” As Spinoza writes, “it is not surprising that so many controversies have arisen among the philosophers who have wished to explain natural things by the mere images of things.”

Sometimes these debates about the meaning of a term, are just that, debates between philosophers, academic speculation. This is not true of work. While there may be different meanings and ideas about work ranging from the physical to there anthropological, there is one sense, one meaning, that is operative, a particular sense that is taken to be be universal. The wage form dominates over all other senses of work, work is whatever one does for a paycheck. Such hegemonies are never complete, can never dispense with the other senses. As much as wage labor defines the central meaning of work, this dominant sense draws from a disparate series of meanings that are also invoked, it is the wage that defines work, but the wage form is still understood as being a measure of a physical expenditure, a reward for working hard, and as in some sense a reflection of its anthropological importance, work is a contribution to society.  The phrase "making a living" functions by holding these different senses together, short circuiting the division between the economic and the anthropological.

These different definitions can sustain and reinforce wage labor, or they can undermine it. Sometimes it is clear that wage labor, work done for a wage has little or nothing to do with what is socially useful, as in David Graeber’s famous definition of “Bullshit Jobs,” jobs that are pernicious or pointless but still collect a wage. It is because of this instability and ambivalence that any dominant meaning of work necessarily draws from other divisions, other relations, and ultimately other imaginations in order to sustain itself. Our dominant image and definition of work is not just one that draws from the wage relation, but in doing so it necessarily intersects with a gender and racial relations. With respect to the former, there is a long history of the division between waged and unwaged work lining up with the gendered division of labor. Waged work was done by men outside the home, while this work was supported by the unwaged labor of cleaning, care, and social reproduction in the home. This division was so entrenched that even as its material conditions came undone, leading to the demise of the housewife as an economic position, and the work of social reproduction became waged in the form of daycare, cleaning services, and fast food, these actions still fell outside of what was considered to be real, which is to say productive work. A persistence of the past into the present can also describe the intersection of the hierarchies of the wage relation. Race was also a marker of exclusion from the freedom and autonomy that came with the wage. Slavery was as much a condition of capitalism as unwaged housework. However, this is not just past tense, as Stuart Hall argues, “Race is the modality in which class is lived.” The hierarchies of race shape and are shaped by the disavowed hierarchy of the labor relation. Overrepresentation, the tendency to make the male worker engaged in a productive activity such as construction, the image of work as such is necessary overdetermined (and undetermined). 

It is here that we can see the two directions of the sketch above converge. It is because work, like many universal terms is defined in part by its particularity, conflict, and unstable hegemonies, that is has a history, or that there can be a politics of this history. As I said at the opening, the politics of work is not just that there is a hegemony over the concept of work, although that in itself would be political, especially in the way that it intersects with different exclusions from who gets to count as a real worker, which is to say who gets to count at all, but that work is itself a figure of the people. This then raises a second question, What constitutes a people: what makes a people a people? In Faire Peuples Gérard Bras has argued that we have to think of the nation and the state as two different scenes of the people, two different ways of imagining and constituting the people. The people are too disparate and disperse to constitute anything like a determinable concept, there are too many and too many different ways to grasp them, thus nation and state stand in as two different scenes, two different ways of imagining. They each have their own specific dramaturgy, their own specific representations and rituals that re-present a multitude of individuals as a particular people. Bras’ comments follow Etienne Balibar, who argued that the conflict between two different scenes of the people, The people can refer to a unity defined according to shared language, history, and tradition, a nation; or the people can refer to a set of laws and institutional norms that define and determine collective belonging, a state. These two different constitutions of the people are in some sense the structural condition of modern nation states; there is no state that does not in some sense ground itself in a nation, even as heterogeneity of languages and customs strains any unity of belonging and tradition, and there is no nation that does not aspire to being a state, to constituting its own laws and sovereignty. Which is split between nation and state, the particularity of national belonging and the universality of citizenship. As Balibar writes, 

"For my part, I consider the demarcation between democratic and liberal policies and conservative or reactionary policies today to depend essentially (if not exclusively) on attitudes towards ethnic discriminations and differences of nationality on whether pride of place is given to national belonging or emancipatory goals (the rights of man or citizen)."

Bras ultimately argues that there are three scenes of the people. The nation, the state, and a third dimension of the people that could be summed up as “the streets.” This is the people that emerges and claims its name in a direct contestation of its appropriation. When people in the streets chant, “This is what Democracy looks like,” it is a claim to reappropriate the very constitution of the people. These three scenes are each in conflict, but in different ways, between the nation and the state we have the conflict between two different ways of positing what constitutes commonality. In the first it is a common shared something, a language, a history, a tradition, while in the second, in the nation, it is a common set of laws and norms for living, a common laws. Between the state and the streets we have a conflict between the laws and authorities as they exist now, the existing constitution, and the popular will, the people, that is their source, constitutive power. The people are figured alternately as remembered in history, as instituted in laws, and as constituting themselves in the streets. These are all different particular senses, particular images, underlying the universality of the people. Three different scenes and senses of the people which converge and diverge in specific historical moments. I could be argued that we are always dealing with three different scenes, in varying degrees and different relations, sometimes the nation, state, or streets are dominant. 

I have added a fourth scene, one drawn not from the nation, the state, or the streets, but the construction site, which is not to say any workplace, because this image of the people as worker is defined by its constitutive exclusions. The worker as a figure of the people is defined as much by its exclusions, of the various types of workers, unwaged in the home, engaged in services, and public workers, as it is by its erroneous inclusions. One of the defining characteristics of the worker understood in this way is that it replaces economics with aesthetics, not just in terms of the color of one’s collar, but in terms of an entire wardrobe and lifestyle. Deprived of the defining characteristic of exploitation, of class struggle, anyone can be identified as a worker. Donald Trump has been called "the Blue Collar Billionaire," class is just eating at McDonalds. As Etienne Balibar describes this topsy turvy world, “The capitalist is defined as a worker, as an ‘entrepreneur’; the worker, as the bearer of a capacity, of a ‘human capital.” More troubling is that as a figure of a the people, the worker is closer to that first figure of the people, that of the nation, than the citizen, or the streets. It is often in the name of the worker, of protecting jobs, that we see the harshest demands to limit who gets to live and belong to the nation. The worker is no longer a figure of exclusion, those who are in civil society but not of civil society, or of revolution, of those who have nothing to lose but their chains; instead the worker has become a figure for whom exclusions must be made, and of the existing order that must be maintained. The worker has displaced the citizen, and the creation and protection of jobs has replaced the rights of the citizen.

Such a sketch is admittedly at once partial and overstated. It is an attempt to sketch out a particular imaginary that I am calling right workerism. This imaginary has its structural condition in the very gap that separates particular experiences from universal conditions, and, as I have argued is the product of a long history which has obscured the divisions between capitalist and worker, replacing them with a series of divisions between private and public worker, the worker of this nation against the workers of that nation. Its hegemony is not total, or complete. One of the striking things about the current historical moment is the symbolic value of work is being elevated as its material value is being reduced. Work is made the condition for belonging and for self-respect at the same time that it is incapable of paying bills or providing for a living. This has led to the renewal of work as a site of contestation and transformation, in the organizing of new unions and other activities. If the current direction of politics can be understood as an attempt to hold together an image of the worker as entrepreneur of the self with the nation as the site of the people then perhaps its contestation can be found in the conjunction of the worker and the streets, on insurrection. Such a conjunction would fundamentally redefine what it means to work, moving away from the images of productivism and independence that define the image of the worker, work as a figure of separation and division, separating real workers from mere pretenders, instead it would make work a figure of not just solidarity, but dependence. It is only be recognizing how much we are dependent upon each other for our survival and existence that it becomes possible to transform the people a force of insurrection and transformation.

Presented at Princeton University in March of 2025.