The Ungovernable Society E-Book

Grégoire Chamayou

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 692

Beschreibung

Rebellion was in the air. Workers were on strike, students were demonstrating on campuses, discipline was breaking down. No relation of domination was left untouched - the relation between the sexes, the racial order, the hierarchies of class, relationships in families, workplaces and colleges. The upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s quickly spread through all sectors of social and economic life, threatening to make society ungovernable. This crisis was also the birthplace of the authoritarian liberalism which continues to cast its shadow across the world in which we now live. To ward off the threat, new arts of government were devised by elites in business-related circles, which included a war against the trade unions, the primacy of shareholder value and a dethroning of politics. The neoliberalism that thus began its triumphal march was not, however, determined by a simple 'state phobia' and a desire to free up the economy from government interference. On the contrary, the strategy for overcoming the crisis of governability consisted in an authoritarian liberalism in which the liberalization of society went hand-in-hand with new forms of power imposed from above: a 'strong state' for a 'free economy' became the new magic formula of our capitalist societies. The new arts of government devised by ruling elites are still with us today and we can understand their nature and lasting influence only by re-examining the history of the conflicts that brought them into being.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

Introduction

Notes

Part I. Indocile workers

1 Indiscipline on the shop floor

Notes

2 Human resources

Notes

3 Social insecurity

Notes

4 War on the unions

Notes

Part II. Managerial revolution

5 A theological crisis

Notes

6 Ethical managerialism

Notes

7 Disciplining the managers

Notes

8 Catallarchy

Notes

Part III. Attack on free enterprise

9 Private government under siege

Notes

10 The battle of ideas

Notes

11 How to react?

Notes

12 The corporation does not exist

Notes

13 Police theories of the firm

Notes

Part IV. A world of protesters

14 Corporate counter-activism

Notes

15 The production of the dominant dialogy

Notes

16 Issue management

Notes

17 Stakeholders

Notes

Part V. New regulations

18 Soft law

Notes

19 Costs/benefits

Notes

20 A critique of political ecology

Notes

21 Making people responsible

Notes

Part VI. The ungovernable state

22 The crisis of governability of the democracies

Notes

23 Hayek in Chile

Notes

24 The sources of authoritarian liberalism

Notes

25 Dethroning politics

Notes

26 The micropolitics of privatization

Notes

Conclusion

Notes

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

Introduction

Begin Reading

Conclusion

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 17

Figure 1

The company and its stakeholders according to Rhenman

Figure 2

The firm viewed according to the model of production

Figure 3

The firm viewed according to the stakeholder model

Chapter 21

Figure 4

American Can Company advertisement, 1936 (detail)

Figure 5

Television ad by the ‘Keep America Beautiful’ campaign (1971).

Chapter 23

Figure 6

Typology of forms of government according to Hayek

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The Ungovernable Society

A Genealogy of Authoritarian Liberalism

Grégoire Chamayou

Translated by Andrew Brown

polity

Originally published as La société ingouvernable © La Fabrique Éditions, 2018

This English edition © 2021 by Polity Press

This book is supported by the Institut français (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess programme.

This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE Foundation (French American Cultural Exchange). French Voices Logo designed by Serge Bloch.

Illustrations from R. Edward Freeman, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach © Cambridge University Press, 2010, reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press through PLSclear.

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4202-4

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Chamayou, Grégoire, author. | Brown, Andrew, translator.Title: The ungovernable society : a genealogy of authoritarian liberalism / Grégoire Chamayou ; translated by Andrew Brown.Other titles: Société ingouvernable. EnglishDescription: Medford : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A brilliant work that shows how the political contours of our contemporary neoliberal societies took shape in the crisis-laden decade of the 1970s”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020032896 (print) | LCCN 2020032897 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509542000 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509542017 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509542024 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Free enterprise--History. | Capitalism--History. | Liberalism--History. | Labor discipline--History.Classification: LCC HB95 .C47613 2021(print) | LCC HB95(ebook) | DDC 330.12/2--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032896LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032897

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FOREWORD

Grégoire Chamayou’s book should be read as an important contribution to the study of neoliberalism – or whatever we are to call the great renewal of reactionary thought that emerged in the 1970s and still dominates our society today. In fact, he contributes to the literature on neoliberalism while simultaneously rejecting that term neoliberalism itself – or, rather, fundamentally reorienting our understanding of it.

Chamayou accomplishes this reorientation, in part, by giving voice and priority to intellectual and political figures that have largely been left out of the standard accounts. He orchestrates wonderfully the conservative and reactionary chorus in the United States in the battle of ideas that in the 1970s arrived at a new hegemony. He does, of course, engage with and give insightful interpretations of the well-known protagonists of neoliberal economics, such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and James Buchanan. But the standard focus on such figures leads too often to a conception of neoliberalism as a single, coherent project. Chamayou demonstrates, instead, that the movement was profoundly heterogeneous.

In fact, one of the most innovative aspects of the book is, in my view, the way Chamayou delves deeply into the literature emerging in the 1970s on management and managerialism, which in many respects diverges significantly from neoliberal economics. Managers, business leaders and management theorists, rather than thinking only in economic terms, constructed a political project, opposing workplace democracy, for instance, in order to preserve the authority of the ‘private government’ of the firm. Management theorists developed a practical, strategic conception of governance, no longer aimed internally within the individual business but instead oriented outward: an expansive notion of strategic management intended to govern also the social world outside of the firm, ruling over workers, shareholders, consumers and other social forces, as if in concentric waves. These lesser known authors of management theory are in Chamayou’s argument just as important as the well-known neoliberal economists, if not more so, in developing the new paradigm. By highlighting their perspective and their importance, he casts the entire project in a new light.

A second way that Chamayou reorients our understanding of this movement is by emphasizing its internally varied and political character. This is particularly apparent from the analyses of strategic management. Rather than analysing neoliberalism as a solely or even primarily economic project, we must grasp this heterogeneous project that is political at its core. Many authors have highlighted how neo-liberalism is intimately tied to authoritarian state policies, for instance in the Pinochet, Reagan and Thatcher governments. For Chamayou, however, the authoritarian rule that accompanies neoliberalism is not only or even primarily based in the state but instead the power of managers and the firm. Authoritarian liberalism is Chamayou’s preferred term to grasp the range of strategic deployments of power extending from state to business.

The political nature of the movement is made particularly evident by the repeating lament that Chamayou traces among management theorists: that the firm and society as a whole have become ungovernable. This plaintive cry echoes the evaluations of neoconservatives and neoliberals of the era. The management discourse against workplace democracy, for example, parallels Samuel Huntington’s well-known claim that democracy has gone too far and is no longer sustainable because it has allowed too many ‘minorities’ to make demands on the state and on social resources. It is fascinating (and chilling) to see how in these conservative and reactionary circles in the 1970s, democracy is so willingly sacrificed in the name of governability, which takes the place of supreme value. In fact, the theorists, business leaders and politicians involved in these debates wield the fear of ungovernability as a weapon. Merely the threat of it served to legitimate and make appear inevitable the deployment of new structures of authority at all social levels. But that is not to imply that cynical business leaders and management theorists simply invented the threat to legitimate authority. No, it is important to keep in mind that pressures of social antagonisms, insubordination and indiscipline were very real in the 1970s.

The question of ungovernability, in fact, can serve as a pivot to look back on Chamayou’s argument from a different perspective. He tells us that his book is a history from above, and, indeed, the dramatis personae who populate centre stage are primarily those on top or, rather, those who serve the interests of the ruling class, preserving the power and wealth of business and élites. It might seem, looking only at this well-lit stage, as if these thinkers, through debates with each other and through the forward march of ideas, were autonomously inventing a new paradigm and driving forward historical development. And yet, incessantly in Chamayou’s book one hears the clamour off stage of social antagonism and contestation, and it is not hard to see that the pressure of those forces is the real motor of the development. He does, in fact, give an excellent account of the rising insubordination of young workers, the threats to corporate profits of consumer movements and environmental movements, and the anti-corporate thrust of the Vietnam War protests. Business and political leaders, economists and theorists were keenly focused on and trembled at the thought of these rising powers. Faced with the rising crisis of governability, they were forced to invent new mechanisms of governance. The development of strategic management and liberal authoritarianism, then, were really a response to the way these forces had made society ungovernable. Chamayou’s history from above, then, has to be read at an angle, because all the drama on stage is really seeking answers to threats of those forces off stage, from below.

Although it is firmly rooted in the 1970s and the debates of the era, this book is also profoundly about our present. It demonstrates, in fact, some of the myriad ways in which the structures and strategies of power developed then still rule over us today. And understanding better the birth of these forms of rule will allow us better to contest and eventually overthrow them.

Michael Hardt

INTRODUCTION

Governable. Adjective (neologism): that can be governed.Example: ‘This people is not governable’.

Supplement to the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1839)1

This type of period is familiar. The signs never lie; the same omens had been observed on the eve of the Protestant Reformation or the Russian Revolution. So says the Californian engineer and ‘futurologist’ Willis W. Harman, for whom all the indicators of a major earthquake are now flashing red. They include: ‘Increased rate of mental disorders. Increased rate of violent crime, social disruptions, use of police to control behavior. Increased public acceptance of hedonistic behavior (particularly sexual). […] Signs of anxiety about the future […], decreased trust in institutions of business and government. Growing sense that old answers no longer work.’2 In short, it is ‘the legitimacy of the present social system of the industrialized world’ that is crumbling, as he warned us in 1975.

And indeed, widespread rebelliousness was in the air. No relationship of domination was left untouched: insubordination in the hierarchy between sexes and genders, in the colonial and racial orders, in the hierarchies of class and labour, in families, on campuses, in the armed forces, on the shop floor, in offices and on the street. According to Michel Foucault, we were witnessing ‘the birth of a crisis in government’ in the sense that ‘all the processes by which men govern each other were being challenged’.3 What happened at the beginning of the 1970s, as people have since remarked, was a ‘crisis of governability that preceded the economic crisis’,4 a ‘crisis of governability’ at the levels of society and business,5 a crisis of ‘disciplinary governability’6 that foreshadowed major changes in the technologies of power.

Before being taken up by critical theory, however, this idea had already been put forward by conservative intellectuals. It was their way of interpreting current events, of problematizing the situation. Democracy, as Samuel Huntington stated in 1975, in a famous Trilateral Commission report to which we will return in detail, was affected by a ‘problem of governability’: a universal surge of popular feeling was undermining authority, overburdening the state with its boundless demands.

The word ‘governability’ was not a recent invention. In French, gouverner can mean both ‘to govern’ and ‘to steer’; gouvernabilité had already been used in the nineteenth century to refer, for example, to the ‘properties of governability or steerability’ of a ship or the ‘conditions of stability and governability’ of an airship, but also the governability of a horse, an individual or a people. In this sense, the term refers to a disposition within the object to be led, its propensity to be guided, the docility or the ductility of the governed. Ungovernability is therefore conceived as its polar opposite: as a restive counter-disposition, a spirit of insubordination, a refusal to be governed, at least ‘not like that, not for that, not by them’.7 But that’s just one facet of the concept, just one of the dimensions of the problem.

Governability is indeed a compound capacity, one which presupposes, on the side of the object, a disposition to be governed but also, on the other side, on the subject’s side, an aptitude to govern. Mutiny is just one hypothetical instance. A situation of ungovernability can also be the result of a malfunction or failure in the governmental apparatus, even when the governed are perfectly docile. A phenomenon of institutional paralysis, for example, may result from something other than a movement of civil disobedience.

Schematically speaking, a crisis of governability can have two great polarities: at the bottom, among the governed, or at the top, among the governors, and two great modalities, revolt or breakdown: the rebellious governed or the powerless governors (the two aspects can of course be combined). As Lenin theorized, it is only when ‘the “lower classes” do not want to live in the old way and the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way’ that a ‘governmental crisis’ is likely to turn into a revolutionary crisis.8

In the 1970s, conservative theories of the crisis of governability also linked these two aspects. Without imagining they were on the eve of a revolution, these writers were worried about the current political dynamic that seemed to be leading to disaster. The problem was not only that people were growing rebellious, nor just that the apparatuses of government were congested, but that these failures and revolts overdetermined each other, weighing down on the system to the point of bringing it close to collapse.

Foucault, who knew the Trilateral Commission’s report on ‘the governability of democracies’, mentioned it to illustrate what he preferred to call a ‘crisis of the apparatus of governmentality’:9 not a mere movement of ‘revolts of conduct’,10 but a blockage in the ‘general system of governmentality’.11 There were endogenous reasons for this, irreducible to the economic crises of capitalism, although connected with them. What he thought was starting to seize up was the ‘liberal art of government’.12 We must not anachronistically take this to mean the dominant neoliberalism, but rather what has since been called ‘embedded liberalism’, an unstable compromise between a market economy and Keynesian interventionism. Having studied other similar crises in history, Foucault made the prognosis that, from this blockage, something else was about to emerge, starting with major redevelopments in the arts of governing.

If society is ungovernable, it is not so in itself, but, in the words of the Saint-Simonian engineer Michel Chevalier, ‘ungovernable in the way that people want to govern it at present’.13 This is a traditional theme in this kind of discourse: ungovernability is never absolute, only relative. And it is in this gap that we find the raison d’être, the real object, and the constitutive challenge of any art of governing.

In this book, I study this crisis as it was perceived and theorized in the 1970s by those who strove to defend the interests of ‘business’. This is therefore the opposite of a ‘history from below’; instead, it is a history ‘from above’, written from the point of view of the ruling classes, mainly in the United States, at that time the epicentre of a far-reaching intellectual and political movement.

Karl Polanyi explained that the rise of the ‘free market’, with all its destructive effects, had historically triggered a vast countermovement of self-protection on the part of society – a countermovement which, he warned, ‘was incompatible with the self-regulation of the market, and thus with the market system itself’.14 But this was just the kind of conclusion that the organic intellectuals of the business world in the 1970s were coming to: things were going too far and, if current trends continued, they would entail the destruction of the ‘free enterprise system’. What was starting to gather pace in this decade was a third movement, a great reaction from which we have not yet emerged.

I will here be studying the formation of this countermovement from a philosophical point of view, by tracing the genealogy of the concepts and modes of problematization that underlay it rather than setting out the factual details of its institutional, social, economic or political history. The unity of my object, however, is not the unity of a doctrine (this book is not a new intellectual history of neoliberalism), but the unity of a situation: starting out from identifiable points of tension, from the conflicts which broke out, I shall seek to examine how they were thematized, and what solutions were considered. I will try to examine the ideas that were put to work, their endeavours and the intentions behind them, but also the dissensions, contradictions and aporias they encountered.

The challenge of the new thinking was not just to produce new discourses of legitimation for a capitalism under scrutiny, but also to formulate programmatic theories and ideas for action aimed at reconfiguring the current order. These new arts of government whose genesis I propose to relate are still active today. If it is important to carry out this investigation, it is because it may help us understand our present.

This third movement is not reducible to its doctrinaire neoliberal component – far from it. Many procedures and dispositifs that have become central to contemporary governance did not figure in the texts of the founding fathers of neoliberalism, unless they were introduced and defended in complete opposition to their theses. Our era is admittedly neoliberal, but with a bastard neoliberalism, eclectic and in many ways contradictory; its strange syntheses can be explained only by the history of the conflicts that marked its formation.

This crisis of governability has had as many facets as there are power relationships. They were met, in each field, with specific backlashes. I here focus on the crisis that affected business insofar as it was a form of private government.

In addition to the issues that are still with us and that will emerge over the course of this book, my choice of topic was motivated by a more specific preoccupation. At the very time when big business is one of the dominant institutions of the contemporary world, philosophy remains under-equipped to understand it. From its traditional corpus, it has mostly inherited theories of state power and sovereignty dating back to the seventeenth century. It has long had its treatises on theologico-political authorities – but nothing of the kind for what we might call ‘corporato-political’ authorities.

When philosophy finally approaches this subject, for example by belatedly incorporating it into its teaching, this often happens in the worst possible way, by regurgitating a naive discourse on business ethics or corporate social responsibility, of the kind produced in business schools. Philosophy these days is no longer the handmaid of theology, but of management.

It is now time to develop critical philosophies of business corporations. This book is just a preparatory work in this direction, a historico-philosophical inquiry into some of the central categories of dominant economic and managerial thought – categories that are now prospering, while the conflicts and objectives that led to their development, and continue to guide their meaning, remain forgotten.

This book is organized along the various axes which, in their interaction, comprised the crisis of governability in business as it was thematized at the time. For the defenders of the business world, each axis corresponded to a new difficulty, a new front on which to mobilize.

1. A corporation, first and foremost, governs workers. At the beginning of the 1970s, management faced massive indiscipline from the workers. How could it square up to these? How could it restore the former discipline? If the old procedures were obsolete, what form could a new art of governing take? Various strategies were envisaged and debated. (Part I.)

2. But if we go higher up the vertical axis of subordination, a second crisis appears, this time in the relation between shareholders and managers. Noting that, in companies run by shareholders, managers simply become the managers of other people’s business, and do not have the same interest as the former bosses and proprietors in maximizing profits, some people worried about a possible lack of zeal on the managers’ part, or even worse, a ‘managerial revolution’. How were managers to be disciplined? How could they be brought back into line with the shareholders’ values? (Part II.)

3. At the same time, on the horizontal axis, in the firm’s social and political environment, unprecedented threats were emerging. Against a growing cultural and political rejection of capitalism, new movements directly attacked the way major business groups were led. How were people to react to what appeared as ‘an attack on the free enterprise system’? They were torn as to the strategy to adopt. (Part III.)

4. These ‘attacks’ intensified and spread from country to country, especially with the first big boycotts launched against multinationals; firms now turned to new consultants. How were they to manage not only their employees, but protestors from outside their firms, and, beyond them, a ‘social environment’ that had become so turbulent? New approaches and new concepts were invented. (Part IV.)

5. At the behest of the emerging environmental movements in particular, new social and environmental regulations became necessary. As well as the horizontal pressure of social movements there was now, in addition, the vertical expansion of new forms of public intervention. How could these regulatory projects be defeated? How could they be opposed, in theory and in practice? (Part V.)

6. What, more fundamentally, did this twofold phenomenon of generalized protest and growing government intervention stem from? One answer was the flaws of welfare democracy which, far from ensuring consent, was digging its own grave. In the eyes of neoconservatives as much as neoliberals, it was the state itself that was becoming ungovernable. Hence these questions: how could politics be dethroned? How could democracy be limited? (Part VI.)

For my investigation, I have gathered various heterogeneous sources from different disciplines; I have taken the decision to intertwine ‘noble’ and ‘vulgar’ sources when they have the same object – thus a Nobel Prize-winning economist may rub shoulders with a specialist in ‘busting’ trade unions. Their writings are all strategic texts in a struggle, and they all provide answers to the question ‘What should be done?’ They are texts that set out procedures, techniques and tactics – either very concretely, for example in practical guides or manuals for managers, or more programmatically, through reflections on discursive strategies or overall practices. This corpus comprises mainly English-language sources: as far as managerial thinking and economic theories of the firm are concerned, the United States has been the birthplace of new notions that have quickly spread worldwide.

I often keep myself in the background in this book, so as to reconstitute, by cutting and editing quotations, a composite text whose assembled fragments are often worth less individually, through their attribution to a singular author, than as characteristic utterances of the different positions to which I strive to give a voice.

Notes

1.

Louis Barré,

Complément au Dictionnaire de l’Académie française

, vol. 2 (Brussels, 1839).

2.

Willis W. Harman, ‘The Great Legitimacy Challenge: A Note on Interpreting the Present and Assessing the Future’, in

Middle- and Long-Term Energy Policies and Alternatives, Appendix to Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Energy and Power

(Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1976), pp. 25–31 (p. 27).

3.

Michel Foucault, ‘Entretien avec Michel Foucault’, in

Dits et écrits

, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard-Quarto, 1994), p. 94.

4.

Eve Chiapello, ‘Capitalism and its Criticisms’, in Paul du Gay and Glenn Morgan (eds.),

New Spirits of Capitalism?: Crises, Justifications, and Dynamics

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 63.

5.

André Gorz,

Misère du présent, richesse du possible

(Paris: Galilée, 1997), p. 26.

6.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,

Empire

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 240).

7.

Michel Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce que la critique? Critique et Aufklärung’ (1978),

Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie

, 84, no. 2, April–June 1990, pp. 35–63 (p. 38).

8.

Lenin, ‘“Left-Wing Communism”: An Infantile Disorder’, in Vladimir I. Lenin,

‘Left-Wing Communism’: An Infantile Disorder

(Chippendale, Australia: Resistance Books, 1999), pp. 27–99 (p. 83).

9.

Foucault sometimes uses the two terms interchangeably. See Michel Foucault,

The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79

, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 70. On this notion, see Jean-Claude Monod, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une “crise de gouvernementalité”?’,

Lumières

, no. 8, 2006, pp. 51–68.

10.

Michel Foucault,

Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78

, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 196.

11.

Foucault,

The Birth of Biopolitics

, p. 318.

12.

Ibid., p. 320.

13.

Barthélémy Prosper Enfantin,

Oeuvres d’Enfantin

, vol. XI (Paris: Dentu, 1873), p. 125.

14.

Karl Polanyi,

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

, 2nd edn (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001), p. 136.

Part IIndocile workers

1INDISCIPLINE ON THE SHOP FLOOR

Put thirteen small bits of card into thirteen small holes, sixty times an hour, eight hours a day. Solder sixty-seven pieces of sheet metal per hour and then find yourself one day placed in front of a contraption that needs 110. Work amid noise, […] in a fog of oil, solvent, metal dust. […] Obey without answering back, be punished without right of appeal.

André Gorz1

Tommy passes a joint to Yanagan who draws the smoke deep, then hands it to me. […] The smoke striking into my lungs sends my blood leaping. And soon the flying sparks, the hot steel, the raging, exploding furnaces above us seem like frivolities on carnival night.

Bennett Kremen2

‘The younger generation, which has already shaken the campuses, is showing signs of restlessness in the plants of industrial America’, warned the New York Times in June 1970. ‘Many young workers are calling for immediate changes in working conditions and are rejecting the disciplines of factory work’.3 ‘Labour discipline has collapsed’, observed an internal report at General Motors the same year.4

If discipline means gaining ‘a hold over others’ bodies’,5 Indocile behaviour is manifested by an irresistible longing for disengagement: don’t stay where you are, run away, get out of the business, take back your own body and make off with it. But this was exactly the set of feelings that factory life was starting to generate on a large scale at the time, as there was among the younger generation of workers a ‘deep dislike of the job and […] a desire to escape’.6

In the US automobile industry, turnover was huge: more than half of the new unskilled workers were leaving their positions before the end of the first year.7 Some were so repelled by their first contact with the assembly line that they took to the hills after the first weeks. ‘Some assembly-line workers are so turned off’, managers reported with astonishment, ‘that they just walk away in mid-shift and don’t even come back to get their pay for time they have worked’.8

At General Motors, 5 per cent of workers were absent without any real justification every day.9 On Mondays and Fridays this rose to twice the figure. In summertime, in some factories, it could reach 20 per cent. ‘What is it like on a Monday, in summer, then?’, one factory worker was asked in 1973. He replied, ‘I don’t know, I’ve never been in for one’. Another worker, when asked ‘how come you’re only working four days a week?’ replied, ‘because I can’t make enough money in three’.10 A third was asked what exactly he was looking for, and replied ‘for a chance to use my brain’, a job where ‘my high school education counts for something’.11 Factory life? ‘You’re like in a jail cell – except they have more time off in prison’, replied another.12

In factories, your body was ruined and your mind was exhausted, you felt dead: ‘I sing, whistle, throw water at a guy on the line, do anything I can to bust the boredom’.13 Unable to endure the infinite repetition of the same any longer, you aspired to create rather than to produce: ‘Sometimes, out of pure meanness, when I make something, I just put a little dent in it. I like to do something to make it really unique. Hit it with a hammer; deliberately to see if it’ll get by, just so I can say I did it’.14

Ordinary acts of indiscipline, just like the disciplines of which they are the counterpart, involve an art of detail. They require just as much meticulousness and obstinacy in producing their transgressions as the opposite side does in enacting its regulations. Operating on the scale of the smallest gesture, they recover moments of respite, in a fierce and intimate struggle whose booty can be calculated in the few dozen seconds you can grab for yourself from the rhythms of the assembly belt. ‘But eventually the main problem is time’.15 You slow down on purpose, you put on the brakes, alone or collectively, or conversely you sometimes accelerate so you can later enjoy a brief stretch of time out. ‘I’m not the only worker playing this game: almost everybody does it’. You steal a handful of moments for yourself, just to breathe, to exchange a few words, to do something else: ‘I’m good enough at my job now that I can do two or three cars in a row fast and then have maybe 15 or 20 seconds for myself in between. The main thing I do with these interludes is read. I read the paper every day and I read books. Some of the books are quite complex. The main thing I’ve had to learn in order to read under these conditions is to remember what I’ve read and to be able to quickly find where I’ve left off’.16 If discipline is a rhythmopolitics or a chronopower, indiscipline is too, but in a diametrically opposite direction, a fight against the clock of a particular kind. ‘I actually saw a woman in the plant running along the line to keep up with the work. I’m not going to run for anybody. There ain’t anyone in that plant that is going to tell me to run’.17 The first main refusals of acceleration were workers’ struggles. The Indocile are time thieves.18

At General Motors, one trade unionist reports, the staff ‘uses its powers as a dictatorship’.19 The authoritarianism of the little bosses, close supervision, pernickety instructions and absurd orders, insults and continued pressure – all of this was now unacceptable. ‘The foremen’, says one Black worker from Baltimore soberly, ‘could show more respect for the workers – talk to them like men, not dogs’.20

The state of social tension, said an alarmed Wall Street Journal in 1969, is the ‘worst within memory’. Everything suggested that an ‘epic battle between management and labor’ was imminent, announced Fortune.21 In fact, in the year 1970 alone, nearly two and a half million workers went on strike in the United States.22 This was the biggest wave of work stoppages since the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. With the high number of strike actions came more radical forms of struggle. Over and above wage demands, the complaints concerned the forms of labour organization and were aimed at the authorities that were imposing them.

Bill Watson, a worker at a Detroit car factory in 1968, recounts a widespread wave of sabotage that he witnessed. The engineers had introduced a new six-cylinder engine model that workers judged to be poorly designed. They had expressed their criticisms to the management, in vain. Faced with this flat refusal, some teams started to ‘forget’ to mount certain parts. Soon, others followed, sabotaging the work in their turn. Mountains of unserviceable machines rose up in the workshops: ‘At that point there were so many defective motors piled around the plant that it was almost impossible to move from one area to another’.23 This phenomenon, says Watson, was not isolated. There were, pretty much all over America at the time, conflicts of the same kind: they expressed a desire on the part of workers to take over production, to gain control of their work, of the way they did it, of what was being manufactured in the factory.

In 1970, the CEO of General Motors sent a warning to his employees: ‘we cannot tolerate employees who reject responsibility and fail to respect essential disciplines and authority. […] GM increased its investment […] to improve both productivity and working conditions, but tools and technology mean nothing if the worker is absent from his job. We must receive a fair day’s work for which we pay a fair day’s wage’.24

How was discipline to be restored? GM management opted for the ‘hard line’:25 speed up the work rate, automate unskilled tasks, downgrade the remainder, make cuts in wages, and strengthen surveillance and control. The automobile factory in Lordstown, Ohio, with its assembly line described as ‘the fastest in the world’, was the firm’s technological flagship, the incarnation of the employers’ solutions to productivity problems. In 1971 it was placed under the control of the ‘General Motors Assembly Division’, a managerial shock force, described as ‘the roughest and toughest’ of the group.26 Under this harsh regime, many jobs were scrapped and the production rates, already very fast, were accelerated: from sixty cars per hour to almost double that amount. Now, ‘in 36 seconds the worker had to perform at least eight different operations’.27 ‘You just about need a pass to piss. That ain’t no joke. You raise your little hand if you want to go wee-wee. Then wait maybe half an hour ’till they find a relief man. And they write it down every time too cause you’re supposed to do it in your time, not theirs. Try it too often and you’ll get a week off’.28

In Lordstown, the workforce was particularly young, twenty-eight on average. It took young bodies to keep up with such a work rate – but the young minds that guided those bodies were also the least ready to submit to it. One day, a car arrived at the end of the assembly belt with all its parts unmounted, lying in a tidy pile in the frame. The managers accused the workers of sabotage. ‘Sabotage? Just a way of letting off steam. You can’t keep up with the car so you scratch it on the way past. I once saw a hillbilly drop an ignition key down the gas tank. Last week I watched a guy light a glove and lock it in the trunk. We all wanted to see how far down the line they’d discover it. […] If you miss a car, they call that sabotage’.29

The management, which reckoned that the losses due to ‘indiscipline’ amounted to 12,000 cars per year not being produced on the site, reacted with increased firmness, launching hundreds of disciplinary proceedings: one worker was sacked for arriving a minute late; another was suspended for having farted in the passenger compartment of a vehicle; a third for singing tralala on the shop floor.30

At the beginning of March 1972, faced with this tightening of screws, the workers resorted to a wildcat strike. The fighting spirit of the Lordstown workers made an impression. ‘These guys have become tigers’.31 They were ‘just not going to swallow the same kind of treatment’ as their fathers; they were not afraid of the management – this was what was at stake in the strike.32 The press talked of a ‘Lordstown syndrome’, an ‘industrial Woodstock’.33 After a month of conflict, the management backed off and reinstated the previous pace of production.

Thus, when confronted with acts of worker indiscipline, the management could find no better solution than to respond by intensifying the disciplinary regime that this indiscipline had rejected in the first place, then fanning it to such an extent that it was radicalized and turned into open revolt. Managers were caught in a contradiction. They knew for a fact that worker indiscipline expressed a visceral rejection of the organization of industrial work and, ‘especially among the younger employees, a growing reluctance to accept a strict authoritarian shop discipline’.34 They were also aware that ‘the conditions for work in the new factories are such that discontent and rebellion are not exceptional reactions but rational’,35 that there was ‘a link between fatigue and repetitive work, between discontent and absenteeism’. And yet they continued to act as if discontent ‘constituted an “abuse” to be punished’,36 and to respond with ‘techniques of fear and relentless pressure’ that were a ‘source of unending conflicts’.37

Hence this worry: if it continues like this, where are we going? Right to the wall, some answered: ‘dark days are coming for GM if, as the management has often stated, Lordstown represents the future of the automobile industry’.38

Even among specialists in management, perplexity spread. Deeming the old procedures to be obsolete, some hatched plans for reform. Faced with the crisis of disciplinary governability, a new art of governing labour would need to be invented.

Notes

1.

Michel Bosquet (a pseudonym of André Gorz), ‘Les patrons découvrent “l’usine-bagne”’,

Le Nouvel Observateur

, no. 384, 20 March 1972, p. 64.

2.

Bennett Kremen, ‘The New Steelworkers’,

New York Times

, 7 January 1973, special issue on ‘Business and Finance’, p. 1.

3.

Agis Sapulkas, ‘Young Workers Are Raising Voices to Demand Factory and Union Changes’,

New York Times

, 1 June 1970, p. 23.

4.

Quoted by Emma Rothschild, ‘Automation et O.S. à la General Motors’,

Les Temps modernes

, nos. 314–15, September–October 1972, pp. 467–86 (p. 479). In the industry, according to the

Wall Street Journal

, ‘morale in many operations is sagging badly, intentional work slowdowns are cropping up more frequently and absenteeism is soaring’ (

Wall Street Journal

, 26 June 1970), quoted in Jeremy Brecher,

Strike!

(San Francisco, CA: Straight Arrow Books, 1972), p. 252.

5.

Michel Foucault,

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 138.

6.

Judson Gooding, ‘Blue-Collar Blues on the Assembly Line’,

Fortune Magazine

, July 1970, reprinted in Lloyd Zimpel,

Man Against Work

(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), pp. 61–75 (p. 62).

7.

Emma Rothschild,

Paradise Lost: The Decline of the Auto-Industrial Age

(New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 124.

8.

Gooding, ‘Blue-Collar Blues on the Assembly Line’, p. 63. According to one union member, ‘the young worker feels he’s not master of his own destiny. He’s going to run away from it every time he gets a chance. That is why there’s an absentee problem’ (ibid., p. 66).

9.

According to a GM executive cited by Ken Weller,

The Lordstown Struggle and the Real Crisis in Production

(London: Solidarity, 1973), p. 2.

10.

Quoted by Ken Weller from the

Sunday Telegraph

, 2 December 1973 and

Newsweek

, 7 February 1973 in Weller,

The Lordstown Struggle

, p. 2.

11.

Quoted by Stanley Aronowitz,

False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness

(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 26.

12.

Gooding, ‘Blue-Collar Blues on the Assembly Line’, p. 63.

13.

Quoted by Aronowitz,

False Promises

, p. 36.

14.

Quoted by Studs Terkel,

Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do

(New York: The New Press, 2011; first published in 1974), p. 38.

15.

John Lippert, ‘Shopfloor Politics at Fleetwood’,

Radical America

, no. 12, July 1978, pp. 52–69 (p. 58).

16.

Ibid.

17.

Agis Sapulkas, ‘Young Workers Disrupt Key GM Plant’,

New York Times

, 23 January 1972, p. 1.

18.

See Michel de Certeau,

L’Invention du quotidien, vol. 1: Arts de faire

(Paris: Gallimard, 1990), p. 45.

19.

Quoted by Aronowitz,

False Promises

, p. 41.

20.

Gooding, ‘Blue-Collar Blues on the Assembly Line’, p. 68. According to the

New York Times

, today’s workers ‘are better educated and want treatment as equals from the bosses on a plant floor. They are not as afraid of losing their job as the older men and often challenge the foreman’s orders. And at the heart of the new mood […] there is a challenge to management’s authority’. See Agis Sapulkas, ‘Young Workers Are Raising Voices to Demand Factory and Union Changes’,

New York Times

, 1 June 1970, p. 23.

21.

Richard Armstrong, ‘Labor 1970: Angry, Aggressive, Acquisitive’,

Fortune

, October 1969, reprinted in

Compensation & Benefits Review

, vol. 2, no. 1, January 1970, pp. 37–42.

22.

Jefferson Cowie, ‘That 70’s Feeling’,

New York Times

, 5 September 2010, p. 19.

23.

Bill Watson, ‘Counter-Planning on the Shop Floor’,

Radical America

, no. 5, May–June 1971, pp. 77–85 (p. 79).

24.

Quoted in Milton Snoeyenbos, Robert F. Almeder and James M. Humber (eds.),

Business Ethics: Corporate Values and Society

(Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1983), p. 307.

25.

Aaron Brenner, ‘Rank-and-File Rebellion, 1967–1976’, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1996, p. 37.

26.

Weller,

The Lordstown Struggle

, p. 8.

27.

Aronowitz,

False Promises

, p. 23.

28.

Weller,

The Lordstown Struggle

, p. 3.

29.

Quoted in ibid., p. 9.

30.

Ibid.

31.

Sapulkas, ‘Young Workers Disrupt Key GM Plant’, p. 1.

32.

Jefferson R. Cowie,

Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

(New York: New Press, 2010), p. 46.

33.

Cowie,

Stayin’ Alive

, p. 7. The Lordstown strike was ‘one of the most sustained campaigns of informal in-plant resistance ever to have been documented’ in American social history (Weller,

The Lordstown Struggle

, p. 8).

34.

Malcolm Denise quoted in Weller,

The Lordstown Struggle

, p. 4.

35.

Rothschild, ‘Automation et O.S. à la General Motors’, p. 469.

36.

Ibid.

37.

Aronowitz,

False Promises

, p. 35.

38.

Rothschild, ‘Automation et O.S. à la General Motors’, p. 469.

2HUMAN RESOURCES

[The alien character of labor] emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague.

Karl Marx1

In the 1950s, conservative intellectuals had believed they were in a position to announce ‘the end of ideology’ – already! – and the extinction of the class struggle with it. The ‘American worker’, claimed Daniel Bell in 1956, had been ‘tamed’. Not, admittedly, by the means that Marx had criticized in his time, nor by impoverishment, nor through ‘the discipline of the machine’ but ‘by the “consumption society,” by the possibility of a better living which his wage, the second income of his working wife, and easy credit all allow’.2 Even when he suffered from his working conditions, the worker’s thoughts led ‘not to militancy, despite occasional sporadic outbursts, but to escapist fantasies – of having a mechanic’s shop, a turkey farm, a gas station, of “owning a small business of one’s own.”’3

Everything was quiet, and then – crash, bang, wallop! At first, people were stunned, unable to understand anything. We need to try and imagine the immense and painful surprise represented by the movements of the 1960s for those who were firmly convinced of the withering away of social conflict in the ‘consumer society’.4

Some, revolted by this revolt, accused the troublemakers of ingratitude. General Motors Vice-President, Earl Brambett, ‘deplores the younger workers’ insistence on even more benefits and improvements, [and] thinks instead they should show more appreciation for what they have’.5 But what more did they want, exactly? That was the scandal. And how could they still revolt? That was the mystery. Explanations were sought; people concocted theories about the revolt, and sought out its causes.

This unrest was first understood as arising from the generation gap. New workers were ‘younger, more impatient, less homogeneous, more racially assertive and less manipulable’.6 They ‘bring into the plants with them the new perspectives of American youth in 1970’.7

What else happened? Psychologists made their contribution to the ongoing debate. Once the primary needs of human beings have been satisfied, they do not stop there: once their stomachs are full, then it is the turn of their minds to cry famine, as Abraham Maslow explained, pointing to his famous diagram of the ‘pyramid of needs’.8 Beyond their salaries and their careers, new generations aspired to something else, to more intense human relationships, as we see from reports in the Harvard Business Review, ‘as provided by commune living experiments’.9 Similarly, workers’ expectations were being fleshed out, taking on a more qualitative dimension. They were demanding of their jobs something more than an income: interpersonal relationships, something substantial, a ‘meaning’. A transition to a ‘post-materialist’ state of mind.

It is clear that the more such subjectivity asserts itself, the less it will tolerate being subjected to alienating work. Max Weber had warned: ‘The capitalistic system […] needs this devotion to the calling of making money’, to that ‘incomprehensible’, ‘mysterious’ idea that a human being ‘should be able to make it the sole purpose of his life-work to sink into the grave weighed down with a great material load of money and goods’.10 If other appetites take over, the ‘work ethic’ suffers. ‘Who Wants to Work?’ was the headline in Newsweek in March 1973.11 The question answered itself.

In this analysis, it was relative material prosperity, of the very same kind that Bell claimed had endorsed an enduring consent to the exploitation of wage-earners, that was identified as the source of new dissent. This entailed a major shift in theories of revolt. Why does anyone rebel? One answer had been: out of necessity. But now people started saying: because it was a luxury they could afford.12

The factory is one of the sites where new aspirations collide most brutally with old structures. But we need to be careful, as ‘an anachronistic organization of work can create an explosive and pathogenic mix’.13 According to Management Professor Richard Walton: ‘In some cases, alienation is expressed by passive withdrawal-tardiness, absenteeism and turnover, and inattention on the job. In other cases, it is expressed by active attacks – pilferage, sabotage, deliberate waste, assaults, bomb threats, and other disruptions of work routines’.14 But ‘dramatic increases in these forms of violence are taking place at the plant level’.15 The danger is political: the worker may resort to ‘displacement of his frustrations through participation in radical social or political movements’.16

Echoing the Lordstown strike, the question of ‘quality of life at work’ became central, for a time, in American public debate. In 1972, using the terminology of the young Marx, the Harvard Business Review asked: ‘How to counter alienation in the plant?’ And Congress, the same year, organized senatorial hearings on ‘worker alienation’.17 But if alienation is problematic, this is above all for economic reasons, because of its negative impact on productivity. If there is a lesson to be learned from the Lordstown episode, it is that it showed a ‘disregard for the interaction of human resources with capital and technology’.18 What advantage is it for a manager ‘to have a perfectly efficient assembly-line if […] workers are out on strike because of the oppressive and dehumanized experience of working on the “perfect” line?’19

If you could start your professional life again from scratch, would you choose the same job that you are currently doing? To this question, in the middle of the 1960s, 93 per cent of the university professors and 82 per cent of the journalists canvased replied ‘yes’, compared to 31 per cent of textile workers and 16 per cent of automobile workers.20 The authors of the study concluded that, in addition to the least physical demand, autonomy was the main factor in job satisfaction. Conversely, ‘alienation exists when workers are unable to control their immediate work processes’.21

Lauding the virtues of ‘autonomy and self-control’,22 and judging that ‘industry today is over-managed and over-controlled’,23 the managerial reformers of the 1970s recommended stimulating the ‘participation’ of workers to increase their productivity as well as their satisfaction. Instead of the old strategy of ‘control’ they recommended a strategy of ‘commitment’.24 While the previous, intensive strategy had still aimed to pressure workers by submitting them to intensified discipline, the later, extensive strategy proposed to ‘use effectively the capacities of a major natural resource – namely, the manpower they employ’.25

Several pilot projects involving participative management thus emerged in the United States.26 If the French Left had, as fuel for its ideas about self-management, the experience of the Lip factory (occupied by its workers in Besançon in 1973), American managers, for their part, could assess the benefits of participation by pointing to the case of the General Foods dog kibble factory in Topeka (Kansas) in 1971. This was the countermodel of Lordstown: the rules were set collectively and the activity was organized into ‘autonomous working groups’, with ‘self-managed’ teams responsible for large swathes of production.27

The conclusion was very definite: ‘productivity increases […] when workers participate in the work decisions that affect their lives’.28 The enrichment of tasks, said psychologist Frederick Herzberg, pays.29 With this in mind, the good news could finally be announced: there was a ‘a felicitous congruence between worker satisfaction and the securement of managerial objectives’.30 For the workers, more satisfaction; for capital, increased productivity. In the end, it was win-win.

However, there was at least one social group that felt it had something to lose: management, which feared being deprived of a significant number of its prerogatives.31 Activist worker Bill Watson recounts the following anecdote: in the factory where he worked, the management had, during a period of high lay-offs, planned to make an inventory of their stock, planned to last six weeks. The task had been entrusted to some fifty workers. To save time, they cobbled together a system of their own, a self-organized inventory, which proved more effective than the original procedure provided by the management. The management abruptly ended this spontaneous experience, on the grounds that ‘the legitimate channels of authority, training, and communication had been violated’.32 ‘Management’, says Watson, ‘was really determined to stop the workers from organizing their own work, even when it meant that the work would be finished quicker and, with the men quickly laid off, less would be advanced in wages’.33 Managers could therefore set the preservation of their own power higher than strict considerations of economic efficiency.

As Business Week also put it: ‘Attempts to introduce plant democracy at one model General Foods (GF) plant in Topeka, Kansas have failed because managers felt their positions threatened by the success experienced when workers started taking some initiative in making decisions’.34 ‘In reality’, says André Gorz, ‘the hostility of the employers was not based on essentially technical or economic factors. It was political. The enrichment of tasks marked the end of the despotic authority and power of bosses great and small. […] In short, once they went down this road, where would it all end?’35

Could the productivity gains associated with participation be assured without losing control, without triggering dangerous new trends? The reformers were betting that one could give workers a limited autonomy without things going bad; others were much more sceptical. The problem with autonomy is that, once granted, it is not satisfied with half measures. There was fear of a ‘domino effect’.36

In fact, from the employers’ point of view, the room for manoeuvre was narrow. What were the options available? One strategy involved keeping the status quo, and even hardening the existing disciplinary regimes, but at the risk of intensifying indiscipline and social conflicts, with the shortfall this implied. The second option was to introduce ‘participation’, with the promise of a harmonious convergence of interests, less alienation and more productivity – except that in this irenic picture, it was feared that even limited forms of empowerment might bring the wolf into the fold.

This was the dilemma: either to renew a disciplinary regime that was known to be counterproductive, or to promote an autonomy which, although factitious, could be dangerous. The result was a dead end. Another solution, however, was coming into view.

Notes

1.

Karl Marx,

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

, translated by Martin Milligan (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959), p. 30.

2.

Daniel Bell,

The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties

(Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), p. 246.

3.

Ibid., p. 247.

4.

André Gorz summed up the volte-face as follows: ‘The thirst for consumption, throughout the 1950s, remained intense, and seemed to confirm the managers in their deep conviction: […] there is nothing a man will not agree to do for money; he will sell his labour force, his health, his youth, his nervous equilibrium, his sleep, his intelligence. This lasted for a while. Then, by the mid-1960s, disturbing murmurs started to be heard in the big factories’ (Michel Bosquet, ‘Les patrons découvrent “l’usine-bagne”’,

Le Nouvel Observateur

, no. 384, 20 March 1972, p. 64).

5.

Gooding, ‘Blue-Collar Blues on the Assembly Line’, p. 65.

6.

Malcolm Denise, quoted in Weller,

The Lordstown Struggle

, p. 4.

7.

Gooding, ‘Blue-Collar Blues on the Assembly Line’, p. 62. They enter the world of work after experiencing ‘rebellion in their school lives and in the military’ (Stanley Aronowitz,

False Promises

, p. 35).

8.

See Abraham Harold Maslow, ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’,

Psychological Review

, vol. 50, no. 4, 1943, pp. 370–96. According to Maslow, human beings have several strata of different needs, from the most basic to the most elaborate, from the need to find food to the need for spiritual fulfilment. Economic ‘progress’ thus corresponds to an elevation on the pyramid of needs, from the bottom (very materialistic) to the top (very ethereal). However much satisfaction we provide the rebel with, he will always want, not necessarily something more, but something

better

.

9.

Richard E. Walton, ‘How to Counter Alienation in the Plant’,

Harvard Business Review

, November/December 1972, pp. 70–81 (p. 72).

10.

Max Weber,

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

, translated by Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 33.

11.

‘Who Wants to Work? Boredom on the Job’,

Newsweek Magazine

, 26 March 1973.

12.

Among the models offered at the time by the American social sciences was the famous ‘J-curve’ put forward by James C. Davies: revolts or revolutions are most likely to occur when a prolonged phase of economic and social development is followed by a sudden stalling of the economy. In this diagram, it is not poverty in itself which is a factor in rebellion, but the mismatch between the subjective expectations generated by a phase of relative prosperity and their actual level of satisfaction when this latter suddenly drops below the expected level. See James C. Davies, ‘Toward a Theory of Revolution’,

American Sociological Review