Hegel and the Wobblies

Submitted by johanselig on July 3, 2006

The State has been reduced to a senseless machine that nevertheless works; a center-less machine that absorbs value-time and speaks the abstract language of mobility of labor, of work spread through space and through daily life. The margins are at the center: at the center of the assigning of value, at the center of socialized production. The Wobbly figure re-emerges in the form of the fragmented worker. An experience long-removed from institutionalized worker movements appears to us as the present-day form of organization. The hobo. Hegel, at one point, can no longer explain or understand the fact that the lack of territoriality (of Power and of the insubordinate class) is not equivalent to the territoriality of the Individual, the State, Politics, and the Political Party. At that point, perhaps, one may begin to grasp what route freedom and autonomy take within the urban society. The process of assigning value comes out of the factory, expands everywhere: in the city, in urban space, in the home, and in the existence of millions of workers and non-working workers such as the unemployed, marginals, drug-addicts, in the proliferation of part-time and "off-the-books" work, and in the infinite forms by which time assigns value. What is the proletarian individual like? Labor force mobility, the lack of proletarian territoriality, the historical experience of the Wobblies in the '20's amount to thousands upon thousands of mobile workers who move from one part of the continent to the other. An experience which totally escapes the traditional ideological and organizational schemes of the Marxists, Leninists, Linkskommunists, and in-factory unions. The Hegelian categories of dialectics cannot deal with the reality of a social organization of labor, the disappearance of the laboring individual, nor the practices of a movement which refuses to be reduced to the territorialization of a party or program. It is true that the American rebellions have never produced a form of consciousness of a social reality as all-encompassing as the Hegelian-Marxist dialectics, nor a form of political planning as all-encompassing as the insurrection to conquer Power. A weakness of the American movement, as is explained by traditional Marxism, which in fact disregards the history of this unorthodox movement; or is it rather that a real society in movement cannot be reduced to the formal schemes of an all-encompassing design? It is not by chance if today we pose this question. The end of the factory as a central place of exploitation; breaking up of leisure time, reassembled only in the abstract continuum of Value: in Italy the CENSIS(1) discovers that the economically sound sectors are those where the irregulars and the marginals are employed. The factory becomes a sort of social welfare for unproductive workers. It is evident that the form of organization of America's working class can only function as a driving belt between the State and ranks of unproductive workers who are always aided, insured, and become, paradoxically, parasites. The parasites, such as extremists, drug addicts, marginals, and degenerates are the motor of a productive up-swing. We declare this without the haughty attitude of an employer, but recognize it simply as a political defeat. We were not able to organize the movement of the non-guaranteed workers into a movement of freedom, that is, making intelligence autonomous as a productive force. We were not able to make an autonomous force of the mobility of labor and, especially, of intelligence, the inventive power of the young proletariat and of the educated young, who are the carriers of technical-scientific know-how. Here lies the problem, and we should begin anew. Translated by William Pagnotta 1. CENSIS: Center for Socio-economic Studies (Rome).

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