Abstract
Now, forty years since the publication of Labor and Monopoly Capital, Harry Braverman still casts a tall shadow on studies of the labor process. We are forever indebted to his reintroduction of Marxism and his analysis of how power played out on the shop floor through the deskilling of labor. Yet as Randy Hodson argued in his The Social Organization of Work, Braverman’s all-encompassing views on the degradation of work contributed to an underdeveloped conception of worker agency that still exists in the labor-process literature. There is nothing inherent in the degradation of work, however, that precludes a wide variety of social responses. As Paul Willis reminds us in his Learning to Labour, workers “thread through a dead experience of work a living culture which is far from a simple reflex of defeat” (p. 52). It is this living culture that Marek Korczynski so beautifully captures in his Songs of the Factory, a book both theoretically sophisticated and also a great read.
Korczynski does not explore the use of music as part of union and other political activities but unpacks how pop music on the radio is used by workers at a blinds manufacturing firm in England. What he documents is not just passive listening to music: embracing Christopher Small’s (1988) concept of “musicking,” he includes all the active ways that workers sing along and dance to, mime, and engage with pop music. Korczynski walks us through a factory where workers reject (and sometimes even mimic) Taylor’s founding principle, which depends upon the limitation of workers’ movements, by adding their own dance steps, belting out a chorus, or turning up the volume as a way of responding to management actions or just “staying alive” in what are routine and degraded jobs.
But this is not just a casual appropriation of music. Korczynski examines how workers imbued songs, and their choruses in particular, with a whole pallet of new meanings—some from their personal lives, some from what had just occurred in the factory, and others emanating from the daily grind that sparks their hopes and dreams about something better. In this way, they are both personal and collective responses, but most importantly, they are potent examples of workers’ living culture—even in the face of overwhelming alienation. And it was not as though everyone is the factory sang all the time in some industrial version of Mamma Mia. Korczynski identifies cultural instigators who led the “musicking” but notes as well that there were other workers who, perhaps because of their physical isolation, never participated.
In a later chapter of Songs of the Factory, Korczynski explores more traditional ways that workers resist by holding back or “soldiering” production and withdrawing from labor-management participative programs. While I found this chapter much less insightful than his chapters about the use of music, he makes an important linkage between “musicking” and other forms of fightback. In this way, cultural activities are not just bracketed off in a different sphere but are part and parcel of overall activism.
I only quibble with Korczynski’s analysis when he examines the “musicking” in the factory as if it emerged only on the shop floor as a response to workplace conditions. I suspect that much of the repertoire that he describes is drawn directly from larger working-class culture—that the same kind of “musicking” he describes is used in doing household chores and in community settings by the same cultural instigators. Exploring these linkages would have strengthened his analysis and helped to create whole people whose agency is not just at work but in their larger lives as well. Nevertheless, Songs of the Factory is a significant contribution to the study of workers’ culture and work and the labor process.