Book Review: Workers’ Inquiry and Global Class Struggle,by Robert Ovetz

Unruly, zealous and creative are the class struggles presented in this recalcitrant book. In giving voice and scrutinising various labour conflicts across nine countries that make up to 70% of the world’s population, this book edited by Robert Ovetz outlines different ‘choke points’ in the labour process to provide the analytical ground for a reinvigorated global class struggle. The method: To consciously apprehend and outline the complex technical terrain in which capital dominates and fragments labour, and discern the organisational possibilities for disrupting the labour process and inverting the logic of capital accumulation. The strategic aim: To strengthen the working class and its self-organising autonomy by providing paradigmatic victories, as well as by explaining their limits, so that these may serve as strategic and tactical templates for workers located in similar or different territories and sectors across the world.

Workers’ Inquiry and Global Class Struggle draws upon an Autonomist Marxist perspective that refuses ‘contract unionism’, rank-and-file co-optation practices and corporatist approaches more generally, and it embraces the fact that capital and labour are ‘inimical’ to each other, and that working class composition is always ‘in flux’. It is through and only through class struggle that capital and labour transform and ‘consolidate nodes of class power’ while, and in falling short from social revolution, their inherent antagonism prevails. Following Harry Cleaver’s argument that ‘the violence that capitalists required to impose their order reveals the depth of [workers’] resistance’, this insightful book complements more recent worker-centred approaches (cf. Moody, 2017), and focuses on workers’ perspectives, it locates them within global and national accumulation dynamics, and questions how the possibility of self-empowerment may take place in an adverse landscape (also Ovetz 2019).

Interestingly, Robert Ovetz (ed.) has asked different authors to explore class struggles occurring in the global north (US, UK and Italy), in developing countries (such as South Africa, China, India, Mexico, Argentina or Turkey) and in a wide range of sectors (such as transport, logistics, education, platform work, call centres, cleaners, gamers, mining or metallurgic) by adopting a ‘workers’ inquiry’ approach to their case-studies. The latter consists in developing a ‘proletarian methodology’ that combines academic and activist research, a form of ‘class science’ or ‘militant research’, that ‘uncovers the tactics, strategies, organizational forms, and objectives of both capital and workers with the intention of providing the necessary information about the positions of power of each in order to further the success of the workers’ struggle’ (Ovetz 2020: 8–9). Inspired by late Karl Marx’s (1880) survey and Ed Emery’s (1995) manifesto, a workers’ inquiry seeks to ‘obtain exact and positive knowledge of the conditions in which the working class – the class to whom the future belongs – works and moves’ (Marx in Ovetz 2020: 2). Updating similar studies of the 20th century, like those exerted by the Johnson-Forest Tendency, Zerowork and Midnight Notes in the United States, Socialisme ou Barberie in France, Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia in Italy, and Hotline in Germany, the more recent analysis that this book and other authors like Immanuel Ness provide within a global context do not but show that such line of inquiry is alive. In that sense, this book complements the work of other contemporary authors (Bailey et al. 2017; Ness 2014), on the validity of autonomous Marxism in the strategic study of class struggle.

The analytical framework fosters a nuanced understanding of the ‘composition of the working class’, which may be thought as a ‘dance between the current technical composition of capital, workers’ capacity to recompose their power, and capital’s counter-attack intended to decompose organized workers’ power and impose a new technical composition’ (Ovetz 2020: 13). However, ‘while it can be said that capital seeks a “class composition”, [. . .] it is also true that workers’ struggles repeatedly undermine such control and thus rupture the efficacy [. . .] of the class composition. Such a rupture occurs only to the degree that workers are able to recompose the structures and distribution of power among themselves in such a way as to achieve a change in their collective relations of power to their class enemy’ (p. 14). Although there is ‘no exhaustive list’ of the technical composition of capital, as capital always ‘devises new responses to class struggle’, ‘an inquiry into the organization of work would map the existing division of labor by outlining the hierarchical command structure of the workplace, the types of jobs with their different responsibilities and the role of each in the production process’ (p. 18). The result of such a comprehensive study would ‘ultimately lead to identifying choke points, vulnerabilities, and weaknesses where well-organized workers can strike most effectively to disrupt the relations of production, shift power, and assert control’ (Ovetz 2020). In spite the fact that not all the case-studies have followed the same analytical approach in the concrete conceptualisation of workers’ strategies (e.g. some have deployed autonomist categories like that of Negri’s and Hard’s ‘multitude’, while others have relied on more institutionalist approaches like the ‘union power resources approach’), the case-studies consistently provide a historical and contextual outline in which the particular struggles have taken place.

McAlevey’s (2016) innovative ‘structure test’ has been presented as a framework to organise workers in the workplace and asses their capacity and commitment to engage into industrial action. Similarly, Ovetz proposes a more overarching and less immediate approach, so that long-term class interests and ensuing contradictions are emphasised over short-term interests (e.g. how to achieve a better collective agreement) and union-centred lessons (how the union can reproduce itself within a changing context). According to an Autonomist reading, short-sighted class victories always mediate but may also potentially undermine more disruptive, autonomous and self-organising worker strategies (Ovetz 2020: 10).

This autonomist and critical stance, however, points toward an interesting paradox that should perhaps invite the authors of the book to engage in further conceptual analysis. How can we claim the autonomous subjectivity of the working class, its disruptive and creative potential, when it is necessarily mediated through relations and institutions that reproduce capital accumulation? Where and how can we determine that class struggle has resulted in a provisional ‘armistice’ in favour of labour, if the latter has been achieved through a re-composition of capital – via new legal arrangements and acceptance of a profit oriented labour process – and, thus, is still forced to sell its labour power at its value if it wants to reproduce itself in the ‘world market’? In other words, is the production of working class power not the very barrier to its own emancipation? (cf. Las Heras 2019). A critical strategic engagement with union-renewal strategies may thus show the inherent limits of predominant union tactics and their necessary fragmentation of working class power. Recently, Las Heras and Rodriguez (2020) show how Basque unions’ effective and systematic use of a strike-fund has allowed workers to augment their confrontational capacity with capital, and yet this widespread form of organized conflict does not take place without cross-union coordinating problems. Although Workers’ Inquiry cannot systematically address some of these theoretical and political conundrums, the reader will definitely find a very timely, rigorous and partisan analysis of a set of class struggles that may provide important comparative insights for those who want to transform our society.