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2 Michael Seidman L’Etrange Histoire de « Ouvriers contre le travail » Les vici

2 Michael Seidman L’Etrange Histoire de « Ouvriers contre le travail » Les vicissitudes d’un livre The Strange History of « Workers against Wo r k » The Vicissitudes of a Book 3 J E D O I S A V E R T I R L E L E C T E U R que l’essai qui suit pourra lui paraître exagérément autobiographique et faire trop référence à ma personne. Les historiens écrivent presque toujours sur la vie des autres, non sur la leur. Cette fo- calisation quelque peu complaisante sur moi-même se justifie, à mon avis, par les éclaircissements qu’elle est susceptible d’ap- porter sur les circonstances d’une production intellectuelle et pro- fessionnelle, et de sa réception. Cet essai aborde, en outre, cer- tains aspects de l’histoire du travail et de ses relations avec les théories des années 1970 à aujourd’hui et a finalement pour dessein d’explorer le milieu, peu connu mais intellectuellement actif, de l’extrême gauche en France durant cette période. Mon premier livre, Workers against Work : Labor in Barce - lona and Paris during the Popular Fronts*, est une monographie universitaire dont je crois l’histoire singulière. Depuis sa paru- tion en 1991 aux University of California Press, il a été vilipendé et loué, célébré et piraté, trahi et traduit en cinq langues. Ses ad- mirateurs en ont été des intellectuels, des libertaires, des com- munistes et des capitalistes ; ses détracteurs tous plus ou moins pareillement hétérogènes. Ouvriers contre le travail était, à l’origine, une thèse achevée en 1982 sous la direction d’Arthur Mitzman de l’université d’Amsterdam (Pays-Bas). L’idée m’en est venue, quoique pas en- tièrement, de la « critique du travail » post-1968 dont je me suis imprégné alors que je vivais à Paris entre 1979 et 1982. Je ren- contrai à cette époque bon nombre de Français qui redéfinissaient la révolution à venir tout simplement comme le fait de ne pas tra- vailler pour un salaire. Leur position rappelait les revendications socialistes, aussi bien marxistes qu’anarchistes, du X I Xe siècle pour une abolition du travail salarié. Prosaïquement, pour survivre dans L E T M E W A R N T H E R E A D E R that the following essay may be judged overly autobiographical and self-referential. Historians nearly always write about other people’s lives, not their own. I justify my somewhat self-indulgent focus because it may throw some light on the conditions of in- tellectual and professional production as well as reception. The essay also attempts to revisit aspects of labor history and its re- lation to theory from the 1970s to the present. Finally, it will explore the little known but intellectually active milieu of the French extreme left during the same period. My first book, Workers against Work: Labor in Barcelona and Paris during the Popular Fronts (W a W), is a scholarly mo- nograph with, I believe, a unique history. Since its publication by the University of California Press in 1991, it has been reviled and revered, praised and pirated, trashed and translated into five languages. Its admirers have been academics, libertarians, communists, and capitalists; its detractors nearly equally heterogeneous. WaW originated as a dissertation, which was completed in 1982 under the supervision of Arthur Mitzman of the University of Amsterdam. Its conceptualization was influenced – but not completely determined – by the post-1968 “critique of work” that I absorbed when I lived in Paris from 1979 to 1982. At that time, I became acquainted with a number of French people who redefined the future revolution simply as not laboring for wages. Their position recalled the nineteenth-century socialist demand – articulated by both Marxists and anarchists – for the abolition of wage labor. More pragmatically, to survive in an — THE STRANGE HISTORY OF « WORKERS AGAINST WORK » L’ÉTRANGE HISTOIRE DE « OUVRIERS CONTRE LE TRAVAIL » — 4 5 * Michael Seidman, Workers against Work : Labor in Barcelona and Paris during the Popular Fronts, University of California Press, 1991 ; traduction française : Ouvriers contre le t r a v a i l : Barcelone et Paris pendant les fronts populaires, é d . Senonevero, 2010. (Les notes signalées par un astérisque sont du t r a d u c t e u r ) . * The author wishes to thank UNCW History Department’s Faculty Friday Seminar—especially its organizer, Mark Spaulding—and the Triangle Area French Cultural Studies Seminar, convened by Jim Winders and Don Reid, for their own and their groups’ comments and questions on previous versions of this e s s a y . L’auteur souhaite remercier le séminaire du vendredi du département d’histoire de l’Université de Caroline du Nord à Wilmington (UNCW), en particulier son animateur, Mark Spaulding, et le séminaire des études culturelles françaises du Triangle, organisé par Jim Winders et Don Reid, pour leurs commentaires, individuels et collectifs, ainsi que pour leurs questions concernant des versions antérieures de cet essai. L’ÉTRANGE HISTOIRE DE « OUVRIERS CONTRE LE TRAVAIL » — 7 expensive urban environment, the young Parisians in this circle sometimes performed odd jobs or lived off unemployment and welfare checks. Drinking and smoking, which was heigh- tened by the occasional use of soft drugs, helped to define this milieu. Having experienced undergraduate life in the U.S. during the late sixties and early seventies, these hedonistic ac- tivities were less shocking to me than their anti-work ideology. The Parisians exposed me to essential texts, such as the anthology, La Fin du travail, and the pamphlet, Le Refus du travail (1). Both publications argued that work was oppressive and, just as im- portantly, workers resisted it. During the 1960s and 1970s in France and in other western nations, a new interest in labor history arose, and, for the first time, historians began to chronicle workers’ everyday refusals of work (2). During these decades, Michelle Perrot and Michel Foucault composed histories of the rejection of disci- plinary techniques by workers, women, prisoners, and others (3). This history from below resurrected the popular classes’ search for autonomy and reflected a crisis of m i l i t a n t i s m e . As Foucault stated in the early seventies, “The masses don’t need him [the intellectual] to gain knowledge; they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than he and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves (4).” Non-worker activists and militants had only minor roles to play when wor- kers’ autonomy and self-determination were the goals. Intel- lectuals certainly could not lead the movement or provide it with revolutionary consciousness in the Leninist sense since, according to leftist critics of orthodox Marxism, the struggle itself – not well-meaning intellectuals – formed class consciousness. Works of labor and social history by Perrot, Foucault, and others, both reflected and sparked desires to revive libertarian traditions. A number of my friends and acquaintances in Paris in the late seventies and early eighties adopted councilism and demanded workers’ self-government. Richard Gombin’s key text reevaluated positively a leftism which Lenin had disdained as “infantile” (5). In turn, anti-Leninist leftists dismissed di- rection by “revolutionary” political parties and supposedly representative trade unions in favor of wildcat strikes, factory occupations, and varieties of workers’ control which, they — THE STRANGE HISTORY OF « WORKERS AGAINST WORK » 6 (1) Alexis Chassagne and Gaston Montracher, La Fin du travail (Paris: Stock, 1978); Le Refus du travail, (Paris: Echanges et Mouvement, 1977.) ; Bruno Astarian, Aux origines de l’antitravail ( P a r i s : Echanges et Mouvement, 2 0 0 5 ) ; Danièle Auffray, Thierry Baudouin, Michèle Collin, Le Travail, et après (Paris: J. P. Delarge, 1978). See also Jacques Guigou and Jacques Wajnsztejn, Mai 1968 et le mai rampant i t a l i e n (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008), 150. (2) Antoine Prost, La CGT à l’époque du Front populaire: 1934-1939. Essai de description n u m é r i q u e (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1 9 6 4 ) ; Rolande Trempé, Les Mineurs de Carmaux, 1 8 4 8 - 1 9 1 4 (Paris: Les Editions Ouvrières, 1971); Yves Lequin, Les Ouvriers de la région lyonnaise (1848-1914) (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1977). (3) Michelle Perrot, L e s Ouvriers en grève: France 1871-1890, 2 vol. Paris-La Haye: Mouton, 1974); Michel Foucault, D i s c i p l i n e and Punish: The Birth of the P r i s o n , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977). (4) Foucault quoted in Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s ( P r i n c e t o n : Princeton University Press, 2010), 308; Michel Foucault, Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984) (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 75. (5) Richard Gombin, T h e Origins of Modern (1) Alexis Chassagne et Gaston Montracher, La Fin du travail, éd. Stock, 1 9 7 8 ; Le Refus uploads/Litterature/ michael-seidman-l-x27-etrange-histoire-du-livre-quot-ouvriers-contre-le-travail-quot.pdf