There’s a moment in chapter 12 of Capital where Karl Marx describes a critical phase of glassmaking in a manufacturing workshop. Five workers gather at “the hole” of the furnace, each focused on an individual task that, taken together, will produce a bottle. “These five specialized workers represent the individual organs of a working organism that can function only as a unit.” Those five workers can only function as a unit “when all the workers are directly cooperating with one another.” That need for working cooperatively gives each and every one of those workers a tremendous amount of power: “When one member is missing, the whole body is paralyzed.” If just one worker withdraws their cooperation, the working organism ceases to be. Production is stopped, profit is threatened.
For the Left, this is much more than a story about making bottles or the manufacturing process. It’s more than a story about workers and strikes and capitalism. It’s a story about the power ordinary people have. And the reason ordinary people have that power is not because they are producing bottles or even socially necessary goods. It’s that the people with power, capitalists, and the system those people of power depend on, capitalism, is actually dependent upon the people with little individual power cooperating to use that little independent power they have to create something that capital and the capitalist need.
From the very beginning of its history, in the eighteenth century, the Left has had a dream, the dream of finding and wielding that one lever of power that can bring the social organism to a stop because it is a lever of power that the people at the top need. Whatever that organism may be — the monarchy of Louis XVI, the family under patriarchy, the factory under capitalism, and so on.
For many decades, the dream of that power lay in the strike. But as our sense of workers and unions has declined, the strike and its larger…
Auteur: Corey Robin
