Workplace Ethnography
I want to focus a different conception of the responsibility of investigations in the development of workplace or workers inquiry. I would suggest this as a more than literary modality, rather a forerunner of a kind of militant ethnography that is sorely needed. First of all reference is to Engels The Condition of the Working Class in England, then the huge chapter “The Working Day” in Marx’s Capital, volume one, right through to very late in Marx’s life when he penned 100 questions for a “Workers Inquiry” wanting to generalise the Factory Inspections of England to France, and beyond? Then we would trace this perhaps to the Bolsheviks, and Lenin of 1902, the so-called Factory Exposures, to Mao in Hunan writing reports …show more content…
Then many other examples that might be called a parallel sociology, owing debts to Adorno as well as Kracauer’s 1920s work on the Salaried Masses, through to the Italian post-war Marxist Operaist tradition starting with Panzieri in the journal Quaderni Rossi (Wright 2002, 21) and the Workerism of Italian autonomia, on up to Negri and Hardt (though of course with reservations (Hutnyk 2004). I am also tempted to explore, alongside this, from outside the labour movement, how the collection of oral histories and questionnaires of the “poverty-stricken” came to be known as co-research, and how the term Inquiry has much wider appeal among contemporary activists . If it is in fact standard to say, as I think it is, that everyone can trace this work back to the figure of the Factory Inspector Leonard Horner as described by Marx in “The Working Day” in Capital, we also owe it to Marx to note his criticisms of Horner, but also his recognition that the factory inspectors were an innovation on the part of capital. Towards the very end of his life, Marx declared as much in a short notice in La Revue Socialiste April 20, 1980, that called …show more content…
The bourgeoisie can only recognise itself through the state as orthodox Marxism would have it, and needs institutionalised sociologists and anthropologists to articulate its self-image (this is another trap of the teaching factory, Gertrude Kugelman as Girl number 18) but workers inquiry is necessarily collective, participatory and self-organised. Here, a responsibility to oneself as part of a project offers a different outlook than does the control orders of disciplinary knowledge. Breaking with the order, words, and hierarchy of knowledge is where scholarly engagement might sidestep the requirement of dedicating the working day to profit (in order for us to work for our human
I want to focus a different conception of the responsibility of investigations in the development of workplace or workers inquiry. I would suggest this as a more than literary modality, rather a forerunner of a kind of militant ethnography that is sorely needed. First of all reference is to Engels The Condition of the Working Class in England, then the huge chapter “The Working Day” in Marx’s Capital, volume one, right through to very late in Marx’s life when he penned 100 questions for a “Workers Inquiry” wanting to generalise the Factory Inspections of England to France, and beyond? Then we would trace this perhaps to the Bolsheviks, and Lenin of 1902, the so-called Factory Exposures, to Mao in Hunan writing reports …show more content…
Then many other examples that might be called a parallel sociology, owing debts to Adorno as well as Kracauer’s 1920s work on the Salaried Masses, through to the Italian post-war Marxist Operaist tradition starting with Panzieri in the journal Quaderni Rossi (Wright 2002, 21) and the Workerism of Italian autonomia, on up to Negri and Hardt (though of course with reservations (Hutnyk 2004). I am also tempted to explore, alongside this, from outside the labour movement, how the collection of oral histories and questionnaires of the “poverty-stricken” came to be known as co-research, and how the term Inquiry has much wider appeal among contemporary activists . If it is in fact standard to say, as I think it is, that everyone can trace this work back to the figure of the Factory Inspector Leonard Horner as described by Marx in “The Working Day” in Capital, we also owe it to Marx to note his criticisms of Horner, but also his recognition that the factory inspectors were an innovation on the part of capital. Towards the very end of his life, Marx declared as much in a short notice in La Revue Socialiste April 20, 1980, that called …show more content…
The bourgeoisie can only recognise itself through the state as orthodox Marxism would have it, and needs institutionalised sociologists and anthropologists to articulate its self-image (this is another trap of the teaching factory, Gertrude Kugelman as Girl number 18) but workers inquiry is necessarily collective, participatory and self-organised. Here, a responsibility to oneself as part of a project offers a different outlook than does the control orders of disciplinary knowledge. Breaking with the order, words, and hierarchy of knowledge is where scholarly engagement might sidestep the requirement of dedicating the working day to profit (in order for us to work for our human