The American worker - Paul Romano

and Ria Stone

An extensive two-part article on factory workers in the US in 1947. In the first half,
auto worker Phil Singer (using the pen name, Paul Romano) vividly describes factory
life, and in the second, Grace Lee Boggs (using the pseudonym, Ria Stone) outlines a
Marxist analysis.
by Paul Romano and Ria Stone (1947)
Introduction by Martin Glaberman
CONTENTS:
INTRODUCTION
PREFACE
PART I
LIFE IN THE FACTORY
INTRODUCTION
I. THE EFFECTS OF PRODUCTION
II. A LIFE-TIME TRANSFORMED INTO WORKING TIME
III. SINCE THE WAR ENDED
IV. THE INEFFlCIENCY OF THE COMPANY
V. MANAGEMENT'S ORGANlZATION AND THE WORKERS' ORGANIZATION
VI. STRATA AMONG THE WORKERS
VII. THE CONTRADICTION IN THE FACTORY
CONCLUSION
PART II
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF SOCIETY
INTRODUCTION
I. THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION IN THE PROCESS OF PRODUCTION
II. THE HUMAN NATURE OF INDUSTRY
III. CLASS INDIVIDUAL AND THE SOCIAL INDIVIDUAL
IV. IN SOCIETY WITH OTHER MEN
V. THE CRISIS OF THE CAPITALISTS
VI. THE WORKERS CRITIQUE OF POLITICS
INTRODUCTION
The American Worker was first published in 1947, a quarter of a century ago. Its
continued relevance is indicated by the fact that the section on life in the factory has
been reprinted in several places in the last few years. It was written by a young worker
in a General Motors plant in the East. For the auto industry in the immediate post-World War II years it was a rather small plant, employing only about 800 production

workers. Yet so sensitive was Paul Romano's observation of life in production that it
exposed social relations and physical facts that are still evident and still relevant.
A few years after The American Worker was written, the auto industry entered upon an
intense period of automation (foreseen in this pamphlet) which altered many things in
the way the industry (and work) was organized. Yet the basic conditions remain the
same. Romano wrote (page 2) that "the factory worker lives and breathes dirt and oil. As
machines are speeded up, the noise becomes greater, the strain greater, the labor greater,
even though the process is simplified." After twenty-five years more of the UAW, its
contracts, and its grievance procedure, those conditions remain essentially the same. On
May 6, 1971, the Detroit Free Press reported testimony in the trial of James Johnson, a
worker at the Eldon Ave. Axle Plant of the Chrysler Corporation, who was charged with
killing two foremen and a worker at the plant. A union steward, John Moffett, "told of
dangerous greasy floors, unprotected conveyors and dangerous aisles crowded with
workers and hi-low trucks at the same time."
Romano says, "The machinery is speeded up to a high degree. As a result there are
continuous breakdowns and a large crew of maintenance men is needed. The wanton
use of machinery is everywhere apparent." (Page 12).
Writing of the problems that General Motors faced in its new Vega plant in Lordstown,
Ohio, the Wall Street Journal noted on January 31, 1972: " 'If there was any one
miscalculation in this plant, it would have to be the 100-car-per-hour speed,' says Mr.
Anderson (a GM executive)... Equipment that works fine in other auto plants at speeds
of 50 cars or 60 cars an hour tends to destroy itself at the faster pace here."
With renewed and growing interest in working class organizing, there is a special
interest in Romano's perceptions of the attitude of workers to activists and radicals.
"Most of these workers," he says (page 22), "feel that the union activist is in there for
some reason. Union activity is out of the run of the average workers preoccupation. He
believes, therefore, that anyone who engages in it more than the rest has a reason. He is
distrustful, and would like to know what that reason is."
"Workers view radical parties this way: Members of a radical organization through
various means acquire positions of union leadership. There they agitate, etc. The
conception is that it all comes from above. As a result, a gulf arises between the
professional radical workers and the rank and file." (Page 32.)
These perceptions have infinitely more validity today.
The pamphlet appears as two contributions side by side -- that of a worker and that of an
intellectual. This was viewed at the time that the pamphlet was first published as a
necessary weakness. The fusion of worker and intellectual into one totality (as in a
popular working class press) had not been achieved by any Marxist group. But at the
same time that The American Worker was evidence of that separation, it was also
evidence of the attempt to overcome that separation, if only in the formal placing of two
articles side by side.
Fundamental to The American Worker is the dialectical relationship between the two
parts. Without the theoretical conceptions of Part II, there would not have been a Part I.

Ria Stone wrote that "Today it is the American working class which provides the
foundation for an analysis of the economic transition from capitalism to socialism, or
the concrete demonstration of the new society developing within the old." (Page 43.)
This was the view that led a Marxist group to seek out, to help record, and to publish the
experience of a young worker with an acute perception of the world around him.
This was not done to provide justification for a party line or illustrations of the ideas of
intellectuals. It was done because "That is what Marx conceived as socialism -- the
actual appropriation by the workers in the productive material life, of their human
capacities." (Page 65.) Neither essay stands alone. Neither is cause, neither is effect.
They depend on each other. A theoretical framework to free the worker to express his
deepest needs. The experience of workers to provide the basis for the continuing
expansion and development of theory, that is, of the continuing analysis of capitalist
society and the socialist revolution being created within it.
The original publishing group that produced The American Worker was the JohnsonForest Tendency, a group deriving from the theoretical conceptions of the West Indian
Marxist, C. L. R. James. In its later forms as the Correspondence Publishing Committee
and as Facing Reality, this tendency has for thirty years made a continuing contribution
to the development of a viable Marxism relevant to revolutionaries in American society.
Although Facing Reality was dissolved in 1970, this reprint is being undertaken to make
this material available to those who continue to be concerned with a fundamental aspect
of
the
modern
industrial
world.
Martin Glaberman
PREFACE
This little pamphlet concerns itself with the life of the working class in the process of
production. Its purpose is to understand what the workers are thinking and doing while
actually at work on the bench or on the line.
Romano, himself a factory worker, has contributed greatly to such an understanding by
his description, based upon years of study and observation, of the life of workers in
modern mass production. The profundity of Romano's contribution lies not in making
any new discovery but rather in seeing the obvious-the constant and daily raging of the
workers against the degrading and oppressive conditions of their life in the factory; and
at the same time, their creative and elemental drive to reconstruct society on a new and
higher level. Many have seen the manifestations of revolt in the workers' actions but
have failed to analyze them and draw the conclusions. On the basis of Romano' s report,
Ria Stone is able to probe the problems of modern society and to see in the struggle of
the men in production not only the struggle against the cancerous and destructive weight
upon them of capitalist production, but also the basis for the emancipation of all
humanity.
The ideas and experiences related in this pamphlet correspond closely to my
observations as a worker, as a trade unionist, and as a union committee-man in Detroit
for many years.
The two most fundamental questions of importance to workers are the amount of
production and the regularity of employment. Few things will arouse workers to strike

action like speed-up. A strike against a speed-up invariably draws the enthusiastic
support of non-production workers.
Most of the spontaneous sit-downs in the early days of the union were against the
speed-up and for the right of the men to determine the speed of the line. It is important
to note that not the wage demands were primary to the auto and rubber workers in the
formation of their unions but rather the right to determine the conditions of their
employment through instruments of their own. It is further important to note that the
standard of living of the workers has either improved very little or actually deteriorated
since the rise of the CIO. Yet the burning problems in the shops today are centered not
around wages so much as around the bitter hostility of the workers to their role in
production.
In the process of developing the means of production, the capitalist mode of production
also developed the force that would one day successfully challenge it. One chief
characteristic that runs like a red thread through the whole history of capitalism is the
constant series of revolts and rebellions against the mode of production itself. These
revolts and rebellions were not serious challenges to American capitalism so long as
they were not able to find expression outside the factory, due to peculiar historical
factors. The explosion of the CIO in the mid-thirties was the first decisive social
organization of this historic tendency of revolts and rebellions against life in the factory.
Until the coming of the CIO, the American capitalist class held undisputed sway,
politically, socially and economically.
The workers in building their unions thought that they were creating instruments of
organizing and controlling production in their interest. The capitalists, aware of this,
insisted that the unions recognize the capitalist mode of production. This is the basic
conflict. It is this conflict that the labor leadership is unable to resolve. This is the
dilemma that destroys innumerable leaders who have risen out of the working class.
This conflict arises constantly in many different forms. It plagues the union leader on
the local level constantly.
Production schedules are rarely constant. The workers are very hostile whenever
standards are revised upwards and severely castigate the union if it doesn't have a say in
this matter. I have heard hundreds of workers complain: "If the union doesn't have
something to say about how much we produce, what's the use of having a union?"
Whenever jobs are time-studied, the men are always dismayed when they learn that the
union doesn't have the right to decide with the company the standards of production.
When the company raises the number of units to be produced on a given line, the
demand the workers immediately make of the committee-man is: "What is the union
going to do about this? Does the company have the right to change production like
this?" Whenever changes in production methods are made and they result in the use of
fewer workers, the first thing the men want to know is: "Why don't we benefit from this
as well as the company?"
The men expect the committee-man to perform his function of defending their interests
on the job. On the basis of the contract, this is sometimes extremely difficult. Unless the
committee-man is very cautious, he may end up by helping the company to maintain
order, efficiency and uninterrupted production at the expense of the men.

For example, a production standard is established. The man assigned to the job refuses
to perform according to standards. He is sent to the Labor Relations office where he is
disciplined, docked for time off the job and ordered to produce as required. The
committee-man who is there to represent the man can only chime in and tell the worker
that on the basis of the contract, he must produce according to production standards or
face discharge.
Another example: Production is set for a whole line of, say, 200 men. The men protest
the production that is set and are ready to strike. Either the company or the men call the
committee-man. He tells the men that on the whole the production set is correct; that the
company has the right to set the production; that it is illegal to strike; and that the men
should accept the standard. He tells them, finally, that in individual cases where the
standard might be excessive, corrections will be made. Meanwhile, production must
continue without interruption.
The company establishes a series of rules and regulations to enforce discipline, order
and to maintain uninterrupted production. These the union must accept or at least accept
the company's right to discipline the men. So if a man or some men are violating some
rule, say, loitering, smoking, showing "disrespect', to supervision, or refusing to do
some disagreeable task, the foreman, in order to appear to be a good guy, calls in the
committee-man to caution the workers to respect whatever rule is being violated. The
committee-man in one form or another must comply.
The higher levels of the leadership try to solve this dilemma by fighting for concessions
outside the process of production. They give the impression of social workers in and out
of the plant. The workers in the shop are aware of this. Here is an illustration of how
they react. One day a worker was protesting a speed-up and said to me: "What are you
guys going to do about it? I know, nothing as usual. What good is the union? Now don't
tell me about the local's grocery store or about us being able to get women's clothes
cheaper. Do something about the speed-up." The unions have devised elaborate systems
of seniority to guarantee certain rights in regularity of employment, overtime, layoffs,
recall and job rights. Yet in large plants, as for example the one in which I work, only a
very small fraction of the workers attend union meetings. Whenever I have approached
workers and asked why they didn't attend union meetings, they invariably answered:
"They never talk about our conditions in the shop." As a matter of fact, workers prefer
departmental meetings where they can bring up and discuss problems that pressingly
affect them on the job.
The attitude of the workers in the shop to the union varies. The majority of the workers
support the union and would defend it. A large section of the workers, although in favor
of the union, are hostile to the union bureaucracy. On the one hand, they are aware of
the powerful social role played by men like Lewis, Murray and Green. On the other,
they see how little these men intervene in the process of production in the interests of
the workers.
The apparent contradictions in the workers and the stresses pulling the committee-man
in opposing directions, are precisely the contradictions and stresses of capitalist
production itself. The capitalists are primarily interested in uninterrupted production.
The worker wants to produce under conditions where he can decide what is to be
produced and how it is to be produced, where he can do the work he likes, and most

important of all, where he has the knowledge that his worth is recognized and that he is
playing an important and necessary role. Under present conditions, the most powerful
and at the same time the most frustrating tendency of the workers is to produce and to
cooperate for production as little as possible. The workers realize that a certain
minimum of production on their part is necessary in their own interest. They also realize
that they must not produce above the minimum. They therefore agree among themselves
to set such production quotas as will subject them to as little exploitation as possible.
Anyone who violates these quotas is bitterly resented.
These contradictions demonstrate the necessity of basing the working class struggle and
the reconstruction of society on the fundamental opposition of the workers to the
capitalist process of production. It is not for more to eat nor for the right to vote for one
bourgeois politician against another, but rather to tear himself loose from the oppressive
conditions of capitalist production that the worker is willing to wage battle. This
incessant revolutionary struggle will be unabated as long as capitalism lasts. So long as
the problems of the workers remain, the problems of society remain. The problems of
society can be understood only by understanding the basis of society-the working class.
They can be solved only by the working class organization of the productive forces on a
socialist
basis.
J. H.
PART
LIFE IN THE FACTORY

INTRODUCTION
I am a young worker in my late twenties. The past several years have found me in the
productive apparatus of the most highly industrialized country in the world. Most of my
working years have been spent in mass production industries among hundreds and
thousands of other workers. Their feelings, anxieties, exhilaration, boredom, exhaustion,
anger, have all been mine to one extent or another. By "their feelings" I mean those
which are the direct reactions to modern high-speed production. The present finds me
still in a factory-one of the giant corporations in the country.
This pamphlet is directed to the rank and file worker and its intention is to express those
innermost thoughts which the worker rarely talks about even to his fellow-workers. In
keeping a diary, so to speak, of the day-to-day reactions to factory life, I hoped to
uncover the reasons for the worker's deep dissatisfaction which has reached its peak in
recent years and has expressed itself in the latest strikes and spontaneous walkouts.
The rough draft of this pamphlet was given to workers across the country. Their reaction
was as one. They were surprised and gratified to see in print the experiences and
thoughts which they have rarely put into words. Workers arrive home from the factory
too exhausted to read more than the daily comics. Yet most of the workers who read the
pamphlet stayed up well into the night to finish the reading once they had started.
In direct contrast was the attitude of the intellectuals who are detached from the working
class. To them it was a repetition of an oft-written story. They felt cheated. There was
too much dirt and noise. They could not see the content for the words. The best
expression of what they had to say was: "So what?" It was to be expected, for how

could those so removed from the daily experiences of the laboring masses of the country
expect to understand the life of the worker as only the worker can understand it.
I am not writing in order to gain the approval or sympathy of these intellectuals for the
workers' actions. I want instead to illustrate to the workers themselves that sometimes
when their conditions seem everlasting and hopeless, they are in actuality revealing by
their every-day reactions and expressions that they are the road to a far-reaching change.
CHAPTER
THE EFFECTS OF PRODUCTION

You've
Got
to
Live
The worker has to work. There is no alternative but to produce in order to provide even
the bare necessities of life. The greater part of his waking hours are spent in the factory.
It is here that he, as a worker, must think and act. No matter what the conditions of life
are in the factory, he has got to make a living. That is one of the strongest motivations
governing the attitude of the worker in the modern productive system. He may not think
of ever being anything but a worker, but that does not prevent the thousand and one
pressures of factory life from leaving deep impressions upon him.
The worker is compelled on the job to perform a task which can only make him rebel:
the monotony; the getting up every morning, the day by day drudgery which takes its
toll. He labors under forced conditions. Not only that, but there is the fact that he
compels himself to accept these conditions. Home, family, economics make him a slave
to this routine. Theoretically, he is a free wage earner. Realistically, he cannot maintain
such a policy and exist. In other words, he thinks he has the right not to accept his
condition, but clearly realizes he must. These two pressures tend to foment a
subterranean frustration within him.
The
Shop's
Hard
on
the
Body
The factory worker lives and breathes dirt and oil. As machines are speeded up, the
noise becomes greater, the strain greater, the labor greater, even though the process is
simplified. Most steel cutting and grinding machines of today require a lubricant to
facilitate machining the material. It is commonplace to put on a clean set of clothes in
the morning and by noon to be soaked, literally, with oil. Most workers in my
department have oil pimples, rashes and sores on their arms and legs. The shoes become
soaked and the result is a steady case of athlete's foot. Blackheads fill the pores. It is an
extremely aggravating set of effects. We speak often of sitting and soaking in a hot tub
of water to loosen the dirt and ease the infectious blackheads.
In most factories the worker freezes in the winter, sweats in the summer and often does
not have hot water to wash the day's grime from his body. How many thousands of
workers have ridden the bus home with sweat and grime from the shop still covering
their bodies. Even if the facilities are there, the desire to get home and away from the
shop is so strong that workers often will not even bother to change out of their work
clothes. On the other hand, some workers deliberately scrub themselves and take
showers before leaving the factory. They attempt to leave every last taint of the day's
work on the inside of the plant gate. A new set of clothes and they are on the way home
feeling a little relaxed from the day's grind.

X is a laborer. He pulls chips from the machines; fills the machines with cutting oil and
helps stock up. Since a number of laborers were laid off, his job has increased in
intensity. He has more machines to tend. As a result, he, like the others, begins sweating
profusely. The bad part is this. Upon filling the cart with chips, he pushes the cart
outside of the plant. The constant change of temperature combined with the sweating
gives many of these laborers colds and bone troubles (arthritis, etc.).
However, they have discovered that if they wear a heavy sweatshirt, the perspiration
will be absorbed. Of course, they are continually uncomfortable.
Factory lighting as I have known it has never approached daylight in being able to ease
the strain on the eyes. Most often in the shops it is of a yellow hue. To illustrate the
results of this, it is best to repeat what other workers have said on this score. A worker
coming off the shift steps out into the sunlight. He blinks his eyes and says: "I feel as if
I have just come up out of the coal mines."
Sometimes workers who do not even know each other, greet each other in passing. One
day a worker whom I did not at all know, walked by me and in a brief statement and a
gesture of his hand towards the earth announced: "Down into the salt mines again."
Lunch time on the cafeteria veranda, an ex-GI says: "These goddamn factories are
prisons. You are cooped up without a chance to get a decent breath of fresh air."
The plant is generally filled with a heavy smoke from the carburizing- and heat treating
departments. It fills the nose and throat. Some one wrote the following on the locker
room bulletin board: "Why don't some one do something about this smoke hell-hole?" It
remained there for a few days and then the following was written: "The union is no
good, the smoke is still here,"
In the various shops in which I worked, I used to notice that most old-timers chewed
tobacco. Now there is a definite reason for this. To be exact:
1. It was one way to substitute for smoking on the job.
2. It seemed to absorb the fumes, dust and steel fragments that floated around.
I have noticed several young workers doing it now. I asked one why, He said that every
night when he got home, his throat is coated and also his nostrils with the dust of the
shop. He said it is a lung protection. Many of the workers have discolored teeth as a
result. Snuff is also used.
I have made these observations of other jobs.
Foundry workers have the soles of their feet cooked on the job. It is a hot, filthy, smoky
job and the feet ache from toasting. There is the ever--present danger of being burned by
molten metal.
Crane operators inhale all fumes, dust, gas, heat, etc., which rise to the ceiling. In one
shop, the crane men used to complain bitterly that they had to urinate in buckets because
they we re not allowed to leave the crane.

Production welding is also bad. The mask is over the head for long hours. It is a stifling
job. The flash of a welding torch can blind a worker. Many such accidents happened
during the war.
The factory routine often causes the worker physical discomfort and irritation of a very
intimate kind. In the morning he faces the question: should he relieve himself by
moving his bowels before he leaves the house, which will mean rushing in order to get
to work on time; or should he be uncomfortable until he can relieve himself in the plant?
On the other hand, in the plant he may not be able to leave his machine at the time he
has the impulse to go to the men's room because of the production demands made on
him. Sometimes in such a situation, he shuts down his machine in anger and says: "To
hell with this. When you gotta go, you gotta go." No matter what course he follows, the
result is that what should be a simple, personal routine, becomes a matter of pain,
irritation and conflict.
There are times when a worker will cut himself badly. Although the company
continually states that the hospital facilities are there for the use of the men, and that
even the most minor cut or bruise should be reported to the hospital, the men do not
report for treatment often. The reason for this is that they are afraid that they will
receive a black mark on their record which might classify them as careless workers in
this or any other factory where they might be working.
One day workers in one end of the shop are freezing from the cold. They get up a
delegation and go into the front office. They say: "Either we get heat or we go home."
Monday morning on a dreary, cold, winter day: Workers are dressing and changing
clothes. A worker comes in and in one word expresses the philosophical outlook and
feelings of each worker present. In a frustrated, definitive, angry tone, he says, "Horse
S" Everyone understands and says to himself, "You can say that again for me, brother."
And
Harder
on
the
Mind
There are times when a worker suffers a nervous and mental breakdown as a result of
attending machines for long hours over a period of months and years. It takes a period
of sustained exposure to result in such a climax. In one shop where I was steward, I
happened one day to look over at a machine where one of the workers was sitting. He
had his head in his hands. It was immediately discernible that something was wrong. I
went over to him. He told me if he didn't walk out that instant, he would break. I hurried
him into the locker room and he left the building. A couple of days later he told me that
was the closest he ever came to a physical and mental breakdown. In the same
department I knew one worker who suffered a nervous break-down after parts of his
machine had showered him when the power was on and something went wrong. Home
difficulties, combined with the machine often produce terribly nervous individuals.
On the job, as a result of constantly handling steel chips, the fingernails are torn away.
Sometimes it is painful, but always irritating and annoying. Many accidents happen
because of simple forgetfulness. The most usual is that of getting a cut by grabbing a
chip coming off the machine. Many machines require a constant repetition of routine
actions on the part of the worker. With the foot he steps on a lever while his hands are
engaged in putting a piece of work in the machine and pushing other levers. The week
in and week out repetition of these movements at certain times produces a sort of

dullness or dizziness. The result is that one day the worker will put his hand in the
machine instead of the piece of work. After such an accident, the operator asks himself,
"Why did I do that?"
The militancy of the American worker is something of a sporadic nature. Now fierce,
now subtle, now quiet. He may go for months without a violent outward expression.
Even years. This does not belie the fact that continually within him is an ever-pressing
force which drives towards eruption. Such an explosion at a particular time seizes any
reason at hand as the basis for its manifestation.
A worker walks in and sits down in my aisle of lockers at the beginning of work. He is a
veteran, was wounded overseas. He suddenly exclaims in a loud voice, "Let's go out on
strike." I look at him and ask, "What brings this on?" He replies, "I can't stand it."
"Stand what?" I ask. He answers: "The incessant pounding in my head. The goddamn
bang-bang-bang of the machine is driving me nuts. It is driving me crazy. Back and
forth, back and forth."
The machine he operates is a cold header. It chops off half-inch pieces of steel about
one-half inch in diameter from a large roll of steel. It takes great pressure and is done
without heat so that the result is a steady pounding noise, with the feeding arm going
back and forth. I myself worked next to these machines for several weeks. When you
leave work, there still remains the continued booming in your head.
I asked one worker how old he was. His reply was "30." I then said, "Well, you are as
old as you feel in body and spirit." He replied, "Then here am I, an old man."
One young worker I know spoke of the fact that he was always under a strain because
the boss was constantly yelling at him. As a result, when-ever he sees the boss approach,
he hides. In arguments with the boss, on the other hand, he suddenly becomes angry and
threatens to quit.
There is the worker who arrives every morning in the locker room with, "Ours is not to
reason why, ours is but to do and die."
The worker's attitude is: "All that the company is interested in is production and more
production." This is his way of protesting against the complete disregard of the
individual human element. This is also evidenced by such statements as: "What do they
think we are, pieces of steel?"
CHAPTER
A LIFE-TIME TRANSFORMED INTO WORKING-TIME

II

I
Work
All
Week
for
Friday
Night
The life of a worker is transformed into working-time. He does not know how to play.
After working hours, in the company of other workers, the conversation invariably
returns to the shop. It is like a drug that will not release his mind. The worker thinks of
pay day and the end of the week. His off-hours are always conditioned by, "I can't stay
up late as I have to go to work tomorrow." When Sunday night arrives, he thinks
dejectedly of returning to work on Monday morning. The incessant process continually

repeats itself. He looks longingly for week-ends and they disappear before he has a real
chance to absorb them. He says, "I work all week for Friday night."
There are times when the worker has several days off in a row. The knowledge of this
almost immediately begins to loosen the psychological strain. After a few days, he
begins to acquire rest and peace of mind. The work takes on a lighter aspect. He has the
opportunity to look out of his limited sphere. The pressure of work temporarily leaves
him. Oddly enough however, during fleeting moments of this period, a sense of
unexplainable guilt for not being at work suddenly will come over him. The return to
work is difficult. The first few hours back in the shop still finds the worker imbued with
the spirit of his sojourn. Then comes the end of the day. The appearance and feeling of
the worker are exactly what they were before the break occurred.
Effects of production are of a very insidious nature. Some of the cumulative effects
reach heights of bursting power. There are days when some workers will go home early
or not come in to work at all.
The worker often has to fool himself in order to keep working the whole week. On
Tuesday he will promise himself a day off the following day. When Wednesday rolls
around, he will say to himself: "I'll work today and take off on Thursday instead." He
does this until Friday comes along and then he says: "I might as well finish the week.
Another eight hours won't kill me."
One of the workers won $50 on a bet. When he learned of it in the plant, he worked 4
hours and then took off.
Now and then, the plant has a fire drill. The workers march out of the plant for five
minutes. Everyone seizes the opportunity to smoke. Remarks of this kind can be heard:
"I'd like to go right home," or "I wish we would stay out till quitting time."
Ten workers from my department are settled around the table at lunch time. As the half
hour period ends, one worker states adamantly: "Let's stay here (cafeteria) and not go
down to work. We work hard. What can they do to us if we stay?"
There is an old popular phrase used on payday, "Another day, another dollar".
When payday comes, the locker-room buzzes as though a faucet was turned on. This
one day of the week, there is whistling, chattering, and lively activity. The thing for
which the workers have struggled all week has arrived, so it is natural that they should
justify their suffering by the "good old pay check."
On the other hand, there is at certain times in the worker a psychological drive to remain
in the plant. As we know, a worker spends most of his waking hours in the plant or at
his labor. His life, therefore, revolves around this activity. His subconscious becomes
overwhelmed with facts and thoughts concerning machine, workers, bosses, regularity
of work hours, and incessant repetition. When out of the shop, he breathes a little more
like a man. His home is more like the expression of his life. When the break occurs in
the work and he has his weekend, for a fleeting moment he has loosened himself from
the effects of the shop. Then crash! He must reorient himself back on Monday to the
same old routine. The mental strain at many times is immense. This was much more so

during the war when in many instances the work day was 12 hours, 6 and 7 days a
week. As a result, having become acclimated to the shop, there were times he would
rather remain than leave. The longer hours a worker puts in, the easier it is to drag him
still further in the work day. There is a converse to this. As the work day shortens, and
the work week correspondingly, the worker then begins to want a still shorter working
period.
Once we were going back to a 40 hour week. I have heard many comments on this. The
greater part of them are statements to the effect that these workers are very happy about
it. They hate to lose the overtime pay (as they need it badly) but since the initiative was
not theirs, they feel that they are not cutting their own throats. As I have heard it: "I
won't ask for overtime. If the company gives it to me, I will work, but I hope there is no
overtime." Speaking of overtime, workers sometimes resent other workers refusing
overtime, because they are afraid that it will jeopardize their own overtime. They do not
want overtime but are forced to take it by economic necessity.
Then I have heard rambling conversations. One worker says, "Let's work 6 hours a day,
5 days." Another says: "While you are wanting, how about 2 hours a day, 4 days a
week?"
There Must Be a Better Way of Making a Living Than This
There exists today in the factory an attitude which was not apparent before the war. As
stated by the workers, it goes, "There must be a better way of making a living than this."
It is a distinct change. Several business suggestions have been bandied back and forth.
Opening a tavern, ice cream parlor, launderette, etc. No one of the workers could
finance it alone, so for a while they spoke about partnerships, but then gave that up.
They feel the closeness of their economic position.
I have noticed the trend amongst the workers to speak more and more in terms of
security. How it can be gotten, etc. There is a strong attitude prevalent to the effect that
the worker gets pushed around too much on the job. They think in terms of a year or
two at the present job. "When production really gets under way it will be a short time
before the ware-houses are flooded." In short, they expect bust. Every time a four day
work week is scheduled, the workers speak as if the depression is already here. On the
other hand, when they are sure of a full week's work, some workers will take a day off.
The married worker with a family feels that the single worker who supports himself
only, cannot be too responsible. He arrives at this conclusion this way. Factory life is
drudgery. Anyone who is not forced by necessity to endure it, is one who will at any
moment up and leave or be irresponsible on the job. It is not uncommon to hear one
worker say to another, "Why do you stay in the factory? If I was single, I would be out
of here long ago."
One of the inspectors told me he is going into business. Day after day he gets up at the
same time, goes through the same routine, and comes home. He says he refuses to take
it any longer. This monotonous procedure is getting him down. He does not want to
spend his life this way. He had best make a break before he gets old. He does not care if
he loses all his savings, at least he will be free for a while. He was in the marines and
did picket duty during the strike. I told him he was doomed to the factory and he
became very upset. He took a month's leave of absence, failed, and then came back.

Workers often change jobs in the hope of finding conditions better in another situation.
Often they will even take less pay if a certain job appears to offer peace of mind. It is
apparent now though that conditions of work everywhere are the same. A change of jobs
may bring a novelty, but it wears off in a week or so.
The
Wife
and
Kids
The worker cannot express even to himself the real meaning of his suffering. When he
arrives home, he finds that his wife, after a hard day' s work in the home, often does not
show any interest in his problems. His realization of this makes him at times resent the
fact that he cannot even unburden himself to his wife. He often talks to his kids about
his work though. Not so they will understand, but as a release for himself.
At other times, his wife is the only one to whom the worker can unburden himself.
Many workers' wives know as much about the factory their husband is employed in as
do workers in the shop. Over the supper table the many pressures which fell on the
worker that day come out. Perhaps a fight with the foreman, some spoiled work, or
trouble with the machine. If during the day the worker has made some creative work or
found himself able to deal with some troublesome problem on the machine, he will
report it to his wife in glowing terms.
Many times the worker awakens on a non-work day with the impression that it is a
working day. Saturday or Sunday for instance. He wakes up with a start, not having set
the alarm and frantically realizes he is late. The shop is ever in his subconscious.
About getting up in the morning, there is a technique which most workers use against
being late. The dock is set and placed about 5 or 10 feet away. To shut it off, it is
necessary to get out of bed and walk, stumble, and what have you, to the dock. This
process insures the workers waking enough to realize it is time to get up. When the dock
is placed next to the bedside, it is a common occurrence to reach out, stop the alarm, rest
a few minutes and then wake up late for work. This provokes haste and nervous
stomach, upset in the family, etc.
Often the wife must do the waking up at five or six in the morning. This adds to the
trials of her day as she has to wake up a short time later for the kids. Many times home
life is disrupted by this series of events. It results in early morning quarrels and
arguments with the husband leaving for work without his lunch pail. Also a cause of this
disruption in family life is the shift work. The third shift from 12 :00 to 7 :00 A.M. is the
worst. Some call it the nightmare shift. The family can rarely get together and looks
longingly for weekends. The worker gets home at the beginning of day and tries to sleep
with the kids running around. He gets irritated at the kids and yells at his wife for not
keeping them quiet. He works hard all night to come home to this.
Both second and third shifts prevent the husband and wife from sharing in a rational and
human manner the normal intimacies of life.
Many young workers think of a new baby in the family in terms of support, or will they
make enough to take care of it. If a slip occurs, the chain grows tighter. Many workers
resort to having abortions for their wives. I know one such case in the shop where the
woman became critically ill as a result and still suffers from the effects. This family

already has two children. They like infants. The only apparent reason for the abortion
was economic insecurity.
After supper, sitting in the living room, it is a matter of minutes before falling off in an
exhausted sleep on the parlor chair. Here is the way it is told. "I put the radio on. I heard
the announcer state the 'Lux radio for the evening,' and that is all. I woke up a few hours
later. Stiff neck and backache and flopped into bed."
Here are some other aspects of home life. Many workers say, "I've already got my icebox filled with beer. I generally drink a half a dozen bottles before going to bed." Or,
"Relaxing with a bottle of beer."
Taking a ride on non-work days, a worker many times will deliberately avoid those
streets which lead him to work. He comes to dislike all those buildings and landmarks
which line the route to the factory. Or he will many times deliberately ride this circuit
up to the plant and past, precisely because he is free to do so on this one day.
On the other hand, workers have often made it a point to bring their whole family down
to the plant site on a Sunday. There they explain to the family what section of the plant
is their working area.
The worker tries to bring a bit of his home into the factory, so he often shows to other
workers the pictures which he carries in his wallet of his children. Sometimes it is the
home in which he lives. It is not unusual for snapshots of all kinds to be on the inside
cover of a worker's toolbox. One fellow had a snapshot of a filling station which he
once owned, and another of his automobile.
In spite of the fact that workers continually go on strike, during periods when such is
not the case, the attitude prevailing is one which would seemingly prevent a strike.
Workers continually refer to the fact that they have a wife and kids and have
responsibilities. They say, "I can't afford to be out of work or go on strike. If you were
married, you would know and understand."
It is very difficult to reach workers at certain periods. To picture this point clearly we
can say that the workers have drawn back into themselves to think things out. Events as
they unfold are the lever which periodically brings forth these thoughts into actions. The
average worker has too much responsibility to be persuaded by words alone.
CHAPTER
SINCE THE WAR ENDED

III

The
Speed-Up
At the time of the telephone strike, in the spring of 1947, we got an eleven and a half
cents raise. Machines have been speeded up again to get it back. Most workers said
when we got the raise that the company would take it out of our hide.
The worker used to be able to smoke more often. Now he has to spend all day watching,
changing and cleaning tools. The interludes are briefer. The end of the day produces a
more exhausted worker, mentally and physically. The moments of relaxation are
continually diminishing.

On the other hand, the more the machine is speeded up, the more times the worker seeks
to leave his machine even though this increases the chances of the machine' s cracking
up.
Workers in many departments now run 3 and 4 machines where previously a worker ran
one. This keeps a worker jumping and on his toes. Invariably during every day someone
will speak of his exhaustion.
A worker on a high speed automatic machine said: "I am geared up at a high speed pitch
to run a fast machine. Kept busy piling up the work, loading and putting new tools in. If
I was to be put on a slower machine, I couldn't stand the change of pace. At the same
time it would be a vacation compared to the fast one I run."
I
Dropped
Dead
The shop has the incentive system. The company appears to cheat workers here and
there out of parts of their bonus. Many ask "Why do they do this?" The computations of
the bonus become complicated especially when time cards are given to workers. The
company is often accused of ripping up time cards that were given to workers.
One worker went into a long, heated talk against the incentive system. Spoke of how a
man has to exhaust himself to reach or go over the established norm. Also a normal
day's work would relieve tension and is enough to expect from a worker. He stated
vehemently that he would like to throttle the inventor of the bonus or incentive system.
When the operators fail to make bonus by the end of the day, they climax it with the
expression, "I dropped dead." The essence is that the worker exhausted himself to no
avail.
To
Produce
or
Not
to
Produce
The machines are speeded up about 40%. The workers are caught in a contradiction. To
continue to produce at that rate might soon put them out of work. The workers are
divided on the subject. Some think that it matters little, and that when the big bust
comes, it will hit them anyway. Others quietly begin to lower their production per day.
The work, intensifying in pressure, also drives more workers to reduce their daily quota.
To produce or not to produce under these conditions is the question. The cost of living
soars upward, compelling the worker to produce in order to make extra money on
incentive with which to meet his daily needs.
When time-study men are about, the worker will find a multitude of reasons for shutting
the machine down. A resentment of large proportions grows as he sees the man from the
office with the dock in his hand. It is then that he uses all the tricks he knows to slow
down the machine and also his own action. The time-study man is unwanted in the
shop. Everywhere he goes, resentment-filled eyes follow him. He is aware of this, and
many times is almost apologetic, at other times surly.
The
Company
Checks
Up
Relations between checker and worker have always been a strained affair. The worker
always attempting to cheat, the checker always feels sure the worker is putting
something over on him. Of course, the checker' s personality becomes molded to his job
and he becomes more or less of a "bastard" to the workers. He counts their work to see

that they are not cheating, which they resent. However, the workers cheat at every
opportunity by stealing work after collection or by deliberate miscount to the checker.
Stealing pans of work from the company is an art which many practice. The worker in
the morning will steal a pan of work. If in the afternoon, the checker accidentally should
give him a miscount on a few pieces, he gets angry and demands the few pieces, even
though they mean little.
On some machines, counters were placed to determine whether the worker was stealing
work, and to determine the amount of cycles the machine made. A cycle is equivalent to
one finished piece of work. It is clear that every means will be used to get the utmost
out of the men.
The company is now checking the usage of electric power the last 15 minutes before
quitting time. Many workers having reached their quota by then, shut down. It appears
as though the company wants to determine the amount of labor they are not receiving.
The
Worker
Double
Checks
The worker becomes a bookkeeper and carefully calculates his day's percentage,
checking it against company receipts to see that he is not cheated. He does the same
with his paycheck every week. He is consumed with anger if the company has shorted
him.
The plant took inventory this week. Many workers including laborers, machinists, heattreat, grinders, etc., participated. For the past several months workers have been stealing
pans of work to fill their bonus needs. Obviously, there will be a shortage of tens of
thousands of pieces in inventory. The workers found the situation quite humorous.
We are on production in our department. One hundred percent is the norm you are told
to achieve. It takes all day to reach that. It is generally in the last three quarters of an
hour that you make your bonus. What has happened is this. The checker comes around
to close the worker out just about then. Many lose their bonus because the checker
comes too early. There have been some violent flare-ups on this score. Once a worker
came around and told the others not to turn in their work until quitting time. However,
there is a contradiction involved. The workers are told to shut down early but yet hate to
lose their bonus. Here is how the workers get around this: After the checker has gone,
they let the machines run for the next guy, so that when he comes in, lying in the pan
will be the work he would normally lose at the end of day. The next man does the same
for him.
Some workers spend the last half hour making work for the next fellow. However, there
are many workers who don't do so. Caught in the contradictions of company
inefficiency, high piece-work rates and the desire to make bonus, the end of the day
finds them too exhausted to change tools or to make extra work for the incoming
worker. The desire to shut down the machine as soon as possible and to get away from it
is always present.
Violations
In our shop there is a set of company rules. If any are broken, it means a violation.
Three violations give the company the right to fire you. This can readily be used by the
company when seeking to fire someone. One worker once told me, "They can fire you

anytime. All they have to do is say your work is scrapped three times or catch you
smoking, or coming in late." (However, this is dependent on the strength of the union.)
The company every once in a while sends a superintendent into the washrooms to catch
workers smoking or sitting down. Badge numbers are taken down and a black mark put
against your record. The worker resents these sneaky tactics.
Workers have been restricted to machines till the bell rings. Formerly, they were able to
go up five minutes or so earlier to the lunch room or at quitting time to the locker room.
There is also to be no more eating of lunch at the machines. However, the men are
already breaking it down. Violations are given out by the company. The plant
superintendent complains that no sooner is the restriction announced than he catches a
worker eating a sandwich. He says the worker has the gall to offer him a bite too. One
worker was hauled in and threatened with a violation. His reply was, "I will eat three
sandwiches and you can give me the three violations and try to fire me."
One worker I know has two violations. He is bitter over such treatment of workers. That
is no way to treat your fellow men, he says. I asked him why he signed the violation
when he should have fought it with the union. He says that while he was in the office,
he was raging inwardly, but it could not be noticed outwardly. He signed it to show the
company he was not afraid of them.
The company tries not to antagonize workers who are trouble-makers. Their attitude
seems to be that if such a worker is irritated by the company, he will prove to be a
greater source of aggravation for the company. Therefore, they attempt wherever
possible to placate such workers.
The company has the right to fire workers who have been given violations. That is, for
stealing work, making scrap, being caught smoking etc. Although that is the law, so to
speak, the company rarely invokes it. They could not in actuality enforce it. Instead they
attempt to irritate the worker into obeying the law.
A worker once was caught stealing a pan of work to make up his bonus needs for the
day. Upon being called into the office, he demanded that they should give him his final
pay, and if they did not like his work, he would go elsewhere. The company declined to
do this, but in order to penalize him, gave him a few days off.
Plant supervision has attempted several times to prevent men from using their half hour
lunch to doze off in the locker room stretched out on benches. I used to do this in other
plants. The idea is to eat your lunch surreptitiously before the bell and then escape into
sleep for one-half hour. The awakening is only that much worse though.
The men often say: "If they were to fire us for all the violations that are committed,
there would be no one working in the plant."
No
Use
Giving
the
Company
Something
for
Nothing
The worker does not give freely of his fullest abilities. When he deems it necessary, he
will cut his production. If he can't make out on the job, he will make sure he goes well
under for the week. "No use giving the company something for nothing, as that is what
they are looking for," he says. "You're here to work for yourself, not for the company."

There are days when a worker has become particularly irritated at the Company. He
vents his anger by putting out less work than usual. Other times, when the company
speeds up the machine and increases the norm, a section of workers will tacitly agree to
begin a slow down. Such a situation is occurring now in one department. In order to
compel the company to reduce the rate, the workers are at present engaged in a daily
reduction of their percentage. Since the company has refused by arbitration to reduce
the rate, the men are relying on their own actions to compel a change.
The workers feel that strikes merely for wages do not get them anywhere. There is a
direct, distinct and often openly voiced sentiment against another strike. However, it is
easy to see from day to day, that as a result of the speed-up in the machinery and the
increased exploitation, no excuse of wages will be needed for strike justification when
the saturation point is reached.
CHAPTER
IV
THE
INEFFICIENCY
OF
THE
COMPANY
The plant I work in is part of a giant corporation. The network is country-wide. It is a
high degree of capitalist organization in industry. However, the bureaucratic supervision
of work results in inefficiency on a tremendous scale in view of the effort involved. It
appears that the company is sacrificing all for production. It is not so. More production
could be gotten in a different manner. The intent is more at the subjugation and control
of the laborer.
Wanton
Use
of
Machinery
The machinery is speeded up to a high degree. As a result there are continuous
breakdowns and a large crew of maintenance men is needed. The wanton use of the
machinery is everywhere apparent.
A cam will be put in the machine to reduce cutting time. The tools as a result hit at high
speed and both burn and break up. As a result of excessive speeds, bearings in the
machines bum out, and some machines are always in repair. Such machine speeds
induce the worker to say: "Some day these damn machines will take off and fly away."
The machines are geared to certain types of metal. Often the steel put at the machine is
of a temper harder than that required. This once again causes burned up and broken
tools.
For weeks on end, necessary repairs will not be made. A new hole needs to be tapped in
a fixture to keep it secure. A slipping clutch or brake threatens the cracking up of the
machine at any time with the added danger to the operator. Nothing is done.
The company is not interested in how many tools are burned up, or how often the men
must change them. They are primarily interested in getting the machines to run at
maximum speed and then it will be up to the operators to keep up with them.
"If
I
Had
the
Money
Spent
on
This..."
The company continually attempts to cut down on the expense departments, that is, the
non-productive departments. The production departments suffer by this and are
constantly irritated by having to do incidental errands.

The grinding department has blueprints from which they calculate how to grind up the
tools. The worker in his daily experience finds that the blue-print is no good and he asks
the grinder to do it his way. The grinder says "okay," and for a while he cooperates with
the machine operator. Management hears of this. A big argument takes place. The
grinder is told that he is to take orders only from management and to follow the
blueprint. He then says: "You're the boss," and does as instructed. What follows would
be somewhat funny if it did not add to the troubles of the worker in the shop. The
worker is then compelled to go to the crib, get the tool, find the foreman, tell him a
change must be made in the tool, get a requisition from the foreman, go to the grinding
room, and request the grinder to stop whatever he is doing to grind up the tool he needs.
It should be remembered that from the moment the worker goes to the crib for the tool,
it has already been ground up once.
A huge conveyor belt has recently been installed throughout the plant. It goes from
department to department. Hundreds of steel girders and steel baskets comprise its
make-up. The cost ran into thousands of dollars. As far as the workers are concerned it
is at this date a failure. The workers are constantly hurting themselves on it. It is in the
middle of the machinery and serves as a hazard. The workers are becoming increasingly
angry about it.
Whereas before the machine operator stacked up his work in pans and placed them on
the floor for a laborer to pick up later, now the men are ordered to place the work on the
conveyor. The laborer is now eliminated in this respect. The company had tried to
institute this once before, but failed. Many of the workers rebelled at the new system,
claiming it was out of their classification, etc. For some days there was a disturbance.
Although the new system has proved in some ways more satisfactory, the fact that the
men were not consulted and the company arbitrarily instituted it, brought on the revolt.
At this time, a layoff numbering into hundreds has been taking place. The workers
contrast the cost of the conveyor and its waste of money and space to this layoff and say
that the expense involved could easily have kept all these workers on the job. Many say,
"If I had the money spent on this, I could retire for life." The layoffs have brought on
increased labor on the part of those still remaining. The workers all understand and state
openly and consistently that the company is trying to cut overhead and expense. These
layoffs have affected all but the production departments, i.e., laborers, inspectors, tool
room, maintenance, and other non-production.
An incident happened in the shop one day. There was a shortage of laborers due to the
layoff. Consequently when the checker came around, he asked the machine operators to
load the work onto the conveyor. There was a rebellion expressed thus; "Give them an
inch and they want a mile." As a result, a number of the operators refused to load. The
laborers were put back on the job. It is obvious that the company is trying to get the
machine operators to do the work of the chip-pullers and laborers as well.
A worker put in a suggestion, asking that the recently installed conveyor be used to
carry tools to the machines. The company turned it down. The workers thought it was a
good idea, but would fail because there never are enough tools anyway and most of
them would be gone before half of the machines had been reached.

Management
Complains
Management complains continually that the workers do not cooperate. They don't clean
the machines or sweep the floor. There are seventy accidents in one month in one
department. Safety meetings are held once a month for one half hour following lunch.
At the meetings, management attempts to superimpose the company's safety staff as a
counter to the union apparatus. The workers are exhorted to bring their complaints to
this safety committee. To stimulate worker's participation they appoint three shop
workers as the first rung of the safety committee. Thereafter the committee consists of
the company engineers and personnel.
The safety meetings are conducted by the company. A speech is generally given by the
foreman for most of the allotted half hour. The last few minutes are left open for
discussion by the ranks. If a worker or two speaks about something unimportant, they
are patiently listened to. If, however, the men are in an uproar and begin jumping up to
complain about this, that, or the other thing and the meeting runs away, it is immediately
adjourned, and the company says: "Back to the machines, men, we have work to do."
These are some of the reactions of the workers to the safety committee meetings.
1.
"Oh
boy,
another
half
hour
to
rest."
2. "What kind of safety meeting is this? All they did was yell at the porters."
3.
Some
doze
off
during
meetings.
4. The foreman and superintendent always say: "The men are negligent and don't
cooperate
with
the
safety
committee."
5. You are told to get enough sleep, not to drink, and to eat the right foods.
6.
The
men
snicker
sometimes.
7. The company maintains they are doing everything to help the men.
At one meeting the company stated: "We now have enough laborers to keep the plant
clean, now do your part." Not long after, half the laborers were laid off. It seems to the
workers that the company doesn't know its plans from one week to the next.
Why
Such
Inefficiency?
One grievance condition in the plant has existed for over a year. Heavy smoke from the
heat-treating furnaces periodically covers the plant. This has been brought up in almost
every committee meeting. The condition still exists. One worker says: "Someday, we
are going to do something about this."
One day a worker is hauled into the office for making a pile of scrap work. They want to
know why. His reply is this: "The lighting is poor. Those bulbs on the machine become
coated with oil and I can't see. My eyes become strained looking into the machine and it
was impossible to see what I was doing."
Inefficiency and red tape on the part of the company often drive the worker to the point
of a combination of tears and anger. A shortage of tools at a critical moment, an
improperly ground tool, a faulty machine left unrepaired and endangering the worker,
help not around when needed, stock for the machines left not at the machine for which it
is needed but ten machines down where it is not needed; passing the buck down the line
when something goes wrong all contribute to the aggravating situation.

Workers often say:

"Why such inefficiency?"
"The company lost a day's work because of a lack of a piece of chain costing about 75
cents."
"Why are there no washers? Can't the company afford it?"
"It is getting so that supervision don't give a damn about anything." Many workers
become angry because of the fact that suggestions which they put in are ignored. These
suggestions would add to efficiency and also increase production as well as save money.
There is a general tendency in all strata of the working class to work in as efficient a
manner as possible. Also, workers feel pride when a plant is operated efficiently. The
more complex and efficient the plant, the greater pride the worker experiences. The
more conservative workers, i.e., the ones on higher paying and better jobs, those who
have a perspective of going out on their own, or those who feel there is a chance for
advancement, constantly seek and strive to make for more efficient operation. On the
other hand, the majority of the workers face a frustrating contradiction. They feel their
oppressed status and consciously and unconsciously struggle against it. They realize that
any increase in efficiency is a further exploitation and oppression. As a result, they
constantly have to struggle to maintain a balance between good and efficient
workmanship and their class interests.
The company tries to increase production by every mechanical means. Management
talks much about the human factor in production but it cannot conceive that the human
factor lies in the collective capacities of the workers themselves.
The
Violent
Reaction
of
the
Worker
The conditions of life in the factory often drive the worker into a fury. If windows
supplying vital ventilation are closed, he will like as not pick up a piece of steel and
break the window. That is the way I have seen it time and again.
In the toilets, water will deliberately be left running at full force when no one is using
the sink. Fixtures are dismantled and doors broken.
I have seen workers methodically tear apart sections of machinery lying about and
throw them away.
The conveyor has large steel baskets which hang from the chain belt. Periodically a
dozen or so must be repaired. It seems that the workers twist the baskets as they go by,
swing them back and forth, and in general mutilate them.
I have heard workers say that they wish that their machine would break up mechanically
so that they would not have to run it.
There is the destructive fury manifested by the worker throwing a piece of work at the
machine when it does not function properly. He bitterly curses the "God dam machine."

Another worker slipped with his wrench and cut himself. He hurled the wrench on the
floor in anger. This same worker during the same day had machine trouble. His anger
reached new heights. He cursed the machine, the company, the foreman and kept
shouting he was going to quit.
Going off the shift, a worker spits at his machine and curses the company and anybody
in earshot.
A "Hammer Merchant" is a worker who uses a sledge hammer to adjust the fixtures on
his machine. Instead of loosening the bolts keeping the fixture tight, he resorts to such
activity as using the hammer in order to save him time on production. Over a period of
time the machinery becomes mutilated. Many workers resent such a destruction of the
machine and it causes arguments among them.
I once had trouble with a machine and said to the worker next to me, "If I owned this
machine, I'd break it up." I was very irritated at the time. He replied, "Don't break your
own machine but break this one, it belongs to the company."
The
Dilemma
of
the
Foreman
The position of the foreman is an extremely tenuous one. He is caught between two
fires. He has to force the worker to produce as his job hinges on it. The pressure upon
him from above is very heavy. An important slip on his part would mean his being
broken. Those who are above him deliberately divorce themselves as much as possible
from daily contact with the workers. This task they place upon the foreman and the first
rank of supervisory help. Any difficulty the foreman has with workers is taken out on
him. At the same time, there is the immense amount of red-tape and buck passing of
responsibility which finally puts the whole burden of something not done upon the
worker himself. In the words of the worker, "Before you get something done around
here you could drop dead."
All this, having its effect upon the foreman, produces a tense and strained individual. If
he is at all sensitive, he is a mental wreck, always transmitting his unstable position to
the worker.
I am acquainted at first hand with the situation concerning one foreman who had to take
several weeks off as he was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
Many foremen, in order to ease the pressure on themselves, will cultivate a shell of
indifference. They vow to themselves that no matter what happens, it will not get the
best of them. Then when trouble arises in the shop, the foreman will shrug his
shoulders, and intimating there is nothing he can do about it, walk away, leaving those
involved to figure it out for themselves.
Such situations sometimes develop into "hot potatoes." No one in the supervision will
take responsibility. So from top management on down, the "buck" is passed. So
confused does the issue get, that even the various layers of supervision wind up
contradicting each other. No one will take the authority to give a decisive statement on
the matter.

I once spent several months as a foreman over a few workers. I learned through this and
experience as a worker in production that the supervisory help, i.e. the foremen, become
irritated by the fact that they feel the workers are deliberately holding back on the job.
The men are not producing as they could. They express it: "The men don't want to work,
they are lazy." This feeling presses on the foreman and drives him to driving the worker.
On the other hand, many foremen are close to the workers. Some workers will even stop
other workers from irritating a particular foreman. The men feel that these foremen are
in a tough spot and are subject to discipline and firing as are other workers.
From a Detroit worker I learned that during the foremen's strike the workers felt a
mixture of guilt at going back to work and not sticking with the foremen, and of
satisfaction because of the chance to show how well they could work without
supervision.
CHAPTER
V
MANAGEMENT'S ORGANIZATION AND THE WORKERS' ORGANIZATION
The company for which I work is a gigantic industrial concern which employs hundreds
of thousands of workers. From all accounts its assembly lines everywhere are vicious in
their exploitation of the individual. Its technique is high speed production. On the other
side we have the U.A.W., the most advanced union in the country. The class struggle has
tripled in intensity and the workers speak in new terms and thoughts.
Management's
Organization
It is clear to me that the reactions of the individual to production are of such a nature
that they cannot be checked by the present-day utilization of the means of production.
There is only one course open to the ruling class. It is to channelize, to corrupt, to
disrupt, to coerce, to prevent any extreme expression from taking root or form with a
view to change.
With this in mind, I shall proceed to discuss the manner in which this is done in the
shop, the means used, and the divisions created.
1.
The
Probation
System
[i]
The rebelliousness of the worker takes many forms. It is the conscious organization of
this rebelliousness which the factory owners attempt to prevent. For example, the
company in which I work insists on a six month probation period for a new worker.
Exactly why? First let us get clear the fact that it takes but a month or two, more often a
few weeks, to determine the ability and worth of the worker. Why then six months of
probation? This six months period is the longest I have ever heard of in any union
contract. Usually it is one month or two.
The six months period is a time in which new workers are provoked into revealing what
their attitudes are. If such workers are stamped dangerous, out they go.
In certain departments, the company hires and fires en masse. Out of say, 40 laid off, a
select few will be called back. By this means, during a trial period, the company can
select more reliable elements. Then a mass lay-off to avoid charges of discrimination.

Then quietly, individuals are called back to work. The company is not bound to these
temporary employees as there exists the six month probation period.
[i]
2.
The
Rumor
System
The company tries to keep the workers in a constant state of agitation and uncertainty
by spreading rumors. Whenever a change is about to take place, a dozen rumors flood
the shop. This is skillfully done. The workers never know what is coming next. First it
is: we will work seven days a week, 12 hours a day. Then, three shifts at 8 hours. Then,
two shifts at 9 hours. Then, no Saturday work or there will be Saturday work. There will
be a big lay-off in everybody's department, etc. The workers have a rapid grape-vine
over which flows information with an amazing speed. These rumors are spread by the
company which then hits with a 5 day week, 8 hour day. That is the general idea. The
conditions of employment are continually in flux. Finally the worker gets disgusted and
says: "The hell with it, let them do what they want," or when angry, "What the hell are
they up to now?"
3.
The
Kind
Master
The company tries to make the workers believe that it is looking out for their best
interests. It sponsors all sorts of clubs. 25 year club, bowling clubs, gun clubs, and
fishing clubs. It goes in for paternalism, family circles. It likes to have members of the
same family working in the shop. The company tries to imitate the workers' own
tendency to organization.
Many times the company will deliberately issue sales of stock to employees in order to
simulate part ownership. This however cannot counteract the miserable life of the
worker in production.
The workers are not fooled any more by this sort of thing.
The company sponsors a nation wide contest among all its employees. It is called
"MJC," the "My Job Contest." The workers are exhorted to write letters as to why they
like their jobs and especially why they like to work for this company. Over a hundred
and fifty thousand dollars are being spent on the pushing of this contest. The factory
walls are covered with signs advertising it. To induce the workers further, the prizes to
be given away are brought to the plant. There are autos, refrigerators, washing
machines, ovens, and the like. To date, 30% of my plant have made entries and on a
nation-wide basis, about 100,000 have entered. The workers joke and laugh about the
contest. Their remarks vary from: "The biggest liar will win," to "The winners are
already picked out." Others say: "I like my job because I can feed my family", "I like
my job because I want to win a new Cadillac," "I like my job because I want to keep my
job," etc. Some workers at a loss for what to say ask their children. One worker's child
said "because you buy me pretty clothes, Dad." When he asked his wife, she said: "Why
don't they give you a steady day job?" The company is pressuring the workers to enter
the contest. The foreman and plant superintendents have been going around trying to
coerce workers into entering. One long employed worker was in the office about it. He
noticed that the boss had a mark next to his name. He became furious and had an
argument with him. He said that he would write a letter only if he himself decided. So
far he had decided not to and no one was going to compel him.

The contest seems more to have stimulated workers to thinking about what they do not
like about their jobs. Many are entering in spite of their hatred of the job. They feel that
there are things which a worker likes. The company will accept letters in any language
and will translate. They want the letters above all to be in the language of the worker
and they stress this very much.
4.
Company
Men
There is a general feeling of insecurity throughout the plant. It is clear to me that the
company is aggressively preparing for the next strike wave, or labor trouble, by building
up a stratum of company men, or as it were, a labor aristocracy of a sort. These workers
make it a practice to go out drinking and visiting other workers with a view to building
up personal relations, and then to draw them into their circle.
a.
Stool
Pigeons
Are
Made,
Not
Born
When the bosses find a worker they want to corral, a certain type of treatment is
employed. This treatment is of a most ingratiating nature. The worker is treated with kid
gloves. In many instances the foreman will go out of his way for you. It places some
workers under a tremendous mental strain to combat it.
In the past several months of my employment in this factory, I have been approached
more than a dozen times by various workers who have attempted to bring me under the
ideology of the company.
I have had discussions with various of these company men. It is necessary to lead these
workers on in order to draw out the information. The point at which I was considered
safe was the point at which a bolder approach could be used. So one quite bluntly tells
me where the bosses drink on off days and then casually invites me to come down to the
tavern and meet them over a few drinks.
Other workers use a different approach. There has been an undercurrent of propaganda
for an independent union. The aim being to throw out the existing CIO, busting all
seniority as it exists and giving preference to company men. This was broached to me
quite frankly by one worker. He intimated in these very words, "Suppose the company
has a network of stooges through-out the plant powerful enough to break this union,
would you come along?" He received an appropriate answer from me as a result of
which he determined it safer not to broach the subject to me again.
Still another such worker recently quite frankly explained to me I was "busting my head
against a stone wall. Why not play smart? Look out for yourself. A smart guy can go
places if he looks out for himself." He went on to explain how the union is no good and
is made up of bureaucrats approaching gangsters. This worker is a set-up man in the
shop and the other workers know he is trying to get ahead.
The company stooge tries to draw out other workers by anti-company talk such as, "The
damn company tries to get the best of you," etc. The unwise or unsuspecting worker
finds himself out of a job in no time at all. The last shop I was in, I saw fifteen workers
go by the board in four months because of one stool whom I immediately recognized
after my experience in several other shops.

One day in the ear with another worker, we had a conversation with a stooge. After
dropping the latter off, the worker says, "I can't understand it. This guy never says
anything about the union and yet he talks against the company the way he does."
b.
The
Dilemma
of
the
Company
Stooge
The untenable economic situation pressing upon the working class brings certain
sections to the point where they turn informer and betrayer of their fellow workmen.
Combined with this is the drudgery and monotony of factory work as a whole from
which these elements hope to escape by advancing themselves through their activity. As
a result of their efforts in behalf of the company, many of these workers become
foremen, set-up men, and in instances rise to even higher positions. At any rate, it is
much easier for them to secure more financial benefits in their pay envelopes.
Another reason why such workers turn to such activity is the fact that they find the
union incapable of satisfying their needs. At the same time the role of the union
bureaucrat fills them with disgust. The anger at these fakers gives them some of their
moral support.
There are many drives in back of a worker turned stooge. Home, wife, children provide
his first impulse. At any rate that is his first conscious expression of what he is doing. In
defense of these, he justifies all his actions and develops the attitude of: "The hell with
everyone else. Everyman for himself. Nobody does anything for you but yourself."
Some of these workers become fawning and servile, lose all self-respect. Others are
decent men who are well-liked and who labor under a terrific mental strain as a result of
the gulf which must be created between them and other workers. In general any selfrespecting worker has a disdain and disgust, bordering at times on hatred, for the
company stooges.
Self-seeking workers, e.g. company stooges etc. will denounce each other to get ahead.
They will inform on each other to higher-ups on being inefficient, etc.
The stooge in production today is more clever than most of his counter-parts in years
gone by. At all times he skillfully will try to cover his own tracks. He attempts to
understand all the backward prejudices that workers have and use them against the
worker. I have seen stooges brazenly condemn the existence of such workers as
themselves to other workers.
These worker stooges are caught like other workers in the maelstrom of capitalist
production. In seeking a way out, they choose to perform as they do, no other means
appearing to them.
c.
Infiltration
into
the
Union
The company's network of stool-pigeons and plants operates into the very heart of the
union. Many times these agents employ a militant union exterior for their purpose, the
betrayal of the workers for the sake of their own promotion.
In order to create anti-union sentiment, company stooges will infiltrate into union
positions and then deliberately betray the workers. This infuriates the workers against
the union inasmuch as they are unaware of what has happened.

At a recent union meeting, something of interest came to light. The chairman of the
shop committee spoke of what transpired at union-management conferences. He stated
that the company had no faith or trust in workers who would never join the union. In
fact, their greatest satisfaction was to break away a fighting militant from the union and
reward him with a good supervisory job. This type of worker the company felt it could
trust. This same chairman had mentioned on several instances that the company had
continually tried and still was trying to reach him.
In many instances, the company will attempt to demoralize a new committee-man or
steward by ignoring him and not recognizing him. This was standard practice in other
factories in which I have worked. This straightens out over a period of time depending
in the main on the shop and the ability of the man involved.
In my plant it is well known that stewards and former militant union men get special
treatment if they are amenable. Better jobs, more money, etc. At union meetings, it is
not a rare thing for a rank and filer to take the floor and point-blank accuse various
union representatives of being out and out company men. Such a rank and filer is
immediately marked down as one to be approached by stooges. Recently one such rank
and filer immediately got transferred from an unskilled job to one on a machine with an
increase in pay.
It is interesting to note that this type of worker, in many instances, bands together with
others in the shop in attempts to influence and maintain control of the union. This they
do because they never fully trust the company and wish to have at hand the union as a
counterweight should the company double--cross them. Of course, in achieving some
sort of influence, they resort to bureaucratic tricks and scheming of all kinds to get their
men in.
At a recent union meeting the local's president spoke of the company stooges and how
they were trying to bust the union. He said that the plant was infiltrated with them and
that the company was on the offensive. The union is invoking an old statute and will
expel or exclude from membership any one who they discover is a company man. At the
same time, it was announced that proceedings had been started against such an
individual in one of the departments. The union chairman always warns that fifteen
minutes after the meeting is over, the company will know exactly what took place
during the meeting.
The company men constitute the minority of the workers in the shop, but during a
period of quiet, they can give the impression that the company is strong and its eyes and
ears are everywhere. Any worker who has had a few factory jobs throughout several
years knows of the existence of these company men. In a new plant he learns to keep his
mouth shut for a safe period of time. Many months pass before the gap is bridged
between the new worker and his fellow workman. He takes no sides. In answer to
involving questions, he will answer with a nod or a knowing wink. What goes on about
him does not escape him although to all appearances he has the aspect of disinterest.
First impressions are almost always voided. Real trust is usually placed only in
individuals with whom he has become more intimately acquainted through social
intercourse outside the pressures of the factory.

This situation becomes completely altered during a critical period when the workers are
in action. Then a new cohesion is established among the workers, and the company men
seem to run for cover, while the workers speak their minds freely.
The
Workers'
Organization
I arrived in the plant two weeks after the "Big Strike" had ended. Things were tense for
several weeks. Newcomers were eyed with suspicion by both workers and company so
soon after the strike. My first day in the plant found me waiting in one of the
departments for the foreman. A worker sauntered over to me. In a very brief discussion,
he tried to determine my attitude towards unions. I shook him off and he walked away.
His speech made it clear that he was anti-union. Union men made themselves
conspicuous by their avoidance of newcomers.
1.
The
Average
Union
Man
The average union man in my shop rarely talks about the union except to complain that
it doesn't do enough for the workers. Nevertheless, he definitely feels he must have the
union. The company would ride all over the workers without the union. In spite of his
antagonism at the way the union is run, he still holds to this belief. He attributes the
small attendance at meetings to several factors. One, the meeting hall is too far away
from his home and the workers live all over. He says: "Why must they always hold it on
a Sunday? A man likes to take his family and go for a ride or picnic on that day. A
fellow works all week and should be with his family sometime." However, even when
the meetings are called after work, the attendance is small. The workers reluctantly
show up at a meeting. Most of the workers recognize this, but say: "Look how everyone
turns out on a strike ballot, contract negotiation or election," They do not leave it to the
leadership to decide crucial issues as they do not trust their decisions. The rest of the
year, the ranks abstain almost completely from union activity, and angrily criticize the
manner in which the leadership operates. They believe more could be done.
In spite of all this, the workers carefully watch developments in other unions throughout
the country. When, in Pittsburgh, a union president was put in jail by the government,
the ranks were in sympathy with the call of a general strike in that city to free him.
When shop meetings are held in the plant locker room, the ranks will come. They
straggle, but they come. Only a few talk. The rest watch carefully what developments
take place. If the union representative is under attack, they watch him squirm, and when
a rank and filer speaks up, he generally voices the sentiments of the rest of the ranks.
Although most of the workers appear uninterested, they are not. They absorb everything
They may nod in agreement or disagreement at something which is said, and carry away
their opinions with themselves.
Most of these workers feel that the union activist is in there for some reason. Union
activity is out of the run of the average workers preoccupation. He believes, therefore,
that anyone who engages in it more than the rest has a reason. He is distrustful, and
would like to know what that reason is.
The ranks feel that new elections liven up the union and keep union representatives on
their toes.

Recently an election was held for delegates to a convention. Various programs were put
forth. One nominee had in his program, the slogan for a Labor Party. The union
executive board distributed a leaflet at the gate stating that the local had voted against
the Labor Party. If the ranks had to be informed that the local had voted such a way, it
was clear that only a handful had been present at the passing of such a resolution. And
that is the way it is most of the time, with twenty to thirty union members deciding on
issues affecting the whole body of the membership of 800.
At the first union meeting I attended in this factory many subjects came up. There was a
motion condemning the Army Courts-Martial System. Much information also about the
economic system, happenings in the country, and blasts at the industrialists.
2.
The
Union
Leadership
Many union representatives are sincere in their desires to lead, and to fight for, the
workers, but most of the union leaders that I have seen, although they work on the
machine or on the bench, do not react to most situations as the rank and file does. It is
not rare for a committee man to attempt to persuade a worker not to put in a grievance.
The rank and file do not hesitate to demand departmental meetings when issues arise
that directly affect them on the job. They do not trust these to the union leadership. They
want to be there and to decide what action is to be taken. The workers go up and down
the aisles saying: "We want a departmental meeting. If the committee man doesn't call
one, we'll hold it ourselves."
The Taft-Hartley bill hung over the nation for some months. One day Congress made it
into law. The next day I listened carefully for comment. One fellow says: "Those guys
are really out to put chains on us." Another says: "Labor all over the country should
walk out." A third says: "This will fix those union leaders."
As a member of the rank and file, I approach an official of the union, an executivecommittee member. I demand that a plant-wide emergency meeting be immediately held
in view of the situation. He refuses point--blank and says: "The usual monthly meeting
will be held in two weeks." I talk to several workers. They say that they have heard
rumors that the plant will walk out at twelve o'clock. The chairman of the shop
committee then comes up to me. I demand an emergency meeting where the ranks can
express themselves. He tells me; "You are going off half-cocked. Next week the C.I.O.
is holding a National meeting in Washington on the subject and we must wait."
Several weeks after the initial crisis has passed, the leadership finally calls an after-work
meeting on the anti-labor bill. A handful of workers shows up and the leadership rages
on this point: "Such vicious attacks are being made on labor and when we call a meeting
on this vital subject, the ranks don't show up."
The union leadership has a great deal of ridicule for the ranks. They constantly make
fun of the fact that the ranks don't give a damn, and don't attend meetings. Their attitude
is one of: "Here we are trying to do everything for them and they don't give a damn."
The union leadership is very much afraid of rank and file action. Recently a grievance
of a serious nature came up. It was clear that to stop the company would require clearcut action on the part of the workers. Just the presentation of a grievance on the matter

was viewed with alarm by the bureaucracy. Their advice was: "Don't do anything rash."
"Keep cool, and think it over." etc. The leadership is constantly on the defensive with
the ranks.
Many times the leadership will agree to certain new proposals of the company which
will have an effect on the rank and file. They do not notify the ranks of their agreement
as they do not want trouble. This happened recently. It is apparent that "company
security clauses" are also frightening some union leaders. It would take rank and file
action of a decisive nature to reverse the trend. At a recent meeting one worker arose
and asked why the men in the shop were not consulted by the company when a change
affecting them was being made.
One day several workers are discussing the union contract with a union representative.
The subject is the speed-up. The union official maintains that the workers must abide by
the contract. He says, "Any change in the machinery which the company maintains is a
change in method, gives them the right to raise the number of pieces per hour." At
another time he reiterates that the union contract is binding. A rank and filer states: "It is
binding just so long as we let it be."
The president walks about the plant with an aloofness almost comparable to that of the
plant superintendent.
Even at a union dance there is this kind of separation. The union leaders have a central
table at which they all sit with their friends. They have full bottles of liquor and other
drinks. They engage in a cloistered bit of revelry. Some wear "Tuxs" and most all wear
white flowers in their lapels. They are somewhat boisterous at times. The atmosphere is
not one of workers' comradeship. There appears to be a high degree of formality
pervading the dance as a whole. A worker easily felt more at ease in the shop than he
did at the dance.
The most disgusting sight is that of the company superintendent sitting at their table.
They are all very friendly. There appears to be more friendliness than between the ranks
and the union leaders.
What is the company superintendent doing at the workers dance? He circulates around
amongst those present, acting very friendly and trying to develop new friends in the
ranks. Those workers who ignore him make it felt.
There are some 800 workers in the union but only about 150 attend the dance.
3.
The
Union
Election
An election is about to take place. In the 8 months I have been in the plant, this is the
first time things are beginning to move intra-union. Factions and groupings are
everywhere. Suspicion, mistrust, conniving, deals, etc. are the rule. Each group tries to
gather to itself any rank and file support it sees. Cliques are continually working under
cover preparing for the elections. The ranks barely participate in the elections. One
hundred out of 800 members show up for the nominations. Everything is fluid as groups
and individuals vie for positions. The rank and file voice is noticeably absent. What
takes place is obviously the work of a handful of maneuverers. At the meeting is
mentioned the fact that some of the company's foremen were formerly the best union

militants. I have never seen a union election as completely confused as this. There are
no programs open to the rank and filer. Nothing is solid. During the nominating, it is
obvious that blocs are forming right on the floor. One worker tells me he feels that all
international officers should be elected by a popular vote.
Company stooges are everywhere. They will wind up in every group. They can't lose
that way. A certain number of company men have already been elected to office.
Unless the average militant is careful, he must inevitably be drawn into the mess of
scheming. The ranks are basically hostile to what takes place and view it all with
disgust.
In the shop, printed campaign tickets appear. Each candidate claims more experience
than his opponent. Much effort and talking is put out by those seeking office.
The Negro vote was fairly decisive in the election. Among the Negroes, one campaign
was carried out, while the opposite was carried out with the whites.
The elections brought to the surface many bitter battles and prejudices. Most viciously
used was the Negro issue. Inasmuch as the sentiment in the shop tends toward JimCrow, the various groups attempted to accuse the others of close association with the
Negro workers and then smear them as a result. There were rumors and mouth-to-mouth
slanders of all sorts on this score circulating throughout the plant.
One Sunday in the union office, before the elections started, I listened to a discussion
between the union leaders. They were discussing why they run for office. There seemed
to be some confusion as to exactly why. One spoke this way: "We sit down pre-election
and plot and plan how to win. When we win it, we say, 'Why are we saddling ourselves
with this all over again?"
4.
The
Hostility
of
the
Rank
and
File
The failure of the ranks to control the union in all periods leaves the road open to
bureaucracy and unprincipled factionalism, both of which weaken the union. The
section of workers which always attends union meetings is made up of a various
assortment of workers. Among them are militants, professional radicals, bureaucrats,
union-apparatus men, career seekers, company stooges, and a number of serious nonpartisan rank and filers. If any group wishes to pass a motion at any meeting, it is not
unusual to understand that it was all planned beforehand. In the union audience,
proponents of a certain motion will be strategically dispersed, to speak up at any
moment.
The American worker has become thoroughly aware of, and is disgusted with,
bureaucracy, both union and governmental. Civil life gives him this outlook even before
entering the factory. Upon finding it first hand in the union where it affects him directly,
it produces a positive resentment within him. The American way of life has instilled in
him the picture of cross and doublecross. He trusts no leaders. That is why a good and
sincere committee-man must sooner or later run into trouble with the ranks. It is known
in a union that the first defeat or mistake of a union representative brings down the
wrath of the ranks upon him. The rank and filer almost automatically searches for
examples of betrayal.

During the fourth of July week, the plant was shut down. It was a paid holiday for the
workers. Theoretically no one was supposed to be working that day. Some weeks later, a
report of the union committee meeting with the management is distributed to the
workers at the gate. One of the grievances mentioned is that of our shop committee
man, who, it appears, worked on the holiday. He claims that he was not paid on the
basis of an operator's pay, but rather on a laborer's rate for that day. It comes as a
surprise to the men that he worked that day and they are disgusted with him for having
done so when the others didn't. They think it pretty stupid to have bothered to put in a
complaint and thereby bring it to the attention of the men. Worker Z says to me very
sarcastically: "And that is the union about which you have been shooting off your
mouth."
The worker looks for the first mistake of the leadership. He seizes upon this one error so
that he can justify his antagonism towards the leader concept. Many good militants have
lost faith in unions as a result of being the center of such a situation. Those whom they
daily tried to defend suddenly turned on them at the first, faint sign of a betrayal.
In the U.A.W. handbook entitled, "How to Win for the Union," a warning is given to the
stewards, committee-men, etc. as to what to expect on this score.
It is interesting to note that many workers lose money each week on lotteries and pools
or horses. However, when a raise in union dues is put forth, a howl immediately goes
up. The union is castigated, the conception of the union being the bureaucrats. Some of
the ranks feel that some phony somewhere will cash in on the deal. Nevertheless the
assessment is received.
In spite of the worker's dislike of the bureaucracy, they would positively defend their
union against an attempt to bust it. As one worker put it; "Any union is better than no
union."
The worker has many apparently contradictory reactions to a labor Party. He looks at
Great Britain and says: "It is doing no good there. How could it help us to have one?"
One worker says: "It's Communist." Others say: "Some cliques, groups, or bureaucrats
will get a hold of it and use it to their own interest." The workers are afraid that a labor
Party will be run the way the union is run today.
One worker seemed to think the labor Party was a good idea but he couldn't understand
why the labor leaders didn't make one right away. He stated that the workers should
have more immediate control over the leaders of such a party, and agreed that if
representation was direct from the factory and right of recall by the rank and file was a
first principle, the leaders would have to toe the line. He remarked: "Why any one of us
could be sent to represent the men in such a situation." Another worker said to me: "The
capitalists aren't going to allow a labor Party. What do you want? A revolution?"
One day, I spoke to a worker about a labor Party abstractly. The reaction was this;
"What good would it do? Somebody would slip the leaders 10,000 dollars and the
workers would be left in the dust."
CHAPTER
STRATA

VI
AMONG

THE

WORKERS

The last few years have been eventful ones. Many of the workers of whom I now write,
entered the factory just prior to the entry of this country into the war. Some came from
small businesses which they owned. They often refer to the fact that they were their own
boss then. Others entered the factory then but after a few years were drawn into the
armed forces. There are large sections of Italian, German, and Polish workers. In spite
of the fact that most of them are native-born, events which take place in their parents'
countries are followed with the greatest of interest.
Today in the factory, there are workers from all walks of life. E.g.: ex-school teachers,
former coal miners, workers who had small businesses such as a garage, grocery store,
candy store, trucking business, fur raising farm (mink), land farming, odd jobs business,
salesmen, ex-insurance salesmen, house-painters, and lawyers. There were many more.
Each of those I have mentioned was the former vocation of one or more workers whom
I now know in the shop.
The
Negro
in
the
Shop
The Negro question in the plant is of a vital nature. In the main, Negro workers have
been quiet, reserved, but deeply moved by their position in the plant.
The average Negro worker sizes up the workers in his shop. He knows who is okay and
who is not. He has a keen ability to detect falseness. Towards bosses and stooges, he
puts on an act of extreme stupidity. When the boss tries to pull something over on him,
he assumes an air of ignorance and incomprehension.
1.
The
New
Negro
There is in the factory today a generation of new, young Negroes. youth who have gone
through the war but have spent comparatively no time in a factory. They chafe under the
indignities which they receive. They are not a depression product, but youth who have
returned recently from service and who have matured in the last six years.
The past several years they have been filled with war propaganda: equality, democracy,
and freedom from fear. They want it and are ready for a fight if they don't get it. They
have gone through grammar and high school and show a high degree of intelligence.
They are anti-Uncle Tom.
Most of the Negro workers in the plant are veterans. Many have seen active fighting and
have toured the U.S. and foreign countries. What they have seen has left a deep
impression on them. Their readiness to fight at the drop of a hat is evident.
2.
The
Negro
Worker
and
the
Machine
The Negro worker looks longingly at the machine. If he is on a job he does not like, he
will skillfully try to give the company as little of his labor as possible. In the factory, the
Negro is confined primarily to the dirty, unskilled laboring jobs. He is never hired
outright as a machine operator. He must get in the plant and then fight his way up. One
Negro worker told me he ran automatic screw machines during the war. The company
which hired him now would only give him a laborer's job.
If the Negro does succeed by his efforts in finally getting on a machine, the company
and many white workers will make it extremely difficult for him. He will often be
driven to quit the plant rather than suffer the indignities.

Only a few Negroes are on machines. The others resent new workers being hired and
given jobs that they feel they have a right to. There is much discrimination in this
respect. Often now at union meetings, these young workers take the floor and denounce
the discrimination and demand equal opportunity in upgrading.
I have heard Negro workers threaten to quit the union if it does not do something for
them.
If two machinists, one white and one Negro, apply at the personnel office for an
opening, the white will get the job.
A Negro worker has to do a better job than the white worker in order to keep his
position. The competition is fierce in such instances, and the Negro is sure to be let go if
he does not out-do the white.
And then there are white workers who resent a Negro getting good pay for a job, and
would like to take the job for themselves.
There are many Negroes in the plant who have pride in their work. They are serious in
their desires to give their best and to help their fellow workers. But the same pressures
which drive workers as a whole apart, react doubly so on them. They deeply resent the
humiliation which they suffer in production, and the failure on the part of society to give
them an even break produces a negation of the qualities which workers as a whole
admire. It confuses, distorts, and upsets them. They yearn for integration into the social
process. They desire to be one with their fellow men. I have seen Negro workers
deliberately turn their backs on a white worker. At another moment they have given of
their best. The Negro's slacking on the job is directly traceable to his resentment at the
restricted role he plays in production. Between these two tendencies the Negro is torn
apart.
The Negro worker today watches keenly when one of his race hits the professional
headlines. He desires so much to have the abilities and the talents of his people given a
chance that when Jackie Robinson hits a home run, he applauds with a vigor and
excitement which bursts out all over.
Negro workers have the amazing ability to be able to determine on sight the model,
make, and year of most any car. In the shop, the laborers who handle the chips from the
machine know more about the quality of steel being used on various machines, and the
piece numbers being run on different machines than most of the operators. They are able
to distinguish on sight the part number of a score or more types of work. I have been
told that in Detroit the best auto drivers, recognized as such by the workers as a whole,
are the Negroes.
The day the Negro has the opportunity to unfold all his talents will be the day when the
community as a whole will benefit.
3.
The
Negro
and
the
White
Worker
The workers have many confused and contradictory reactions. In relation to the Negro,
it manifests itself in many ways. The Negro as a result is under a terrible pressure in the
shop. He does not know when or where he will suddenly hear some degrading remark.

Some examples of those Jim Crow expressions are given here with the notation that the
same worker could make the same statements in one day. E.g.: "The Niggers buy the
best of everything when they buy. The best cars and furnishings and clothes." Then the
opposite: "The Niggers never have brakes or windows on their cars." Also: "The
Niggers bring down rents and they are dirty."
In the plant, the white and Negro workers eat in the same cafeteria. Outside the factory,
when some of these same white workers go into a restaurant where the same Negro
workers are eating, they walk out.
When something is lost or stolen, the first people thought of are the colored porters and
laborers. When things are missing, you can be sure it either dropped into the oil, or
another machine operator appropriated it. However, the white worker instantly thinks
the Negro took it. Vicious anti-Negro elements capitalize on these instances for the
company and try to drive a deeper wedge between the workers.
Racial tension reaches a climax at various times. Once it exploded in a battle between a
Negro and a white worker. The white taunted the Negro. The two went outside and the
Negro was beat up. Back in the plant the white worker continued taunting and chasing
the Negro. Suddenly the Negro stopped, picked a bar of iron up, and floored the white
worker. Later, in an inquiry, the white worker took full blame and absolved the Negro.
Company stooges used the incident to bring out every backward prejudice of white
workers.
The following is an example of how these contradictions manifest themselves in the
union. A union dance was organized. The dance committee chairman deliberately tried
to arrange a Jim Crow dance by distortedly citing a local law, (which was
unconstitutional anyway) to the effect that there could be no mixed dancing. It was
made clear to the Negro workers that they were not wanted. Several workers take the
floor and condemn the dance stating it's all or nobody. They demand that the issue be
fought out at the dance hall with everyone in attendance. One Negro seems to have an
Uncle Tom attitude. He does not wish to battle it out, but requests that the dance be held
elsewhere with the union taking a loss. He is willing to pay assessment of 5 dollars to
other members' 2 dollars, to make up the deposit loss. An F.E.P.C. is proposed to
prevent such occurrences. Other Negroes speak up against discrimination on the job.
The one Negro with the Uncle Tom attitude has a favored position in the plant. He is
one of the handful of Negroes who is doing a skilled machine job, and he fought his
way up during the war.
Only one Negro girl attends the dance but leaves soon after, being completely isolated.
The Negro workers deliberately shunned this dance. It was their way of keeping their
self-respect.
The white unionist feels that every man in the shop has his job to do. He is hired for a
certain job, and that is what he should do. He thinks that the Negro worker should carry
on in the same way. He does not however realize that it is precisely the fact that the
Negro has his job to do and no other, which angers the Negro.
4.
Negro
Leadership
In spite of the overwhelming Jim-Crow attitude in the plant, a Negro ran for vice-

president. This worker was to some degree set off from the other Negro workers
because of the fact that he was one of the few who during the war was upgraded. His
being on a job of a somewhat skilled nature developed in him what some of the other
Negroes called a superiority complex which they resented. In spite of this, their desire
for representation was so strong that he received the bulk of the Negro vote. This I
learned from a number of Negro workers themselves.
A young Negro worker in the shop told me he used to be a leader in the Young
Communist league but resigned. He resented the Communist Party putting up puppet
leaders. He is against a third party and for a distinct labor party. He says that all the
capitalist Negro organizations are no good. The Negro will never gain his freedom
under capitalism. He belongs to the N.A.A.C.P.1 He says that the capitalists absorb
militant Negroes when they break through the surface. He has utter contempt for those
Negroes who have been selling out their people. He claims that the Negro aristocracy
thrives on segregation and directly continues to promote it for themselves. He says it is
up to the Negroes to lead themselves. The distrust of the whites has left no alternative.
The Negro attendance at union meetings is small. It seems that the Negro worker feels
that the union is incapable of solving his larger problems of equality and universal
freedom. This was graphically illustrated one day in a discussion between me, a friend
and several Negro workers. My friend tried to keep the discussion on the trade union
level, but the Negro workers continually broke this down and attempted to discuss the
general social problems in relation to them and the new ideas and experiences they have
gained as a result of the war.
From my observations of the shop in respect to the Negro workers, it is clear that some
dynamic leaders from their ranks are needed. They have little respect for the white trade
unionists and feel they are being used. Leaders must come from their ranks with a farreaching program.
There is a tremendous ferment among the Negro workers. White workers know this.
There is an intimation of fear among some white workers as to what the Negro may do.
At the same time many white workers respect and understand the position of the Negro
in the factory as well as the Negro himself. The Negro worker feels the impending
depression. He burns fiercely within. He knows he will be the first to be put on the
chopping block. He feels that now is the only opportunity he has to strike back
somehow, some way, in the organized labor movement. The threat of impending strikes
is welcomed by him. He less than others can afford the loss of pay, but he first of all
will vote strike.
The
Attitude
of
the
Conservative
Worker
There is in the factory today a stratum of workers which over a period of years has
accumulated a high seniority. That is, these workers have spent several years in the
same industrial plants. During this time they have observed and experienced various
union regimes. More so than transitory workers, they have seen union leaderships
develop into various patterns and effects. They are aware of the class collaborationist
activities of the union bureaucrats. Bureaucratism has left a mark on them. This group
of workers which represents a large section of the American labor movement, is acutely
aware of the rottenness of present day society. They harbor a deep and abiding hatred of
the industrial ruling class. They are wise to its maneuvers, tricks and abuses of the

workers. At the same time, not having a fundamental grasp of the economic laws
governing society, many believe that the capitalist class is all-powerful. They lean more
to this conclusion as they see the trade union bureaucracies continually capitulate.
One old seniority worker said that the old workers were against the strike. Many
claimed that the union leadership in the International had juggled the votes and called
out the men when they should not have. One such worker claimed that, "those who were
for the strike were the new War workers who had never been in industry before. They
did not know what our conditions of work were before the war. I was not against a
strike as a strike, but against it being called when it was called. The company was being
reconverted and was getting back tax refunds from the government. We were licked
before we started. We used up all our savings in the strike and many of us had to go
back into debt. It was tough enough getting out of debt from the pre-war years. I would
not be against a strike now as the Company needs production and is no longer getting
tax refunds. No one broke the picket lines because the company itself after a while shut
down the plants. Had they remained open, there would have been violence and workers
would have attempted to bust the picket lines. As it was, very few workers from the
plant manned the picket lines."
It should be stated here, that from the accounts of the strike ballots taken during the
1946 strike wave, the majority of workers overwhelmingly voted strike.
1.
"If
I
worked
here
as
long
as
you
have..."
Throughout the years the process of production has steadily been working on these old
workers and has produced an explosive latent force in them. More than all the other
sections of the workers, they have been subjected to a steady and uninterrupted
education and development by capitalist production. All the contradictions are there.
Their years of service in one factory have created in them a feeling or attitude of having
a vested interest in the plant. This is expressed by other workers thus, "If I worked here
as long as you have, I would want to own the factory." The manner in which these
workers move about the factory indicates an attitude of ownership. The assuredness
with which they move from department to department can be seen even in the way in
which they walk.
The apparent inability of the union to solve their problems, the seemingly tremendous
power of the boss, have contributed to making these workers cynical and conservative.
Many sections of them become out and out company men. The company is forced to be
lenient in one respect or another towards these workers because they know the ins and
outs of the plant thoroughly. However, this does not prevent periodic explosions.
One worker with the company 25 years collided head on with an overhead guard. In a
blaze of fury he got a hack-saw and began to saw it down. In his anger he was shouting,
"Let them fire me." Then followed a string of invective and abuse at the company. It is
odd because he is a company man.
On one particularly hot evening, another worker with ten years seniority says to a group
of fellows, "Let's f- them all and not go back into the plant." He then says decisively,
"What the hell can they do to us?" Immediately following his statement an extremely
funny scene occurred. The assembled workers began to imitate the foreman pleading

with them to get back to work. One of them, assuming the identity of the foreman says,
"Please, fellows. Please go back to work, Please," The other workers immediately burst
out into loud laughter.
2.
"Fellows
like
me
know
plenty"
I would like to illustrate concretely the development of some of these long time
seniority workers as I have seen and heard it. "Z" is a worker employed 20 years by the
company. In the past few months he has come out with some revealing statements. It is
clear that through the years he has given many worthwhile suggestions for production to
the company, but has not been rewarded satisfactorily for them. One evening during the
lunch period he tells a dozen or so workers from the department the following, "I have
an idea now that would stop those machines from cracking up. But those sons of -- ain't
going to get it for a measly fifty bucks. Either they give me a thousand bucks or they
can go f- themselves."
At another time, the same worker angrily says, "While we are sweating our heads off,
those bastard bosses are in Florida sunning themselves." He goes on to say, "The plant
Super went out at seven and comes back at eleven all tanked up. Now if that son of a
bitch said anything to me while I was taking a shower upstairs at eleven-thirty, I would
let him have it."
One day a copy of a daily newspaper was lying on one of the work benches. One of the
columns concerned itself with the Marshall Plan which is being furthered by the U.S.. A
worker with several years seniority was reading it. On the basis of that we got into a
discussion of the European problem. These are his approximate words: "It is easy to see
that Europe must be united on some sort of plan. These countries fighting with each
other for so many years has only brought wars and destruction. They were crazy for
trying to destroy German industry. The German workers are some of the most skilled
and mechanically minded people in the world. Europe will never recuperate if they don't
put the German workers back into the factories."
From there we got into a discussion of our factory. I asked him about the efficiency in
our factory and what he and the others with long years of experience about machinery
could do if they had the opportunity to put their ideas into practice freely. He replied,
"Fellows like me and workers "X", "Y", and "Z" know plenty. What do they, (the
company), know about production. They get more in our way than anything. Those
engineers, who sit in the office, try to plan out things complicated so that they can keep
their jobs. They've got to eat too, you know."
3.
"Sure,
all
that
stuff
is
true"
The "Saturday Evening Post" of July 19, 1947, carried an article entitled: "The Union
That Dared To Be Different." The article deals with a factory which was on the verge of
bankruptcy. In order to forestall the lay-off of hundreds of workers, the union and the
company came to an agreement whereby the workers would have the full run of the
shop to develop production to a point where the company would be able to remain in
business. Not only did production increase, but absenteeism fell off almost entirely, and
waste almost disappeared. I gave the magazine to one of the shop workers to read. He
has been a worker for over fifteen years.

He was particularly struck by the manner in which the workers increased production
when they were given a free hand. I present in the following an approximate account of
his comments on this article.
"This guy has a lot of common sense. One shop I worked in I was set-up man. I used to
stand at the machine and constantly try to devise new adaptations. I had hundreds of
ideas. I have lots of them now, but what's the use of trying them out. The next guy
would come in and change what I had done. I know ways of grinding tools now which I
am positive would make the job easier and more efficient, but if I tried them out as
things are everything would get more confused. What those workers have done is pretty
good but I don't think we could do the same in our plant. Those engineers don't hold a
candle to the guy on the machine. How can they know what we know when we spend
hours right on the machine? There are things which it is impossible to learn unless you
work at it every day over a period of years." He ended up with an indication that the
writer of the article might be a communist.
On January 1, 1947, immediately following the big post-war strike wave, "Collier's
Weekly" appeared with an article by Peter Drucker entitled, "What to do About Strikes."
I brought the issue into the shop and asked a worker who had been with the company
over the past ten years to read it. He had been in the preceding strike and was in a
position to understand what Drucker had to say.
He agreed that strikes were "essentially revolts." That the workers were psychologically
unemployed in the midst of employment. He had gone through the depression years and
remembered well.
"Sure. All that stuff is true," he told me. The deep penetrating unrest that upsets all
workers he knew about.
The
Attitude
Toward
Radical
Workers
Workers view radical parties this way: Members of a radical organization through
various means acquire positions of union leadership. There they agitate, etc. The
conception is that it all comes from above. As a result, a gulf arises between the
professional radical workers and the rank and file.
During the election, accusations went around that one side was using "Red" tactics in
consolidating the Negro vote. Red-baiting has risen to new heights in the past year.
I have often heard workers speak of communists this way. "Communists are guys who
don't want to work."
The average worker thinks communism means regimentation. Everybody lives in the
same house and wears the same clothes. He says there is no chance for individuality in
such a set-up. And, besides, how can a fellow make a million bucks if he wants to. The
worker also thinks that the communist wants half of whatever you've got. Half of your
cigarette, and half of any and all your possessions.
In spite of this, the worker immediately recognizes the fullest control by the workers as
communism.

One day in speaking to the steward, I proposed that departmental meetings be held
throughout the plant. I explained that this would give the fullest opportunity to all the
sections of the plant to discuss the problems closest to them. This would also make it
possible for all conditions and decisions affecting the workers to be subject to the
closest control by them. He became furious and said that it was communistic. "You can't
let the ranks decide everything like that."
Joe Worker today is an educated individual in that he has usually gone through at least
twelve years of grammar and high schools. He has a wide sphere of knowledge and can
talk about machinery, autos, polities, government, movies, etc. Enough so as to offer an
opinion on any subject which may arise for discussion.
I sat with a group of workers. The discussion went as follows: An ex-G.I. said,
"America needs socialized medicine. The army provided medical care for millions. Why
not in peacetime? The health of the nation is all-important. All doctors should be
conscripted for the health of the nation. They should be paid on the merit system. That
is, the most skilled get the most money."
One worker says, "That is communism," The speaker says, "But there is good and bad
in all systems and forms of politics, There is much good in communism."
A comparison was made as follows, "If the government can supply police protection, it
should also give health protection." The discussion was fully participated in by all the
workers at the table. They came to the conclusion that what the young G.I. was talking
about was pretty true.
The
Veteran
in
the
Shop
Veterans in the shop are now beginning to rehash their wartime experiences. For almost
a year they have spoken little about their experiences. Now the past is once more
coming to the fore and re-evaluations are made. Men kid each other as war heroes as
they tell of incidents. Many tragic happenings are also unfolded. The regimentation of
the army was greatly hated by the men. The first acts on the part of the company which
are of a regimental nature are immediately compared to the army. The phrase, "I thought
I was out of the army," is used.
The veterans have come back into the factory with their experiences having left deep
impressions on them. Navy veterans attempt to strike up acquaintances with other Navy
veterans. The same for the army G.I.. The bulk of them still wear their service clothes in
the shop. The reason they give is: "They are good work uniforms." It appears that there
is more than that to it. It seems to serve as a link by which they continue the bond
between them. Often G.I. terms are used in describing the factory. The regimentation of
the armed forces is compared with that of the factory. Battle fatigue is called machine
fatigue or "Acme" fatigue (the Acme is a type of automatic machine). Sounds of the
shop are compared with those they have heard in service. When the plant siren goes off,
it becomes an air raid. Dinner time and pay time become the moment to whistle bugle
calls for mess and pay-time as it is done in the service.
The antagonisms towards the officer caste are transmitted back into the factory towards
the boss and supervision.

The factory is called a steel jungle to be compared some way or other to the islands of
the Pacific.
The
Women
in
the
Shop
The outbreak of the war brought many women into the factory. I have seen many
women operate machines which I have run. In one factory, they were employed as crane
operators. The job required a great degree of sensitivity in the lifting of huge sections of
steel throughout the factory. Women proved to be particularly able in this. I have seen
them swing a heavy load of steel down the length of the factory and skillfully place it
exactly where it was wanted. There were many women on grinding machines in this
factory during the war. Today I know of but one or two.
The factory seems to have given a sort of assuredness to many of the women workers.
The shop counteracts to some degree the unequal status between men and women in
society generally. Although very few women attend union meetings, those who do show
a surging desire to express themselves. Some think the union is the affair of the men and
are afraid to interfere. Others think that the women don't stick together like the men. I
had a talk with a woman worker in the shop one day. She was extremely scornful of the
men in the factories of the Eastern states. She claimed: "they are all puny, no doubt from
factory life, and do not compare with the healthy men of the Southwestern states and the
wide open country. What's more, I'll equal and double anything any of you men do. I
have held down three jobs at one time already." She was belligerent in trying to
establish an equal status with the men.
The relations between the sexes are completely distorted by capitalism. Certain women
in the shop are labeled as women who can be slept with. Whenever a woman goes down
the aisle, whistles, cat-calls and phrases fly down after her.
At the time of the telephone strike, the workers were amazed at the militancy of the girls
in that strike. Accounts of the picket line struggles were widely read by the workers.
Their comments were: "Those girls sure have plenty of guts. Why they are fighting
every one from the company to the State and local governments. It sure is a surprise to
me."
CHAPTER
THE CONTRADICTION IN THE FACTORY

VII

Lowered
Productivity
of
Labor
I had discussions with several workers on the lowered productivity of labor.
Worker "R" agrees. Especially concerning the assembly lines. Says workers do not want
to exist as slaves. Says production could be upped 20% or 30% if workers were given a
free hand. Complains of the insuperable number of obstacles which a worker encounters
during the day. Says if all red tape and annoying supervisory help were eliminated, and
if workers ingenuity were allowed full play, production could be considerably upped.
He says it is very difficult to know what the individual worker thinks as he isolates
himself mentally in many respects from his fellow worker. He does not often say what
he thinks. He says workers hold back on their production and never give their fullest.

Just
Putting
in
Time
I spoke with two other workers on the same subject. One worker says production could
be doubled. The other is in doubt. Seems to think it means more work for the workers. I
approached the subject on the basis of a 4 hour day, 5 day week and asked if that goal
was possible. I tried to impress them with a plant-wide conception of cooperation. I
explained what was in reality workers' control. One said that during the war in his
section of the plant, the fellows used to knock out work fast deliberately and then spend
a few hours in horse-play. They enjoyed themselves and at the same time got the work
out. He claims the mental attitude was entirely different then. Now the monotony is
extremely evident. It is just a question of putting in time. He resents the pressure of the
foreman when the production norm is completed and he is kidding around. The
foreman, it seems, cannot stand workers being idle even though the norm has been
filled. (The other worker in reference to this noted that the miners had not been paid for
a full days work in their walk-out, although the production quota for the day had been
filled.) He spoke of the many skilful tricks applied by workers during the war.
The steel gang distributes steel wherever it is needed throughout the plant. This job
often consists of several workers pushing about large skids of steel. It is plain to see that
the foreman over that groups feels that these workers are holding back. He constantly, in
moments of impatience, lends his own strength to pushing the skids. The workers
distinctly resent this. They do not mind when I, another worker, help them. When I add
my weight, the skid of steel rolls smoothly. This may mean that only another worker is
needed. But from the look on the faces of the steel gang, it might also seem that they
had adjusted their strength to keeping the skid moving at a slow pace.
A laborer one day confided in me the following: "You know, kid, being a laborer is
really an art. The idea is not to be around when you are needed. There is a way to time
all this, and the clever laborer need not exhaust himself."
I will add that this may have been much more true during the war. It appears that since
some have been laid off, the laborers must work harder. But when the opportunity
presents itself, the laborer will still seize it to lighten his load.
As the tempo of work increases and the oppression of the worker becomes greater, at a
certain point in the process a change comes over the worker. At the moment the machine
is inflicting its greatest damage on him, and when he is reaching the bottom depths of
his despair, a sudden sense of defiance and then freedom envelopes him. This happens
at rare moments but leads inevitably to lowering the productivity of labor as it exists
under the present factory setup.
On the other hand, I have seen workers almost wear themselves into the ground trying
to put out an extra number of pieces purely from the desire to see how much they could
do. In these instances, there was no extra money involved. In contradiction to this,
workers will deliberately burn out tools in the machine at quitting time, by turning off
the lubricant. Sometimes this is done to chastize the incoming worker for something illnatured he has done.
The
Division
of
Labor
The worker labors under contradictions. He may often wish to help another worker in

some task, but because of the classifications and the fear of risking the resentment of his
fellow workers, he refrains from doing so.
At the same time there is the ever present threat of the company using the worker's
action against him in attempts to further the amount of work a man must do.
The wage scales and classifications in the shop are extremely numerous. It is a continual
battle to reach a higher classification and more money, with one worker competing
against another. Much anger is generated between workers and against the company
over upgrading or promotions to new jobs. Every time a new job is open, a bitter
wrangle takes place. It is not predominantly a question of the nickel raise involved, as it
may seem on the surface, but a desire for recognition and a chance for exploitation of
one's own capabilities.
In factories where different classifications of work are set up, workers confine
themselves to their own classifications. For example, a machine operator runs the
machine, the laborer sweeps and cleans, lifts, etc. This is usually the case. I have
noticed, however, the distinct tendency on the part of workers to break these
classifications by doing work not in their jurisdiction, so to speak. An operator does
some laboring work, etc. This infraction of the rules is done on the workers' own
initiative. That is, they take on the added tasks as long as they do it of their own accord.
If the company orders them to do these things, immediately the men rebel and refuse. It
is almost impossible to stop them when they decide of themselves.
Seniority regulations of the union very often prevent workers with real qualifications
from getting ahead. For instance there are workers with a few years of experience who
have outdistanced old time workers in ability and imagination. This is traced
fundamentally to the type of technical and academic training they have received in the
modern school system. I have heard even workers with seniority talk about how the
seniority system is a brake on production. At the same time they would fight against the
company's trying to override seniority. They are in a contradiction because they realize
that workers need seniority as a defense and yet feel that such defensive measures do
not allow the best productive talents of the workers to emerge. The workers say that if
they had the opportunity in the ranks to decide who should be upgraded, they would be
able to make better choices.
The last several months have shown signs of a swift development in the workers. They
are stirred and moved by a deep unrest. They want a better life in the factory. Their
desire to solve the frustrating contradictions of production can be seen everywhere. For
example the worker who, sick to his stomach from the stench of his machine, shuts it
down and shouts "To hell with my classification. I can't stand it. I am going to clean out
this goddamn machine."
The
Creativity
of
the
Workers
When a worker has the opportunity to sneak away, he investigates the other sections of
the plant. Rarely does this happen. The longing to vision the whole of which he is a part
is never satisfied. He does not get to know the routine and full mechanics of the next
departments. When he can, the worker will stop at a machine which intrigues him, pick
up a piece of work and comment on it. He will question the operator about it. An
exceptional yearning can be seen in the watchful eyes of those whose job it is to

perform some sort of laboring or unskilled manual task. It is not uncommon to hear one
worker say to another, "Boy, that job's a good one to have."
However, when a worker is upgraded, the new job soon becomes routine and once again
he feels the same dissatisfaction. Many workers express the hope to get into the tool
room, but even in the tool room the work has been broken down into routine operations.
One of the highest skilled men in my department is a set-up man. He does a variety of
jobs in the course of the day, changing set-ups, devising fixtures, etc. Yet he is bored
with his work. He says: "If you think this is such a good job you can have it. I'm fed up
with it."
During the war, there arose a type of worker creativity known as a "Government Job." I
don't think there is a worker who at some time or another has not made a "Government
Job." It was always natural to observe a worker making something for himself during
working hours. Hundreds of thousands have made rings, lockets, tools, and knickknacks. If the foreman or boss would come over and ask "what are you doing?", the
reply was "a Government Job." Many beautiful things were made and the workers used
to show them to each other. This has carried over and it appears that it will remain. The
term applies to anything the worker makes for himself on company time. But it also
appears that the workers today don't have as much patience for this type of work and
something more is needed.
The worker doesn't want to know how to do many things just for the sake of doing
them. One worker will refer to another as a good all-round man. He would also like to
be one but even that is not enough.
At lunch time, workers will often discuss how a job could be done more efficiently from
beginning to end. They will talk about what stock to use, how to machine it, how to do
certain operations on various machines with various set-ups. But they never get a
chance to decide how and why things should be one. However, if they can't use all they
know, they try to use some of it.
In order to make production, many workers devise ingenious adaptations. Some change
gears when the foreman is not about. Some make special tools and fixtures for their
machines to make it easier for themselves. They keep these improvements secret so the
company doesn't benefit. At times they help each other and at other times they do not.
The other day the worker on the next machine devised something of skilled nature to
better his machine performance. He insisted on showing it to me and explaining to me
what he had done. He was pleased with his accomplishment but was frustrated that there
were no others he could show it to.
Operators on steel-cutting machines have desires to speed up R.P.M.'s on them and then
increase the feed to the maximum cut to see how far they can go. This is characteristic
on lathes, boring mills, etc. I've done the same myself many times. Although destruction
may result, the workers seek in this way, completely to master the machine.
Since the workers are unable, in the shop, to express fully their creative instincts,
outside the factory and in the home, they seek to give free rein to these instincts.

Many workers seek relief from tension of the shop on their off hours by working on
their cars. Cleaning and polishing them. Tinkering with the motor and other parts.
Workers continually paint and fix up their own homes.
But here too they feel that something is missing. They may interrupt such a project for
weeks because they have lost interest and, unless they force themselves to finish, it
remains undone. Many workers say to their friends in the shop: "When I finish a day's
work here I have to go home and do the same thing there."
When a worker sees a new piece of machinery he eyes it with professional skill. "What
a piece of machinery that is," he says. His appreciation is not based on a monetary
calculation of the machine, but on its performance under his own command.
The
Community
of
Labor
The miserable life in the factory is universal, so when some workers whine and
continually complain to their fellow workers, it antagonizes them. Gripers are not liked
and wherever possible avoided. The workers say to a griper: "Don't complain to me. Go
tell it to the boss."
The average capable worker respects another good worker. It is his way of building up
respect among his fellow workers in recognition of his capabilities. The community of
labor brings this forth as part of an unstated code.
Workers have ways of testing each other. Sometimes a whole day will be spent plaguing
a worker; for example, putting bluing on his machine, stopping his machine continually,
upsetting his tool box, hiding his tools, etc... This is to determine if the worker will
squeal to the boss and also to determine if he has a sense of humor and is a good guy.
Often a worker takes satisfaction out of coming to work on a very hazardous day. The
initiative is his and he chooses to come as this is one day he is not expected to come to
work. Those workers who do come that day find a certain enjoyment out of having
arrived, especially if there are workers absent. There is then a certain camaraderie or
light-heartedness apparent.
Workers in each department visit the toilet for a smoke and rest at certain periods during
the day. No one has set the time, but in my department, we have set a custom of our
own. The day is divided into sections. First smoke is at 10:00 A.M., second is at 2:00
P.M. At these specific times, some of the other workers will be there and there is
company to talk with.
When a worker moves from one factory to another, a temporary feeling of being lost
seizes him, and unsureness of whether he will be able to make good on the next job.
One day in the new plant among the workers again and his confidence in himself and
his ability immediately returns.
When tragedy befalls a worker, death in the family, illness, or some such personal
sorrow, the workers express deep sympathy. Often it is difficult to console such a
worker in words, so in order to show his sympathy, the average worker will attempt
some way in the day' s work to aid the bereaved worker. When tragedy strikes a worker,
he finds some relief back in the factory away from the sorrow at home.

As
Though
They
Were
Somebody
At lunch, one day, workers were discussing and lamenting the fact that there is so little
real friendship amongst people. One was speaking in terms of what really amounted to
comradeship. He remarked that it was tragic that relations between men were not
harmonious.
All employees are numbered. Badge numbers are systematically re-placing names of
individual workers. Pay envelopes, work charts, etc., are all figured on the basis of
number. Even workers begin to refer to each other as numbers. "No. 402 worked on my
machine last night."
There are many workers in the shop who search for some expression of their importance
as individuals. The company, knowing this, institutes a certain type of uniform. It is in
the form of a smock or light work coat with the company insignia on it, usually worn by
set-up men, inspectors, etc. I took care to notice the effects of this rose on a few
workers. For the first few days, they seemed to adopt a self-important air as though now
they were somebody. After a few days, the coat was dirty, and added to this, from the
very beginning the other workers ignored the new distinction which those who wore the
coats seemed to think they had. The novelty soon wore off as no change was brought to
their status and work continued in the same monotonous manner as before.
Workers now and then wear their names on their shirts. Many workers become
identified by the distinct type and color of the clothing they wear.
I described above the conveyor system and the hostility of the workers to it. There are
some other aspects to this situation. Previously, the checkers came to the workers'
machines and in a relationship exchanged receipts for the work which the operator
created. Now the worker places his work on a conveyor from whence it travels to a
central pay point. At various intervals during the week he receives his receipts. The old
relationship no longer exists of contact between worker and checker. (This is very
satisfactory to the checker.) The old system gave the worker a feeling of individual
contact with the recipients of his work. The worker is angry at the new system and
demands that the old relation be established. He insists that he be paid for his work at
his machine. His reason is that otherwise he is cheated of some of his day's work. But
this is no more the case than usual. The company goes to extremes to see no one is
cheated. The new system as stated proves in many respects more satisfactory than
before. But the worker, not understanding himself or his reason, is angry because he
becoming further divorced from, and automatized in, his work. He attempts to protect
his individuality and resents the regimentation of his labor into a sterile path. So he
protests not the fact that he is required to lift the work onto the conveyor, but the further
divorce of himself, from the end result and the receivers of his efforts.
Teamwork
Production as it exists today in the shop seeks to divide the white from black, Jew from
Gentile, worker from worker. But the shattering of the division can take place right at
the point of production. As I have stated previously, workers have a basic respect of
other good workers. The comunity of labor establishes a pride in this type of activity
which is deeply rooted in the worker. No matter how much modern production distorts
the worker, this instinct remains always there. This becomes a universal trait and cuts
through barriers of race, creed, and religion. But there is no way for the worker to

express this trait today in any productive manner. The result is that it appears in other
ways.
At times, a wonderful camaraderie develops in the shop amongst the workers. Usually
this is discernible in some sort of horseplay. Many times workers will sing songs
together to lighten the day' s work. Or many will talk everlastingly of the baseball
teams, their standings and who is playing. Specific detail is given to individual players
and many know very exact information on some of the players and their health. Workers
will use any subject as a means of maintaining a bond of interest between them, e.g.
baseball, betting, women.
A good worker always likes to keep his place of work clean. The conflict of
classifications often prevents him from doing so.
One day the floor along the row of machines has become soaked with oil. Sawdust has
been thrown down to absorb it. The result is a thick, heavy mess on the floor. Although
this condition almost always exists, this one day the operators find a broom and clean
about their machines. Then systematically the broom is passed on down the line. The
company always exhorts the men to do this, but very rare are the times when they do,
although they want very much to keep their places of work clean.
One day the temperature soared to the top of the thermometer. The plant is stifling. The
top row of windows in the plant is closed. The chain has broken and has not been fixed.
Workers up and down the shop complain continuously to the foremen. They are helpless
for some reason and are not able to get the windows opened. No one puts in a grievance.
I look for the committee-man, but he has not come in. I approach one worker and say,
"Let's open the goddam windows ourselves. If we wait for the company to do it nothing
will be done." He says, "Come on." I mentioned it to a few workers and they agree. Two
of us went up to the bathroom window which was suspended from the ceiling and
looked over the situation. It was impossible to fix it from there. We went back down and
had to return to our machines. What had become crystal clear to me was the fact that a
half-dozen workers would instantaneously have responded to a call to get a ladder
ourselves and go up and fix the window.
The workers are ready to act together to better their life in the factory.
CONCLUSION
The basic machine in production is the lathe. It was on the basis of the first crude lathe
that the advanced machinery of modern production has developed. Almost all
machinery is a modification of the lathe e.g. the huge boring mills, or of the drill press,
e.g. the thread-cutting machine, or of the lathe and the drill press. Most every worker
who understands machinery knows this. The point which I wish to make is this: The
mastery of any of these machines automatically prepares the worker to gain mastery
easily over the others. I have seen this hundreds of times in the last 7 years. I as well as
other workers have at some time or other, been put on machines which we had never
run. Most often it took about a half hour to be able to run them satisfactorily. This is a
frequent occurrence in most factories. When work runs out on one machine, the worker
is often put on another. I see it every day in the factory. In my present plant, during the
first two months, I ran a drill press, air-chuck lathe, automatic-screw, foot press, etc.
Two of these machines I had never run before.

I recall that during the war this was much more so. Another fact shown by the war was
the ease with which newcomers to machinery could learn in a comparatively short space
of time. This was proved to me by the fact that in the first three years of the war, I alone
trained some twenty-odd workers, white and Negro, ranging in age from 17 to 50, in
running engine and turret lathes.
It is clear, then, that the present-day organization of production itself develops certain
strata of workers in a multiplicity of abilities. But this multiplicity of abilities the
worker can never develop to its fullest in the factory as it is today.
The worker uses his five senses in the day-to-day labor in the factory. Every one of
them is distorted and mutilated. The terrible frustration which is the product of years of
exposure to an inhuman production apparatus drives relentlessly toward the overthrow
of that apparatus and its replacement by a productive system which will enable the
worker to give fullest expression to his senses.
In modern production, the worker is isolated on an island in the midst of men and
machines. So divorced has the worker become from himself that he is divorced from his
fellow worker. He cannot stand the chattering of men in the cafeteria, and can find ease
better, alone at his machine. The anxiety of the worker is due to the fact that he is
forever caught between the contradiction of wanting to let his instinct, to do a good job
and be close to his fellow workers, have its way, and then having to reverse himself.
The deep undercurrent of protest which exists in the factory is slowly but surely
beginning to concretize itself. The deepest hostility exists everywhere. It can be seen in
the slumped shoulders of a worker trudging down the length of the factory; in the way
in which a worker walks up to a drinking fountain and wearily bends over to meet the
rising stream of water; and in the set lips and drawn features of the worker towards
midnight on the second shift. What more profound expression of all this can be given
than the words of worker X who, in speaking to his foreman, says, "thought Lincoln
freed the slaves." Later in the company of several shopmates, he mentioned something
to the effect that it was time that someone came and freed us from the machines.
What
the
Worker
Wants
Life, as he lives it in the factory and as it corrodes his home life, builds up this
tremendous hatred in the workers. He struggles blindly to throw off the weight of a
distorted factory system. His exasperation at the lack of efficiency is always apparent
and is deeply rooted in him. It impedes him and tears at him internally. Day by day he
attempts to circumvent the bureaucratic methods and orders from above. He takes note
of all defects in the utilization of labor-power that result from the improper utilization of
technical resources or from unsatisfactory administration. He attempts in vain to carry
on a struggle against red tape, laxity and bureaucracy.
He wants every participant in production to understand the need for and expediency of
the production tasks he is carrying out, and for every participant in production to take an
intelligent part in remedying all technical and organizational defects in the sphere of
production.
The worker expresses his hatred of the incentive system by saying he should write the
union contract. This is no less than saying that the existing production relations must be

overthrown. It is also much more. It means that he wants to arrange his life in the
factory in such a way that it satisfies his instincts for doing a good job, knowing that it
is worthwhile, and living in harmony with his fellow men. It is deeply rooted in the
worker that work is the foundation of his life. To make his work a meaningful part of
life, an expression of his overall individuality, is what he would attempt to put into
reality.
It is because I feel all this and see it around me in the factory that I am a revolutionary
socialist. Socialism is not merely an ideal to be wished for. It must grow out of the daily
lives and strivings of the workers, and it must bring a new life to them in that which is
closest to them and to society - their work.
It is not for today's leaders of society to solve this problem. They have shown inside the
factory as outside it how helpless they are. It is from the workers that will come the men
and women who will lead and guide the tremendous upheavals to come. Today they are
being processed and prepared in the factory for a new reorganization based on the freed
capacities of men in the labor process.
A powerful force is today preparing the socialist reality of tomorrow. I am a part of that,
as a worker and as a revolutionary socialist. It is because of this that I have learned to
see clarity in confusion. I see that in socialism the workers will gain the dignity which
capitalism cannot give, and as a revolutionary socialist I have been able to clarify for
myself and for other workers the coming revolution by which the workers will create a
new
world
for
themselves
and
for
the
rest
of
humanity.
Paul Romano
PART
THE
RECONSTRUCTION
by Ria Stone (1947)

2
OF

SOCIETY

INTRODUCTION
The crisis of contemporary society, the barbarism and chaos which govern the daily
existence and immediate perspectives of men from one end of the earth to another, have
provoked in all layers of society a probing into the ultimate perspectives of humanity.
This probing, haltingly begun during the years of the depression, was momentarily
suspended in the holocaust of the Second World War. But in the war also, the myth of
salvation through the Roosevelt New Deal was exploded and with it the last barrier to
the most relentless questions. The desperate efforts of the Wallace-ites and the Stalinists
to perpetuate the Roosevelt myth, while condemning its contemporary international
embodiment in the Marshall Plan, only make more pathetic the gulf between the
memories of one dead man and the profound yearnings of two billion living ones.
Today, in all strata of society, a search is going on for the way to create a world, one
world, in which men can live as social and creative individuals, where they can live as
all-round men and not just as average men. Out of this search a new philosophy of life
is being created. Neither the Christian Revolution nor the Protestant Reformation, the
only comparable milestones in the history of Western civilization, can parallel in depth
and scope the process of evaluation and re-evaluation now going on in the activity and
in the thoughts of men.

This report by Romano, a worker, of the life of a worker in the United States today, is a
fundamental contribution to this evaluation. Un-like the writings of intellectuals and
statesmen, it is a social document describing in essence the real existence of the
hundreds of millions who constitute the basis of our society. The cultural life and
philosophy of every society has always been determined by the life of the working class
at its base. But except in periods of revolution, the world is wont to forget this. Nothing
shows more clearly how close the social revolution is to the surface than the fact that
today, wherever political and industrial statesmen meet to try to resolve the crisis of
modern society, one problem haunts their minds - how to develop the productivity of the
workers. Never has the attitude of the workers to their work meant more to society. In
every country whatever the social denomination, the ability and willingness of the
workers to produce is regarded as the foundation of national and international policy. If,
as we believe, this is a problem actually resolvable only by placing the control of
production into the hands and heads of the workers, it is also a problem which can be
fundamentally understood only by penetrating into what the workers are doing and
thinking as they work at their benches and at their machines.
Only by understanding the actual conditions of life and the actual strivings of an actual
working class at a certain stage of its development, can the problems of humanity as a
whole be understood. Those seeking in the modern barbarism for a unifying principle by
which to understand the past and build the future, must turn their attention to the daily
degradation of the individual and the concrete struggle for liberation which is
developing in the working class.
We make our analysis of the American working class, not because it is the working class
which we know best but also because it is the most powerful, the most advanced in the
world in social productive powers. In the nineteenth century Marx made British
capitalism the foundation for his economic analysis of capitalism. Today it is the
American working class which provides the foundation for an analysis of the economic
transition from capitalism to socialism, or the concrete demonstration of the new society
developing with in the old.
CHAPTER
I
THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION IN THE PROCESS OF PRODUCTION
The semi-skilled workers of mass production are today the vanguard of the workers in
the United States. Between 1921 and the present day, particularly after the 1929
depression and during the second world war, American industry underwent an industrial
revolution which, for depth and extent, has an antecedent only in the industrial
developments of the early nineteenth century. As those developments erupted in the
Chartist movement, the 1848 revolutions in Western Europe, and the Civil War in the
United States, so the industrial revolution after the first world war has been preparing a
world-wide social revolution.
Between 1899 and 1919 electric power had been utilized mainly to drive the old type
machines. Between 1923 and 1929 new type machinery was introduced to exploit this
electric power. On the basis of this new machinery and the centralization of capital
resulting from the 1929 depression, production was then expanded and concentrated
into enormous factories exceeding in size most of the towns of the world. These
factories attracted into the ranks of the working class individuals from all sections of the
country and from a multiplicity of former occupations. Farmers from the dust belt,

white collar workers, the student youth who dreamed of professions and the old folks
who had given up all hopes of a useful social existence; Negroes but lately tied to the
plantations of the South, women whose lives had been confined to husbands and
children - all these were sucked into the maw of the machine and had now to reconcile
their previous mode of social existence with the new reality of work at the bench or on
the line. Those who did not enter the newly developed productive apparatus between
1934 and 1939 were torn from their traditional moorings by the depression, and were
available, at the beginning of the war for a stampede into the shipyards, the aircraft
factories and the radio shops of the "arsenal of democracy." The industrial reserve army
of seventeen million unemployed merged with the millions already at the bench and
created the largest and most powerful industrial working class that the world has ever
known.
The
Contradiction
of
Semi-Skilled
Labor
If these workers had but recently been carrying on their social existence within the
confines of family, church and village, they were now part of an Industrial community.
If they had but recently come actually or in prospect from occupations in which they
controlled their pace of work or lack of it, they now found their lives completely
dominated by the schedule of the time-clock, the machine and the assembly line. By the
very nature of the new semi-skilled Labor, which on the one hand, necessitated the rapid
learning of skills and on the other, degraded the worker to the monotonous repetition of
certain operations, these workers were from the very beginning caught in a
contradiction. They were neither the skilled artisans of the old aristocracy of labor nor
were they the common laborers whose chief asset was their strength. The more each
became lit for a variety of labors, the more, he as an individual, became replaceable.
The skill of each was not expendable but it was not a monopoly so that the man, if not
the skill, was expendable. Out of this contradiction the CIO had exploded in 1936-1937. It represented the instinctive striving of the American working class to tear itself
loose from the contradiction between, on the one hand, its degradation by the machine
into detailed labor, and, on the other hand, what Marx eighty years ago called the
necessity inherent in modem industry for "variation of labor, fluency of function and
universal mobility." Deepened and expanded by the war, this contradiction has become
a cancer systematically eating away at the vitals of American bourgeois society.
If this contradiction pervaded the roots of the industrial community on the home front, it
was even more sharply present in the army. Fourteen million men and women,
irrespective of their former occupations, found themselves assigned to functions not
only in combat but in transport, ordnance, office and hospital. A farmboy was
transformed into a signal corps specialist; a clerk in a shoe store became a combat
medic among whose functions was the administration of morphine or plasma to the
wounded in accordance with his judgment of the nature of their injuries and the
possibility of their recovery. All this was part of the routine experience of every enlisted
man. And equally routine but more dramatic was the expendability of any one of them.
To
Face
With
Sober
Senses
For millions of workers, therefore, the industrial revolution of the last two decades has
meant a combined and concentrated development of the history of modem capitalism.
From farm to assembly line, from the home to the shop, from the desk to the machine,
from the village to the metropolis, from Texas to Paris, they have experienced within a
few short years the infinite variety of the modem world along with the deadly monotony

of the labor process, the social insecurity and the circumscribed opportunities of
capitalism.
What Marx described one hundred years ago as the essential movement of bourgeois
society has come to life for sixty million workers:
"Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social
conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from
all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before
they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned and man is at
last - compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations
with his kind."
The American worker today is facing "his real conditions of life and his relations with
his kind." The post-war strikes were the first empirical eruption of this evaluation.
Following upon the great wave of strikes, individual workers and groups of workers, in
their attempt to explain their actions to themselves, have been carrying on a restless
search within their own thoughts, in conversations at the bench and at the bar, and
wherever they meet and talk. The suddenness with which millions of workers have had
their lives revolutionized by production against the background of capitalist depressions
and wars, has transformed the American worker from an easy-going practical empiricist
into a thoughtful, questioning, investigator into the realities of the society around him.
Whether he goes on strike himself or only reads of others striking, whether he wins or
loses his demands, the same question haunts the worker--where is all this leading to?
The American workers are today trying to create a conception of social history out of
their shattering disillusionment with the promise of the American way of life and the
new appreciation of productive powers which they have gained by their experiences in
industry and in the army.
The
Creativity
of
the
Workers
Nowhere more than in the United States do the workers, in putting forward their claims
as workers, also put forward their claims as human beings. For geographical and
historical reasons, based on the absence of feudal restrictions in the United States, the
outlet of the frontier and the continual replenishment of the labor force through
immigration, the expansion of the country has proceeded uninterruptedly through the
expansion of the productive forces of men. The natural riches of the country have been
taken for granted. The social wealth, prestige and power of the country is, and has been
recognized to be, the result of industry which, robbed of its capitalist integument, is no
more than human productive powers. In an impoverished agricultural region like
Southern Italy, or on a small island like England which must maintain its empire by
maneuverist alliances, the intervention of God or the political genius of statesmen may
have been regarded as the decisive factor in the nation's history. The United States, on
the other hand, although in general it lacks social thinking, has been dominated by the
idea that the universe around us has been created through human energy and foresight.
The result is the conviction pervading the thinking of the workers that work has or
should have a positive and creative value.
It is not the right to vote which has endeared the American way of life to the American
worker, but the opportunity for individual freedom and mobility. The democratic dream

which is the ideological fabric of the United States, has never been the dream of
political democracy. It has been the conviction, nourished by the actual opportunities in
the country for over a hundred years, that every man, the common man, could test his
capacities in a variety of ways. To the American workers freedom has been an economic
force. The hope, always present although with every year less frequently realized, was
that every man could be his "own boss." By which was meant not that he could become
a boss over others but that he could in his own little shop or farm, regulate his own
hours, put his own ideas into operation. Yesterday, millions of workers actually became
their "own boss" in a tavern, an ice cream parlor, a gasoline station, a radio shop. Today
the workers in the shop torture themselves with the thought of the impossibility of ever
escaping from the factory prison. To the entrenched big bourgeoisie, "free enterprise"
meant the right to extort surplus labor from the workers; to the workers "free enterprise"
meant freedom from the necessity to sell their labor power to the boss and freedom from
control by a boss over their productive hours.
The workers today have lost the sense of economic freedom and look upon their work
as a form of bondage. Work has become to them just "labor," just "putting in time." It is
to them neither the expression of their own humanity, a means to the development of
humanity in general, nor a preparation for eventual freedom. It is only for "the
company," and will always be only for "the company." The company is interested only
in production for the sake of production. The worker, created by the development of the
productive forces, is interested in producing as a human being. The worker enjoys work.
On his days off from the auto assembly line, he is as likely as not to spend his time
tinkering with his car. Thereby, he expresses in his "free" time the characteristic
distinguishing the human species from the animal species. But the difference between
free working time and wage working time is never absent from his mind, either in
retrospect or in prospect.
It is this much more than the unequal distribution of wealth in the United States which
has convinced the American workers of the class character of capitalism. The alienated,
non-creative character of his productive activity keeps the American worker in a
constant turmoil and questioning regarding the perspectives of such activity. The
economist sees unemployment and lack of purchasing power for the workers as the
basis of the social crisis and thinks he can resolve the question by "full employment,"
(e.g. sixty million wage-earning jobs) and higher or guaranteed annual wages. It is a
typically bourgeois illusion. The workers today are, as one bourgeois analyst has
described it, psychologically unemployed. 2 Working or not working, they are
constantly haunted by a feeling of frustration and a fear that they are doomed to remain
victims of the attraction and repulsion of capital.
Precisely because American capitalism has been the most revolutionary and progressive
of all capitalisms in the sense of unlocking the mysteries of production, there is organic
to the American workers a conviction that any social order to which they give their
devotion must be revolutionary and progressive in the same sense. It is therefore
precisely the previous vigor of American capitalism which is today its greatest weakness
in the face of the American working class.
The
Alienation
of
the
Workers
The American worker today makes in practice the distinction which Marx made nearly a
hundred years ago in theory - the distinction between abstract labor for value and

concrete labor for human needs. Marx denied that the essence of value production was
the search for profits by the individual capitalists. He specifically denounced the
bourgeois political economists who could see the law of motion of capitalist economy
only in the greed of individuals. Marx was concerned with the activity of the workers.
By value production, he meant production which expanded itself through degradation
and dehumanization of the worker to a fragment of a man. The essence of capitalist
production is that it is a dynamically developing relation by which the dead labor in the
machine, created by the workers, oppresses and degrades to abstract labor the living
worker which it employs. Abstract labor is alienated labor, labor in which the worker
"develops no free physical and spiritual energy but mortifies his body and ruins his
spirit."3 Concrete labor for needs, on the other hand, is not merely nor even essentially
the labor which produces butter rather than guns. It is the labor in which man realizes
his basic human need for exercising his natural and acquired powers.
Marx described abstract labor in human terms which penetrate to the very roots of the
psychological and social reality of today. Alienated labor, he said, "is external to the
worker, does not belong to his essence. Therefore, he does not affirm himself in his
labor but negates himself. He does not feel contented but dissatisfied... The worker
therefore feels himself to be himself away from labor and in labor he feels remote from
himself. He is at home when he does not work and when he works, he is not at home.
His labor is therefore not free but coerced, forced labor. Labor is therefore not the
satisfaction of a need but is only the means to satisfy the needs outside of it."
To read Romano's description of the life in the factory is to realize with shocking clarity
how deeply the alienation of labor pervades the very foundations of our society. All the
preoccupation of the intellectuals with their own souls and with economic programs for
"full employment" and a higher standard of living, fade into insignificance in the face of
the oppressive reality of the lifetime of every worker. The importance of Romano's
document is that it never for a single moment permits the reader to forget that the
contradictions in the process of production make life an agony of toil for the worker, be
his payment high or low.
The new society must bring about a revolutionary transformation in the lives of the
workers in the shop. That was the axis of Marx's thinking.
Socialist relations of production, he said, are those in which "labor becomes not merely
a means to live but is itself the first necessity of living. The powers of production have
also increased and all the springs of cooperative wealth are gushing more freely together
with the all-around development of the individual."
By the powers of production, Marx meant the fully developed productive powers of the
individual workers, freely associated with their fellow workers. Such universality in the
workers was the only means for developing universality in the rest of society. Without
the universality of the workers, the dehumanization of the whole of society was
inevitable.
The capacity and the desire for universality are created by capitalism itself and nowhere
more than in the United States. The American worker has little sense of the political
history of the country except insofar as it is embodied in a few great names, but the
daily experiences of his conscious years give him a conception of the revolutions in

production which constitute industrial history. He is therefore in constant revolt against

the attempts of bourgeois society to give a mystical character to capital in the process of
production by confining him to certain detailed operations. Outside of his working
hours, the worker drives a car, a new model every few years, a process which demands
from him confident control over the machine and the spontaneous adjustment to a
variety of signals. Electrical appliances, the press with its variety of subjects, the movies
and television surround him and stimulate his human appreciations. The American
worker, and particularly the young worker, is the most mobile in the world. During the
course of one year, he may fulfill the technical requirements of a half-dozen jobs as he
wanders from factory to factory seeking to escape from the factory altogether. The
potentiality of such productive powers forced into the regimen of their limited exercise
in the factory is a source of constant frustration to the workers, intensifying their hatred
of their work and their anxiety to find another mode of expressing their humanity.
CHAPTER
II
THE
HUMAN
NATURE
OF
INDUSTRY
Not only does the potentiality of such productive powers exist in the workers; the means
of production themselves have been developed to the stage where only through the free
exercise of the workers' productive powers can the machines themselves be employed.
Abstract labor reaches its most inhuman depths in machine production. But at the same
time, it is only machine production which lays the basis for the fullest human
development of concrete labor.
The
Social
Development
of
Machinery
For over one hundred years the development of the means of production has been
through the transference from the worker of all his skills, capacities and sensitivities.
First, by division of labor and the perfection of the detailed operations of the workers
under manufacture, the technical basis for the machine was created. Then the machine
itself emerged as the embodiment of these detailed operations. The machine had a
strictly capitalist use. It was the basis for extracting more surplus labor from the workers
by means of its greater regularity, intensity and uniformity. Hence, every incorporation
of human powers into the machine was a corresponding dehumanization of the worker.
However, at a certain stage of its development, the machine itself began to become so
valuable, not only in terms of the capital invested in it but also in terms of the
complexity of operations which it embodied, that new qualities were demanded from
the workers. At first, it was primarily physical energy which was demanded from the
workers. Then with the technical development of the machine, the irregular energy
supplied by the workers became insufficient, and first steam power, then electric power
became the source of energy. With the substitution of the electric motor in the late
nineteenth century, and the increased mobility and flexibility of the machinery, the basic
requirements from the workers became training and discipline. What was demanded
from the workers was manual dexterity and control, combined with complete
subordination to the management in assignment of tasks. This combination,
euphemistically known as efficiency, gave birth to a new pattern of thought known as
Taylorism. The machine was semi-automatic and demanded a semi-skilled worker, a
worker capable of certain manual skills and control but with no intellectual skills or
over-all conception of the production process. All such skills and responsibilities
became the province of engineers and technicians. Today, the knowledge, science, etc.,
of the means of production have reached a new stage. With the development of electric
power and electronics, completely automatic production is possible and necessary. The

units of production can now incorporate complete flexibility, power, precision, freedom
of movement and ease of control. But what is required from the workers on such
production units is equal flexibility, precision, freedom of movement and ease of
control. The workers must themselves become complete masters of the productive
powers developed in the instruments of production.
The universality which is embodied in the machines must also be developed in them.
What is required in each worker is not only manual but technical knowledge. Even more
important, the objectification of all-around human activities in the machine demands the
creation of a comparable human sensitivity. The semi-skilled worker is not sufficient,
nor is the specialized technician. As the objective world more and more incorporates the
human sensitivities of man, man himself must increasingly assimilate the acuteness in
perception which characterizes the operations of the objective world.
The
Appropriation
of
Human
Nature
"Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labor
are brought about at the cost of the individual laborer; all means for the development of
production estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor-process in the
same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power." Yet not
theory but life shows us that at a certain stage, the increased transference of human
science, skills and sensitivities to the machine demands a corresponding integration of
the same science, skills and sensitivities in the workers employing the machine. This is
the dialectical process so sneered at by the intellectuals. Without a dialectical
transformation in which the worker is enriched in human capacities in the same
proportion as the means of production, the productive forces inherent in the means of
production themselves can not be unleashed.
This dialectical transformation is the essential content of the appropriation by the
workers of the means of production. This is the new production relation which the
social revolution must introduce a production relation in which the productive forces
inherent in both machines and men are unleashed. This production relation is therefore
also a new human relation of men to nature and of nature to man.
The workers described by Romano who wander about the plant, hungrily eyeing
different machines and different operations, are seeking to make this appropriation and
create this new human and natural relation. Their absorption in popular science
magazines, startling science stories, museums of industry and art, is also part of this
desire for re-integration. To the intellectual, smug in his contempt for the labor process,
Marx's social program for the human appropriation of the social productive powers may
seem abstract. But the worker who ingeniously devises new tools or carefully thinks
through various setups, although in a fit of despair he would as easily break up the
machine which dominates him, would have no difficulty in understanding that the new
relations of production must be based upon the "free development, intellectual and
social, of the individual." No other relations of production could break through the
contradiction tearing at the workers in their daily life in the factory.
There may be vulgar materialists whose conception of completely automatic production
provides only for robot operators. They betray the typical empiricism and naive realism
of those intellectuals who have only contemplated the world and are therefore unable to
understand that the world develops through the practical activity of man. Let them

ponder the description of the actual design of "machines without men" developed by
bourgeois engineers. 4
We must begin by reaffirming the fact that the social and historical essence of the
machine, stripped of its capitalist employment, is that it embodies human activities. This
social essence has been lost sight of in bourgeois society which in its irrepressible need
to expand surplus value by deve1oping ever more powerful machines to exploit the
workers, has increasingly designed the machine in terms of end product rather than of
operation.
Automatic production requires that the machines be designed in terms of operation
rather than of the end product. The new machine is made up of many small units
plugged together. Each unit is capable of performing one function, and several plugged
together will be capable of doing all the operations required to build a given part. A
great number of units linked electrically and by conveyors will produce and assemble a
complete product. The complete machine will be highly adaptable and can be
rearranged at any time to build a completely different product.
The basic units of the fully automatic factory will perform the following functions: l) To
give and receive information, 2) To control through collation 3) To operate on materials.
All these can be performed automatically. The giving and receiving of information can
be done through electronic detection devices such as the photoelectric cell; the carrying
of information by devices such as the electric circuit; the recording of this information
by devices such as the dictaphone and film; and the calculating of such information by
devices such as the new electronic-tube counter.
The collation and control device is a system of electronic tubes and circuits that accepts
information fed into it by information units and in turn feeds controlled power to the
operation units in accordance with this information. The actual operation on materials transport, fabrication and holding - can all be done by adaptations of familiar
machinery.
The
Need
for
Social
Man
When Marx analysed the instruments of production as essentially "social objects," he
was anticipating just such automatic machinery. A social object contains the totality of
human activities as perfected by the previous industrial history of man. Fifty years ago,
even twenty years ago, it might have been possible not to understand what Marx had in
mind. But the actual inclusion of human sensitivities in the automatic machines being
designed today dramatically reveals the essentially human nature of industry.
A social object requires for its control men who embody this human nature in
themselves, the social man. Without this social man, the social object has no sense. "Just
as for unmusical ears the most beautiful music makes no sense."5 The completely
automatic production unit is social also in the sense that it requires the most complete
continuity of operations. If at any stage in the process, there is a loss of time, then the
whole process is interrupted. Each man, therefore, in control of any particular stage of
the process must be aware of the relation of his role in production to that of every other
man. That is the essence of planning. Not coordination from above of pieces of steel, or
inanimate chess men. Planning, as control from below, is an economic necessity based

upon the enormous scope and variety of modern industry. Without the inclusion of this
scope and variety in the worker, there is no planning within production but only
blueprints for production. The bourgeoisie can conceive and introduce "planning" only
in the sense of blueprints because its mental horizon is fettered by the class conception
of workers as cogs in a machine, a conception as outmoded in the modern world as the
mode of production out of which it developed. In this question -- so critical for national
and world economics today -- the Stafford Crippses, for all their selfless devotion, are
bound by the same fetters. Administration for the masses is no substitute for
administration by the masses.
The yearning of the workers for universality today is no mere desire to acquire skills in
a host of interesting jobs or to imitate the skilled craftsmen of an earlier age. The
workers conceive of their mastery of the machine as a mastery of the process of largescale production, and hence as an all-embracing integration of the workers' activity and
judgment in a network of complex operations. It is associated humanity which will
control production, and it is this control which will make of each man not an isolate
individual doing one job or many jobs but a social individual participating in a social
project.
Moreover, only arising from the exercise of their human capacities can there exist in the
workers the willing cooperation and self-discipline without which the employment of
the completely automatic unit is impossible. Without what has been called by Polakov6
a "discipline of mind complying with the laws of nature," life, limb, product, plant and
perhaps the whole neighborhood are in serious jeopardy. The example of an airplane
crew can give an indication in microcosm of what is necessary on a social scale. The
bourgeoisie during the war had to train each member of an air crew in a multiplicity of
operations and a knowledge of the sciences embodied in flying. Most, if not all of the
crew had to know something about the operations of the others, perhaps not as expertly
as the operator, but well enough to take over in case of emergency. Equally important
were the sensitivities of the individual members of the crew not only to new conditions
but to each other. The human nature of the men was decisive for the functioning of the
mechanism. What is true for the plane isolated in the air is even more true of automatic
production on a community scale. Unless the workers as individuals and as a social unit
are completely aware of the laws of nature as they apply to production, unless their
mastery of production is the basis of social organization, unless they are using all their
human senses, unless they have appropriated the capacities of the machines, unless they
have a human social relation to one another, the mechanism is not only useless to them
but a danger to the whole of society.
The
Need
for
Universality
It is this economic need for universality on the part of the workers which makes it so
difficult for the capitalists today to introduce completely automatic machinery. The
semi-skilled worker of today is a worker within the transition process from semiautomatic machine production to completely automatic power production. His
contradictions and frustrations are the contradiction and frustration of a class society
which cannot complete the revolutionizing of the instruments of production. The
bourgeoisie uses the most advanced techniques and completely automatic processes, to
propagandize the worker as to the advantages of capitalism in advertisements, gadgets,
means of consumption, but it cannot use them in production because that would require
a complete destruction of the class relations of bourgeois society.

The economic necessity for new production relations for fully automatic production is
recognized even by bourgeois consultants. Leaver and Brown in the article which we
have cited, write:
"The whole trend of present automatic controls and devices applied to present
production machines is to degrade the worker into an unskiIled and tradeless non-entity.
The development of completely automatic production lines would reverse this by
demanding a skilled force of technicians and operators. The astonishingly rapid
development of new skills and occupations under the pressures of war shows that men
are up to it."
Even more dramatically, Polakov wrote a dozen years ago:
"With the advent of the Power Age, the tendency toward specialized men and
universalized machines is gradually changing toward special single-purpose machines
and all-around 'universalized' mechanics."
"What the Power Age requires of workers is something altogether different from the
qualifications of the Machine Age or the pre-machine era workers."
"The Power Age worker's new requirements--his mental alertness, general intelligence,
'polytechnic literacy' and loyal dependability--are making him less and less a 'beast of
burden', a mere 'machine hand', and more and more an intelligent human being, an allaround educated man, defining 'educated man' as 'those who can do everything that
others do.' (Hegel)"7
Under
Penalty
of
Death
But it was Marx who eighty years ago in Capital posed the problem with the most
dramatic sharpness:
"Modern Industry, through its catastrophes, imposes the necessity of recognizing as a
fundamental law of production, variation of work, consequently fitness of the laborer
for varied work, consequently the greatest possible development of his varied aptitudes.
It becomes a question of life and death for society to adapt the mode of production to
the normal functioning of this law. Modern Industry, indeed, compels society, under
penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of today, crippled by life-long repetition of
one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to a fragment of a man, by the fully
developed individual, fit for a variety of labors, ready to face any change of production,
and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of
giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers."
Modern Industry, contemporary industry, has proved the scientific character of Marx's
prognosis. It was no abstract philosophy regarding the universality of men nor sympathy
for the degraded detail workers which enabled Marx to write with such penetration and
foresight. Because he recognized that the essence of the machine was not its
employment of mechanical powers, but rather its human nature, not what it produced
but how it produced, he was able to anticipate that in time all human sensitivities would
be embodied in machinery and that this, the human nature of industry, would be
meaningless to men unless their human capacities were developed correspondingly. As
he wrote in 1844:

"On the one hand, therefore, inasmuch as everywhere for man in society, objective
actuality becomes the actuality of human essential capacities, human actuality and thus
the actuality of his own essential capacities, all objects become for him the
objectification of himself; objects affirming and realizing his individuality, his objects,
he himself becomes object... Not only in thought but with all his senses, man is thus
affirmed in the objective world."
"On the other hand, from the subjective point of view, an object has sense for me only
insofar as my essential capacity is subjective capacity for itself, because the sense of an
object for me... goes just so far as my sensitivity goes."8
The bourgeoisie today flounders about helplessly in the face of the social ruin which its
rule has created. Never have the means of production been so highly developed, yet
never have they seemed so inadequate to the task of elementary economic
reconstruction. The penalty of death hangs over all humanity. The concrete alternatives
are a continuation of the existing barbarism or the rebuilding of society by the
enrichment of the human capacities of the workers.
This is one of the deepest aspects of Marx' s concept of historical materialism which has
been concretely disclosed by the development of modern society with all its wealth in
productive machinery and its poverty in social relations. The class relations of bourgeois
production, by being a fetter upon the productive powers of the workers, are also a fetter
upon the development of the means of production. The yearning and capacity of the
masses for universality is only the concrete proof that the emancipation of society rests
with them. The key to increased productivity and the reconstruction of society is the
development of the humanity of the workers. It is this perspective of human freedom
which the socialist revolution opens up before modern man.
CHAPTER
III
CLASS
INDIVIDUAL
AND
THE
SOCIAL
INDIVIDUAL
Marx did not write lightly of the penalty of death which faces modern society. The
problem of revolutionizing the social relations to conform to the development of the
productive forces is so critical for capitalist society, and particularly for American
capitalist society, that the bourgeoisie has been forced to take cognizance of it in an
organized fashion. At Harvard, for example, under the direction of Professor Elton
Mayo, the intellectual servants of the bourgeoisie have advised it that "economic logic"
and "technical invention" go hand in hand with an increasing social disintegration.
So hostile is the working class to existing social relations that it carries on an incessant
revolt in the labor process itself, not only against any attempts to increase its
productivity but also and essentially against any attempt to maintain productivity at all.
As early as 1919, Herbert Hoover, head of the European Relief Commission, reported
that what was holding up the reconstruction of Europe was "demoralized productivity."
Today, the demoralized productivity is so deep-going, so pervasive, that without the
destruction of class production relations and the development of universality in the
workers, what society faces is the common ruin of the contending classes.
Mayo's researches, carried on in the factories, have led him to the conclusion that the
workers function as a group and not as individuals. He writes:

"In every department that continues to operate, the workers have, whether aware of it or
not, formed themselves into a group with appropriate customs, duties, routines, even
rituals; and management succeeds (or fails) in proportion as it is accepted without
reservation by the group as authority and leader."
The bourgeoisie is deeply disturbed at the attitudes of this working group. Nor is their
concern only with the workers' hostility to the foreman, supervisor or boss. According to
Mayo, the workers govern their activity in the shop by a social code which includes four
axioms:
"You should not turn out too much work; if you do, you are a 'ratebuster.'"
"You should not turn out too little work; if you do, you are a chiseler."
"You should not say anything to a supervisor which would react to the detriment of one
of your associates."
"You should not be too officious; that is, if you are an inspector, you should not act like
one."
Disintegration
of
Old
Social
Ties
These four "don'ts" are the expression of the worker's alienation from any social
purpose beyond those of the protection of his working group. They symbolize the
disintegration of the old social ties of bourgeois society. A disintegration going on apace
at its very core. The workers create a new social tie, their class solidarity. But precisely
because the class does not find within the given, the capitalist society, any expression of
social needs, precisely because it instinctively realizes that the existing social needs are
the class needs of an alien class, this new social tie is expressed in a negative manner,
creative only in devising means to oppose the given society.
Mayo goes on to say:
"Insistence upon a merely economic logic of production, especially if the logic is
frequently changed, interferes with the development of... a code [of human
collaboration ] and consequently gives rise in the group to a sense of defeat. This human
defeat results in the formation of a social code at a lower level and in opposition to the
economic logic."
Mayo does not know how profound are his observations. The workers today, pressing
toward the revolution in the productive forces which require their classless universality
or existence as social individuals, are instead forced by the production relations of
capitalism into a class community. They create new social ties negatively because
capitalist production relations prevent them from creating them positively. Their
discipline, unity and organization as created by large-scale capitalism, are exercised in
the service of their class, and class existence is not social existence but alien existence.
So long, therefore, as class existence is necessary, the workers cannot exercise their
complete human capacities. They belong to the community "only as average
individuals, only insofar as they live within the conditions of existence of their class... a
relationship in which they participate not as individuals but as members of a class."

(Marx, German Ideology.) The desire of the workers, and the economic and human
necessity of society, is that the workers exist as social individuals. The oppressive
weight of bourgeois relations forces them to exist only as average class individuals.
"The lower social code" by which they govern themselves is their only protection
against the enemy class.
The capitalists fear this "lower social code" because it impedes their need for surplus
value and they seek to undermine it by destroying the unity of the workers, creating
company men, etc. The workers hate this code because it conflicts with their natural
human desire to do a good job and forces them to subordinate their individual
personalities to the defensive needs of the class. Nowhere more than in the United
States is there such a sharp division "within the life of each individual so far as it is
personal and insofar as it is determined by some brand of labor and the conditions
pertaining to it." (German Ideology.) The U.S. working class is hostile to class existence
because it is a comparatively new working class without the European revolutionary
tradition of opposition to the feudal aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. The American
workers must struggle as a class and yet they and their confinement to a class position
continually oppressive.
Degraded to badge numbers, the individual workers seek to distinguish themselves by
their clothing, their knowledge of baseball players, movie stars, etc. They are pressing
against the conditions of life of class society. The Negroes, the most oppressed layer and
therefore the layer of society most confined to average existence in contemporary
society, are the ones who reveal most deadly this contradiction between the human need
for individual expression and the class need for uniformity. They hate being regarded as
Negroes and yet are determined that society should recognize their growing
revolutionary mobilization as Negroes. Each individual Negro may seek individual
distinction in dress etc., but the individual distinction immediately becomes a
uniformity of the race.
The
Fully-Developed
Individual
The bourgeoisie seeks to inculcate into the workers the idea that under the new socialist
society their individuality will be destroyed. Sceptical tho they are of bourgeois
propaganda in general, the workers are not un-receptive to this propaganda. Yet it is the
class relations of bourgeois society which regiment the workers at the machine and
impose average uniform existence upon their social lives. At every point in production,
the workers are deprived of any opportunity for creative individuality. Any positive
exercise of inventiveness in productivity would only react to the detriment of their class.
"With the community of revolutionary proletarians, on the other hand, who take their
conditions of existence and those of all members of society under their control, it is just
the reverse; it is as individuals that the individuals participate in it." (German Ideology.)
Marx never wrote of the new socialist society without specifically emphasizing the fully
developed individual who would be the basis of such a society. But the essence of
individuality for Marx was the expression of self- activity in relation to the development
of the productive forces and therefore a historical and not an abstract reality. To be an
individual at any stage of society's development, the person must embody the previous
gains of the species and the multiplicity of talents which these have made possible.

For nearly a century, capitalism, with its fetishism of commodities, has so dulled man's
understanding of himself that he has believed individualism to be indistinguishable from
personal aggrandizement and competition with others. Yet, when the bourgeoisie was
revolutionary, i.e., could speak in the name of society, the essential characteristic of the
successful capitalist was not his increase of his private coffers at the expense of others,
but rather his "enterprise" which tore apart the mysteries in which the feudal guilds had
surrounded production and destroyed the local barriers separating men from one
another. Because the bourgeois revolutions destroyed the feudal fetters on man's selfactivity, the bourgeois individual was essentially a co-worker with other individuals,
expanding the horizon of society. He was in this sense a social individual. For this
reason, the bourgeois individual not only expanded his wealth but also his physical and
mental capacities, creating the most vibrant, energetic and cosmopolitan individual that
society had ever known. 9
This concept of the social individual has been lost in bourgeois society precisely
because the bourgeoisie is no longer self-active, but has become the victim itself of the
system which accumulates wealth at one pole while accumulating misery, agony of toil,
slavery, ignorance, brutality and degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the
class that produces its own product in the form of capital. As Marx was the first to point
out:
"Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is ours only when
we have it, when it exists for us as capital, or when we possess it directly, eat it, drink it,
wear it on our body, in short, use it... For all the physical and spiritual senses, therefore,
the sense of possession which is the simple alienation of all these senses, has been
substituted." ("Private Property and Communism.")
Hence, with the decline of bourgeois society, or the development of its production
relations into fetters upon the self-activity of individuals, the essence of the bourgeois
individual becomes ruthless competition and accumulation in antagonism to the rest of
society. To get there the "fastest with the mostest," the bourgeois individual must
deprive all men, including himself, of all the human senses. Not he but value becomes
the subject. He becomes respectable only as personified capital, i.e. to the degree that he
serves the self-expansion of capital.
The
Creation
of
New
Social
Ties
In opposition to the ruthless antagonistic competition of the bourgeoisie, the working
class exercises all its ingenuity to devise means of suppressing its productive energies,
at the expense not only of the bourgeoisie but even of the working class itself. In many
shops what tires the workers out is not chiefly the physical exertions of their labor but
the constant attention needed not to give the company a "fair day's work," because the
worker refuses to be measured in terms of a "fair day's pay." Since man's essence is to
exercise his self-activity and all his senses in a socially productive way, the slowdown,
the self-imposed discipline against making suggestions for improving production, the
deliberate neglect of the machine, are a constant source of frustration to the workers
themselves.
It is only when the routine daily struggle of the class explodes into violent activity
against the bourgeoisie (the throwing of a foreman out of the window, the conflict with
the police on the mass picket line, etc.), activities which require an overt exercise of

their creative energies, that the workers feel themselves as human. As a result, the return
from the picket line to the covert class struggle is even more frustrating than if the strike
had never taken place. The molecular development of these offensives and retreats can
only explode in the revolution which will enable the working class to employ its
creative energies not only in smashing the old relations of production but also in
establishing new social ties of a positive and creative character.
The solidarity of the working class in its struggle against the capitalist class is only one
side of the concept of socialized labor, a side which even the AFL bureaucrat can
understand. It does not by any means begin to exhaust or even approximate the
profound concept of the new social ties which Marx saw as the essence of socialism.
Marx knew well the vulgar Communists of his day with their crude conception of
levelling, and he answered them with a history sweep which has been amply justified by
the development of the instruments of production.
"Social activity and social spirit by no means exist merely in the form of direct
community activity and direct community spirit." However "community activity and
spirit, i.e. activity and spirit which are expressed and asserted directly in actual society
with other men, are to be found where--ever such an immediate expression of sociality
is based on the essential content of the activity and are suited to its nature."
The essential content of productive activity today is the cooperative form of the labor
process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the
soil, the transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of labor only usable
in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as the means of
production of combined, socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of
the world-market, and this, the international character of the capitalist regime.
The bourgeoisie maintains a fetter on this essentially social activity by isolating
individuals from one another through competition, by separating the intellectual powers
of production from the manual labor, by suppressing the creative organizational talents
of the broad masses, by dividing the world up into spheres of influence.
This conflict between the invading socialist society and the bourgeois fetters preventing
its emergence is part of the daily experience of every worker.
The worker who longs for an overall conception of his production and its relation to
others, who walks about speaking to other workers about their work, who emphatically
goes through the motions of his co-workers, who sees in the skill of the German
workers the key to rebuilding Europe, will understand what Marx meant by social
activity because it is precisely this which he is constantly seeking to substitute for the
isolation, estrangement and provincialism of bourgeois social relations.
The bourgeoisie in its revolutionary days could exist as social individuals only because
it unleashed the creative capacity of human forces. Today, both the material and the
human forces can become truly social. The unleashing of these more developed forces
today by the proletarian revolution will make the workers into really social individuals
who will be more inclusive of society and more representative of the gains of the
species than the bourgeoisie was even in its heyday.

CHAPTER
IV
IN
SOCIETY
WITH
OTHER
MEN
The worker in the modern factory is constantly torn between his human desire to
cooperate with his fellow workers and the restricted relation to other men to which he is
confined as a detail laborer. The development of all-sided universal man in the
productive process is the key to the establishment of human relations between man and
man. "That man is alienated from his species-essence means that one man is alienated
from another and every man is alienated from human essence." ("Alienated Labor")
Conversely, only when man becomes all-round universal man within the process of
production, can he have human relations to other men first inside and then outside the
process of production. This is the key to the sterility of the petty-bourgeois intellectuals
and it is the key to the abolition of the alienated relations between the sexes and the
antagonistic relations between the races.
The
Intellectuals
and
the
Quest
for
Universality
The petty-bourgeois intellectuals, today, are seeking for universality but in an alienated
fashion because they are themselves the product of the division between manual and
mental labor which is the climax of class relations. This division of labor is the
culminating point of the inhumanity of class relations because it deprives both poles of
the division of one essential aspect of human existence necessary to develop even their
economic functions. To the degrading alienation of the manual worker from the
intellectual processes of his production, there corresponds the debilitating alienation of
the brain worker from the manual application of his ideas. The army aphorism that
every officer needed a group of enlisted men to take care of him illustrates the
impotence to which even the ruling class is condemned by this division of labor.
Corresponding and arising from the monotonous repetition of certain manual tasks by
the worker at the machine is the specialization in various detailed phases of technical
production by the brain worker. In the oil refining industry, for example, one technician
is confined to designing the cooling towers, another to fractionating towers, a third to
piping and a fourth to chemical processes. In the rest of society, the same fragmentation
develops. To the nurse whose daily existence is haunted by the thermometer and the bed
pan, there corresponds at the other pole the eye, ear and nose specialist who performs
fifty routine tonsilectomies in a working day. Schoolteachers are compelled to act as
drillmasters and policemen to recalcitrant pupils, dissatisfied with an outmoded
academic regimen.
If the workers feel their incomplete humanity and struggle against it, the intellectuals
and technicians are even more restless because more inclined to introspection, more
isolated from one another and therefore without the means for struggle which capitalist
production creates for socialized labor. Being more facile and less confined by the
immediate needs of their work and with a deep-seated conviction, nourished by their
status in society, that they should be universal men, they develop hobbies, create
fantastic dreams of a new world or escape to the "sweet monotony of toil" close to the
earth.
With the decline of every society and with the consequent inability of the individuals of
the ruling class to express any more the social essence of humanity, the petty-bourgeois
moralists, horrified by the barbarism and decay, begin to get lost in the philosophic
jungle of counterposing the individual as representative of individuality to society as
representative of totality. As Marx pointed out, in exposing the idealism of the True

Socialists, "Society is abstracted from these individuals, it is made independent, it

relapses into savagery on its own, and the individual suffers only as a result of this
relapse." (German ldeology) That is how the Existentialists are thinking today. They
would rescue the individual from society ("Hell is other people" - Sartre).
Workers'
Activity
-the
Key
By contrast, Marx, with his eye on the development of social activity and social objects
in the process of production, specifically warned: "We should especially avoid reestablishing society as an abstraction opposed to the individual. The individual is the
social essence. His expression of life, although it may not appear in the direct form of a
communal-type life carried out simultaneously with others, is therefore an expression
and assertion of social living. The individual and the species life of man are not
distinct." ("Private Property and Communism")
The basic philosophic reason for the incapacity of the petty-bourgeois intellectuals to
develop the concept of the social individual is their confinement within the vulgar
materialism and uncritical idealism of defining bourgeois society. This is a reflection in
thought of the division in class society between manual and mental labor. In its
revolutionary days, the bourgeois ideologists could see the basis of society in the
productive activity of individual men. (Adam Smith - Labor is the source of all wealth.)
Thus the basic class conception of the division of labor between leisure activities and
productive activities was for a brief period subordinated in the vigorous industrial
development. But with the increasing class differentiation of bourgeois society,
productive activity becomes a symbol of degradation.
Industry is not "regarded in connection with the essence of man" but "only in terms of
the external relations of utility." Although the products of industry are in reality the
"objectified essential capacities of man," they are regarded only as "useful objects in
ordinary material industry." Correspondingly, the true universality of men is sought not
in the productive process but only in intellectual pursuits like art, science, religion, etc.
The more the productive activity of the worker becomes degraded, the more the
intellectual takes the "dirt" of labor for granted and seeks salvation in a realm of ideas
and programs as remote as possible from the process of production. The pettybourgeoisie today seeks to build its own philosophic community where ideas hold sway
and what is important is not what men think but the fact that they think. Such a Platonic
conclusion follows inevitably from the incapacity to see in the misery of the workers
anything but misery.
Marx never took his eyes off the workers' activity in production because he never lost
sight of the revolution which would transform labor into a human activity. Conversely,
because he always had this revolution in mind, his main concern was always the actual
life of the workers. As he insisted: "If you proceed from production, you necessarily
concern yourself with the real conditions of production and with the productive activity
of men. But if you proceed from consumption, you merely declare that consumption is
not at present 'human,' that it is necessary to cultivate true consumption and so on.
Content with this, you can afford to ignore the real living conditions and the activity of
men." (German ldeology.)
The petty-bourgeois economists of the New Deal variety, who seek to alleviate the ills
of bourgeois society, follow this pattern precisely. They think always in terms of the

underconsumption or inhuman consumption of society. The agitation around atomic

energy, for example, is always in terms of its inhuman use and not in terms of the
objectified human capacities which it represents and can develop. When a depression
threatens, the only solution the economist can find is increased purchasing power for the
workers. When automatic production is recommended, the alarm is immediately set up
that it will throw men out of work and therefore leave no market. This is the typical
petty-bourgeois indifference to the worker' s productive life and therefore to the
essential activity of man.
Not only is this so. It cannot be otherwise so long as the degradation of the activity of
the worker is the means whereby production is expanded, i.e. so long as the proletariat
remains proletariat. All the concentration of the economists and the reformists upon
increasing consumption is only a reflection of this essential disregard, inherent in
bourgeois society, of the activity of the producers. The problems of consumption will
never be re-solved until the release of the human capacities of the producers resolves the
problems of production. That is why the proletarian revolution which will release these
capacities will bring about such a profound social change. By releasing the productive
forces of the producers themselves, it will also release society from the preoccupation
with the end-product and the accumulation and distribution of this end product. Men's
thoughts can then be turned to the development of man's humanity in the process of
production itself.
The
Emancipation
of
Women
The development of man's humanity in the process of production is the only basis for
establishing a human relation between men and women. Under the conditions of class
society, the relationship of man to woman develops primarily as a sexual relationship
and not as a relationship between human beings. "Because man is alienated in the
productive process he feels himself more at home in his animal functions, eating,
drinking, procreating, while in his human functions he feels more like an animal."
("Alienated Labor" )
The more man feels alienated from his humanity in production, the more he is driven to
try to find his humanity, that is, to realize himself, as a man, in consumption, and
particularly, in the sexual relation. This is true of the genus Man, i.e. both men and
women. The more women are drawn by capitalism out of the division of labor between
the sexes in the domestic sphere and into the alienated labor of production in the factory,
the more they also feel at home not in their productive activity but in their sexual
relations to men. For both, the sexual relation is what Marx called an animal relation
because it is abstracted "from the rest of the range of human activity." (ibid) The greater
the alienation in production, the greater the necessity to intensify and glorify the sexual
relation with romance, etc. In the United States, this glorification has achieved its purest
expression because in the United States, without feudal hangovers and with advanced
industrial production, the relationship between men and women is a product of the
alienated activity of both in the process of production. Within this framework the
equality of the sexes is the equality of alienated man and alienated woman. Within the
framework of class society, therefore, the emancipation of women is an emancipation of
them as females and not as human beings. In order for the sexual relation to become a
human relation, i.e. for eating, drinking, and procreating which are also human
functions, to become human relations, it is necessary that the genus Man be
emancipated from alienated labor. This is not to deny the importance of women

struggling as women for emancipation. The workers must assert themselves as a class in
order to achieve recognition as human beings and in order to recognize their own
strength as human beings. Their class struggle is "the necessary form and energetic
principle of the immediate future but it is not as such the goal of human development
and the form of human society." ("Private Property and Communism.") Analogously, in
order for women not to have to assert themselves as women in order to achieve
recognition, it is necessary that the genus Man not be driven to seek in the opposite sex
what Marx called his "common needs" rather than his "human needs."
A revolution in the relations between men and women requires a revolution in the mode
of production according to the development of the wealth of human capacities contained
in industry and hence also in man. "The restricted relation of men to nature determines
their restricted relation to one another." (German Ideology.) Today, the basis for
overcoming this restricted relation of men to nature lies in the appropriation of the
productive powers by man. There can thus be built a new economic foundation for a
human rather than a restricted relation between the sexes. In no sphere of human
relations will the new social ties be more obvious. For the first time both men and
women will be emancipated from the preoccupation with the sexual relation in its
biological or romanticized form.
The
Human
Relation
Between
the
Races
The antagonisms between the races will also find its final resolution only through the
development of all-sided universal man in the process of production. The Negro is
forced by the oppression of his race in the existing, i.e. capitalist society, to fight as a
Negro. This nationalistic revolt continually shakes the stability of the existing society
and is therefore one of the most important contributing factors to the success of the
proletarian revolution.
It is however, in the social community, created in the heat of the class struggle, e.g., in
the sitdown strikes which built the CIO, that the relations between white and Negro
workers are the relations between revolutionary men, i.e. men who feel themselves
bound in a social cause and therefore instinctively recognize themselves and each other
as universal men, social individuals. The pattern laid in this self-mobilization is the
pattern which will be created in the process of production itself by the social revolution.
A completely new mode of production will be created which will develop the men of
both races as universal all-sided men who can have human relations rather than race
relations with one another.
So long as each man has an exclusive sphere of activity which is forced upon him and
from which he can not escape, he must have an alienated relation to other men and
particularly to those men from whom an easy distinction can be made on superficial
characteristics. The inhumanity of man to man is the result of the inhumanity of every
man in his specifically human, i.e. productive functions. The increasing frustration of
man in production drives him to an increasing alienation from his fellow men outside
the process of production. Only through the development of all-sided men will this
process be reversed. The alternative is a police state to hold together the men alienated
from one another in society.
Thus, all problems of social relations in the crisis of contemporary society, the
alienation of the manual and mental workers, the family, the state, race tensions--all

drive us back to the one essential problem--how to release the humanity of man in the
process of production. It was by keeping his eye on the process of production that Marx
was able to develop a truly social philosophy in which all men, of both sexes, of all
races and of all occupations, were viewed as all-round human beings. This philosophy
he called "humanistic naturalism" or "naturalistic humanism." Civilization has never
known and could never have known a more human philosophy because civilization has
never known a situation where the developed existence of industry and of human
psychology can be what Marx called "the opened book of human capacities." The
bourgeoisie must keep this book closed. The proletarian revolution will force it open
and release all those imprisoned within the alienation and fragmentation of bourgeois
society.
CHAPTER
V
THE
CRISIS
OF
THE
CAPITALISTS
No ruling class has ever been able to maintain itself for long in the face of contempt
from the masses as to its economic powers. The workers today have lost respect for the
bourgeoisie as technical administrators. They do not so much hate the bourgeoisie as
despise it. The workers every-where say: "It is getting so that supervision don't give a
damn about anything." The war brought this contempt to a head when the workers
found that, despite the propaganda about the boys at the front, they had to loaf on the
job because profits had been guaranteed by cost-plus. The workers recognize that the
bourgeoisie's only respectability remains its right to hire and fire, and in strike after
strike in the post-war wave, they have defied this cherished prerogative.
Knowing that its economic logic has carried it to this impasse and terrified by the
production revolts of the workers, the bourgeoisie is seeking today to resolve its crisis
by teaching the bosses to be social administrators rather than technical administrators.
Listen to Elton Mayo:
"We do not lack an able administrative elite but the elite of the several civilized powers
is at present insufficiently posted in the biological and social facts involved in social
organization and control."
"If at all critical posts in communal activity we had intelligent persons capable of
analyzing an individual or group attitude in terms of, first the degree of logical
misunderstanding manifest; second, the non-logic of social codes in action, and third,
the irrational exasperation symptomatic of conflict and baffled effort; if we had an elite
capable of such analysis, many of our difficulties would dwindle to vanishing point."
This is the idealism which if organized into political form would be nothing less than
Fascism. The big bourgeoisie of Germany created Hitlerism for precisely these ends.
Organic to bourgeois society is the concept that the masses must be administered. If
technical administration does not keep them quiet, then social administration must be
introduced. If social administration by private capitalists does not succeed in obtaining
the collaboration of the workers, then there must be organized social administration of
the masses by the state.
Every solution to the discontent of the workers can be tried by the bourgeoisie except
the one solution which would get at the roots of the discontent, namely, the

appropriation by the workers of all the knowledge, science and control which is
incorporated in industry.
The
Recourse
to
Mass
Psychiatry
The bourgeoisie is unable to surrender to the workers the human nature of industry.
They must therefore construct a theory that the psychological illness of the workers
constitutes the human nature of the workers. Compare with this Marx's conception of
human psychology as the "opened book of human capacities!" The gap between the
psychological conceptions of man as ill and of man as striving toward a complete
humanity is not only a theoretical one. It is firmly rooted in the class relations. Because
the workers can no longer adapt themselves to the existing, i.e., capitalist society,
bourgeois thought can only believe that the fault is with the workers and not with
existing society.
Unable to open the book of human capacities, the bourgeoisie seeks to console the
workers through the agency of a mediator. The class basis for this mediator was
analyzed by Marx one hundred years ago.
"Every self-alienation of man from himself and from nature appears in the relationship
by which he surrenders himself and nature to another man differentiated from him. Thus
religious self-alienation necessarily appears in the relationship of the layman to the
priest, or also, since it is here a question of the intellectual world, to a mediator. In the
practical actual world, self-alienation can only appear through the practical actual
relation to another man." ("Alienated Labor.")
The bourgeoisie thinks that by listening sympathetically to the personal troubles of the
workers, they will thereby give dignity to labor and personality to the workers. This is
the confessional of the personnel office, Mr. Anthony in the shop. It is the modern
version of the priestly confessional. Stemming from the attitude to the workers in the
shop, it is today running riot through all spheres of society, and particularly American
society, as is evidenced in the post-war movies.
The Catholic Church was developed to mediate between man and God, who according
to the Christian doctrine was only the human nature of man (Christ). In the same way,
today, an elite of psychiatrists is to be developed to mediate between the workers and
their human nature embodied in industry. The elite is to become man' s priestly nature.
But unlike the priests of the Catholic Church, today's mediators between the workers
and their human nature must exercise a total control over the workers precisely because
of the striving for totality and universality in the workers. If total control of the
productive process is not exercised by the workers, then the mediators must exercise
total control of all aspects of the workers' lives. If the social productive powers of the
workers are not enriched, then the knowledge by the administrators of the physiology,
psychology and sociology of the workers must be thoroughly organized. The solution
proposed by Mayo can arise only out of the contempt for the working class so organic to
the bourgeoisie and its hired prize-fighters. But for precisely this reason this contempt is
not to be dismissed lightly. When challenged, it passes very easily over into fear and
desperate counter-revolutionary measures. One year after the defeat of Hitler in Europe,
Mayo's book originally written in 1933, was reprinted by Harvard University. It is a
warning not only to the workers but also to the petty-bourgeoisie which continues to

bury its soul in individual psychiatry when the bourgeoisie is laying a base for mass
psychiatry.
The consultants to the bourgeoisie today offer the same solution to the class antagonism
as Hegel offered in his time to the Prussian state. What they are calling for are wiser
men, better administrators, men who have a consciousness of the new "psychological
reality of 1947." As Hegel, viewing the extreme opposition of classes demanded that a
universal class be adapted to the task of mediation (Philosophy of Right), so the
bourgeois consultants today seek to embody universal knowledge in the administrative
elite. In 1819, Hegel began only with the idealism of the intellectuals and their rear of
the masses. He had to end with the concept of the totalitarian state. There was no other
alternative. Any attempt to make the masses object rather than subject, any attempt to
take the initiative way from them at a time when their objective and subjective need is
to assume the complete initiative, can only end by stamping out all their initiative.
Fascist Germany has given us living proof that as soon as this occurs, barbarism for the
rest of the nation follows immediately.
But if this is the perspective today without the social revolution, it is also a guide to the
all-sided development of man which the proletarian revolution must introduce. The only
effective struggle against Fascism is the revolutionary struggle for universal man. The
Lutheran revolution destroyed the priest as mediator and permitted man to become his
own interpreter of human nature in God. The proletarian revolution must destroy every
barrier which mediates between the workers and the objectively unfolded wealth of their
human nature.
CHAPTER
VI
THE
WORKERS'
CRITIQUE
OF
POLITICS
The rise of Fascism and the impotence of political democracy as a weapon against it
have robbed the petty-bourgeoisie of the illusion that its arguments and ideas were the
locomotive of history. But the crisis of the petty-bourgeoisie is the crisis of politics and
here as always, the instinctive attitudes of the working class must be our guide. The
modern American worker is supremely indifferent to politics. Three hundred and sixtyfive days in the year, it matters little or nothing to him whether a Democrat or a
Republican holds office. And on the three hundred and sixty-sixth day, he usually cares
only if it is a presidential year. This lack of political interest has its roots in the
American development. The experience of the workers has been that Democratic or
Republican, whatever the differences or lack of difference in the platform, successful
candidates acted according to the needs of the American capitalist economy.
Because different political parties have made so little difference to the actual
development of the American economy, politics has been mainly a competition between
groups of capitalists, organized into political machines, to cut for themselves bigger
slices of the American pie. The pie was enormous and the politicians were begrudged
their cuts only occasionally. Particularly in the cities where the political machines ruled
during the invasion of immigrants from Europe, there was complete candor between the
machine and the voters as to the code governing elections. Politics was an exchange of
votes for the very real if inexpensive favors on the many problems that beset the
foreign-born worker in a confusing new environment. However with the integration of
the immigrant workers and the passing of the political machine, the machinery of
politics has been exposed in all its nakedness. The result has been that the American

workers are beginning to make their own profound critique of bourgeois politics as a
fraud and a deception making no difference to their actual life.
The
Illusory
Political
Community
In this, the American workers express with unerring instinct the same truth at which
Marx arrived by his thoughtful study of the French Revolution. Politics, Marx said, was
profoundly and essentially bourgeois. Its basis is the domination of one class over
another and its consolation is that it provides the individual who is actually alienated in
his material life with the illusion that he is participating in a social community. In their
striving for complete emancipation, men go through the stage of political emancipation
because it represents a progressive step over the domination of men by the opiate of
religion. Religion gives men the illusion of democracy only in the heavenly kingdom.
Political democracy at least brings the kingdom closer to earth.
But "political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one side, to the member of
bourgeois society, to the egoistic independent individual, on the other side, to the
citizen, to the moral person." The more man is alienated from his true humanity in the
process of production as a worker, the stronger must be the opiate that he is a social
individual in his political relationships as a citizen. Hence, the necessity for the Fascist
state. But "not until the real individual man is identical with the citizen and has become
a generic being in his empirical life, in his individual work, in his individual
relationships, not until man has recognized and organized his own capacities as social
capacities and consequently the social force is no longer divided by the political power,
not until then will human emancipation be achieved."
That is what Marx conceived as socialism--the actual appropriation by the workers in
their productive material life, of their human capacities. Politics and the state would
wither away, because it would no longer be necessary to maintain the illusory political
community.
The analysis which Marx made of politics applies not only to bourgeois politics but to
all attempts to substitute the political community for the actual community of
emancipated man in the labor process. Thus, what dominates the life of the United
States today is not the bourgeois parliament in Washington, which is at this moment
beginning to appear as little more than an investigations committee, but what has been
wisely called the "economic parliaments" of the trade union councils and conventions. It
is the trade unions which today form the political community for millions of workers
and to which therefore must be applied the Marxist criticism of politics.
The
Industrial
Organization
of
Labor
The American worker today has transferred his cynicism regarding bourgeois politics to
trade union politics. In the trade union hall and at trade union meetings, he sees different
caucuses vying for power and for the administration of the union. In creating the
industrial union movement the workers felt that they were creating an instrument for
their social emancipation. Now, however, the union appears only as an arena for
opposing political groupings. The worker wonders why the labor leaders whom he has
created should behave as they do. The answer to his question must be sought in the
actual development of the capitalist mode of production. Thereby, we cannot only
explain the labor bureaucracy to the workers but also to itself.

A labor union like the United Steel Workers of America embraces close to a million
workers and includes not only steel foundries but iron-ore mines of the Mesabi, the
aluminum rolling mills of Alcoa, Tennessee, the locomotive shops of Schenectady and
the can factories of San Francisco. The structure of such a union is an industrial
government with branches and divisions, not only parallelling those of the steel
monopolies but even rivalling those of the national government. There is a legal
department, a research and engineering department, a contract department, an
accounting department, and a legislative department. The trade union machinery
corresponds department for department, plant for plant, company for company, city for
city, state for state to the machinery of the bourgeoisie.
The overall operations of such a union are the means whereby unity and continuity of
production is maintained for different industrial units all the way from the mining of ore
to the finishing of steam shovels. The United Steel Workers Union has been aptly
termed U.S.A. The petty-bourgeoisie rants about the control which such giant unions
have over the country. The big bourgeoisie knows that without these unions, it would be
virtually impossible for it to keep production going for more than a few days. Modern
society has reached the point where what is decisive is not the interlocking of financial
wealth or directorates but the interlocking of production. For this the union or some
kind of organization of labor is absolutely essential.
The union contract which is the constitution of this industrial government is the modus
operandi of the actual process of production. It contains the analysis, breakdown and
codification of the actual labor process of the millions of workers engaged in these
industries. The most important features of the union contract are not the wage rates nor
even the hours, but rather the unending rules and regulations regarding classifications of
work, conditions of labor, piece-rates, etc.
These classifications and rulings are the classifications and rulings of the alienated,
fragmented activity of the workers. They are the modern analogue of the old guild
restrictions of feudal society. But whereas the guild restrictions were a barrier to the
division of labor necessary to unlock the mysteries of production, today's codifications
of alienated labor are a barrier to the reintegration and synthesis necessary to
revolutionize the process of production. The revolutionary potentialities inherent in the
productive forces, both material and human, have reached the point where the
codification of the alienated labor process is a restriction on the economic necessities
and actual yearnings of the workers for universality and reintegration.
The union contract governs the life of the worker from morning to night, during every
minute of his working hours. The petty-bourgeois concept of the "social contract" was
the myth of isolated individuals in which each counted only as one in forming the
political community. The union contract is the actual reality of the fragmented
individual in the labor process. The workers defend the union contract as a weapon
against the bourgeoisie given the present relations of production. Not to defend the
contract would intensify their exploitation because it would enable the bourgeoisie to
force upon them a quantitative increase in alienated labor of the same quality. Moreover,
and even more important, is the fact that the workers have won the contract through
class warfare and see it as a symbol of victories won against the bourgeoisie. At the
same time, instinctively, the workers feel that the classifications only codify their
alienation. The workers fight hard for better contracts, they demand that the labor

leaders get better contracts for them. But when the contract is won, the workers sense
immediately that it represents a new shackle on them and an added responsibility for
continuous production. Hence, they snort at the contract and console themselves that
their struggle at least brought them a raise. It is a demonstration of the fact that the
reforms of better contracts remain within the framework of alienated labor and only
decrease its quantity.
The
Dilemma
of
the
Labor
Leadership
The labor leader of today has no special privileges or skills to protect as did the
organized workers of the old craft unions. More often than not, he has but recently come
from the bench, and in actual salary and standard of living does not exceed the workers
whom he represents. What corrupts the labor leadership is its role in the process of
production itself. The labor leadership is the administrator of the union contract.
Because the labor bureaucracy represents the divisions of labor within the capitalist
mode of production, its representation of the ranks must turn into an administration of
the ranks. The labor bureaucracy is the agent of the workers but it is the agent of the
alienated, i.e. semi-skilled workers. It is not, like the old Social-Democracy, an agent of
the capitalists but it is a representative of the capitalist mode of production. The labor
bureaucrat sits down with the capitalists and works out time-studies and classifications,
not because he is collaborating with them as individuals but because they both represent
the capitalist mode of production. That is why there is practically no difference between
the time-study provisions of the union, the company and the labor relations board. And
that is why, also, every committee man has at some time or other had misgivings about
sending an aggrieved worker back to his bench on the basis of such provisions.
The wildcat strikes which have dotted the American landscape since the middle of the
war are an expression of the hostility of groups of workers in isolated departments here
and there against the alienated character of their labor. Once begun, they become the
signal for other workers in other departments to revolt against the general alienation.
The sharp words of a foreman, 90 heat, a new division of labor, any one of these can
bring about a wildcat strike which erupts in the midst of the interlocking "socialized
production" between the various industrial plants. It is precisely for this reason that the
labor bureaucracy is so hostile to the wildcat strikes. The union bureaucracy represents
the unification and stabilization of alienated labor. On the other hand, the wildcat strikes
represent a revolt against alienated labor. The union bureaucracy pledges union
responsibility in exchange for union security, but it cannot deliver because union
responsibility depends on the ranks, and the ranks do not regard the stabilization of the
status quo in production as their mission. The bureaucracy prefers well-organized
national strikes to wildcats. Production is paralyzed as a whole, there is no disruption of
the interlocking of production, and with everything shut down, there is no necessity for
the mass picket lines which can erupt into conflicts with the state.
But the trade unions are not merely a structuralization of the existing mode of
production. They are also the fruit of the expanding unity of the workers, a unity
expanding along with the cooperative form of the labor process and exploding in the
strikes which organize the union in opposition to the bourgeoisie. In this sense, they are
schools of communism for the workers and have an intrinsically political character
whether or not they take political expression on the parliamentary arena. It is this aspect
of the trade union movement, the fact that they threaten a political movement of the

working class against the bourgeoisie, which the capitalists fear most and which they
are always seeking to undermine. Similarly it is this aspect of the trade unions which the
workers are most prepared to defend against any attempts of the bourgeois state to
destroy their organized strength.
In the same way, the labor leadership is not only the representative of the bourgeois
mode of production but also the militant leadership thrown up by the mass movement.
In this sense, the labor leadership represents the social movement of the masses against
their alienated labor, represents their creative unity in action, and their need to
appropriate the instruments of production in the all-sided way which, as we have shown,
is only possible with a completely new mode of production.
The trade union leadership therefore has a dual character. It is the administrator for the
capitalist mode of production but it maintains its hold on the masses only through the
social, political and economic gains which it represents to the masses as a result of past
struggles and as a promise of the future.
The Roman Emperors could not develop a mode of production which would give
employment to the proletariat who had known free labor. They had therefore to give
them bread and circuses and a political empire in which they could serve as overlords.
In the modern world the New Deal bestowed respectability on the system of public
works. The union bureaucrats try to avoid this pitfall. But they cannot satisfy the much
more deeply rooted yearnings of the modern proletariat for a mode of production in
which it can freely exercise its natural and acquired powers. They must therefore
attempt by all forms of social programs, e.g., the health, educational and recreational
programs of the ILGWU, the political programs of the CIO-PAC, the program for
"wage increases without price increases" of Reuther, the welfare funds of Lewis, to
justify their leadership of the workers. All the secondary aspects of the misery of the
proletariat, the labor leadership can tackle, all material needs it can seek to satisfy, but
the basic human need in the proletariat to appropriate the social productive powers in
the labor process itself, that the trade union leadership cannot tackle so long as it
functions as an integral part of the trade union machinery built on the existing mode of
production.
We have treated above the misconception of class society that the real universality of
men is not to be found in the labor process but in pursuits outside of it, in religion, art,
politics, literature, etc.
Inherent in the wage labor on which capitalist production is built is the ideology that
productive activity is merely a means to existence rather than the first necessity of
human existence. Productive activity, in other words, is considered in bourgeois society
to be labor, a means to satisfaction of needs and not a human need. The shortening of
the working day, a fundamental premise for the new socialist relations of production,
has been regarded as a means whereby the worker could have more hours to himself
outside of production rather than as a means whereby his productive hours could
become more human. Yet productive activity is the distinguishing characteristic of the
human species, and to unleash such productive activity by developing the all-sided
individual in the process of production is the objective of the socialist revolution.

The labor bureaucracy cannot tackle the essential question of the in-human activity of
man in the labor process, because to do that it would have to represent a more human
and therefore more productive mode of labor. In other words, it would have to pose the
social revolution to the workers, not only as ridding society of the capitalist exploiters,
but also as the solution of all concrete day-to-day problems arising from their life in the
factory in a revolutionary manner. Unless it does this, it must remain confined within
the bourgeois ideology of wealth and poverty in material terms.
The
Yearning
for
Social
Change
The trade union leadership of today degenerates into rival political machines like the
capitalist parties of yesterday because the necessary revolutionary development of
production which is now on the order of the day, rests not with it but with the objective
needs of the economy rooted in the workers at the bench. Except for a political caucus
which represents the movement of the workers toward a revolutionary solution for their
life in the factory, each new leadership only administers the alien mode of production as
did its predecessors, since each is the prisoner of this framework.
But there is one big difference between the capitalist politicians and the labor
politicians. The workers to whom the trade union politicians must appeal are not the
immigrants and dispersed artisans, mechanics and laborers of the 19th and early 20th
centuries. Rather they are highly concentrated, organized, disciplined by production,
and have a deep yearning for social change. Therefore, to capture the allegiance and
votes not only of the workers in his own industry but throughout the nation, and also to
woo the petty-bourgeoisie, a labor politician like Reuther must put forward a
comprehensive program for a New Deal as did the bourgeois politician Roosevelt in an
earlier period. Reuther is perfectly aware that the whole movement of industry is in the
direction of more extreme centralization of capital and socialization of labor. He is
playing his political cards with this in mind. But as Marx pointed out in his analysis of
Napoleon III, what appears in one period as tragedy, must appear in its imitation as
farce. The American workers have gotten over the shock of the 1929 depression and the
confused restlessness which could be appeased by Roosevelt's New Deal. Reuther may
stop half-way. The American workers will not. Any movement which would place
Reuther or one of the national labor figures at the head of the nation would be the result
of such a self-mobilization of the nation's workers and such an attempt to rid themselves
of the whole alienation of capitalist production that the labor bureaucracy would either
be forced into a counter-revolutionary dictatorship against them or such a fumbling and
confusion as would make the impotence of Attlee in Britain look like superb
statesmanship.
Into
the
Realm
of
Freedom
So sharp is the contradiction within the trade union activist between his role as
representative of the social movement of the proletariat and his duties as representative
of the alien mode of production, that it is not uncommon for the trade union militants
who helped form the CIO in 1936-37 to be returning to their benches or to shop
stewardships, relinquishing their posts to ex-AFofL leaders, professional labor leaders,
lawyers, etc. They are some of the material from which the revolutionary leadership of
the next period will come. The theoretical answer to their dilemma, as it is the answer to
the dilemma of all layers of society, is in the understanding of the social movement
which brought them to leadership in the mass strikes of 1936-37.

Every major struggle by the workers is a struggle to leap from the realm of necessity
into the realm of freedom. When the struggle is over, and the gains have been
crystallized in higher wages, shorter hours and union security, it appears that the essence
of the movement was not the creative energies of the masses bursting the seams of
capitalist society but rather the concrete ends achieved. The CIO, however, coming in a
period when, particularly in the United States, an industrial revolution was taking place,
when the whole world was agitated by the barbarisms of capitalism and when new deals
and new social orders were part of the mental environment of every worker, still retains
its revolutionary content in the memories of the workers who participated in its
formation. Their hostility to the labor bureaucracy is an expression of their
determination not to allow the CIO to become a routine appendage to the capitalist
mode of production. As the bourgeois analyst, Peter Drucker, has pointed out, it is this
revolutionary content to their unions which makes the workers today press upon their
leaders to fight it out rather than to negotiate. In essence, the CIO was a social crusade,
an attempt on the part of the American workers to rise to their historic destiny and
reconstruct society on new beginnings.
Since World War II new millions have joined this crusade and acquired an organic
awareness of the inter-relatedness of production between one department and another,
from coal mine to assembly line; between town and country, from continent to
continent. For the same reason that they derive a genuine satisfaction from the intricate
functioning of this productive mechanism, they are today, more than ever before,
seriously disturbed by the constant disruptions and threats of disruptions inseparable
from its capitalist administration.
The American bourgeoisie is organically incapable of assuring any perspective of
economic and social stability and progress on the one-world scale axiomatic in our time.
Already its political front, which had seemed so imposing, is beginning to show signs of
great strain. Today, more and more workers say, with that simple directness which
requires no proof:
"Sure, we could do it better." In these words, there is contained the workers' recognition
of the enormous scope of their natural and acquired powers, and the distorted and
wasteful abuse of these powers within the existing society. In these words is contained
also the overwhelming anger of the workers against the capitalist barriers stifling their
energies and hence victimizing the whole world. Never has society so needed the direct
intervention of the workers. Never have the workers been so ready to come to grips with
the fundamental problems of society. The destinies of the two are indissolubly united.
When the workers take their fate into their own hands, when they seize the power and
begin their reconstruction of society, all of mankind will leap from the realm of
necessity
into
the
realm
of
freedom.
Ria Stone
Text from www.prole.info, slightly edited by libcom.org for accuracy

1. National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People

2. "What to Do About Strikes" by Peter Drucker, Colliers, January 1, 1947.

3. "Alienated Labor" from the 1844 Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of

Marx, translated into English and published by the Johnson-Forest tendency,
1947.

4. Summarized from an article entitled "Machines Without Men" by E. W.

Leaver and J. J. Brown, Fortune, November 1946

5. "Private property and Communism" from the 1844 Economic-Philosophical

Manuscripts of Marx, op. cit.

6. "The Power Age" by Walter N.Polakov, Convici-Friede Publishers, New York,

1933. Whos Who in America lists Polakov as president of Walter N. Polakov,
Inc., Industrial Consultants. He has been an engineer for the Supreme Economic
Council in the U. S. S. R. and for the Tennesse Valley Authority.

7. The reference to hegel is in Polakov's text.

8. "Private property and Communism" op. cit.

9. There exists within the United States today a stratum of small businessmen
who still remember with pride the years of wage-earning apprenticeship by
which they prepared themselves for setting up their own enterprises. With
comparatively little capital investment in machinery to discipline the workers,
these employers are dependent for their profits almost entirely upon the
"cooperation" and willingness to work of their "helpers." The latter, however,
have made their own appraisal of the obsolescence of small-scale production by
rejecting the handicraft concept of skill or the substitution of tedious hand work
for precision machinery. The demoralized productivity of the new generation of
workers has created an ominous contradiction in these small capitalists. On the
one hand, they constantly recall the energy and initiative by which they got to
their present position and fervently wish that the workers of today could develop
from within themselves comparable incentives to hard work and increase of
skills in the old manner. As they express it, "the workers today have no
ambition." On the other hand, sensing that new methods of production and the
existing society do not stimulate such "ambition," and driven by the capitalist
necessity to expand surplus-value, they look in desperation toward the panacea
of a totalitarian state which will destroy the unions and force the workers to
produce. Within this stratum today, there are significant numbers who are aware
that the whip-hand of Fascism would not spare them. These would rejoice to see
the workers establish a new social order based on the release of human
productive forces. But while uncomfortably conscious that the present critical
situation cannot long endure, they remain skeptical that the working class has
the strength and determination necessary to revolutionize society. To stifle in this
stratum its deeply-rooted preference for productivity based upon self-discipline
and self-development, a Fascist movement would have to resort to monstrous
lies, deceptions and force on a scale hitherto unknown.