Customer Reviews

Workers Against Work: Labor in Paris and Barcelona during the Popular Fronts

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David Weir has something of a throwaway line in his book "Anarchy & Culture" about (1997:34) about anarchism functioning as a proxy Protestant reformation in Spain. I always that was quite witty, although perhaps a bit too so, as it makes thing a bit too neat and tidy. While I won't say this back completely backs such up, it does put a lot of weight behind that argument, looking at the long term forms of historical growth and development that lead to radically different outcomes during the popular front era of the 1930s and the associated radical politics of that name. That would be, namely, the widespread and much ballyhooed anarcho-syndicalism of Spain, and the more moderate but still pretty militant organizing of the popular front in France. What this book does that is particularly interesting is to look at the different ways the twin functions of trying to further working class demands for less work and more pay come (work refusal and resistance) come into conflict with the productivist ideologies and goals shared across different spectrums of the left, particularly as these conflicting goals work against each other when a leftist government is in power. You might call them the goals of struggle versus the goals of governing, or constituent versus constituted demands. In other words, people are still arguing for less work and more money, and now the leftist government is saying 'onward comrade, work harder for the revolution' and such things. While I suppose I had always sort of known about left productivism, it never really struck me how much that would be the case, or how you could even have an anarcho-syndicalist union making the case for rationalized, modernist production, with basically Taylorized work patterns (but on the grounds this was good for the worker rather than for purely profit making motives). That doesn't necessarily mean that the radical politics and organizing of the period are not still quite striking or useful to learn from, but just that there's a lot more ambivalence in how their functioning that one often gets in histories of the time, particularly those written some a sympathetic view. So definitely a good book to read for giving a more nuanced reading of the period (quite amusing to find out about the connection between the rise of the travel and tourism industry in France and it being fostered by the Communist Party).