<nettime> CFP Workers, Despite Themselves

[Stevphen Shukaitis <stevphen@autonomedia.org>]

Call for papers for an ephemera issue on:
Workers, Despite Themselves
Issue Editors: Stevphen Shukaitis and Abe Walker

Deadline for submissions: November 30th, 2012.

Workers’ inquiry is an approach to and practice of knowledge production 
that seeks to understand the changing composition of labor and its 
potential for revolutionary social transformation. It is the practice of 
turning the tools of the social sciences into weapons of class struggle. 
Workers’ inquiry seeks to map the continuing imposition of the class 
relation, not as a disinterested investigation, but rather to deepen and 
intensify social and political antagonisms.
The autonomist political theorist Mario Tronti argues that weapons for 
working class revolt have always been taken from the bosses’ arsenal 
(1966: 18). But, has not it often been suggested, to use feminist writer 
Audre Lorde’s phrasing (1984), that it is not possible to take apart the 
master’s house with the master’s tools? While not forgetting Lorde’s 
question, it is clear that Tronti said this with good reason, for he was 
writing from a context where this is precisely what was taking place. 
Italian autonomous politics greatly benefited from borrowing from 
sociology and industrial relations – and by using these tools proceeded 
to build massive cycles of struggle transforming the grounds of politics 
(Wright, 2003; Berardi, 2009).
Of these adaptations the most important for autonomist politics and 
class composition analysis is workers’ inquiry. Workers’ inquiry 
developed in a context marked by rapid industrialization, mass 
migration, and the use industrial sociology to discipline the working 
class. Workers’ inquiry was formulated within autonomist movements as a 
sort of parallel sociology, one based on a radical re-reading of Marx 
(and Weber) against the politics of the communist party and the unions 
(Farris, 2011). While the practitioners of workers’ inquiry were often 
professionally-trained academics – especially sociologists – its 
proponents argued their research differs in important ways from 
‘engaged’ social science, and all varieties of industrial sociology, 
even if it there are similarities. If bourgeois sociology sought to 
smooth over conflicts, and ‘critical’ sociology to expose these same 
conflicts, workers’ inquiry takes the contradictions of the labor 
process as a starting point and seeks to draw out these antagonisms into 
the formation of new radical subjectivities.
This is not to say that workers’ inquiry is an unproblematic endeavor. 
We remain skeptical that the weapons of managerial control can be 
cleanly re-appropriated without reproducing the very social world they 
were designed to take apart. For as Steve Wright argues, “the uncritical 
use of such tools has frequently produced a register of subjective 
perceptions which do no more than mirror the surface of capitalist 
social relations” (2003: 24). As the legacy of analytical Marxism 
reveals, imitation is never far removed from flattery, and at its worst 
moments, workers’ inquiry risks becoming its object of critique. To be 
fair there are disagreements among the proponents of workers’ inquiry 
over the limitations of drawing from the social sciences. But to 
continue the metaphor, like any potentially dangerous ‘weapon’, 
sociological techniques must be carefully examined, and when necessary, 
disabled.
Today we find ourselves at a moment when co-research, participatory 
action research, and other heterodox methods have been adopted by the 
academic mainstream, while managerial styles like TQM carry a faint echo 
of workers’ inquiry. In the contemporary firm workers are already 
engaged in self-monitoring, peer interviews, and the creation of 
quasi-autonomous ‘research’ units, all sanctioned by management 
(Boltankski and Chiapello, 2005). Workers’ inquiry is now part of the 
accepted social science repertoire: its techniques no longer seem 
dangerous, but familiar, at least at the methodological level. The 
bosses’ arsenal now includes weapons mimicking the style, if not the 
substance, of workers’ inquiry. And as George Steinmetz (2005) has 
suggested, while blatantly positivistic research styles have fallen out 
of favor, this obscures the ‘positivist unconscious’ that continues to 
interpellate even apparently anti-positivist methodologies.
The pioneers of workers’ inquiry argued researchers must work 
through/against the ambivalent relations of (social) science; now, there 
may be no other option. Wherever there are movements organizing and 
addressing the horrors of capitalist exploitation and oppression, the 
specter of recuperation is never far behind. The point is not to deny 
these risks, but to the degree such dynamics confront all social 
movements achieving any measure of success. It is by working against and 
through them that recomposing radical politics becomes possible 
(Shukaitis, 2009). Today workers’ inquiry remains, as Raniero Panzieri 
claimed (2006 [1959]), a permanent reference point for autonomist 
politics, one that informs continuing inquiries into class composition. 
With this issue we seek to rethink workers’ inquiry as a practice and 
perspective, and through that to understand and catalyze emergent 
moments of political composition.

Contributors
We invite papers that update the practices of workers’ inquiry for the 
present moment of class de-/recomposition. Can we develop, taking up 
Matteo Pasquinelli’s suggestion (2008: 138), a form of workers’ inquiry 
applied to cognitive and biopolitical production? The very possibility 
of a *workers* inquiry begs reconsideration when official unemployment 
figures drift toward 50% among sectors of the industrial working class.
This issue picks up themes that developed in previous issues of ephemera 
inquiring into affective and immaterial labor (2007), digital labor 
(2010), militant research (2005), and the politics of the multitude 
(2004). We encourage submissions that draw upon this previous work, 
particularly on the politics of social reproduction.
Recently, workers’ inquiry has proven its versatility through new 
applications and reconfigurations. Groups like Colectivo Situaciones 
(2011) and have used the practice of workers’ inquiry to analyze popular 
uprisings. Scholars have drawn from class composition analysis to 
explore areas such as cognitive labor (Brophy, 2011; Peters & Bulut, 
2011), citizenship and migration (Papadopoulos et al, 2008; Barchiesi, 
2011), and finance (Marazzi, 2008; Mezzadra and Fumagalli, 2010). 
Militant research collectives such as Kolinko (2002), Team Colors 
(2010), and the Precarious Workers Brigade (2011) have employed workers’ 
inquiry to intervene composition of social movements and labor politics.
We are particularly interested in research that expands and/or 
deconstructs the project of workers’ inquiry, or that transposes 
workers’ inquiry onto unconventional terrain such as archival research 
and cultural studies. Additionally, we encourage contributors to include 
a substantial reflection on method, possibly addressing some of the 
tensions outlined above and engaging with recent debates about method 
and measure.
Deadline for submissions: November 30th, 2012.

Please send your submissions to the editors. All contributions should 
follow ephemera guidelines – see 
http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/submit.htm. In addition to full 
papers, we also invite notes, reviews, and other kinds and media forms 
of contributions – please get in touch to discuss how you would like to 
contribute. We highly encourage authors to send us abstracts (of 500 
words) outlining their plans. The ephemera conference in May 2013 will 
focus on a related theme, with contributors for this issue invited to 
present their work.
Contacts:
Stevphen Shukaitis: stevphen@autonomedia.org
Abe Walker: awalker@qc.cuny.edu
http://www.ephemeraweb.org/

We're also interested in putting together a panel on this theme for the 
Historical Materialism conference in London in November (information 
here: 
http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/conferences/annual9/call-for-papers), 
particularly with people who plan to submit a piece for this issue. If 
you are interested in this please contact Stevphen by April 20th.

References
Barchiesi, F. (2011) Precarious liberation: workers, the state, and 
contested social citizenship in postapartheid South Africa. Albany: SUNY 
Press.
Berardi, F. (2009) Precarious rhapsody: semiocapitalism and the 
pathologies of the post-alpha generation. London: Minor Compositions.
Boltanski, L. and E. Chiapello (2005) The new spirit of capitalism. 
London: Verso.
Brophy, E. (2011) “Language put to work: cognitive capitalism, call 
center labor, and workers inquiry,” Journal of Communication Inquiry. 
Volume 35 Number 4: 410-416.
Colectivo Situaciones (2011) 19&20: notes on a new social protagonism. 
Brooklyn / Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions.
Farris, S. (2011) “Workerism’s inimical incursions: on Mario Tronti’s 
Weberianism,” Historical Materialism Volume 19 Number 3: 29-62.
Kolinko (2002) Hotlines. Berlin: Kolinko. Available at 
www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/kolinko/lebuk/e_lebuk.htm
Lorde, A. (1984) “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s 
house,” Sister outsider: essays and speeches. Berkeley: The Crossing 
Press: 110-114.
Marazzi, C. (2008) Capital & language: from new economy to war economy. 
New York: Semiotexte.
Mezzadra, S. and A. Fumagalli (Eds.) (2010) Crisis in the global 
economy: financial markets, social struggles, and new political 
scenarios. Los Angeles: Semiotexte.
Panzieri, R. (2006 [1959]) “Socialist uses of workers’ inquiry.” 
Available at http://www.generation-online.org/t/tpanzieri.htm.
Papadopoulos, D., N. Stephenson, and V. Tsianos (2008) Escape routes: 
control and subversion in the 21st century. London: Pluto Press.
Pasquinelli, M. (2008) Animal spirits: a bestiary of the commons. 
Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.
Peters, M. & E. Bulut, Eds. (2011) Cognitive capitalism, education and 
digital labor. New York: Peter Lang.
Precarious Workers Brigade (2011) Surviving internships: a counter guide 
to free labor in the arts. London: Hato Press.
Shukaitis, S. (2009) Imaginal machines: autonomy & self-organization in 
the revolutions of everyday life. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.
Steinmetz, G. (2005) “The genealogy of a positivist haunting: comparing 
pre-war and post-war U.S. sociology” boundary 2 Volume 32 Number 2: 109-135
Team Colors (Eds.) (2010) Uses of a whirlwind: movement, movements, and 
contemporary radical currents in the United States. Oakland: AK Press.
Tronti, M. (1966) Operai e capitale. Torino: Einaud.
Wright, S. (2003) Storming heaven: class composition and struggle in 
Italian autonomist marxism. London: Pluto Press.

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