Offering two public talks on The American Worker pamphlet, workers' inquiry, and the contemporary labor movement in the US this November to be held in London and Dublin.
11/9 as part of the Workers' Inquiry stream
How Can Workers’ Inquiry Aid Organizing?
Saturday, November 9th from 16:30 - 18:15
SOAS: Brunei Gallery, Room B203
Beginning with the 1947 publication of The American Worker pamphlet a new form of “proletarian literature”—first-person narratives and workers’ inquiries—emerged from the automotive factories and corners of Marxian movements in the United States. First-person narratives and workers’ inquiries are strategic interventions to grasp power in the workplace, informal work groups and divisions within the class, forms of mutual aid and working-class self-activity, and can aid emerging organizing efforts. This talk will discuss how the pamphlet aided in the circulation of struggles while furthering workers’ own self-understanding and development of class consciousness, contextualize the pamphlet within the American labor movement and changing regimes of work, and argue that first-person narratives of work and workers’ inquiries offer political possibilities today. The ability of workers to govern their own unions, workplaces and communities can only be expressed with a political project that makes such governing possible. At present, at least in the United States, this project begins with inquiry and a return to The American Worker.
With the Editors of Notes from Below and Mostafa Henaway speaking about "Workers’ inquiry, migration and Amazon"
11/14 at University College Dublin:
Searching for the American Worker
Thursday, November 14th Time 15:30-16:30
Newman G109 at University College Dublin
Beginning with the 1947 publication of The American Worker pamphlet a new form of “proletarian literature” emerged from the automotive factories and corners of the Left in the United States. The pamphlet begins by providing intimate, all-encompassing, and actual details about the functioning, power relationships, and autonomous nature of workers’ struggles in an auto factory—from the workers’ perspective. Then this is followed by an extrapolation of the first part, bounded by Marxian concepts and historical-philosophical considerations. Within a few years of its initial publication, the pamphlet’s two parts circulated through the French and Italian workers’ movements and have had a noteworthy reception internationally ever since. The American Worker speaks to the politics of authorship and representation, complexities of identity and power, and it is still speaking, seventy-five years after initially appearing, to what workers are thinking and doing, then as well as now.
In this talk author, labor educator, and union organizer Dr. Kevin Van Meter will explore the spatial politics of the pamphlets production and distribution, discuss how the pamphlet aided in the circulation of struggles while furthering workers’ own self-understanding and development of class consciousness, contextualize the pamphlet within the American labor movement and changing regimes of work, and argue that first-person narratives of work and workers’ inquiries still offer an innovative form of collaborative knowledge production today.
Hosted by UCD School of Geography
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