Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow:
Neither Crisis Nor Stasis
Helmut Gruber
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547900010814 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Polytechnic University, New York
Linking the fate of labor and working-class history to the temporal fortunes
of socialist parties or the collapse of the communist system seems to reduce
history to a very meager function. It suggests that labor has somehow lost
importance or interest as a historical subject because the political parties
and movements which claimed to speak in its name have experienced drastic reversals or other profound changes. Apparently historians have periodically and repeatedly had to confront such narrow present-mindedness.
Katznelson dwells on this sense of loss which he sees reflected in how "far
more rapidly" the "agenda defended by Hobsbawm and Hill. . . has taken
on something of the quaint feel of antiquarianism."
This kind of thinking totally overlooks the fact that labor history did
not depend on or draw its inspiration and motivation from the American
civil rights or the anti-Vietnam war movements, the fluctuations of the
Cold War, or such labor struggles as those of Solidarnosc. Katznelson is
right in speaking of the committed historians who created the Study Group
on European Labor and Working-Class History (predecessor of ILWCH).
But he conflates two quite different types of commitment, as Eric
Hobsbawm makes very clear in his article "The New Threat to History"
(New York Review of Books [December 16, 1993, 21]): commitment as an
historian and political commitment and the moral responsibility of the
historian as an individual.
Katznelson cites and agrees with William Sewell that labor history has
lost its self-confident intellectual leadership and sense of political directionality and purpose. Who ever made such claims? To experience their
loss the two claim too much for historians of labor, most of whom had no
such grandiose aspirations but were intent on establishing labor's place in
history. I simply cannot understand and find vexing the desire of some
colleagues to always be "on the cutting edge," to rummage in the magic
bag of theory mongers for yet a new perspective long before those in
current usage have been well exploited in empirical scholarship. It is ironic
that it is primarily American scholar-consumers of theories originating in
France and Germany who demand frequent 180-degree lurches in everyone's work to conform to the newest repository of truth. Elsewhere such a
slavish devotion to fashion is considered silly. Michelle Perrot, one of the
finest historians of my generation, has readily admitted having been profoundly influenced by Foucault's notion of the repressive and punishing
nature of institutions. But this in no way made her a Foucauldian.
International Labor and Working-Class History
No. 46, Fall 1994, pp. 45-50
© 1994 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547900010814 Published online by Cambridge University Press
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1LWCH, 46, Fall 1994
These irrepressible searchers for a more perfect theory that will finally
make empirical work comprehensible—with seismographs tuned not to the
archives but to the latest developments in contemporary politics—use the
most recent profound changes on the political Left to proclaim that we
must now find some new leap into the void lest labor history lose its
"purchase and political purpose." (Aside: Does one have to be C. P. Snow
to hear these words as an invitation to the "corridors of power"?) Some of
us, who are still engaged in projects for which the old armory of theory
seemed quite sufficient, might well argue that the contemporary political
crisis of the Left creates an excellent scholarly climate of distance from
which to continue our ongoing work.
Katznelson continually refers to a crisis in labor history, "a field facing
problems of self-definition, which needs revival," to be attained by paying
more attention to political theory and the ties between the state and civil
society. But is this crisis reflected in the pages of this journal during the
past ten years? I would argue that a review of the controversies and themes
recorded there would reveal the opposite. Thus, with the aid of Eley and
Nield, well known for never letting sleeping dogs lie, Katznelson conjures
up the malady for which he has the tailor-made remedy.
There seems to be a contradiction in Katznelson's insistence that either Marxism or postmodernism leads to theoretical and historiographical
dead ends, that one cannot really chose between them or try to find a
means of bridging the duality, and that the tension that separates them
prevents their being used creatively by practitioners, who pick from the
theoretical positions selectively and creatively as the hypothesis of their
inquiry allows and their discovered data dictates. In the actual work of
historians, one loses sight very quickly of such a search for theoretical
clarity and of the reasons behind the choices that are made. How labor
historians have failed to make their craft important beyond its normal
professional place is still not patently clear.
Suddenly one understands, as the cat comes out of the bag: Skewered
on the horns of a theoretical dilemma, snacking from a smorgasbord of
forbidden choices, labor historians have been in "continuing flight from
institutional-political analysis". Both Marxist and social and cultural historians of labor have obscured and mystified the specificity of states, which
cannot be reduced to being one among many sources of social power (an
iron law of "Gestalt politics"). One might oppose such a grandiose valuation of the mythic state by suggesting that political scientists and historians,
who have heeded the siren call to forget all social and cultural trivia and get
back to the "basics," were principally responsible for making worker and
working class hollow terms signifying integers and structures useful in policy crystal-ball gazing or as constructs in the striving for the current "best"
theory. One is hard put to demonstrate how "institutional-political analysis" offers much insight into the reality that class is gendered—a reality
that pervades every aspect of society. It is the essence and meaning of
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
47
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547900010814 Published online by Cambridge University Press
worker and working class that have been obscured and mystified by those
who now summon us once more to reorient our scholarship to the pulsations of the indivisible state.
One can readily agree with Eley's and Nield's regret that labor history
has largely neglected the bourgeois political dimension without agreeing
with Katznelson's conflating of the bourgeoisie with liberalism or liberal
regimes or new progressive social tendencies. In retrospect it is remarkable
how historians of the working class have kept the bourgeoisie within inflexible boundaries that allowed for struggle but nothing else. But it was not
until social historians began to investigate both the nature of such struggle
with greater precision and the "thick" culture that underlay both social
classes that doubts began to appear among labor historians about a history
of workers in isolation from other social classes. It was, of course, customary in the literature to bring the bourgeoisie in, but only in a demonic
sense: as exploiters, manipulators of the state machinery, and sources of
false consciousness. Such visions of the other often have gone hand in hand
with a heroization of workers themselves: a class, a type, a species almost,
uniquely endowed as harbingers and executants of the ultimate transformation of history, ushering in a "perfect" progressive world. Such Marxist
teleology in which the worker is a pure and moral being has foreclosed a
very necessary (re)consideration of what a "bourgeois" was/is. And, s/he is
certainly neither a "liberal and reformer" nor a demonic other.
One important new pursuit of labor history must be of this bourgeois
whose relationship to workers on the plane of state control, electoral politics, workplace decision-making, gender relations, lifestyles, and the languages of self-presentation and association cannot be contained within
class struggle. It is the failure of working-class and bourgeois, especially
petty bourgeois, institutions and leaders to recognize common interests in
addition to apparent differences that has repeatedly allowed historical conditions to arise that were punishing to both social classes. I am suggesting
that the abandonment of Marxist teleology (the classless society) by virtually all who were its former subscribers or sympathizers must bring in its
wake a thoroughgoing reexamination and revaluation of the dialectic as a
method of explaining change.
I am convinced that the concept "class struggle" has already suffered
mortal wounds in much of the important social and cultural historical
scholarship of the past three decades (long before the Berlin wall was
toppled or the Soviet Union collapsed). Even more telling in my view have
been gender studies, or labor histories that incorporate them, in demonstrating that class and class struggle without the proverbial half of humanity
have lost their power of explanation. In the light of this painfully-arrived-at
reality (as of this writing, male rearguard action is still quite strong though
perhaps less blatant), we must rethink the meanings of worker, bourgeois,
and other types that we formally identified solely or largely as classes. Such
a quest may seem daunting to those who haunt archives and repositories
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547900010814 Published online by Cambridge University Press
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ILWCH, 46, Fall 1994
for the most fugitive kinds of data, while hoping for the means of simplifying research. I can offer no solace, because history per se has grown over
the generations by the incorporation of new perspectives, subject matters,
and styles. And it seems most unlikely that any one new theory based on
destruction/deconstruction, the explorations of language, or the resurrection of the ghosts of Condorcet, Locke, J. S. Mill, and even J. M. Keynes
and John Dewey will provide short cuts or the perfect explanatory synthesis.
Katznelson chides the adherents of Marxist and feminist theory
(though virtually any other may be added) for rejecting liberal political
theory or avoiding its favorite themes and he attempts to reassure us that
liberalism has always stood for equality and tolerance. There is something
quaintly old-fashioned about his defense: Liberalism is somehow an
ethereal phenomenon, a spirit that alights now here and then there but
always with good intentions. And this is presented to labor historians with
the aim of proposing "a lurch away from labor history's other preoccupations." It should not have to be mentioned in this context that in the long,
complex, and bloody struggle of workers everywhere to establish trade
unions the protective liberal angel bearing equality and toleration, quite
rightly, was not expected by those engaged in the struggles. (Examples
when offered cling to the Anglo-American experience. What about the
workers of Eastern Europe, France, Germany, Italy, Latin America, etc.?)
The liberalism offered up fails to emerge in some concrete form.
Katznelson talks of "primary institutions of liberal political orders." Are
these parties, voluntary associations, manufacturers' associations, gentlemen's political clubs? Who speaks for this liberal theory in various countries? What can one expect of it when, as Katznelson admits, "both in
practice and in doctrine liberalism has proved remarkably gelatinous"?
Who were the liberals in the Third French Republic: the Radical party,
Leon Bourgeois, or the conservative patrons of the Musee Social? And
were they the upholders of equality and toleration when the condition of
workers or the rights of women were concerned?
A subtext of Katznelson's essay is the need for labor historians to leave
aside their current orientations and to "lurch" toward politics, liberalism,
and the state. A less-than-generous view of my generation as putterers in
gardens far removed from where the decisions of any importance are made
underlies this hectoring. So buried are we presumed to be in our charming
little studies of worker pigeon-raising that we have become completely
unaware of the lurking presence of the leviathan. As David Montgomery
and others have attempted to make clear, the best labor history has always
established the relationship between its more restricted subject and the
larger political context (state context if you will, though I find the notion of
a state entity other than as a repository of powerful institutions indefensible).
I am taking the liberty of speaking about my own current work to
indicate that Katznelson has created a straw man in his retrospective
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547900010814 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
49
glances at labor history practice. I am currently studying the relationship
between socialism and women (mainly working class) in interwar France.
One aspect of this inquiry deals with the failure of women to gain the vote
until 1945, with suffrage being viewed as the cornerstone for the attainment of other rights by women: legal, familial, occupational, and so on. On
one end of the scale, this has required the study of party views, parliamentary debates and actions, and legal views going back to the great revolution; on the other, it has attempted to ascertain the attitudes, mental sets—
mentalities, if you will—of those who had the power to grant this important right to women. In between has been the record of women's own
efforts—feminists, workers, socialist party members—to hasten the march
toward equality. It is a full agenda on which the relationship between social
microcosms and the political macrocosm are kept in some useful tension. I
must admit, though, that the political realm is by far the least interesting,
because it is less revealing about why people believe what they do and act
as they do.
It is this kind of cultural and social exploration that Katznelson would
have us put aside, though it is far from done. One is forced to ask why. I do
not believe that he considers it useless or of negligible importance. Then
what? I think he is in the trap of historical fashion that has been an increasingly powerful force in the historical profession in the Western world since
the end of World War II. Like other articles of consumption, history has
been beset by the desire to change direction, methods, subjects of inquiry,
and nomenclature, not because those had been fully explored or even the
basic work accomplished but because some practitioners in powerful universities, institutes, or foundations had grown weary of the old thing. Newer became better, and those who refused to dance to the new rhythms,
were viewed, in the eyes of the bien-pensants, as passe—ditch diggers at
best whose work might be cannibalized by the then-current "new history."
There is an impatience which haunts this drive for the new theory to replace
and damn everything that has gone before. All too often it results in a raft
of thin theoretical publications but few, including the proud new theorists,
to put these to the empirical test. In part this is due to a natural conservatism on the part of most historians that leads them to continue as they are
doing; in part it derives from the theory smiths' increasing distance from
empirical research.
As an aside, during the workshop session I pointed out "that Katznelson had thrown a bomb into a hornets' nest and that the hornets had
come out, some stinging." The dynamic contestatory and even combative
nature of the critical responses to Katznelson's position piece attest not
only to the intellectual rigor of the editorial board and its broad spectrum
of theoretical and methodological orientation, but also to the readiness of
everyone to listen to different views, not simply to paper over differences,
but to engage in the difficult process of negotiation based on mutual respect.
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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547900010814 Published online by Cambridge University Press
It is now high time to address the main issue of this symposium: future
directions in labor history. As coeditor of this journal, I cannot but rehearse some of its accomplishments during the past ten years. Starting with
Jacques Ranciere's "The Myth of the Artisan" in 1983, we have created a
scholarly controversy section which features a lead article on a significant
topic, theory, or methodology followed by several critical responses. We
have published fourteen controversies, including Michael Denning challenging "The End of Mass Culture," Joan Scott's much discussed "On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History," Sean Wilentz's air-clearing
"Against Exceptionalism, Class Consciousness and the American Labor
Movement," and Michael Goldfield's embattled "Race and the CIO: The
Possibility for Racial Egalitarianism during the 1930s and 1940s." This
format has been a great success with our readers, but not only with them,
since a half-dozen journals including Labor History, the American Historical Review, and the International Review of Social History have copied the
format. During that decade ILWCH also presented a group of thematic
issues ranging from the politics of Haymarket and the Popular Fronts to
Tradition, World War II, and the Origins of Welfare States. I think that
anyone perusing these controversies and thematic issues will find there
much of what Katznelson is asking us to do.
More difficult than rehearsing the past is projecting the future. As
must be evident from what I have said so far, I am much more concerned
with subject matter than theory in making the following suggestions: (1)
Only a very hesitant start has been made in comparative labor history and,
generally, the countries compared have been Britain, France, and the
United States. The inclusion of larger national groupings or geographic
blocs requires the creation of research teams with long-range commitments
and financing. It will be necessary to convince existing research centers
such as the Maison des sciences de l'homme in Paris, the Center for European Studies at Harvard, and the Institut fur Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna to greatly expand comparative research. It will be equally
important but more difficult to convince the major foundations to do the
same by foregoing their action-centered orientation for more scholarly
ones. (2) An only-fleeting survey of the massive bibliographies in labor and
working-class history reveals immediately the serious chronological imbalance in the literature: a heavy concentration on the nineteenth century and
virtual neglect of the twentieth. The difference in source material for the
two centuries is vast; the skilled craftsman's memoire on the one hand, for
example, and the mass media on the other. It is up to journals such as
ILWCH to encourage graduate students to take the plunge beyond 1900 or
1914. (3) The greatest challenge for ILWCH is to remain in touch with
younger scholars, to invite them to submit their work, to encourage them
to stretch themselves, to provoke their criticism, and thereby to give them
a sense of being vital to the profession at a time in their career when their
future seems most uncertain.