Johnson - Response to J. Rancière Le Mythe de L'Artisan

8/13/2019 Johnson - Response to J. Rancire Le Mythe de L'Artisan

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22 ILWCH, 24, Fall 1983

poor and exploited, I reasoned. (Apparently Icarians were different from SaintSimonian workers, who mostly seemed to want to become writers and butlers andthings like that in order to escape theworking class.) Ipulled together a great deal ofinformation about their work and came up with the following. These were craftsthat were overcrowded and poor (shoemakers were the worst off), other elite craftsshunned them (and other compagnons attacked shoemakers),2 but above all theywere crafts whose structures were being transformed by the impact of capital. Yes,indeed, it amounted to a loss of professional status, and what this meant was lesspay for more work, work that was more routinized, specialized, and boring, andwork more subject to sudden speedup, then long layoff. Tailors did indeed work forready-made merchants?they had no choice; the imperatives of a rapidly changingcapitalist economy forced them to. And of course they rued their deskilling, but theyrued itmuch more because itmade them poor, bored, and physically insecure thanby virtue of some psychological trauma due to lost pride. The last was there,certainly, and dozens of Icarians wrote Cabet that they, the pariahs of society,nevertheless felt wounded in their dignity. What I talked about was the global,multi-faceted process of proletarianization, of being de-artisanized. These rebels anddreamers were no longer artisans, at least in the way Ranci?re uses the term.The reader will also note that when Ranci?re cites discussions of the lowposition of worker-tailors, the remarks are from the 1840s?the very time theready-made revolution was having itsmost profound impact. (I also advise Ranci?reto reread the Enquete of the Parisian Chamber of Commerce of 1848 on thetailoring industry; itmay have been a bourgeois whitewash for some industries, butit is a gold mine of information on the devastating impact of ready-made on tailors.)What Ranci?re leaves out of his entire discussion, amazingly, is the impact ofcapitalism. One has the impression that shoemakers and tailors had always been the

maligned or casual, easy crafts he describes. What made them become militantwhen they did? What else but the explosive consequences of emergent industrialcapitalism?3

Ranci?re's argument that militant activity is perhaps inversely proportionalto the organic cohesion of the trade is no doubt correct?it is precisely WilliamSewelPs point in his excellent study of the trades of Marseille.4 Even so, however,this does not mean that the lower orders of the old corporative world had no prideof craft and sense of tradition. That even the poor shoemakers fought for and wonthe right to their own compagnonnage indicates that they possessed a corporativeconsciousness. The very ability of journeyman tailors to organize trade unions, andthey were the first trade to push toward regional and even national union formations,5 indicates the pre-existence of corporative ties among them. More importantstill, under the disintegrative impact of la confection, overcrowded trades, declining

wages, and uncertain employment, one could easily imagine happier, more harmonious days in the past. For tailoring, at any rate, there was in fact a kind of golden ageof the bespoke trade during the Empire and early Restoration. Proletarianizationthus became all themore bitter, and to fight back was natural.

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Response by Johnson 23The second section of this paper raises some fundamental issues.Most important is the need to study career patterns during this era. Ranci?re questions how

meaningful momentary occupational designations are and gives some examples of changesundergone by individuals. More important would be the systematic examination of?tat civil records to reconstitute occupational changes for men and women. I havedone some of this for the factory town of Lod?ve and one can see clearly the freneticjumping from job to job as the woolens industry there collapsed in the 1860s and1870s, while little change occurred in the more stable 1830s and 1840s. Ranci?re's

point on the glorification of a craft and its traditions when one is facing difficultystaying in it (Perdiguier) is an original, important insight. The obverse is also true:people who are satisfied in their work neither trumpet its virtues nor protest?whyshould they? But the glorifiers have definitely had an influence, and their paeans toskilled work and craft traditions are a peculiar and virulent form of false consciousness that Proudham made into an ideology and passed on to later generations ofpetit bourgeois like himself who did provide the ideology of work for Vichy France.

That evolution is easy enough to discern. It frankly justifies a capitalist model.Ranci?re rightly criticizes use of Poulot's Le Sublime to give credence to certaindescriptions of workers' practices which transform political biases into ethnologicaltraits, and points out that Poulot was above all aGambettist politician who soughtto discredit the new worker militants of the late sixties. This is quite true, but oneneeds to go further, for what Poulot does with the artisan ideologies of the 1840s is atour deforce. In one way or another he appropriates virtually the entire corpus ofnon-revolutionary artisan socialism and turns it into a quite coherent antirevolutionary artisan capitalism.He reorients artisan ideology away from its original cooperative, fraternalmold and sets it in a competitive one while retaining almost all the old panaceas:political democracy as the foundation stone, generalized primary education followed by solid vocational training in state-financed schools, chambres syndicales,organized hiring practices through craft-run hiring halls, praise for the institutionsand values of the compagnonnage, reformed Conseils des Prudhommes, and thelynch-pin, cooperation of production financed by cooperative banques du travail.The heart of its value system is the dignity of manual work and its profoundsignificance indefining the human essence. Then there iswhat Poulot isagainst?hisentraves a la question sociales. Besides sublimisme, they are the saber, or militaryspending, the cassock, or priestly power, and the toga, or the unjust judiciary?all

worthy, honored subjects of artisan socialist wrath in the 1840s. And, beneath it allfor Poulot, lurked the grand Saint-Simonian principle of the unity of les industrials?allproductive members of society, masters and workers alike?versus les oisifs.

Although he firmly rejects les th?ories (preferring as he says, practical application), Poulot makes it clear where he stands?condemning the fils de Dieu for theirpreference for an Esquiros, a Cabet, or a Louis Blanc over the system of Proudhon,of which he understands nothing. Poulot's world-view was formed in the context of'48, but he was obviously sorting out his choices among them.



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24 ILWCH, 24, Fall 1983

Let us take one proposal and see what he does with it. His ideas on apprenticeship owe a great deal to the editors of LAtelier for whom the function ofprofessional education provided by the state was to combine a polytechnicaleducation received in school with a more specialized training that only the workshop could provide. Poulot's goal?the end of apprenticeship in theworkshop?andthe creation of highly specialized training in state schools immediately followingprimary school, while it seemed to be the realization of an ancient dream (andGeorges Duveau curiously treats it this way), was in fact to remove the apprenticefrom the clutches, not of themaster, but of les sublimes. Moreover, unlike the focuson instruction mutuelle so dear to the Atelieristes, (whose state instructors wouldcome from the ranks of the workers and who would emphasize constant interassistance among the students), Poulot stresses competition: Apprenticeship without rivalry is an apprenticeship that goes nowhere. Moreover, the well-trainedapprentice will one day be a foreman. Despite the rhetoric glorifying am?tier for alland quoting Rousseau, Poulot seeks to form a reliable elite of workers who willcounter the influence of class-conscious workers. Artisan socialism becomes artisancapitalism. It is instructive perhaps that Blanqui condemned ?coles professionelles asplots to incarcerate the worker in a trade.The fundamental point is that this was all possible?artisan socialism borewithin it its own negation and here Ranci?re and I (and Bernard Moss) are inagreement. The larger question, of course, iswhether itwas also inevitable. When Iwrote the article on the tailors, I was much intrigued by the worker controlmovement in this country and was familiar with French variants from Friedmann toTouraine. This explains its equivocal conclusion. But having watched the promise ofthe former be absorbed by the Quality of Work Life productivity boondoggle(though QWL does present some interesting possibilities for worker political education) and having read Michael Rose's brilliant attack on the Sociologie du travail

movement, the anti-Marxist character of the entire tradition became increasinglyclear.6 Moreover, while skilled workers, the inheritors of the artisan tradition, haveoften played a critical role as catalysts in the development of broader labor agitation,7 they have historically stopped short of the revolutionary transformation ofcapitalist society. As James Hinton put it so neatly: The fact that itwas only thetheory of the struggle for soviet power, and not the struggle itself, that arose out ofthe experience of the [British] Workers' Committees is to be explained partly by theabrupt and unavoidable collapse of the economic power of the shop stewards'movement when the war was finished. More fundamentally, however, it is to beexplained by the ultimate failure of the craft tradition to yield up its revolutionaryore without the clinging dross of exclusiveness. 8So itwas also, itmust be remembered, with the egalitarian journeymen tailorsof the Clichy cooperative during the Second Republic who, when pressed withorders in 1849, rejected the notion of taking in new members, but hired out work tosweated labor. The clinging dross was always there in cooperative ventures?witness the distressing personnel policies of the Verrerie Ouvri?re d'Albi created bysocialist glassworkers driven out after the Carmaux strike of 1895.9



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Response by Johnson 25

It is one thing to stress this problem, and quite another to call Pelloutier orMonatte proto-Fascists and to condemn the entire anarcho-syndicalist movement inthe same breath. Great numbers of syndicalists, Wobblies in the U.S., shop-stewardactivists inBritain and Germany, Gramscians in Italy, and revolutionary syndicalistsin Spain and France, joined the Third International and were welcomed by Lenin.All kinds of research on this problem isneeded, but broadsides and bombast get usnowhere.

Finally, letme register my full agreement with Ranci?re on the problem ofworkers-become-intellectuals and how to interpret what they write. I think that theyreflect very little about the lives of workers, whom they represent no more thanEric Hoffer represented the American dock workers during the 1950s, and to usetheir utterances as anthropologists would their interviews and recordings is simplywrong. They are interesting in and of themselves and should be treated as writersexpressing points of view. How well they document their assertions, develop theirarguments, or communicate their yearnings should be judged just as we would thewritings of Mill or Hugo. Otherwise, as he says, we commit a kind of intellectualracism.

We are all inRanci?re's debt, despite his Olympian tone and quixotic pursuits,for he has focussed attention on the need for greater methodological rigor and morecareful source criticism in the study of the early worker movement in France.Moreover, we are hereby cautioned to beware of both creeping Thompsonism andinsidious Althusserism.

NOTES1. I also included my Patterns of Proletarianization: Parisian Tailors and Lod?ve Woolens

Workers, in John M. Merriman, ed., Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-CenturyEurope (New York, 1979). The Main section in Utopian Communism is pages 175-84.

2. See especially Utopian Communism in France, 181-82, inwhich I conclude the entire discussionof the reasons behind worker adherence to Icaranism with a description of the grim and harried life ofCoriot, an Icarian journeyman shoemaker.

3. For Karl Marx's discussion of the proletarianization of the handicrafts, see Capital (New York,1936), Vol. I, 395-404. One must also read the superb book by Ronald Aminzade, Class, Politics, and

Early Industrial Capitalism, a Study of Mid-Nineteenth Century Toulouse (Albany, 1981), especially hisconcluding chapter.

4. Sewell, La classe ouvri?re de Marseille sous la Seconde R?publique: structure sociale etcomportement politique, Mouvement social (July 1971), 27-63. He even uses the terms open andclosed trades and finds tailors and shoemakers in the former group, portefaix on the docks in the latter.5. Octave Festy, Dix ans d'histoire corporative des ouvriers tailleurs d'habits (1830-1840), Revued'histoire des doctrines ?conomique et sociale, V (1912), 166-99.

6. Rose, Servants of Post-Industrial Power? Sociologie du Travail in Modem France (WhitePlains, N.Y., 1979).7. Michael Hanagan, The Logic of Solidarity: Artisans and Industrial Workers in Three French

Towns, 1871-1914 (Urbana, 1980).8. Hinton, The First Shop Stewards' Movement (London, 1973), 337.9. Joan Scott, The Glassworkers of Carmaux (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 186.


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Johnson - Response to J. Rancière Le Mythe de L'Artisan