Labor's Melancholia: Worker Organizing in the Face of Death
ISA: Rabat, Morocco
Labor’s Melancholia: Labor Organizing in the Face of Death
This paper theorizes an emerging tendency in militant labor organizing, based on my qualitative and quantitative work on the pandemic-era labor movement and public health. The first part argues that the organization and energy of the post-pandemic labor movement—much of which emerges from radical reform caucuses within larger labor unions—is fundamental to an emancipatory politics today. This new spirit of labor organizing, however, confronts two new challenges—the memory of the pandemic and the reality of climate change, both of which condition a new spirit of revolutionary politics.
Where the revolutionary impulse was once about changing the world for the better, in a progressive direction, I argue that much of the radical current in left/labor politics today is oriented toward defending a loss, either from neoliberal backsliding or the literal loss of human life. The Left’s decades-long melancholic search for a new revolutionary / proletarian subject can learn a lot from the way the labor movement has begun to frame its demands—for shorter hours, better health and safety, a green work transition—as society-wide gains. This is true in education and healthcare, but increasingly in some sectors of industrial production as well.
The second part of the paper is a critical engagement with Marx-inspired scholarship on the history of proletarian subjectivity, which includes the work of Andre Gorz, Murray Bookchin, the Black Panthers, socialist feminists, Hard and Negri, and early transnational labor organizations.
In conclusion, the paper argues that the pandemic and climate change help to force the development of a new emancipatory politics, where labor organizing is put face to face with defending human health and survival, connecting “a better life” to “a new world” in very concrete terms.