The Ungovernable Society

A Genealogy of Authoritarian Liberalism

Grégoire Chamayou, Andrew Brown

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781509542017, 9781509542000
• eBook ISBN: 9781509542024
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Rebellion was in the air. Workers were on strike, students were demonstrating on campuses, discipline was breaking down. No relation of domination was left untouched – the relation between the sexes, the racial order, the hierarchies of class, relationships in families, workplaces and colleges. The upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s quickly spread through all sectors of social and economic life, threatening to make society ungovernable. This crisis was also the birthplace of the authoritarian liberalism which continues to cast its shadow across the world in which we now live.

To ward off the threat, new arts of government were devised by elites in business-related circles, which included a war against the trade unions, the primacy of shareholder value and a dethroning of politics. The neoliberalism that thus began its triumphal march was not, however, determined by a simple 'state phobia' and a desire to free up the economy from government interference. On the contrary, the strategy for overcoming the crisis of governability consisted in an authoritarian liberalism in which the liberalization of society went hand-in-hand with new forms of power imposed from above: a 'strong state' for a 'free economy' became the new magic formula of our capitalist societies.

The new arts of government devised by ruling elites are still with us today and we can understand their nature and lasting influence only by re-examining the history of the conflicts that brought them into being.

Part I
Indocile workers

1
INDISCIPLINE ON THE SHOP FLOOR

Put thirteen small bits of card into thirteen small holes, sixty times an hour, eight hours a day. Solder sixty-seven pieces of sheet metal per hour and then find yourself one day placed in front of a contraption that needs 110. Work amid noise, […] in a fog of oil, solvent, metal dust. […] Obey without answering back, be punished without right of appeal.

André Gorz¹

Tommy passes a joint to Yanagan who draws the smoke deep, then hands it to me. […] The smoke striking into my lungs sends my blood leaping. And soon the flying sparks, the hot steel, the raging, exploding furnaces above us seem like frivolities on carnival night.

Bennett Kremen²

‘The younger generation, which has already shaken the campuses, is showing signs of restlessness in the plants of industrial America’, warned the New York Times in June 1970. ‘Many young workers are calling for immediate changes in working conditions and are rejecting the disciplines of factory work’.³ ‘Labour discipline has collapsed’, observed an internal report at General Motors the same year.⁴

If discipline means gaining ‘a hold over others’ bodies’,⁵ Indocile behaviour is manifested by an irresistible longing for disengagement: don’t stay where you are, run away, get out of the business, take back your own body and make off with it. But this was exactly the set of feelings that factory life was starting to generate on a large scale at the time, as there was among the younger generation of workers a ‘deep dislike of the job and […] a desire to escape’.⁶

In the US automobile industry, turnover was huge: more than half of the new unskilled workers were leaving their positions before the end of the first year.⁷ Some were so repelled by their first contact with the assembly line that they took to the hills after the first weeks. ‘Some assembly-line workers are so turned off’, managers reported with astonishment, ‘that they just walk away in mid-shift and don’t even come back to get their pay for time they have worked’.⁸

At General Motors, 5 per cent of workers were absent without any real justification every day.⁹ On Mondays and Fridays this rose to twice the figure. In summertime, in some factories, it could reach 20 per cent. ‘What is it like on a Monday, in summer, then?’, one factory worker was asked in 1973. He replied, ‘I don’t know, I’ve never been in for one’. Another worker, when asked ‘how come you’re only working four days a week?’ replied, ‘because I can’t make enough money in three’.¹⁰ A third was asked what exactly he was looking for, and replied ‘for a chance to use my brain’, a job where ‘my high school education counts for something’.¹¹ Factory life? ‘You’re like in a jail cell – except they have more time off in prison’, replied another.¹²

In factories, your body was ruined and your mind was exhausted, you felt dead: ‘I sing, whistle, throw water at a guy on the line, do anything I can to bust the boredom’.¹³ Unable to endure the infinite repetition of the same any longer, you aspired to create rather than to produce: ‘Sometimes, out of pure meanness, when I make something, I just put a little dent in it. I like to do something to make it really unique. Hit it with a hammer; deliberately to see if it’ll get by, just so I can say I did it’.¹⁴

Ordinary acts of indiscipline, just like the disciplines of which they are the counterpart, involve an art of detail. They require just as much meticulousness and obstinacy in producing their transgressions as the opposite side does in enacting its regulations. Operating on the scale of the smallest gesture, they recover moments of respite, in a fierce and intimate struggle whose booty can be calculated in the few dozen seconds you can grab for yourself from the rhythms of the assembly belt. ‘But eventually the main problem is time’.¹⁵ You slow down on purpose, you put on the brakes, alone or collectively, or conversely you sometimes accelerate so you can later enjoy a brief stretch of time out. ‘I’m not the only worker playing this game: almost everybody does it’. You steal a handful of moments for yourself, just to breathe, to exchange a few words, to do something else: ‘I’m good enough at my job now that I can do two or three cars in a row fast and then have maybe 15 or 20 seconds for myself in between. The main thing I do with these interludes is read. I read the paper every day and I read books. Some of the books are quite complex. The main thing I’ve had to learn in order to read under these conditions is to remember what I’ve read and to be able to quickly find where I’ve left off’.¹⁶ If discipline is a rhythmopolitics or a chronopower, indiscipline is too, but in a diametrically opposite direction, a fight against the clock of a particular kind. ‘I actually saw a woman in the plant running along the line to keep up with the work. I’m not going to run for anybody. There ain’t anyone in that plant that is going to tell me to run’.¹⁷ The first main refusals of acceleration were workers’ struggles. The Indocile are time thieves.¹⁸

At General Motors, one trade unionist reports, the staff ‘uses its powers as a dictatorship’.¹⁹ The authoritarianism of the little bosses, close supervision, pernickety instructions and absurd orders, insults and continued pressure – all of this was now unacceptable. ‘The foremen’, says one Black worker from Baltimore soberly, ‘could show more respect for the workers – talk to them like men, not dogs’.²⁰

The state of social tension, said an alarmed Wall Street Journal in 1969, is the ‘worst within memory’. Everything suggested that an ‘epic battle between management and labor’ was imminent, announced Fortune.²¹ In fact, in the year 1970 alone, nearly two and a half million workers went on strike in the United States.²² This was the biggest wave of work stoppages since the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. With the high number of strike actions came more radical forms of struggle. Over and above wage demands, the complaints concerned the forms of labour organization and were aimed at the authorities that were imposing them.

Bill Watson, a worker at a Detroit car factory in 1968, recounts a widespread wave of sabotage that he witnessed. The engineers had introduced a new six-cylinder engine model that workers judged to be poorly designed. They had expressed their criticisms to the management, in vain. Faced with this flat refusal, some teams started to ‘forget’ to mount certain parts. Soon, others followed, sabotaging the work in their turn. Mountains of unserviceable machines rose up in the workshops: ‘At that point there were so many defective motors piled around the plant that it was almost impossible to move from one area to another’.²³ This phenomenon, says Watson, was not isolated. There were, pretty much all over America at the time, conflicts of the same kind: they expressed a desire on the part of workers to take over production, to gain control of their work, of the way they did it, of what was being manufactured in the factory.

In 1970, the CEO of General Motors sent a warning to his employees: ‘we cannot tolerate employees who ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I. Indocile workers
• Part II. Managerial revolution
• Part III. Attack on free enterprise
• Part IV. A world of protesters
• Part V. New regulations
• Part VI. The ungovernable state
• Conclusion
• Index
• End User License Agreement