Ekonomski boj in razredna kultura delavcev

Abstract

Economic struggles are usually linked to the spontaneous working class ideology of fighting for a mere improvement in wages and working conditions. However, they often transcend their meagre economic results as they are indispensable in the construction of the working class culture of solidarity. Far from being spontaneous, the process of transforming the trade union orientation from class unionism to business unionism in the USA and to social partnership in Europe had to be imposed through social struggles in which capital forced upon workers a pacified form of economic struggle that was required by post-war Keynesianism. The ruling perception of twentieth-century economic struggles was thus shaped by references to the Gramscian concept of hegemony, in which marginal concessions to labour are essential for its successful subordination to capital. However, the intensification of economic struggles in the 1960s and 1970s showed that the hope of integrating labour into capitalist society by marginal concessions underestimated the economic conditions of capitalist discipline. Thus, the neoliberal restoration was primarily concerned with the imposition of capitalist discipline in the “Factory,” which had severe cultural consequences in the sphere of “School and Family.” However, while American neoliberalism orchestrated a frontal attack on organised labour, in Europe the system of industrial relations was preserved, but with disastrous effects on the culture of labour. I grasp these cultural aspects of the neoliberal attack on European labour with the concept of community in resignation, which, unlike the concept of hegemony, explains labour’s subordination in terms of workers’ renouncement of certain rights in the process of forging competitive alliances with capital.