Struggle and Mutual Aid: The Age of Worker Solidarity by Nicolas Delalande

Abstract

Reviewed by: Struggle and Mutual Aid: The Age of Worker Solidarity by Nicolas Delalande John Zerzan NICOLAS DELALANDE Struggle and Mutual Aid: The Age of Worker Solidarity Trans. Anthony Roberts. New York. Other Press. 2023. 432 pages. PUBLISHED IN FRANCE in 1999, Nicolas Delalande's Struggle and Mutual Aid is a mainly Eurocentric study of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), founded in 1864, and its legacy. The First International, as it is commonly known, established many of the features of trade union organization; it is largely in terms of organization that this history is cast. The mutual aid to which the title refers is inseparable from the organization of the IWA and its subsequent iterations. The support the IWA provided, or withheld, was really a function of its structure and, unavoidably, the context in which it operated. Thus, ideology takes a decided back seat for Delalande, though that aspect is ever present during the times under examination. What is far more obscured are basic social institutions that take shape as formal labor bodies appear and evolve, as with the course of any modern institution or formation. I think it is necessary to take a look at basic dimensions in order to grasp the meaning and background of Delalande's terms, the most commonly used one being "solidarity." Émile Durkheim may be said to set the stage with his distinction between premodern "mechanical" solidarity versus modern "organic" solidarity. He upheld division of labor or specialization as fostering the cooperative nature of organic solidarity. This is fundamentally at odds with the reality of modern anomie and subjugation. Delalande does not acknowledge his debt to Durkheim, but Struggle locates its very foundations on such a valorization or elevation of division of labor. Industrial society itself has no other more primary basis, the "solidarity" of the narrowed machine worker, reduced to a role, a cog in a machine. Karl Marx, a key figure in the First International, proclaimed early on that liberation would only be achieved through the abolition of division of labor, that most basic social institution. Where the individual "could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon," Marx saw that specialization introduces distinctions of authority and pits "man against his fellow man." Later on, embracing the industrialism that Delalande completely takes for granted, Marx, Mr. First International, fully embraced the division of labor. Only when the proletariat is united in the factories will it become the liberatory force required for revolutionary victory in the class war. Going forward, Marx clearly predicated liberation on the existence of factories, of industrial wage slavery. In England, the focus of much of Struggle, textile mills were among the first factories in the late eighteenth century. By various means, and against the backdrop of advancing enclosures (forced conversion of communal land into private property), people—mostly women and children—were forced into the factories. There, they toiled long hours. Subject to industrial discipline (e.g., trained to obey the clock), they were driven to a further stage of domestication. Robbed of time and energy, they were hardly the Mighty Proletarians of Marx's dream. Much more refractory, and given to rioting, were independent craftsmen, such as the handloom weavers who resisted proletarianization, even, in [End Page 64] some cases, to the point of starvation. They rejected "solidarity" in favor of their autonomy. In the United States, the Millerites (later known as Seventh-Day Adventists) announced that the world would end in 1844. In a sense they were right; a world did end by that time. Industrialization and the factory had come a bit earlier in Europe, and by the time of the First International in the 1860s, the earlier world of home-based family workshops had definitively come to an end. The IWA itself came to an end in 1872, after failing to give much mutual aid or intellectual support to the survivors of the defeated Paris Commune the year before. It was moved to New York, and its effort expired. The European branch was occupied with questions of regional communication and cooperation. Based in London, its backbone was English trade unions, almost invariably less militant and radical than those on the continent. In its...