The Material of Male Power

Abstract

A skilled craftsman may be no more than a worker in relation to capital, but seen from within the working class he has been a king among men and lord of his household. As a high earner he preferred to see himself as the sole breadwinner, supporter of wife and children. As artisan he defined the unskilled workman as someone of inferior status, and would 'scarcely count him a brother and certainly not an equal' (Berg, 1979:121). For any socialist movement concerned with unity in the working class, the skilled craftsman is therefore a problem. For anyone concerned with the relationship of class and gender, and with the foundations of male power, skilled men provide a fertile field for study. Compositors in the printing trade are an artisan group that have long defeated the attempts of capital to weaken the tight grip on the labour process from which their strength derives. Now their occupation is undergoing a dramatic technological change initiated by employers. Introduction of the new computerized technology of photocomposition represents an attack on what remains of their control over their occupation and wipes out many of the aspects of the work which have served as criteria by which 'hot metal' composition for printing has been defined as a manual skill and a man's craft.' In this paper I look in some detail at the compositors' crisis, what has given rise to it and what it may lead to in future. Trying to understand it has led me to ask; questions in the context of socialist-feminist theory. These I discuss first, as preface to an account of key moments in the compositors' craft history. I then isolate the themes of skill and technology for further analysis, and conclude with the suggestion that there may be more to male power than 'patriarchal' relations.