Workers’ Inquiry and Co-Research: Fault lines and hope
Following CLaSP’s workshop on Workers’ Inquiry and Co-Research, Suraj Bhaskarrao Telange explores the history of the Workers’ Inquiry method and why Marx’s work has been so important to its development.
Graffiti in Reading. Photo by Shreya Sinha, 2022.
Just three years before Marx passed away in 1883, he published a questionnaire ‘Workers’ Inquiry’ in a French socialist journal, La Revue Socialiste (The Socialist Review) and asked French workers to respond. This was one of the last pieces Marx wrote and saw through to publication while he was still alive. The article itself consisted of 100 interview questions inquiring about workers’ work conditions, their pay, their living conditions, their position and their political awareness vis-a-vis the capitalist organisation of production. The idea was to collect research data on the conditions of workers as reported by workers themselves, because only they could shine light on their own ‘misfortunes’ (Marx 1880).
This was a very first application of Workers’ Inquiry as a method of research. In the opening introductory lines to this questionnaire Marx pointed out that empirical studies of workers were so rare that “not a single government, whether monarchy or bourgeois republic, has yet ventured to undertake a serious inquiry into the position of the French working class, but what a number of investigations have been undertaken into crises – agricultural, financial, industrial, commercial, political!” Thus, not only from the scientific point of view but also from a political standpoint, the inquiry into workers’ conditions and their role becomes critical to the socialist project, where knowledge production can be combined with organising.
Since then, the Workers’ Inquiry has become a praxis of left activistic research, bringing to mind a revolutionary imagination in which workers contribute to revealing the hidden workings of capitalist production in order to overthrow and change the relations of exploitation between labour and capital. This is, as Wellbrook (2014) has argued, irrespective of whether we understand it as the inquiry of workers, or the inquiry done by workers of their own conditions. Either way, the core of the Workers’ Inquiry project is that workers and workers’ viewpoints are central to what one of the foundational theorists of the project, Panzieri, calls ‘investigating the technologies of capital’ in the fight against exploitative capitalist relations. This makes it a unique project as it combines processes of knowledge generation with workers’ organising. In this, it goes well beyond methods like the extended case study, opposition research, participant action research and the Feminist standpoint method.
The workshop, ‘Workers’ Inquiry and Co-Research: History, Theory and Practice’ organised on November 7th 2023 by CLaSP at Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with Notes from Below, a radical labour organising magazine, attempted to take stock of the 150-year-old history of this tradition. It demonstrated its resilience, relevance, and importance to contemporary times, in which the ‘mass worker’ has been reshaped into a cheap, gendered, flexible, informalized, migrant, and precarious workforce resulting in the weakening of labour movements across the world.
“We have to defeat the thinking of defeat”
The workshop brought together militant activists and scholars who have recently published on the Workers’ Inquiry project, including Francesca Ioannilli (Un cane in chiesa. Militanza, categorie e conricerca di Romano Alquati 2020), Clark McAllister (Karl Marx’s Workers’ Inquiry: International History, Reception and Responses 2022), Gigi Roggero (Italian Operaismo: Genealogy, History, Method 2023), and Jamie Woodcock (Troublemaking: Why You Should Organise Your Workplace 2023). Through their contributions, these authors not only trace the long historical arc (from Marx to Deliveroo Workers in London) and deeply fought political journey (from Trotsky’s New International to the 1960’s Italian Operaismo/Autonomist Movement) of the Workers’ Inquiry but also reflect on the possibilities of building newer revolutionary alliances within and beyond the workplace. The workshop presenters argued that these new alliances are a must to dispel the common pessimism in labour organising movements, as Gigi Rogerro emphatically argued in his presentation at the workshop, “we have to defeat the thinking of defeat”.
Workers’ Inquiry through time
There were some firsthand accounts of factory life by Pierre Naville and Simone Weil after 1883, when Marx had published the famous questionnaire to Parisian workers. But the theoretical revival of Workers’ Inquiry as a method only happened half a century later, within Trotsky’s New International — specifically within Trotsky’s Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) — in 1947, when the SWP sponsored their first inquiry.
The SWP’s inquiry attempted to analyse the predicament of workers under both socialist and capitalist systems by studying the changes in organisation of production under Taylorism and Fordism, and under the soviet bureaucracy. The famous Trinidadian Marxist historian, C.L.R. James, and Trotsky’s former assistant, Raya Dunayevskaya, argued that production changes led to the totalitarian basis both in American industries and in Stalinist Russia (James et.al 1950). Similarly, the French journal Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism) argued in the 1950s that the Russian bureaucracy in fact had become a form of bureaucratic capitalism instead of a mere degenerated workers’ state (Castoriadis 1975, 131). Such theoretical interventions from Inquiry-inspired approach radically altered the understanding of differences and similarities between labour processes under capitalism and socialism.
The most notable revival of the Workers’ Inquiry project occurred during the Italian Operaismo (Workerism/Workerist) movement of the 1960s, which advocated for the autonomy of workers managing their own affairs separate from the Italian communist party or the Italian State.
The journal Quaderni Rossi (Red Notes) established in 1961 by Raniero Panzieri used inquiry to explain the social crisis of capital. In this way, the Workerists tried to rework Marx’s famous phrase, “the proletariat attaining its own emancipation will free all humanity” politically, by advocating pursuance of workers' partial interests to create crisis within capitalism. The inquirers, Panzieri and Alquati, engaged with working class action during 1960-70’s Italy by doing studies at Fiat and Olivetti. It was in these struggles, at the factory gates, that the Workers’ Inquiry project in Italy acquired its deeply political nature. The debate between Panzieri and Alquati on whether to see workers’ inquiry as a sociological tool (Panzieri) or a revolutionary tool (Alquati) to recompose existing class relations was well-covered in Quaderni Rossi and led to the emergence of Co-Research as a method for the Workers’ Operaismo movement.
“If every crook can govern, then every worker can write their experiences.”
The parallel academic inquiry around workers’ subjection and their conditions under technologically-enabled new production systems was developed in the United States and Britain. The publication of Harry Braverman’s magnum opus, Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, in 1974 led to a new stream of research programmes called Labour Process Theory (LPT). Studying capital-labour relationships at the point of production using traditional sociological survey methods (Braverman, Paul Thompson, Kirsty Newsome, Chris Smith and Phil Taylor etc.) as well as by becoming workers themselves (e.g. Michal Burawoy, Pun Ngai, Steve Strifler etc.) resulted in a solidification of the LPT research programme, inspiring many other labour researchers to study workplaces similar to the Worker’s Operismo.
Although Braverman didn’t directly mention Worker’s Inquiry as a method in his work, he nonetheless drew heavily upon his personal history as a former metal smith worker in his powerful and foundational analysis of labour and deskilling under monopoly capitalist systems. The field of industrial sociology saw theorists like Donald Roy and Michal Burawoy working as workers to study changes under capitalism. Braverman’s example actually underscores the call by Notes from Below contributor Jamie Woodcock, for workers to write about their own conditions. While pointing to the corrupt political systems being led by dishonest thugs across the world, he emphatically declared in his presentation at the workshop: “if every crook can govern, then every worker can write their experiences”.
The Notes from Below Journal Project was started in 2018 by the group of Marxist activists and scholars that can be now understood as the most recent reincarnation of the Workerist tradition. It combines workers’ voices through workers’ own write-ups of their conditions with academic analysis for better theory building. In this sense, the journal is the culmination of the desperate need for an independent voice of workers, while we think of charting a path to rebuilding the broken socialist movements and re-constructing strong labour power across the world.
Workers’ Inquiry or/and Co-Research?
The process of inquiry itself can broadly be grouped into two categories, ‘inquiry from above’ and ‘inquiry from below’ (Notes from Below editorial team 2019). While the former involves accessing workplace research field sites via traditional methods of research, by a researcher who might or might not have been a worker in the past, the latter involves existing workers themselves leading the research.
Although both types are important tools in understanding capital-labour relations, the latter is - for obvious political reasons - preferred by Workerist researchers, including the presenters at the workshop, since it makes workers a conscious subject of their own objective material relations via the process of research. The authors of the works presented in the workshop agreed that the Workers’ Inquiry ‘from above’ is a legitimate method of ‘studying workers’ via traditional sociological methods of interviews, questionnaires, surveys etc., but that this is insufficient for the social transformation that activist researchers hope for. For this reason, the workshop presenters argued for a methodological project through which workers can be organised via investigating the conditions that enable/curtail the work of labour organisations across the world.
The authors of the books presented in the workshop, concurring with Vittorio Rieser, see Co-Research as a fundamental method requiring “being in a condition of where you are pursuing enquiry with workers that you are organizing or workers that are already organized and therefore in either case strictly related to political work”. The researchers doing Co-Research are militants and their research is a militant political practice. Such political ingredients facilitate “the ideal overcoming of the distance between the researcher, the militant, and the worker, within the process of co-production of revolutionary knowledge.” Authors at the workshop saw this as an important and necessary methodological rupture, where the Workers’ Inquiry project is reimagined as a continuum from ‘phase to process’.
If Workers’ Inquiry can be seen as a phase and Co-Research as a process, then the latter should play a catalysing role in the reshaping of class relations. However, under capitalism, class relations are subject to constant change due to the antagonistic nature of class struggle between capital and labour. To signify this dynamic relationship between the changing nature of work and the struggle, Alquati (1962) developed an idea of ‘class composition’. This idea was divided into two parts, technical composition and political composition. The ‘technical composition’ refers to the material relations between workers and their tools (technology and machines) within the labour process. The ‘political composition’ refers to the political actions of workers that transform the working class from class-in-itself to class-for-itself, in the resistance against capitalist subjection.
However, as has been pointed out more recently, both these analytical compositions are primarily only accounts of wage relations in the workplace. As argued by social reproduction scholars, what is prior to and beyond the workplace, namely consumption and reproduction, also need accounting. Without this, the circuit of capital accumulation — more specifically, the M’ (profit) in M-C-M’ (Money-Commodity-Money’) equation — is unsustainable.
To incorporate social reproductive zones in explaining class composition and the ability of workers to organise themselves, the Notes from Below journal has revised this dual frame by adding a third element of class composition, which it has termed ‘social composition’. Social composition is about where labour lives, who labourers are, what categorisations they find themselves assigned to with respect to state and society, and how labour is reproduced. By allowing us to account for prior and outside factors that shapes workers’ action, social composition completes the continuum between technical and political composition. In this way, the Notes from Below journal editorial team (specifically Wheeler and Throne, 2018), and the presenters at the workshop argue that such analyses could potentially bring about political action in the workplace and beyond - the main goal of Workers’ Inquiry and the Co-Research project.
No Inquiry without Politics!
The neo-liberalised world is ruled by supergiant corporations, big data and big bombs, artificial intelligence inventions and supra-national governments. Labour influence is declining across the world due to preposterous levels of precarity amongst workers. In this context the Worker’s Inquiry, incorporating working class voices into scholarship, has established itself as a revolutionary praxis, a heterodox sociological method and a radical political intervention in the fight against capital’s domination of labouring classes in factories and outside them. In a nutshell, the workshop emphatically declared that Ed Emery’s famous slogan - ‘No Politics without Inquiry’ must be turned on its head, and read as - No Inquiry without Politics!
Suraj Bhaskarrao Telange is a PhD candidate in the Department of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London. His PhD research focusses on employment relations in the warehouse sector in India. Suraj will soon be joining the Cultural Anthropology Department at Duke University, North Carolina as a postdoctoral fellow funded by the National Science Foundation, USA.