Loiiis Mercier Vega (1914-1977), originally named Charles Cortvrmt, was born in Brussels. He was active in the French anarchist and labour movements in the 1930s, where he worked with Andre Prudhommeaux (Selection 30) and Marie Louise Berneri (Selections 4, 15 & 75), among others. He fought with the Durruti Column during the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. As with many other anarchists in Spain, he escaped to Latin America in 1939. After the Second World War he was active in the European and Latin American anarchist movements, contributing regularly to many anarchist publications. He wrote several books on anarchist themes, including Anarcho-syndicalisme et syndicalisme revolutionnaire (Paris: Spartaciis, 1978) and Anarquismo ayer y hoy (Caracas: Monte Avila Ed., 1970). ln thefol-lowing excerptsfrom Mercier Vega*s essay, "Yesterday*s Societies and Today's," reprinted in L’increvable anarchisme (Paris: UGE, 1970; Bordeaux: Analis, 1988, 2nd ed., preface by A. Bertolo), translated by Paul Sharkey, Mercier Vega analyses the changing role and composition of the "working class" in modern societies, providing some explanation for its failure to play the revolutionary role assigned to it by the L'Impulso group and other class-struggle anarchists, but also suggesting that quality of life issues may yet inspire workingpeople to radically transform society.
IN THE SPACE OF A FEW DECADES, MOST societies have evolved and been transfigured. A few under pressure from “those at the bottom,” many under that from revolutions in technology: in part through the impact of the clear-sightedness and raised awareness of their citizens, and massively as the result of warfare—international rivalries, competitions between industrial groups, military conquest or confrontations, imperial squabbles over empire.
Relations between the classes, the various dependencies of the individual and the State’s structures and prerogatives have changed. The anarchist may think that these changes have wrought no essential change in what he has always denounced, namely, the economic, political and social constraints weighing upon the worker, the law’s endorsement of privilege, the frustrated circumstances in which he who is the object rather than a full shareholder in society finds himself placed. This reaffirmation of the soundness ofhis principles is no impediment to the very conditions of the social struggle having changed and the way in which oppression is sensed, suffered or rejected having evolved. Which naturally requires much amendment to our propaganda and methodology.
Let us take an example removed from theoretical considerations: let us take the technical edge enjoyed by Argentinean anarchists back in the 1920s—automatic weapons, fast cars, an extensive network of l ocal and international accomplices— over a police force equipped with revolvers, obsolete vehicles and poor telegraphic communications; by the 1940s, that edge had disappeared and bank raids had become all but impossible...
An even more prosaic instance would be the "macadam” procedure employed by many French building and steel industry workers when the threat of unemployment loomed over them; this comprised faking work accidents in order to make insurance claims. This practice was relatively commonplace up until the war in 1939 but became impossible with the establishment of social security.
But this is only a single facet of a social phenomenon. The working class too has—in its mentality, behaviour, fears and hopes—felt the impact of a society operating in accordance with new approaches...
Hunger has become the exception rather than the rule, falling sick is no longer such a catastrophe and certain conveniences have become standard fare in the home and women are no longer strictly dependent upon the earnings of men. In many regards, the working man enjoys advantages once the preserve of the petite bourgeoisie. He can watch television, listen to the radio and take holidays. He is often in a position to become a homeowner, an impossible dream in the years before the war. But most of all, he is, if he is native-born or has been resident in the country for a long time, even in a position to watch the most recent arrivals straining and scrambling in order to get a foot on the ladder of society, at the end of which process they will be able to enjoy, as he already does, the latest conveniences of modern society...
The ideal of the working man is to see his son leave the status of working man behind, rise out of his class and become a white collar worker, an office-worker with a paper qualification. The grand ambition of collective emancipation has been supplanted by the shorter-term hope ofindividual promotion, if not for the working man himself, then at least for his offspring. There could be no plainer proof that the manual worker considers his status inferior and his place in society as subordinate. Even should the working man, taking a pride in his professional capabilities, cherish the notion of passing on his trade to his son, technical innovations would rule this out. A carpenter is not in a position—except on some restoration job—to set any young man, let alone his own son, on course for a dead-end career. Any more than any lathe operator or fitter.
In spite of the improvements that have altered his lifestyle and lifted it above that of his elders, he feels that the working class to which he belongs is doomed to dependency. He may well have a suburban home or a “three bedroom” house in some dormitory town, but he would undoubtedly rather be in a position to rent in a more centrally located district. He may well drive a car, but that is lest he be restricted to his far-off home, can get away from the city for the weekend for a breath of “fresh air” fifty or a hundred kilometres away, along with several tens of thousands of other escapees who, after picnicking to the sounds of the transistor radio, will spend hours on end inhaling gas fumes in the barely moving traffic jams on the journey home. Even when he shows off and plays the bourgeois, he knows and senses that, in the final analysis, his car is more of a burden than a source of relief and that social pressure and the fear of looking shabbier than his neighbour doom him to such outward shows of affluence.
The tendency of an affluent society is to turn him into a fatted calf forever shuffling off to new pastures. It denies him all sense of fraternal community but draws him into an increasingly complicated machine to which he is obliged to defer. In order to provide for his and his family’s ever increasing needs, he needs to put in a few more hours of over-time, take on extra work and get used to traffic jams, contributing to all the security funds and voting for those who will ensure that the system survives and fends off any fundamental change. Hence this comment from one Parisian steelworker: “By the time I get home and the wife and kids tackle me about how much overtime I have done, my next pay-cheque and how it is to be spent, with loan arrangements and catalogues to help in this, I get the feeling I’ve turned into a money-machine.”
Working class communities established on the basis of district, trade, workplaces and unions are vanishing. The home is too far avjay from the workplace; housing estates bring together families whose interests differ and whose origins vary endlessly; the mass media encourage every individual and family cell to wall itself off from the rest. The large company itself, far from encouraging a sense of solidarity among its workforce, reinforces divisions. On emerging from the “firm,” wage-earners scramble for the means of transport that will ferry them, exhausted, back to their homes, meaning that a half hour, an hour, sometimes two hours are spent on the crowded metro system, packed buses and overcrowded trains. The only things permanently in position being the lumbering branches of the great political and trade union machines. Only the workshop, where he spends eight hours working, can occasionally offer a little warmth, where he has his place and importance and where problems take on a more human dimension.
The mammoth size ofcertain firms, the extreme division oflabour, the complexity of manufacturing processes conspire to dwarf the working man and make him feel like some replaceable cog. In a shoe factory, furniture factory, machine-shop, the idea of a collective of comrades supplanting the management was not utopian. Class relations were pretty straightforward and the dividing lines were clear and it was plain to see where the profits were going. The ultimate demand—that the site and the instruments oflabour be taken over by the workers—required courage and daring and a repudiation of subject status rather than any further education. In a complex of interdependent plants, with production schedules emanating from above and operating in accordance with a fluid market, the hope of a worker takeover, and the slogan “all power to the unions,” acquire the ring of utopianism.
The trend towards stratification in everything, the compartmentalization of tasks, the discrepancies in hours worked and monthly wages of the white-collared and the boiler-suited, manifestly inflate this phenomenon of worker disorientation, which is significant enough on its own. The very idea of a new society is transfigured by it. “Socialism” comes to look like streamlined organization without any fundamental changes for “those at the bottom.”
Those remarkable observers Andree Andrieux and Jean Lignon, with their long-established, solid grounding in workers’ conditions, have summed up the new mindset very well:
The notion of a post-capitalist society peddled by the activist does not open up... the prospect of a new life before the labouring masses. Their material circumstances would alter, but not their ‘existential’ situation, which is not the case for the activist. If capitalism were to die out, the activist and the masses would no longer find themselves sharing the same circumstances. The militant, unless performing some administrative or managerial function lifting him off the shop floor and hoisting him into the office, would remain on the shop floor as the delegate representing the workers, but would at the same time be the agent of the new order.
The workers are pretty much aware of this fact: so is the activist.
The outlines of a new society are emerging from within the working class, or rather, working classes, or, ifyou will, the great pyramidal conglomeration ofwage-earners, and they are not such as to inspire much enthusiasm. Despite the obvious technical problems or the scale of the obstacles, there is a backlash in the shape of the “utopian” but telling call for a profound break with the system of dependency, and in times of great social crisis that call resonates in the heart and reaches into the very soul ofthe working man. At which point the anarchists come into their own, addressing themselves to the man weary or ashamed of his enslavement, and not merely “the masses,” labour or some statistical category.
Of course, the working class has never been as unified and undifferentiated as the revolutionary or reactionary intellectuals have painted it. But at least there was a bunch of waged labourers making up a social stratum with shared characteristics, one whose role in the production process was vital and whose lifestyle set it apart. There were differences in wage levels, but not to the extent that they gave rise to clearly separate strata.
These days we need to speak of several working classes. Ranging from the “beginner” proletariat, most of it made up of recent migrants—home-grown or foreign-born —engaged in the hard, tough or unpleasant jobs, to the management echelons who are salaried only for tax reasons, not forgetting public selVice workers divided up or broken down by category, salaried industrial employees with their different regional pay rates, specialist intellectuals from the agencies and laboratories—all involved in the production process from which they find it hard to escape in order to join their otherwise like-minded university chums who have taken up managerial positions.
Wage differentials make class consciousness that much harder to achieve: they add to jurisdictional disputes, splitting the unions and encouraging collusion between the (private or state) management and privileged brackets of wage-earners. They accentuate rather than curtail the tendency to retain a sub-proletariat reduced to low wages and readily disposed of in the event of a crisis or economic slow-down, alongside groups of workers, employees and officials locked into complex regulation arrangements v. herein their docility and diligence are reflected in their wage leve l s.
The internal divisions within the working classes broadly correspond to differentiation on the basis of national or ethnic origin, especially in Europe, and it is to be feared that great waves of xenophobia will be unleashed should there be competition for the right to work when there is not enough work to go around. This is a real danger against which the trade union bodies have made no provision as they confine themselves to vaguely internationalist pronouncements while making no effort to adopt significant numbers of foreign workers who are often exposed to double or triple exploitation, including exploitation at the hands of their own mischievous compatriots.
The lack of a common objective, some overall purpose, even a utopian one, among the body of wage-earners, reinforces the importance of purely quantitative demands and accords a telling importance to the initiative of the authorities. There being no expectation of a comprehensive overhaul of the economic system and government system, which would involve every single worker showing an interest and making a willing contribution, the only option left is to screw as much as possible from a less and less controllable regime which grows ever more distant but which offers a guarantee of infinite economic growth, provided that the worker keeps his nose out.
Through diversification, the worker's condition leads to a breakdown in what mutual aid and community feeling ever existed (little enough in practice but an enormous factor in terms of its symbolic and moral presence). Even on a reduced scale, imitating the bourgeois turns the working man into a bourgeois.
A mental imbalance sets in, surfacing only in times of great tension when events bring it to light. The wage worker in his heart of hearts feels doomed by his fate while, failing to chime with a collective revolutionary movement, all of his efforts are directed solely to keeping up the appearances of bourgeois or manager. This is what substantial segments of working class youth can see or guess at before they are absorbed into the system, before they themselves are caught up in the daily grind. Their rebelliousness should be seen less as contempt for the elders and more as a contempt for conformity, not so much a determination to “make it" as an index of disgust with the society proffered to them.
In manual worker and technician alike—for there is such a thing as engineer-labour just as there is street-sweeper labour—the underlying feeling, whether conscious or flaring up in some work dispute, is that all of the appearances offull citizenship are granted him except where work is concerned, and that this exception makes a fallacious lie and nonsense of the whole thing.
In French populist language, going to work is translated as “gluttony for punishment."
So the new features of industrial society, the characteristics of a post-industrial society represent further hurdles in the already tough search for ways of sketching and building a libertarian world. On the other hand, the outcome, the advantages of a super-organized society do not have the capacity to do away with either the feeling offrustration in workers or the need to come up with a fundamentally different society. If anarchism did not exist, it would very quickly be invented by way of a response to the hypocrisies and blights of the modern world.
World History
