"Workers’ inquiry is an approach to and practice of knowledge production that seeks to understand the changing composition of labour and its role within processes of social transformation. It is the practice of turning the tools of the social sciences into tools for labour organizing. Historically workers’ inquiry developed in Italy in a context marked by rapid industrialization, mass migration, and the rise of industrial sociology. Workers’ inquiry was formulated within autonomist movements as a sort of parallel sociology, one based on a re-reading of Marx and Weber against established parties and unions." -A Workers' Inquiry Reader
That is where we are going with today's Theoretical Weekends here at Scission
The above quote indicates the concept of the "workers inquiry" was developed in Italy. Well, I understand where that thought comes from, but it does ignore the fact that back in 1880 Karl Marx did a workers inquiry of his own. As he wrote:
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!
The blackguardly features of capitalist exploitation which were exposed by the official investigation organized by the English government and the legislation which was necessitated there as a result of these revelations (legal limitation of the working day to 10 hours, the law concerning female and child labor, etc.), have forced the French bourgeoisie to tremble even more before the dangers which an impartial and systematic investigation might represent. In the hope that maybe we shall induce a republican government to follow the example of the monarchical government of England by likewise organizing a far reaching investigation into facts and crimes of capitalist exploitation, we shall attempt to initiate an inquiry of this kind with those poor resources which are at our disposal. We hope to meet in this work with the support of all workers in town and country who understand that they alone can describe with full knowledge the misfortunes form which they suffer and that only they, and not saviors sent by providence, can energetically apply the healing remedies for the social ills which they are prey. We also rely upon socialists of all schools who, being wishful for social reform, must wish for an exact and positive knowledge of the conditions in which the working class — the class to whom the future belongs -works and moves.
These statements of labor's grievances are the first act which socialist democracy must perform in order to prepare the way for social regeneration.
The following hundred questions are the most important. In replies the number of the corresponding question should be given. It is not essential to reply to every question, but our recommendation is that replies should be as detailed and comprehensive as possible. The name of the working man or woman who is replying will not be published without special permission but the name and address should be given so that if necessary we can send communication.
Replies should be sent to the Secretary of the Revue Socialiste, M.Lecluse, 28, rue royale, saint cloud, nr. Paris.
The replies will be classified and will serve as material for special studies, which will be published in the Revue and will later be reprinted as a separate volume."
Karl followed this up with a one hundred page questionaire. He wasn't just doing this for fun or for a school project. Can you even imagine such of Marx. Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi write at North Star:
Was workers’ inquiry a means of accessing the proletarian viewpoint? Was it simply the workers’ participation in generating a universal knowledge?
What is abundantly clear is that Marx had a high estimation of the autonomous activity of the working class. Not only would workers provide knowledge about the nature of capitalism, they would be the only ones who could overthrow it: only the workers in town and country, “and not saviors sent by providence, can energetically apply the healing remedies for the social ills which they are prey.” This practice of workers’ inquiry, then, implied a certain connection between proletarian knowledge and proletarian politics. Socialists would begin by learning from the working class about its own material conditions. Only then would they be able to articulate strategies, compose theories, and draft programs. Inquiry would therefore be the necessary first step in articulating a historically appropriate socialist project.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Italian Marxists were grumbling about the Communist Party of Italy, about Stalinism, about the USSR, about the general state of all things communist. They were searching and exploring a different form of communism than the "already existing" brand. As part of the exploration they began using the method of worker inquiry and what was also called co-research. Marta Malo de Molina writes:
"...it is worthwhile paying special attention to the uses of the worker-survey employed by Italian operaismo (workerism a section of the Italian workers’ movement)9. The young operaisti, gathered in initially around the journal Quaderni Rossi10, attempted to explain the crisis of the workers’ movement during the fifties and the early sixties. For the operaisti, it was not possible to interpret this lived crisis merely as a result of either the theoretical errors, or betrayals by the leadership, of leftist parties (an argument repeated by those orthodox elements of the communist and anarcho-syndicalist sections of the workers’ movement). In contrast, the operaisti argued that the crisis had taken place because of the intense transformations, in the productive process and the composition of the labour force, introduced by the Scientific Organisation of Work. Thus, the use of the inquiry was intended to reveal a “new worker condition”. Looking at the condition of these new subjects, how they could reopen spaces of conflict and reinvigorate workers’ demands become a central theme for the operaisti’s practice and discourse."
Well, enough of this. On to this piece which I found at The Commune (one of my more favorite places these days).
the workers’ inquiry: what’s the point?
Joe Thorne looks at the history of the “workers’ inquiry” idea: from Marx, to Italy in the 1960s, to the present day. This fairly long article touches on debates amongst those influenced by operaismo about how we should relate to the modern workplace.
The point of these notes is: to understand what the term ‘workers’ inquiry means; to argue that it has come to mean at least two different things; to characterise the political objective of these different projects; and to evaluate both the importance of those objectives and how well they are met by the methods in question. The point is to articulate what place I believe the inquiry ought to have in the ideas and practice of revolutionaries. It will also say something about research into class composition more generally.
The term “workers’ inquiry”, its basis in Marxist orthodoxy, and its association with lengthy surveys (100, questions, no less), originates in an 1880 proposal by Karl Marx.
The questions included:
The most obvious reason for caution about any plan drawing inspiration from Marx’s is that there is no record of any responses to his proposal, nor any suggestion that it lead anywhere. This is reason for caution, no more than that: but as we shall see, it was not to be the first time.
The most important modern inspiration for the workers’ inquiry is dissident Italian Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s. Originating in the Quaderni Rossi journal, the idea was taken up by elements in Potere Operaio, Autonomia and Lotta Continua.
Within Quaderni Rossi there were disagreements about the method and purpose of the inquiry.
This latter tendency didn’t just have a research agenda. They had a tactical agenda, part of which was that the inquiry needed to be a workers’ self-inquiry. It implied that not only would the researcher be immersed (working, living) within the research context in question, other workers would be engaged in the process, not merely as objects of research (respondents to questionnaires), but co-researchers themselves.
This (dialogical, organisational, tactical) aspect of the workers’ inquiry is also the one emphasised by Raniero Panzieri:
Why inquiry? Wasn’t it sufficient simply to develop the correct line, and hand out leaflets to the workers telling them what they should do? What set the inquiry method apart from this approach was the recognition that beneath the official rhetoric of demands over pay and perhaps hours, workers had other concerns about their work.
A historian of the period, Robert Lumley, gives an example of a woman worker who had been complaining “to Communist Party officials that they had not understood the problems on the shop-floor (tens of women had been suffering fainting fits and hysteria because of the pressure of work, but the union agreed to compensation rather than a reduction of line-speeds).” She recounts:
The Tribe of Moles
Whilst we are discussing the Italian Marxism of that period, we would do well to mention Sergio Bologna’s text The Tribe of Moles, which seeks to explain the explosions in student militancy in 1977 as an expression of a specific process of class recomposition. As far as I am aware, the text was never described as a workers’ inquiry: but it is nonetheless considered important and influential as a text which addresses the question of the relationship between class composition and struggle.
Bologna’s objective was “to uncover the new class composition underlying these struggles, and to indicate the first elements of a programme to advance and further generalise the movement.” In the conclusion to the text, he anticipated and replied to a particular line of criticism:
But there were no new ‘Mirafioris’, not then, and not yet. Over the next decade, the Italian revolutionary left dissolved its own organisations. What informal organisation was left was smashed, and many of its best militants – Sofri, Negri – are still in prison.
We should be clear about the logic of Bologna’s programme, and how it relates to subsequent historical developments. Bologna’s idea was that the sort of research he was doing could help reorientate revolutionary activists to focus on those areas of the economy which were most capable of producing militancy and radicalism. It provided, was able to provide, no such assistance. In general, this idea – that we can find and target the most important sectors with militant activity is, if not useless, problematic. There are arguably cases when such orientation was effective, including the decision of the Russian Bolsheviks to concentrate their activity on urban factory workers. But it is not very often possible to identify the next “mass vanguard”. For example, it seems unlikely that it would have been possible, in early November 2010 (unless through an organisation with exceptionally deep roots), to identify 16-18 school and college students as the subjects of the next great upsurge. Last summer, we asked Sheila Cohen to write an article for our paper “to look at the broader political sweep of how changes in class structure and composition interact – or don’t – with issues of consciousness and resistance.” Her conclusion? “Mostly the story is one of almost complete unpredictability.”
Decomposing the inquiry I: Wildcat
Under the heading of the workers’ inquiry, a great diversity of approaches to research and writing have developed: the Wildcat group in Germany being the best known and most committed proponents of these techniques, research models, and political concerns. It is possible to argue that these approaches tend more to Bologna’s, as discussed above, than they do to the original idea of the workers’ inquiry. In any case, they include:
It is obvious what these have to do with class-composition. But it is not obvious that they should be discussed under the same category as the workers’ inquiry, which seems to be a very different sort of project – one in which revolutionaries not only investigate proletarian reality, but engage other proletarians in that process of collective evaluation, as part of a process of promoting communist ideas and workers’ struggle. Nonetheless, as we will see, such projects are often promoted under the banner of the workers’ inquiry, and by those who do refer explicitly to the inquiry idea.
But what are the functions claimed for these different techniques? One is similar to that claimed by Bologna for his approach in The Tribe of Moles. As the proposal which lead to Kolinko put it, “we want to attack the question of whether there is a broader tendency of capitalist development and the possibilities for communism behind this formation of a new type of worker.” Or as they said elsewhere, “Investigation means first of all to find out how we can fight against work and exploitation together with other workers in a particular place and how we can develop a form of power at the same time.”
I have explained above why I am sceptical about this approach, and if anything the scepticism seems validated by the Kolinko experience. What more do we know, now, about the possibilities for communism? What more do we know about how we can fight and develop a form of power? Not much.
Ironically, I believe it is possible to argue that, while proponents of the modern workers’ inquiry officially emphasise the importance of listening to workers, and the importance of rigorously evaluating militant experience, these values are not present within their attitude to their own practice and theory of the workers’ enquiry. A member of The Commune, a call centre worker, has reviewed Prol-Position’s Call-centre, inquiry, communism (Kolinko) publication.
A review in Aufheben 12 (2004, not online) makes some similar points. If the idea is that the workers’ inquiry is a qualitatively different and better way to engage with workers than the standard methods of the left, isn’t it a subject of some concern that workers don’t find the texts which are produced, or the process of research, more engaging, empowering, or useful? Isn’t it of similar concern that the interviewees often find the interviews themselves disempowering, even didactic (through leading questions)? Why haven’t young workers in the recomposing class been attracted to the workers’ inquiry? Enough young workers must have come across the Prol-Position researchers in the course of producing the book to test this: was there any noticeable attraction toward involvement in Prol-Position, Wildcat, or workers’ inquiry in general. Why has Wildcat, whilst promoting this approach – which allegedly brings it closer to the working class – been less good at attracting radical workers than Trotskyist organisations, or even spreading its ideas? Could it be that workers are sometimes more interested in general political ideas, or practical ways to build their confidence in action, than microscopic accounts of empirical reality? Is this wrong? Who says? Should the Prol-Position activists have tried to promote answers on the level of organisation? Would those who participated be in favour of doing that another time? If not, why not?
Decomposing the inquiry II: no politics without inquiry?
Ed Emery, a prominent partisan of the inquiry idea made a proposal in 1995 for a workers’ inquiry project in Britain, entitled No politics without inquiry! The practical objective of Emery’s proposal was described as follows:
The political need which this programme was supposed to meet was described as follows.
In other words, much like Bologna and Wildcat (whose approach he explicitly seeks to emulate), Emery is conceiving research, inquiry as an aid to a grand strategy for revolutionary militants. Panzieri’s idea of the inquiry as an organising, project is absent from the proposal. However, if Emery’s approach to the function of the inquiry seems somewhat derivative, his conception of its potential diversity of form and subject matter is creative and interesting. He asks:
The bibliography lists such luminaries as Tony Cliff and Mao Tse Tung as practitioners of the workers’ inquiry, each in their own way. As far as I know, much like Marx’s proposal, and much like the proposal presented to the 2010 ‘Meltdown’ conference hosted by our organisation, this proposal didn’t get anywhere.
Recomposing the inquiry: workers’ stories and faceless resistance
Young militants of the Swedish group Kämpa Tillsammans have developed their own method of inquiry, which does not rely on the lengthy interviews typically used by Wildcat. For the purpose of this review, their experience is worth quoting at length.
Perhaps, in this idea of workers’ stories, we can see a return to the Quaderni Rossi conception of the inquiry: workers’experience as a means to involve workers in general (not only revolutionary workers!) in the promotion of class consciousness, political organisation, and perhaps one day – struggle. One implicit criticism of the Wildcat approach by Kämpa Tillsammans is that the formal interview process is somewhat alienating and boring. This view is also expressed by a member of The Commune who has been interviewed as part of a Wildcat inquiry.
It would be interesting to know what a workplace intervention or organising drive based around stories and first person accounts would be like. Although at least one member of our organisation is currently involved in such a project, the lack of access to materials from past interventions makes it difficult to ascertain the existence of such a project, and evaluate its relative impact. We do have access to a bulletin and leaflets produced by Big Flame – a British group which drew on the influence of the Italian Marxist traditions we have discussed – but in fact they are fairly ‘political’ and ‘objective’ in their tone, although less so than the (admittedly, much shorter) bulletins of Trotskyist groups such as Workers’ Fight. For an example of something a bit different, see page 11 of the Ford Halewood bulletin, which contains a letter and a poem. My impression is that the Big Flame interventions had a less didactic character, not because of the style of the texts, but because of how they were organised: with open editorial meetings, and because of the time which was put in at the factory gate listening to workers, and basing their politics faithfully on the submerged aspirations of the most militant layers. It’s hard to imagine any effective organising based only on passively reflecting mass subjectivity, rather than by bringing to the fore particular elements.
An intermission: The American worker
Well before Quaderni Rossi, a young American factory worker wrote about his experiences at work. What he and his fellow workers felt, smelled, saw, said, and thought. It was published in 1947, the first half of The American Worker. In the introduction, he gives us some idea of the power which dragging working class experience out of the shadows, and placing it in the light can have.
The whole pamphlet is worth reading. It burns with working class life, and we can see why a factory worker at the time would have lost sleep to read it. It doesn’t quite fit into the conception a of workers’ inquiry as a process through which to organise, but as a text it clearly has the potential to act as an organising or consciousness raising tool, just by dint of being hard hitting, raw, well written, and most importantly backed up by a clear intention to distribute it to relevant people by a political network (in this case the Johnson-Forest Tendency) with the means to do so. In our paper, we’ve carried a few reports from comrades on their work, or other aspects of their lives. We should do more of this; but seek to take a leaf out of Paul Romano’s book: trying to find something in the experience of work which does point in the way of communism. As for how he does it, I can’t detail that here, it’s necessary to read the text. However, Ria Stone, who provides a sort of theoretical after-word, concludes like this:
The inquiry in context: the contributions of organising and politics
Quaderni Rossi’s inquiries, and those of their immediate political descendents, took place in a period of high and sustained class struggle. This was not incidental to the context in which the inquiry had such relevance, but – in Panzieri’s account – fundamental to it.
Such a warning should give us cause to be wary about what we can expect from an inquiry in a period of low class struggle; and therefore some of its limits as an approach to communist activism.
If we return to Robert Lumley’s account of the period, he argues that, alongside the emergence of previously submerged demands (assisted by Quaderni Rossi), an organising tradition based around politically educated militants was vital.
The emphasis in the passage is mine. The point is that it is necessary, in order to build a militant, working class communist movement, not mainly to enumerate the various reasons for our sense of disempowerment, which are many, but to assert that general truth: that the working class can, through its own action, change the world. This idea has a certain power to break through the fixed objectivity of the present moment. An understanding of the world as it is must constantly be subjected to the countervailing pressure of working class self-confidence; which does not always have a real, objective manifestation, but which we can assert only on the level of politics, and of our general, abstract understanding of the world. And indeed, that was the very point of the theory of proletarian autonomy, developed in Quaderni Rossi by Mario Tronti and others.
According to one militant who left the Communist Party in 1967:
My emphasis again: political education is vital; and not all politics flows from analyses of experience or class composition, much of it is based on general and abstract conviction. This is worth mentioning because is a tendency to see inquiry type politics as the crucial form of political activity: and that propaganda, political education, and agitation for action represent, in some sense, ideological and didactic diversions from the real business of politics. But if we return to look at the context in which the modern idea of the workers’ inquiry emerged, we can see the importance, to what happened next (the ‘creeping May’ period of intense class struggle, 1969 – 1976) of these very things. The explosive combination came when the new subjectivity broke through the limits of the old ways of doing things: but in that breaking through, militants took much of value with them:
Therefore, analysing the period which gave birth to the workers’ inquiry, we can say that we need: not only attention to the subterranean elements of proletarian consciousness, but also, no less vitally, political education, and effective organisers. We need to be interested in these elements as well.
Inquiry, research, and building a working class communist movement
The point of this text is to allow me to explain, coherently and in the context of the existing tradition, what competing strands I see in the idea of the “workers’ inquiry” (and, more generally, class-composition related research), and which of those strands I see as being valuable and important.
I have argued that there are two principle strands within the idea of the workers’ enquiry: the activist, militant strand, which engages workers as the subjects of research and action; and the strand which seeks to analyse class composition as an aid to the orientation of revolutionary militants. I argued, broadly, for a positive attitude toward the former (as one element in a broader agitational strategy), and a sceptical attitude toward the latter.
To be clear: the conception of the militant workers’ self-inquiry, articulated in the comments of Panzieri quoted above, I think is of tremendous political importance. It suggests a means of engaging with workers which is more dialogic than didactic. But how we integrate that dialogic intention into our organising will differ from time to time and place to place. I think that the workers’ stories idea of Kämpa Tillsammans is probably the most interesting, clearly articulated contemporary idea about how to approach that practically (and the aspect ofhumour is important!). I think that an inquiry which does not involve others – outside the existing communist layer – as active participants in setting the research agenda, and which does not integrate that with a project to promote militancy, will be of little usefulness; amounting to freelance academia, whether or not that is the intention. But this means we have to prioritise the question: in what forms, now, are workers interested in sharing their experiences? Or if they are not, most of all, interested in that, what are they interested in?
For these reasons, I am much more sceptical about the model of the very different “workers’ inquiry” promoted by Wildcat, which draws (as I see it) on a wholly different set of objectives, which I have suggested are drawn from Sergio Bologna’s interest in the changing structure of class composition as a potential guide to revolutionary orientation. So, I think when we talk about inquiry proposals, it is best we talk in very definite terms, and try to answer the question, first: how does it engage people beyond our organisation (and beyond the ranks of organised politicos) as active participants? (If it can’t, then isn’t that a sign that we ought to be doing something else instead, which can?) And second: what is its militant content? That is, what does it try to do on the level of political organisation?
So much for the workers’ inquiry. Is all research which does not fit this conception useless? No! As it happens, I find the idea of a study into the class-composition (and capitalist functioning) of a city such as Bristol fascinating, and I would be interested in working with others to develop a fairly full account of changing patterns of work and industry in Britain, as well as the British economy’s connection to the wider global one. My political motivation for this is that I want to understand the world that I live in, and I want other people to as well, although I’m not convinced either project would end up being able to inform anything on the level of strategy or propaganda. For this reason, I don’t grant any overwhelming priority to such projects.
For example, let’s take the proposal – currently being considered by some comrades – for an enquiry into the capitalism and class composition in Bristol. If the idea of the Bristol study got to the point of talking to workers, it could have real organising implications, which would be fantastic. But this sort of research does not begin from working class experience – in the case of Bristol, for instance, it begins with asking questions such as: what industries are where? Where do workers live? What is the relation of those companies to global supply chains?
So what importance do I think this sort of research has? I think it does have some importance, but not such importance that I think it ought to be a major drain on time, certainly not to the extent that it competes with workplace activity, in which collective self-inquiry and the promotion of militant activity ought to seamlessly merge. Unlike the self-inquiry proper, I don’t think this ‘objective’ analysis of changing class structure is even necessarily more of a priority than answering questions such as – what is the function of trade unions in Britain today? Or – what is the function of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the modern world system? Ultimately, I think any serious organisation must be able to address these ‘big’ political questions, as well as know about the structure of employment on the docks. They are both necessary.
Postscript: the inquiry and our organisation
How do these attitudes relate to the recent proposals a number of London comrades have made about our paper and organisation? In a number of ways. First of all, because if we want to promote any method at all – whether it’s the workers’ inquiry or armed struggle – it’s necessary to organise to grow as a method of, and with the aim of, doing so. There’s no point having a great idea such as the inquiry, if there’s no attempt to promote it. Secondly, because having such a small organisation and such a small circulation paper doesn’t provide the basis for having a genuine class conversation, which would imply a certain diversity of experiential input, and ideally a certain plurality of involvement in certain industries, areas and job types – such that one can expect a reply from others informed by their own experience. Thirdly, because, to return to the original point of the workers’ inquiry – building a communist movement amongst workers’ – the workers’ inquiry isn’t the only way to do that. There are other methods, and neither Marx nor the Quaderni Rossi researchers pretended otherwise. Diffuse propaganda, political education, agitation for direct action and solidarity, as well as other forms of activity, also have a role. They have had for every remotely successful organisation in the past, and no doubt will in the future too.
 http://www.generation-online.org/t/tpanzieri.htm Note than insofar as the inquiry is meant to lead to a superior “theoretical formation”, it is by addressing “ambiguities” – or presumably, errors – in existing theory. The point is not to come up with theories about class composition in order to prove or disprove them. The point is to use studies of class composition or working class experience to address the questions which workers and revolutionaries are already asking, because they are implied by the political challenges of the moment.
 Fiat Mirafiori in Turin was the most important factory in developing the practice of workers’ autonomy, and hosted the most important of the worker-student assemblies, the movement around which produced Lotta Continua in 1969. What about now?http://cachef.ft.com/cms/s/0/3d897c94-1dce-11e0-badd-00144feab49a.html#axzz1MSZ9KC3D http://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2011-01-15/open-letter-from-the-workers-of-fiat-mirafiori Contra Bologna, the small factories didn’t turn out to be the next major site of struggle either.
 As I believe the comrades in Bristol are considering. . .
 A personal aside. I previously proposed that we base a pamphlet on student occupations around asking participants to give their own accounts of the occupations, and draw out what seemed important to them. Comrade L argued that we shouldn’t bother “scratching the issue” unless we use proper “research methods”. I think we should be prepared to see an approach based on soliciting stories as a method as worthwhile as a 100 question survey. It has some flaws, sure, but it also has the strength of recognising the subjectivity – in the jargon of 1960s Italian Marxism ‘encouraging the self-valorisation’ – of the participants, and their more equal agency in the inquiry process. At any rate, it isn’t a more eclectic approach than that proposed by Ed Emery, who wants to use photography and folk song!
 The Johnson-Forest Tendency was a split from Trotskyism in the US (at different times, both the Socialist Workers’ Party and the Workers’ Party) lead by C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs: its orientation can be identified as roughly ‘Marxist humanist’.