[ecrea] Politics of Workers’ Inquiry Conference Call

*Politics of Workers’ Inquiry Conference Call*
May 2-3, 2013 @ University of Essex
http://ephemeraweb.org/conference/index.htm

Workers’ inquiry is an approach to and practice of knowledge production 
that seeks to understand the changing composition of labor and its 
potential for revolutionary social transformation. It is the practice of 
turning the tools of the social sciences into weapons of class struggle. 
Workers’ inquiry seeks to map the continuing imposition of the class 
relation, not as a disinterested investigation, but rather to deepen and 
intensify social and political antagonisms.

Mario Tronti argues that weapons for working class revolt have always 
been taken from the bosses’ arsenal. But, has not it often been 
suggested, to use Audre Lorde’s phrasing, that it is not possible to 
take apart the master’s house with the master’s tools? While not 
forgetting Lorde’s question, it is clear that Tronti said this with good 
reason, for he was writing from a context where this is precisely what 
was taking place. Italian autonomous politics greatly benefited from 
borrowing from sociology and industrial relations – and by using these 
tools proceeded to build massive cycles of struggle transforming the 
grounds of politics.

Of these adaptations the most important for autonomist politics and 
class composition analysis is workers’ inquiry. Workers’ inquiry 
developed in a context marked by rapid industrialization, mass 
migration, and the use of industrial sociology to discipline the working 
class. Workers’ inquiry was formulated within autonomist movements as a 
sort of parallel sociology, one based on a radical re-reading of Marx 
and Weber against the politics of the communist party and the unions. 
While the practitioners of workers’ inquiry were often 
professionally-trained academics – especially sociologists – its 
proponents argued their research differs in important ways from 
‘engaged’ social science, and all varieties of industrial sociology, 
even if there are similarities. If bourgeois sociology sought to smooth 
over conflicts, and ‘critical’ sociology to expose these same conflicts, 
workers’ inquiry takes the contradictions of the labor process as a 
starting point and seeks to draw out these antagonisms into the 
formation of new radical subjectivities.

This is not to say that workers’ inquiry is an unproblematic endeavor. 
We remain skeptical that the weapons of managerial control can be 
cleanly re-appropriated without reproducing the very social world they 
were designed to take apart. For as Steve Wright argues, “the uncritical 
use of such tools has frequently produced a register of subjective 
perceptions which do no more than mirror the surface of capitalist 
social relations.” As the legacy of analytical Marxism reveals, 
imitation is never far removed from flattery, and at its worst moments, 
workers’ inquiry risks becoming its object of critique. To be fair there 
are disagreements among the proponents of workers’ inquiry over the 
limitations of drawing from the social sciences. But to continue the 
metaphor, like any potentially dangerous ‘weapon’, sociological 
techniques must be carefully examined, and when necessary, disabled.

Today we find ourselves at a moment when co-research, participatory 
action research, and other heterodox methods have been adopted by the 
academic mainstream, while managerial styles like TQM carry a faint echo 
of workers’ inquiry. In the contemporary firm workers are already 
engaged in self-monitoring, peer interviews, and the creation of 
quasi-autonomous ‘research’ units, all sanctioned by management. 
Workers’ inquiry is now part of the accepted social science repertoire: 
its techniques no longer seem dangerous, but familiar, at least at the 
methodological level. The bosses’ arsenal now includes weapons mimicking 
the style, if not the substance, of workers’ inquiry. And as George 
Steinmetz has suggested, while blatantly positivistic research styles 
have fallen out of favor, this obscures the ‘positivist unconscious’ 
that continues to interpellate even apparently anti-positivist 
methodologies.

The pioneers of workers’ inquiry argued researchers must work 
through/against the ambivalent relations of (social) science; now, there 
may be no other option.  Wherever there are movements organizing and 
addressing the horrors of capitalist exploitation and oppression, the 
specter of recuperation is never far behind. The point is not to deny 
these risks, but to the degree such dynamics confront all social 
movements achieving any measure of success. It is by working against and 
through them that recomposing radical politics becomes possible. Today 
workers’ inquiry remains, as Raniero Panzieri argues, a permanent 
reference point for autonomist politics, one that informs continuing 
inquiries into class composition. With this issue we seek to rethink 
workers’ inquiry as a practice and perspective, and through that to 
understand and catalyze emergent moments of political composition.

Keynotes from:
Anna Curcio, University of Messina
Matteo Mandarini, Queen Mary, University of London
Gigi Roggero, University of Bologna

Contributors
We invite presentations and interventions that update the practices of 
workers’ inquiry for the present moment of class de-/recomposition. Can 
we develop, taking up Matteo Pasquinelli’s suggestion, a form of 
workers’ inquiry applied to cognitive and biopolitical production? The 
very possibility of a workers’ inquiry begs reconsideration when 
official unemployment figures drift toward 50% among sectors of the 
industrial working class.

We are particularly interested in research that expands and/or 
deconstructs the project of workers’ inquiry, or that transposes 
workers’ inquiry onto unconventional terrain such as archival research 
and cultural studies. Additionally, we encourage contributors to include 
a substantial reflection on method, possibly addressing some of the 
tensions outlined above and engaging with recent debates about method 
and measure.

Please send proposals of no more then 500 words 
(conference /at/ ephemeraweb.org) by February 28th, 2013.

Attempts will be made to keep registration costs low, particularly for 
those without funding, and will be run on a sliding scale basis.

The conference will be preceded by PhD workshop on workers’ inquiry that 
will take place on May 1st (and will be free for PhD students to 
attend). For more information on this e-mail (sshuka /at/ essex.ac.uk).

Sponsored by ephemera and the Essex Centre for Work, Organization, and 
Society