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Response to J. Rancire, "Le Mythe de L'Artisan" Author(s): Christopher H. Johnson Source: International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 24 (Fall, 1983), pp. 21-25 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Labor and Working-Class, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27671470 . Accessed: 28/12/2013 22:02
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International Labor and Working Class History Number 24, Fall 1983, pp. 21-25

to J. Ranci?re, Response "LeMythe de L'Artisan" Christopher H.

Wayne

Johnson

State University

This is a curious essay. On one hand, it has something very important to say about the problems posed by applying the methodology of cultural anthropology to historical analysis. On the other, it develops a polemic against a view of the founda
tions of early worker militance in France that, as far as I know, no one currently

writing in the field espouses. I also think there ismerit to his argument about the uses to which the "artisan tradition" has been put by anti-Marxist (largely Proud to justify, intentionally or not, a crypto honian) writers on the labor movement
Fascist perspective.

But let us begin with my complaint. Ranci?re tells us that somebody out there thinks that the greater a worker's sense of professional pride, the more prestigious the craft, the more skilled the work, and the deeper and more complex the corporate traditions, the more likely he or she is to be militant. This is the general position that he attacks, although he adds that deskilling?but only deskilling?acts, this view, as a catalyst for the worker to carry out acts of protest. Who
be sure Georges Lefranc, Petainiste, came close. Unfortunately,

according to says that? To

historian

the only

cited any place in the vicinity of the pages where the attack on this myth unfolds is Christopher Johnson. Now I am really only cited for having shown that a dispro portionate number of Icarians were tailors and shoemakers (he forgot menuisiers), but on the off-chance that he associates his myth with my work, I thought it worthwhile to reread what I had written about such matters.1 Itwas fairly interest ing reading, and convinced me that I was not his man. In looking at who became Icarians I had tried to find out what it was that made somany tailors, shoemakers, and joiners take an interest in Cabet's collectivist communism. Since, for the most part, individual biographies could not be recon structed (although the letters to Cabet preserved at the Biblioth?que historique de la Ville de Paris provided helpful hints), it seemed reasonable to investigate the variety of problems having an impact on the work-life of tailors, shoemakers, and joiners in general, especially those in Paris, but elsewhere as well if information could be found. Why, Ranci?re might ask, on their work-life? These were people who wished to transform society and end the exploitation of man by man under the brutal system of economic competition. Their work-life was probably what made them

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22

ILWCH,

24, Fall

1983

poor and exploited, I reasoned. (Apparently Icarians were different from Saint Simonian workers, who mostly seemed to want to become writers and butlers and things like that in order to escape the working class.) I pulled together a great deal of information about their work and came up with the following. These were crafts that were overcrowded and poor (shoemakers were the worst off), other elite crafts shunned them (and other compagnons attacked shoemakers),2 but above all they were crafts whose structures were being transformed by the impact of capital. Yes, indeed, it amounted to a loss of professional status, and what this meant was less pay for more work, work that was more routinized, specialized, and boring, and work more subject to sudden speedup, then long layoff. Tailors did indeed work for had no choice; the imperatives of a rapidly changing ready-made merchants?they capitalist economy forced them to. And of course they rued their deskilling, but they rued itmuch more because itmade them poor, bored, and physically insecure than trauma due to lost pride. The last was there, by virtue of some psychological certainly, and dozens of Icarians wrote Cabet that they, "the pariahs of society," in their dignity." What I talked about was the global, nevertheless "felt wounded multi-faceted process of proletarianization, of being de-artisanized. These rebels and
dreamers were no longer artisans, at least in the way Ranci?re uses the term.

The reader will also note that when Ranci?re cites discussions of the "low" the remarks are from the 1840s?the very time the position of worker-tailors, was ready-made revolution having itsmost profound impact. (I also advise Ranci?re to reread the Enquete of the Parisian Chamber of Commerce of 1848 on the a some have been it whitewash for industries, but tailoring industry; may bourgeois it is a gold mine of information on the devastating impact of ready-made on tailors.) What Ranci?re leaves out of his entire discussion, amazingly, is the impact of capitalism. One has the impression that shoemakers and tailors had always been the maligned or casual, "easy" crafts he describes. What made them become militant when they did? What else but the explosive consequences of emergent industrial capitalism?3 Ranci?re's argument that "militant activity is perhaps inversely proportional to the organic cohesion of the trade" is no doubt correct?it is precisely William SewelPs point in his excellent study of the trades of Marseille.4 Even so, however, this does not mean that the lower orders of the old corporative world had no pride of craft and sense of tradition. That even the poor shoemakers fought for and won the right to their own compagnonnage indicates that they possessed a corporative consciousness. The very ability of journeyman tailors to organize trade unions, and they were the first trade to push toward regional and even national union forma tions,5 indicates the pre-existence of corporative ties among them. More important still, under the disintegrative impact of la confection, overcrowded trades, declining
wages, and uncertain employment, one could easily imagine happier, more harmon

ious days in the past. For tailoring, at any rate, there was in fact a kind of golden age of the bespoke trade during the Empire and early Restoration. Proletarianization thus became all the more bitter, and to fight back was natural.

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Response

by Johnson

23

The second section of this paper raises some fundamental issues. Most impor tant is the need to study career patterns during this era. Ranci?re questions how meaningful momentary occupational designations are and gives some examples of changes undergone by individuals. More important would be the systematic examination of ?tat civil records to reconstitute occupational changes for men and women. I have done some of this for the factory town of Lod?ve and one can see clearly the frenetic jumping from job to job as the woolens industry there collapsed in the 1860s and 1870s, while little change occurred in the more stable 1830s and 1840s. Ranci?re's point on the glorification of a craft and its traditions when one is facing difficulty staying in it (Perdiguier) is an original, important insight. The obverse is also true: people who are satisfied in their work neither trumpet its virtues nor protest?why should they? But the glorifiers have definitely had an influence, and their paeans to skilled work and craft traditions are a peculiar and virulent form of false conscious ness that Proudham made into an ideology and passed on to later generations of petit bourgeois like himself who did provide the ideology of work for Vichy France. That evolution is easy enough to discern. It frankly justifies a capitalist model. Ranci?re rightly criticizes use of Poulot's Le Sublime "to give credence to certain descriptions of workers' practices which transform political biases into ethnological traits," and points out that Poulot was above all a Gambettist politician who sought to discredit the new worker militants of the late sixties. This is quite true, but one needs to go further, for what Poulot does with the artisan ideologies of the 1840s is a tour deforce. In one way or another he appropriates virtually the entire corpus of
non-revolutionary revolutionary artisan artisan socialism and turns it into a quite coherent anti capitalism.

mold

He reorients artisan ideology away from its original cooperative, fraternal and sets it in a competitive one while retaining almost all the old panaceas: political democracy as the foundation stone, generalized primary education fol lowed by solid vocational training in state-financed schools, chambres syndicales, organized hiring practices through craft-run hiring halls, praise for the institutions and values of the compagnonnage, reformed Conseils des Prudhommes, and the of financed lynch-pin, cooperation production by cooperative banques du travail. The heart of its value system is the dignity of manual work and its profound significance in defining the human essence. Then there iswhat Poulot is against?his
entraves a la question sociales. Besides sublimisme, they are the saber, or military

spending, the cassock, or priestly power, and the "toga," or the unjust judiciary?all worthy, honored subjects of artisan socialist wrath in the 1840s. And, beneath it all for Poulot, lurked the grand Saint-Simonian principle of the unity of les industrials?all
productive members of society, masters and workers alike?versus les oisifs.

Although he firmly rejects les th?ories (preferring as he says, practical applica the fils de Dieu for their tion), Poulot makes it clear where he stands?condemning
preference for an Esquiros, a Cabet, or a Louis Blanc over "the system of Proudhon,

of which he understands nothing." Poulot's world-view was formed in the context of '48, but he was obviously sorting out his choices among them.

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24

ILWCH, 24, Fall

1983

Let us take one proposal and see what he does with it. His ideas on appren for whom the function of ticeship owe a great deal to the editors of LAtelier professional education provided by the state was to combine a "polytechnical" education received in school with a more specialized training that only the work end of apprenticeship in the workshop?and shop could provide. Poulot's goal?the the creation of highly specialized training in state schools immediately following primary school, while it seemed to be the realization of an ancient dream (and Georges Duveau curiously treats it this way), was in fact to remove the apprentice from the clutches, not of the master, but of les sublimes. Moreover, unlike the focus on "instruction mutuelle" so dear to the Atelieristes, (whose state instructors would come from the ranks of the workers and who would emphasize constant inter assistance among the students), Poulot stresses competition: "Apprenticeship with out rivalry is an apprenticeship that goes nowhere." Moreover, the well-trained apprentice will one day be a foreman. Despite the rhetoric glorifying am?tier for all and quoting Rousseau, Poulot seeks to form a reliable elite of workers who will
counter the influence of class-conscious workers. Artisan socialism becomes artisan

capitalism.
plots

It is instructive perhaps that Blanqui condemned

the worker in a trade."

?coles professionelles

as

to "incarcerate

The fundamental point is that this was all possible?artisan "socialism" bore it its own negation and here Ranci?re and I (and Bernard Moss) are in agreement. The larger question, of course, iswhether itwas also inevitable. When I wrote the article on the tailors, I was much intrigued by the "worker control" movement in this country and was familiar with French variants from Friedmann to within Touraine. This explains its equivocal conclusion. But having watched the promise of the former be absorbed by the Quality of Work Life productivity boondoggle (though QWL does present some interesting possibilities for worker political educa tion) and having read Michael Rose's brilliant attack on the Sociologie du travail the anti-Marxist character of the entire tradition became increasingly movement, clear.6 Moreover, while skilled workers, the inheritors of the artisan tradition, have often played a critical role as catalysts in the development of broader labor agita tion,7 they have historically stopped short of the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society. As James Hinton put it so neatly: "The fact that itwas only the theory of the struggle for soviet power, and not the struggle itself, that arose out of the experience of the [British] Workers' Committees is to be explained partly by the and the unavoidable of economic power of the shop stewards' abrupt collapse movement when the war was finished. More fundamentally, however, it is to be explained by the ultimate failure of the craft tradition to yield up its revolutionary ore without the clinging dross of exclusiveness."8 So itwas also, itmust be remembered, with the egalitarian journeymen tailors of the Clichy cooperative during the Second Republic who, when pressed with orders in 1849, rejected the notion of taking in new members, but hired out work to
sweated labor. The "clinging dross" was always there in cooperative ventures?

witness the distressing personnel policies of the Verrerie Ouvri?re d'Albi created by socialist glassworkers driven out after the Carmaux strike of 1895.9

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Response

by Johnson

25

It is one thing to stress this problem, and quite another to call Pelloutier or Monatte proto-Fascists and to condemn the entire anarcho-syndicalist movement in the same breath. Great numbers of syndicalists, Wobblies in the U.S., shop-steward activists in Britain and Germany, Gramscians in Italy, and revolutionary syndicalists in Spain and France, joined the Third International and were welcomed by Lenin. All kinds of research on this problem is needed, but broadsides and bombast get us
nowhere.

Finally, let me register my full agreement with Ranci?re on the problem of and how to interpret what they write. I think that they workers-become-intellectuals reflect very little about the lives of workers, whom they "represent" no more than Eric Hoffer represented the American dock workers during the 1950s, and to use their utterances as anthropologists would their interviews and recordings is simply wrong. They are interesting in and of themselves and should be treated as writers expressing points of view. How well they document their assertions, develop their arguments, or communicate their yearnings should be judged just as we would the writings of Mill or Hugo. Otherwise, as he says, we commit a kind of "intellectual
racism."

We are all in Ranci?re's debt, despite his Olympian tone and quixotic pursuits, for he has focussed attention on the need for greater methodological rigor and more careful source criticism in the study of the early worker movement in France. and Moreover, we are hereby cautioned to beware of both creeping Thompsonism insidious Althusserism.

NOTES
1. I also Workers," Europe included my "Patterns of Proletarianization: Parisian Tailors and Lod?ve Woolens in Nineteenth-Century 175-84.

in John M.

(New York, 2. See especially Utopian Communism in France, 181-82, inwhich of the reasons behind worker adherence to Icaranism with a description

Merriman, ed., Consciousness 1979). The Main section in Utopian

and Class Experience Communism is pages

I conclude

the entire discussion of the grim and harried life of

an Icarian journeyman shoemaker. 3. For Karl Marx's discussion of the proletarianization see Capital (New York, of the handicrafts, 1936), Vol. I, 395-404. One must also read the superb book by Ronald Aminzade, Class, Politics, and a Study of Mid-Nineteenth Early Industrial Capitalism, Century Toulouse (Albany, 1981), especially his concluding chapter. 4. Sewell, "La classe ouvri?re de Marseille sous la Seconde R?publique: structure sociale et Coriot, social (July 1971), 27-63. He even uses the terms "open" and comportement politique," Mouvement "closed" trades and finds tailors and shoemakers in the former group, portefaix on the docks in the latter. 5. Octave Festy, "Dix ans d'histoire corporative des ouvriers tailleurs d'habits (1830-1840)," Revue d'histoire des doctrines Servants 6. Rose, et sociale, V (1912), 166-99. ?conomique Power? Sociologie du Travail of Post-Industrial The Logic of Solidarity: Artisans in Modem France (White

Plains, N.Y., 1979). 7. Michael Hanagan, Towns, 1871-1914

and Industrial Workers 1973), 337. 1974), 186.

in Three French

8. Hinton, 9. Joan Scott, The Glassworkers

(Urbana, 1980). The First Shop Stewards' Movement of Carmaux

(London,

(Cambridge, Mass.,

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