Workers as Political Theorists

Our proposal stems from two problems concerning contemporary political theory: first, work is a marginalised concept in political theory, with the recent exception of the development of theories aiming to democratise the workplace; second, theories of work engage mainly with the writings of philosophers. Recent theoretisations in political theory have shown the utility of engaging in theoretical questions while having “an ethnographic sensibility” and through the methods of GNT (grounded normative theory). Our proposal shares with GNT the “attentiveness to the systematic inclusion of a range of voices and ways of knowing” while affirming a strong link with History. Our engagement with history is nevertheless quite different: indeed while historians of political thought and political theorists engage with theorists of the past, we privilege specific political contexts and writings by workers that have a theoretical significance; this methodological approach is grounded on the “strong objectivity” of standpoint theorists that we aim to achieve by including the voices of the workers and engaging with their writings not only as pieces of historical significance but as theoretical texts which deserve attention and are subject to multiple interpretations. These writings allow us to rethink key concepts of the political philosophy of work (exploitation, democracy, participation, self-management, wages, servitude) and specific work configurations (factory work and worker condition, agricultural work, domestic work, etc.). The workers' texts thus question the way political theorists work and the concepts they forge, often at a distance from exploited labour itself. This method is deeply influenced by Jacques Rancière’s works on the socialisms of 1830’s and on the “parole ouvrière” (the words of the worker). Our paper - which stems from collective reflections of the ANR group THEOVAIL - will employ two empirical case studies to show the conceptual diversity that emerges when doing political theory through the writings of workers. Firstly, a few selected interventions of some domestic servants in the feminist journal The woman worker at the beginning of the 20th century develop what could be a theory of service as work and of society as based on the principle of reciprocity where “it is the privilege of all [workers] to serve the common good” as one worker put it. These interventions not only contrast with mainstream feminist theorists that argue that domestic work is work but also offer a quite different conception of the place of work in a political community. Secondly, we will focus on the 1968s, especially through a confrontation between texts of "établis" (intellectuals who decided to work in factories for political reasons) and texts written by "real" workers (factory diaries, published texts, trade-union archives etc.). It will show to what extent the editorial and political context of the post-1968 years constitutes a laboratory for identifying the transformation of discourses on work and how these texts offer new insights for political theory. It is then also a question of knowing what it changes for political thought (and theories of work) when the masses enter the scene.