This semester I have the very good fortune of teaching a graduate course in the History of Theory and Criticism at Memphis College of Art. (Check out my syllabus here and the class blog here.) For their final projects, my students are required to employ one of the theories we studied during the semester to present a thorough critical analysis of a single artwork. In last night’s seminar, one student presented a Marxist analysis of the 1897 etching to your left, March of the Weavers by Käthe Kollwitz, This piece was one in an extended series of works by Kollwitz, inspired in part by Emile Zola’s Germinal and depicting the uprising of Silesian weavers on the eve of the revolution of 1848. I was struck by the fact that, throughout our seminar discussion last night, we all consistently referred to the figures in Kollwitz’s etching as “workers”– this despite the fact that the title of Kollwitz’s piece explicitly indicates that they are a particular ilk of workers, namely, “weavers.” We all clearly shared some implicit, generic recognition of what representatives of the category “workers” look like. We knew who the workers were, what they represented, what they meant, what they stood for and what they opposed, how we were permitted and/or forbidden to talk about them.
Now, to be fair, we all knew that Kollwitz’s etching was a mid-19th century Prussian artwork, and we were discussing it solidly within the frame of Marxian critical theory, so perhaps the emergence of our common sense of “the worker” was not all that remarkable. Nevertheless, it gave me pause to note (to myself, at least) that no matter how hard I tried, I was not able to easily call to mind the image of a “worker” in my own time, or at least not one that I could suppose, with any confidence, would be more or less identical to the images others in the room might call to mind. The image of “the worker,” whether realistic or propagandistic, was a fulcrum of the last two hundred years, a point on which the lever of political sympathies was supported and on which political action pivoted. It was an image that galvanized and united as much as it divided and segregated. It incited and inspired, horrified and terrified. There is hardly a political ideal since the Industrial Revolution that has not at some point, through some greater or lesser degree of manipulation, made the image of the worker work toward its effort to grasp at something universally true,
But what does “the worker” look like in the 21st century? Would we all recognize him or her? Does his or her work look like “work” to all of us? Or, conversely, does our work look like something that “the worker” might do?
I came home and searched Google images for “workers” late last night after my seminar. To no one’s surprise, I suspect, Google served up nary a picture of sickle or scythe, no assembly lines, no field crews, no faces aged-too-early or bodies carried-too-heavily, no huddled masses yearning for anything in particular, even less so for anything in common. Rather, I got images like the one to your left. A group of smiling people, happy workers, diverse in terms of occupation (if not at all in racial representation), but otherwise in every way a piece of advertisement art or, worse, of algorithmic art. This image of workers is not meant to incite or inspire so much as it is meant to not offend. It is an image of “the whole” qua “aggregate of the each”; it is collection, not a collective. These are not a revolutionary people.
Occupational hyper-specialization in the 21st century workforce has diffracted the very idea of a proletariat, of a class of workers, and has made it increasingly difficult to reassemble it as an assembly. We have a hard time imagining (and imaging) “the worker” because s/her is not, by virtue of his or her stubborn resistance to universalizable representation, identifiable to us, for us or, most importantly, as us. This was made evident to me in the course of my seminar last night, but it also confirmed a long-standing suspicion I’ve had about why it is sometimes so difficult to teach Marx to Millennials. They have no image of “the worker” with which they can identify. In fact, to whatever extent they have a working, ideologically functional image of “the worker” at all, it is Kollwitz’s worker or some other 19th century image. Those people— weavers, coal miners, factory or field laborers– are “workers,” and they exhaust all of our imaginative capabilities for conjuring an image of the class, My Millennial-students are not weavers or coal miners or factory or field laborers. They’re “pre-professionals.” They’re in college,first and foremost, to become something, anything, other than “workers.”
Over the years, I’ve developed a number of strategies aimed at disabusing my Millennials of their illusions about work. But it was only this semester, when I had the good fortune to sit in a room of students who are, who intend to be and who will work as artists that I realized an entirely new strategy:
We need to re-imagine The Worker for the 21st century. There is no revolution without art.
3 comments on “Missing: An Image of “The Worker” Today”
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15This is really insightful. I noticed sometime ago that in the films of the eighties, in particular those coming of age films that so thoroughly influenced our generation, there is an overt antagonism toward the blue collar worker and an idealization of *either* white collar success or artistic/intellectual integrity, which inevitably brought with it a lack of material success but a triumph of individuality. The message was clear enough: true worth, whether material or spiritual, could never be found in the life of labor, particularly blue collar labor. That the image of workers today is of a collection of "career" types, all smiling and assured in their personal identities, and not of a collective of weary bodies suffering beside one another, without individuality (and all that is supposed to come with it), without power, and without hope, is a testament to the endurance of that ideological prejudice. It is not a coincidence that those films were being made during the years of the Thatcher/Reagan revolution. And the divide between those who have "escaped" that life (the blue collar life), and those who didn't and who never wanted to, has been masterfully exploited by the Right. It's not a wonder that many of the working people in our society don't even recognize themselves as working class. There's a genuine ideological inability to identify with "the worker."
@Fred: I agree with all of the above. What I'm really wondering in this piece is to what extent the "inability to identify with 'the worker'" that you note could be aided in some way by making a real attempt to reimagine the image of the worker. Maybe that's a lost cause (for the ideological reasons you mention) but I hope it isn't.
I do think that some gains have been made towards breaking through that ideological block — thanks, of course, to the centralization of wealth and the consequences of government supported "too big to fail" institutions. The occupy movement was effective in creating some sense of unity amongst the masses, including people in the upper middle class. Some, though just not enough, and certainly not enduring enough. But I think there might be an even greater barrier to the reception of a re-imagined image of the worker. It may well be that images themselves can no longer bear the weight of political relevance. And if that's true, I wonder what medium if any would be capable to accomplishing that sense of collectivity, vis a vis the pathos of the collected.