This essay was originally published in Another Gaze 04 (March 2020)
i.
Your colleagues probably won’t want to strike until, somehow, they do. The shibboleth of organising in the workplace is to escort them to that decision by way of a semi-scripted conversation that “finds their issue”, honing in with the blundering zeal of a blind buzzard. The strategy belies a fragile if pragmatic logic: there is no single issue that binds us all together – no smoking-gun exploitation, no most basal oppression – but instead a great tangle of individual concerns that dovetail, crest, converge, and taper into generalisable slogans on picket signs. Concrete though the workings of workplace exploitation might be in your head, when it comes to such conversations, the power to explain proves elusive. Perhaps it takes something other than well-reasoned political conversation to tip the scales.
Plucking at the secret strings of a near-stranger’s predilection is one way to get bodies on the picket lines, but such tactics can also seem futile in the current political climate. Today’s labour force has been shaped and weakened by decades of scorched-earth, union-busting policies, an operation undertaken by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher alike in the heyday of neoliberal reform. Their administrations’ systematic and strategic erosion of union power has served not only to inhibit cultural memory of a more robust trade unionism – the total number of union members in the United States peaked in 1979, two years before Regan took office – but to sever unions from political activity altogether.
Unlike her predecessors’ gradual, reformist approach to destabilising union power, under Thatcher unions were abruptly depoliticised, delimited, and defanged. Her government passed laws that loosened workers’ rights, allowing them to be fired or replaced if they went on strike and legally restricting solidarity with the 1980 Employment Act.1 In 1990 this was taken even further with the official illegalisation of sympathy or solidarity action, whose effects we saw play out on the picket lines last autumn during the University and College Union (UCU) strikes for pensions and fair pay. (Though we got many solidarity honks, a postal truck driver only begrudgingly crossed our picket line to make deliveries, explaining that his union – in step with the law – forbade sympathy striking.)
Things were equally grim in the United States in the 1980s, with Reagan creating dangerous precedents by firing unionised federal air traffic controllers who went on strike, slimming down the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and undercutting bargaining power by employing managers to the National Labor Relations Board. The effects of these reforms continue into 2020: the total number of union members has hit a record low in the United States and United Kingdom, with an inverse rise in the numbers of professional ‘consultants’ who union-bust for a living.2 In many cases unions act not as political bodies, but as liaisons between workers and management. They have undoubtedly lost leverage. You might understand why your colleagues don’t see much of a point.
Taking into account the progressively precarious nature of the labour force – the expanding numbers of those who are unorganised, temporary, freelance, casualised – union membership and industrial action have also come to be seen as something like a privilege for the gainfully employed middle-class worker. This was the interpretation proffered by one picket-line harasser (wearing pearls, no less) who told us to “get back into the real world”. The same sentiment has cropped up in conservative circles again and again, and reached a high point in response to the International Women’s Strike in 2017. Who, they wondered with quasi-Thatcherian fixation, can afford not to work for a day? While comments like these betray a flimsy conflation between the tactical withholding of labour power and aristocratic aplomb, there is some truth to the idea that unions advantage certain kinds of workers.
Unions are not, after all, radical organisations: they are both hierarchical and bureaucratised and the bargaining process can be opaque to its rank and file members. They are also, historically, exclusionary. The scapegoating of non-union workers, immigrants, or those forced to work for less has been an enduring feature of trade union rhetoric. In the 1910s and ‘20s, W. E. B. Du Bois would detail these problems in a series of articles on the relationship between Black workers and the labour unions, whose leadership and membership was exclusively white. “In the present Union movement,” he wrote, “as represented by the American Federation of Labor, there is absolutely no hope of justice for an American of Negro descent.”3 Black workers moving north during Reconstruction were not well-received – “the attitude of the labor union has reflected the attitude of the white public”, and they were continually refused entry to skilled unions. Du Bois did not only point out their institutional racism, but also took issue with their limited political power, holding a Marxist stance that saw trade unions as integral to organising the proletariat, forging solidarity, and, in Engels’s words, exhibiting “want of cohesion”, but as not, in and of themselves, revolutionary, given that the very articulation of their demands (in the language of hours, wages, pay, pensions) capitulates to capitalism.
Du Bois still held onto the slim hope that the unions could be ancillary to general class struggle. If they could get their act together and commit to bringing together the strongest possible labour force, building mass and goodwill by democratising their membership and including Black workers, there might be reason to believe a stronger show of solidarity could snowball into something more. “A national caste movement,” he wrote conjecturally, “would weld into unity a powerful mass of desperate men, led by intelligence and property, filled with resentment, armed with the ballot, and determined to fight to the bitter end in alliance with any group or element that promised success.”4
Trade-union organising, though limited, spurs a radical social aesthetics. Look around and there it is, a mass of people who have become a “welded unity”. Thatcher knew that this was dangerous, having seen it with the miners’ strikes of the 1970s and ‘80s, and so made sure the workers who came after her would not live to see solidarity. Instead, this is something we read about in history books. Writing about the Chartist movement of the 1840s Marx observed that was something about it that was beyond easy explanations: “Strikes in one locality are echoed by strikes in the remotest other localities.”5 Sometimes solidarity does not need to be won through reasoned argument. Sometimes it’s opaque, mysterious; as simple and slippery as water on the move.
ii.
The filmmaker and film editor Madeline Anderson’s early career was bundled up with her experience of unionisation. After “terrifically horrendous and exploitative” conditions working non-unionised jobs in film for a few years in the early 1960s, she became the first Black woman to enter into the film editor’s union when working on avant-garde filmmaker Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World (1963), a hybrid feature about disaffected youths in Harlem.6 Her entry into the union was hard-won – she was only allowed membership after she threatened to sue them for barring of application.7 In 1963, Anderson took up a post as an editor with National Education Television (NET), before it became WNET. She was part of the first generation of producers (and, at the time, the only Black person) to work on Black Journal, which would become one of the longest-running public television programmes focused on African American culture and politics, airing from 1968 to 2008.
In 1968, Anderson received a call from the Drug, Hospital, and Health Care Employees Local 1199 union in New York asking if she would be interested in documenting the strike of African American female medical workers with their newly founded branch in Charleston, South Carolina, Local 1199B. Anderson was a good candidate for the job. Not only was she a union member herself, she also had experience making documentary films on contemporary civil rights issues. In addition to her work with Black Journal, Anderson had also made ‘Integration Report 1’ (1960), which focused on the very beginnings of the civil rights movement, looking in particular at Alabama, Brooklyn, and Washington, D.C. The film was meant to be part of a series, but Anderson had considerable difficulty finding funding even for the first part, to the extent that cinema vérité icon D.A. Pennebaker rigged a wooden tracking device for one of the shots on a dime.8
There was both a politics and strategic timing behind the production of Anderson’s films, both from her perspective and from that of public broadcasting. WNET, for one, was keen to use programming and ‘uplift’ to prevent rioting in Black communities in the aftermath of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassinations. Riots broke out across hundreds of American cities immediately after King’s death on 4 April, 1968; the National Guard was deployed to quell the uprisings, which resulted in around 27,000 arrests and 40-odd deaths.9 The ironically titled ‘Holy Week’ was said to have been “the greatest wave of social unrest since the Civil War”.10 Anderson claims she capitalised on these national hysterics to produce a film with as much time and money as necessary.11
With ‘I Am Somebody’ (1970) Anderson knitted together her experience making public television and her political agenda, and tacitly upheld a radical aesthetic impulse that also undergirded the Black Arts Movement (BAM) at around the same time. In leading member Larry Neal’s words, BAM was “the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept”. It brought together artists, activists, and intellectuals to create a radical aesthetics, and black cultural nationalism was seen as providing a means of consciousness-raising.12 While it is the written and spoken word that is largely credited with advancing the goals of BAM – as through Amiri Baraka’s call for “poems that kill” – Anderson’s work sheds light on the way that the moving image and public programming played an important role.13 At the time of Anderson’s tenure WNET was host to the variety show SOUL!, where Baraka and other BAM figureheads would make public appearances in the late 1960s and early ‘70s – before its cancellation in 1973 to make way for an ‘interracial’ integrationist show, aptly titled ‘Interface’.14
At a time when Black technicians, editors and filmmakers were entering the film industry in greater numbers, and when there was hope that the media’s fear of rioting would catalyse the state sponsorship of Black programming, Anderson’s ‘I Am Somebody’ put faith in the consciousness-raising potential of filmic media.15 She told the story of Local 1199B in Charleston with archival footage from film libraries, newsreels, tourism bureau films, and original material. Anderson cannily spliced together her found footage with interviews and scenes of domestic activity, setting the individual story of the film’s narrator, the striker Claire Brown (who worked closely with Anderson in post-production), with and against the mass of other strikers. The use of audio from interviews as disembodied voice-over serves to reinforce this – although at times we don’t know exactly whom we are hearing from, but Anderson seems to suggest that this doesn’t much matter.
‘I Am Somebody’ is only 30 minutes long, but manages to capture the full arc of the strike without relying on straightforward, chronological narration. This effect is improbably achieved by a steady, even pacing: slow, sustained portraits are interspersed with scenes of protest, picket lines and arrest. But that isn’t to say that Anderson permits easy resolution, or the neat folding of her protagonists into a teleology of action. Eschewing what would otherwise be a convenient narrative tool for telling her story – treating the stand-offs between state and activists as both crystallising and propulsive events – Anderson’s even-keeled approach to her footage permits her audience to understand the workers’ strike of Local 1199B as part of a longer history of tension. Anderson does not underline scenes of mass unrest with the choice of sharp cuts, zooms, or quick changes of perspective; perhaps with a feminist distaste for cheap valorisations of action and movement, she grants the same power, the same weight, to stillness.
This suggests that violence is not exceptional or alien but rather embedded into and constitutive of the situation itself, the racist past resounding into the racist present. The opening shots set up the resonances clearly, with Anderson grounding the strikers in their geographical, historical surroundings. There is an uneasy quiet as we see a bridge over Charleston’s still harbour, the muted grey-blues of the steel, sky and water blending to paint a portrait of an industrial melancholy (and establish the tone of the film’s overwhelmingly aqueous palette). The view shifts downstream, to the lazy crossing and muted honks of a tourist ferry; on land, the sluggish clip-clops of an anachronistic, confederate-looking horse and buggy. This is, Anderson underlines, a place trapped within its own history.
This opening sequence is narrated by Brown, who Anderson then shows in her home. She wipes down a mirror, running a rag over her own reflection. She fixes herself a coffee in the kitchen and sits down to stir. Her relaxed gestures suggest the strike must have been a success. Meanwhile, her voice-over lays out the basic facts. When the medical college fired 12 people, 400 workers – all Black women – decided to strike. “We just had to,” Brown says.
…perhaps with a feminist distaste for cheap valorisations of action and movement, she grants the same power, the same weight, to stillness.
Anderson’s direction and editing echoes Brown’s resolve. She shows the striking workers, still wearing their nurse’s uniforms, walking slowly in circles on the picket line. Anderson centres her interview subjects’ faces in the frame, each standing, unmoving, at an arm’s length from her lens. Select words, plucked from the public speeches given by civil rights leaders are emphasised in Anderson’s soundscape. The feet of 14,000 marchers pass by the camera lens, a seemingly unending stream, overlaid with grainy audio of the marchers clapping and chanting the civil rights anthem ‘Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round’. This scene in particular reminds me of Gilles Deleuze’s comment that sometimes the grandeur of action “lies less in the modifying of the situation than in surviving in an impervious milieu.”16
Between durational shots of her protagonists Anderson sometimes cuts to scenes of police brutality, with the peaceful strikers hit by the batons of white police offers, pushed to the ground and dragged into the back of vans. “We didn’t want no fist fights,” one of the disembodied voice-overs proclaims over the action. (The film was produced, according to the opening credits, by the American Foundation for Non-Violence). The strike was about “fighting the police with the law”, about fighting for basic recognition, not just as workers but as human beings. However they are continually met with state violence (militarised police are called into Charleston) and the bureaucratically sanctioned racism of local politicians. The contrasts are often stark. In another scene, marchers file at night into a stark white police truck, being arrested en masse, holding up peace signs with the film’s titular chant: “I am … Somebody”. And who could deny it?
The workers’ chant serves as a tongue-in-cheek contrast to the masculinist imagery of some civil rights-era labour protests whose placard slogans proclaimed: ‘I Am a Man’. Instead, the women on strike in Charleston called for nothing less than the collective, and paradoxically singular, demanding to be recognised as human, as somebody – an amorphous, quasi subject-less some-body, but a body nonetheless. Their demand arose from the struggle for both civil and workers’ rights – in the words of yet another of their chants, this was about both union power and soul power. The slogan is an antidote to the way that labour struggle on film has typically cast the white working class as its ready protagonist. The American New Wave, of the same era as Anderson, famously married its veneration for counterculture with a permissive fascination for white, blue-collar criminality (think Bonnie and Clyde [1967], Easy Rider [1969], Taxi Driver [1976]). It also takes a different line to the (relatively few) films about the civil rights movement, which seem to disaggregate the very idea of solidarity by focusing on the exceptionalism of leadership (Spike Lee’s X [1992] or Ava DuVernay’s Martin Luther King Jr. in the near-biopic Selma [2014]).
As Anderson reminds us, it has long been the task of managers and politicians to separate one from the other. Halfway through ‘I Am Somebody’, Anderson cuts from protest footage to a press meeting. When asked by a member of the press if the 1119B labour strike is related to the civil rights struggle, a suited, sweating, white representative from the county hospital responds in a tellingly evasive manner. He doesn’t believe they have anything to do with one another at all! “They are working for wages at jobs which have no relation to race, creed, sex or anything else,” he says. These issues, of course, have always been deeply intertwined: civil rights with claims to employment and fair pay, and the Black labour movements of the Reconstruction era (as Du Bois pointed out) with the American union federation.
Instead, the women on strike in Charleston called for nothing less than the collective, and paradoxically singular, demanding to be recognised as human, as somebody – an amorphous, quasi subject-less some-body, but a body nonetheless.
Anderson overturns the county hospital’s official viewpoint by foregrounding the dual fight for labour and civil rights, particularly in a moving scene where the recently widowed Coretta Scott King speaks to a jam-packed hall of strikers and their compatriots, a sea of white uniforms and blue hats. While Local 1199 in New York was her husband’s favourite union, hers, she says, is 1199B. Shot from below, King, who is also wearing white and one of the movement’s signature caps, puts the point starkly: the Black working woman is perhaps the most discriminated against of any working woman. Anderson splices in reaction shots from the audience: close-ups of faces beaming with both recognition and admiration.
iii.
Anderson has repeatedly said in interviews that she felt she was able to make the film precisely because (as with Coretta Scott King) she identified with the subjects of her study.17,18 She was one of these women; they were her sisters. This intimacy seeps into the film, too, allowing Anderson to look at the tangle between the strikers’ domestic and professional lives. In one of the film’s most poignant moments, Brown explains in a talking-head interview (rather than in voice-over) that her husband has had to do the shopping and childcare while she’s been on the picket lines. Set against white curtains, Brown looks steadily at the camera while her husband sits sheepish and silent, their child in between. “A lot of times he got kind of upset and we would have to have a talk,” she says. Anderson holds the camera on the husband’s face as he scratches his eyebrow, smiling uncomfortably.
There’s an inversion of gender roles here, but also a blurring of the lines between work, strike and domestic duty. Is the woman at work when she’s at work, when she’s out withdrawing her work, or when she’s doing domestic work? As a foil to the opening image of Brown in her kitchen, Anderson shows the women cooking in the kitchen at the strike headquarters, where they also print out leaflets. Brown tells us that they had a really good time there, even when they were eating only rice and beans. Likewise, at one of the rallies, Anderson includes a close-up of one of the women holding a sleeping child in her arms on the picket line. An off-camera police officer tells them to get into the bus, ostensibly to be arrested, but then he audibly balks into the megaphone: “Uh, we don’t want any infants on this bus.” In much the same way that 1970s feminist political theory sought to unravel divisions between inside and outside and between public and private, Anderson suggests that the domestic bleeds into work, work into the strike, and strike into the home. For these women, socially reproductive labour (cooking, caring, cleaning), withheld labour and ‘professional’ labour are interlocking – oppression is diffuse, and cannot be contested in only one realm. As Brown says near the end of the film, this strike was not just about confronting the county hospital but about confronting the “whole power structure of Charleston”.
Is the woman at work when she’s at work, when she’s out withdrawing her work, or when she’s doing domestic work?
Civil rights-era strikes often billowed outwards beyond direct contention between worker and employer. In Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech, given to Memphis Sanitation Workers on strike the day before he died, he proclaimed that mass boycott would be a necessary, amphibious addendum to striking. Although corporeally his was a politics of non-violence, economically King called for the “redistribution of pain”.19 His words and tactics were well heeded in Charleston. Early in the film, Brown’s voice-over narrates the arrival of Rev. Abernathy of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), stepping down the stairs of a plane. “We needed Rev. Abernathy,” Brown says as he is greeted by a group of men on the tarmac, “to mobilize the Black community in Charleston.” At a rally that evening held in a grand Baptist church, Abernathy underscores just this point: “We are going to be saved together as brothers,” he said, “or we will perish as fools.”
The strike was not straightforwardly effective until it became an issue for the whole community. For Brown, “it was the students that did the most for us out of anybody.” In Anderson’s sequencing, just when things seem intractable, students spur a midnight-hour boycott of white business downtown in solidarity with the striking workers. (Union power and soul power.) While Anderson’s film was produced by the 1199 headquarters in New York – and Brown’s voice-over gives them credit, claiming they “really put out for us” by sending their leaders down, with members contributing over $100,000 “out of their own pockets” – it also hints at the limits of union power, and the necessity of mobilising against state capital in its even more diffuse forms. In a sense, the strike was successful because it took on some of the characteristics of the riots happening around the States that very same year. Their struggle was not just about workers appearing in their role as workers but, when it came down to it, about the interruption of circulation and consumption more broadly.20
In seeking to give space to the contradictions that are inherent to the antagonism between employer and employed, Anderson rewires the historical agreement between documentary film and ‘traditional’ factory labour. After all, the very first moving picture was of the factory: the Lumière brothers set up a camera outside the photographic goods factory they owned to film a stream of workers leaving at the end of the day. The 45-second ‘Workers Leaving the Factory’ (1895) in some ways set the tone for the next century; as Harun Farocki puts it, “the basis for the chief stylistics of cinema was given in the first film sequence.”21 Film was to mirror industrial order in both form and content. It was supposed to be documentary. ‘I Am Somebody’, both in contrast and homage to that impulse, cantilevers representational space for a labour movement that centred race and gender, that contravened not only the historical aporias of American labour history, but also blurred the documentary, originary sanctification of the white working class by mixing ‘pure’ document with interview footage, letting the women tell their own stories.
Given Anderson’s personal links to Shirley Clarke and Richard Leacock (her first employer in the film industry), as well as the general time frame, it would be appropriate to align Anderson’s now-classic documentary with American direct cinema. Like her contemporary Frederick Wiseman, who produced The Cool World and would go on to focus in his own directing on American institutions (high schools, police departments, and mental hospitals), Anderson improbably brought an experimental outlook to programming for a broad public. Her work also has a thematic proximity to the feminist documentary film movement of the 1970s that took labour as subject matter – some of the best-known examples include Harlan County USA (Barbara Kopple, 1976) and Union Maids (Julia Reichert, Miles Mogulescu, Jim Klein, 1976). But if feminist documentary and direct cinema sought, in varying ways, to lift the veil on the intercession of direction and expose the inveterate relation between camera and authority, Anderson’s task here appears to be something rather different. She is less concerned with her own role in the story; the cutting room, rather than the camera, is the real locus of conflict.
In contrast to the way that cinema vérité underscored the manipulation of direction, Anderson’s vocation and legacy might be seen as a problematising of our relationship to editing. Anderson’s editorial praxis exposes the contrivance of putting pieces together to tell a story. If ‘I Am Somebody’ supposes the narrative arc of victory, it also defies simple chronology, suggesting that there are other ways of relaying and relating to the past; as Anderson plays with the drama of homogenous pacing, or uses facial expressions, chants and song, rather than dialogue to envision community; letting situation usurp ‘progressive’ action. Anderson’s highly constructed retelling of the 1199B union strike – in evocation of Walter Benjamin’s notion of the ‘dialectical image’, the idea that montage can envision a radical conception of history as ‘interruptive’ – hints that the plodding along of the business-as-usual present can get shot through with the ruptures of radical collectivity, exposing the contingency of political order.
Such techniques are deployed not only in ‘I Am Somebody’, but also in Anderson’s segment for WNET’s Tribute to Malcolm X (1969), a 14-minute documentary made two years after Malcolm X’s assassination. The film features archival footage of interviews with Malcolm X interspersed with Anderson’s own footage of an original interview with his widow, Betty Shabazz, who, as with Brown in Charleston, is pictured in her home, seated on a couch in front of a light-coloured curtain. Here the much later work of the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), a group of Black British and diaspora artists that began under the Thatcher government, comes to mind. John Akomfrah, one of the collective’s most prominent members, made a 52-minute 16mm film (co-produced by Channel 4) called Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993), using a mix of archival footage and contemporary interviews with figures like Spike Lee, Robin Kelly, William Kunstler, Patricia Williams, and, again, Betty Shabazz.
Akomfrah’s work is more straightforward about the politics of the archive – he invents tableaux and calls on historical re-enactment to underline that Malcolm X’s assassin cut not just a life but a radical imaginary too short – but Anderson deals with similar themes. How do you tell a story with the pictures you have to hand? How can film both remember, preserve and obliterate the past? Both insist that there’s a politics involved when handling artefacts of the contemporary, betraying a faith in the dialectics of film’s material: you have to work with the superstructure of the visual social order to upend or imagine an end to it.
iv.
My union will go on strike again in coming weeks, against changes in the pension scheme, mounting workloads, and pay cuts. This will be, supposedly, the largest strike action in the history of the higher-education sector. Given that many are going to the pickets for the third time in just three years, it seems that the strike is a strike against the university as much as it is against the gridlock and bad faith that has characterised the bargaining process itself: the laws, governments, regulations, managers, and even the unions that have constructed a Daedalian system in which even asking for simple things is difficult. Pickets, along with the cancellation of classes, lectures, and exam marking will ensure that the thorn stays stuck in the employer’s side, that there’s university-wide disruption. But it also feels like we simply want to show others we aren’t giving up.
Something similar seems to be playing out in the United States. The record low of union membership has been followed by a record high of strikes in education, hospitality, restaurants, and what’s left of the automobile industry.22 It seems like everyone who can strike with (some semblance of) protection is taking the opportunity to do so, but it remains difficult to explain how and why it has snowballed like this and continues to gain momentum.23 Surely economic and electoral factors figure largely, with global wealth inequality reaching a fever pitch, and Trump introducing unprecedented threats to workers across the country.24 Attempting to explain this unexpected upsurge in 2018/19, the labour historian and organiser Jane McAlevey echoes Marx’s analysis of the Chartists: “Workers learn to strike when they watch other workers strike and win. That’s where the formula is playing out right now.”25 Motivations can be both simple and enigmatic.
Some have tied these movements to the large-scale labour mobilisations of the 1970s, given that it was amid a similarly robust capitalism that workers flooded into unions.26 Before drawing any conclusions, we should think about the differences that undermine the similarities. Anglo-American unions have, as discussed, become far more impotent. As Anderson has noted herself, the strike in Charleston represented the end of an era: “Labor has lost its power because of opposition to unions and because the younger generation doesn’t understand the source of power created when workers become union members.”27 Given not just generational but governmental ‘opposition to unions’, its legally unlikely that you’ll be able to do much beyond bargaining or, more precisely, much beyond voting to be bargained for. In this sense, the symbolic or aesthetic value of industrial action (that Du Bois and Engels described) now almost outstrips its practical function.
Lack of attachment to an achievable goal and an absence of vested interest was deeply felt by my comrades and me on the picket lines in 2018. While we organised and mobilised (on behalf of our tenured, pensioned supervisors) under the lofty banner of anti-casualisation and anti-marketisation, the thing that was really at stake was comically reformist: an argument about the valuation of the pension scheme, a scheme denied to those of us most casualised, and most precarious. That the language used to drive workers into the union or to pickets is misrepresentative of the actual dispute is not necessarily a fault of the union itself. We have Reagan, Thatcher and Trump to thank for that. Knowing all of this, we were eager to strike nonetheless, not just on behalf of future generations but because the pull of industrial action does not only lie in the promise of victory but in the distinctive good-feeling of interruptive action and solidarity.
People go on strike not just because they want their wages but also because of this ineffable social-aesthetic dimension. Despite my hunch that this might be even more true today, given the weakened bargaining hand our generation’s been dealt, trade unions don’t seem to have a strong will to representational power.28 Sure, there’s social media – but Twitter seems to be better suited to grandstanding than consciousness-raising. (I don’t know if picket pets ever featured so heavily in any other dispute.) In contrast to, say, Local 1199 of the 1970s, a coherent aesthetic front has been suspiciously lacking from our organisational toolkits.
This is not to say that the union is without bite. In 2018 we won an important dispute with the History Faculty at Cambridge, who refused to pay graduate students for teaching undergraduate courses, under the premise that such duties are part of the university’s training scheme. This kind of teaching is now paid. Another major victory has recently come from our anti-casualisation working group. The university has agreed, in principle, to transfer 500 teachers on hourly pay to proper employment contracts. Important gains have been made across the globe through unionised or semi-unionised action in the past months alone: General Motors workers reversed the decision to close a plant in Detroit, a general strike in India saw 150 million workers participate in a two-day strike against Narendra Modi’s anti-labour laws, and the ongoing general strike in France has created economic instability.
As Anderson’s film suggests, such successes rarely happen without tapping into a broader political imaginary, attacking capital in its particularity and diffusion, and pulling ‘un-organised’, casualised bodies into the fold of solidarity. Strikes might have to become more general; unions have to be ready to become political to the best of their abilities.29 They might have to, simply because other people are watching. At the end of ‘I Am Somebody’, Brown, wearing her union cap, looks out onto the harbour, seagulls gliding across the surface. “If I didn’t learn but one thing,” she says, “it was that if you are ready and willing to fight for yourself, other folks will be ready and willing to fight for you.” Like water, solidarity fills gaps, rushes in.
Mimi Howard lives in Berlin and is working on a PhD about post-1945 political philosophy.
1. For summary, see Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working-Class, Verso, 2011, p. 50. 2. Eric Morath, “U.S. Union Membership Hits Another Record Low,” Wall Street Journal, January 2020. 3. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘The Black Man and the Labor Unions’, The Crisis, February, 1918. 4. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘The Hosts of Black Labor’, The Nation, May 9, 1923. 5. Karl Marx, ‘Chartism’, in New York Daily Tribune, July 14, 1853. Available at marxists.org. 6. Ashley Clark, ‘An Interview with Madeline Anderson’, Metrograph Edition, March 3, 2017. 7. Michael T. Martin, ‘Madeline Anderson in Conversation: Pioneering an African American Documentary Tradition’, Black Camera, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Fall 2013), pp. 72-93. 8. Ibid., p. 77. 9. Lorraine Boissoneault, ‘Martin Luther King Jr.’s Assassination Sparked Uprisings in Cities Across America’, Smithsonian Magazine, 4 April, 2018. 10. Ibid. 11. Ashley Clark, ‘Interview with Madeline Anderson’. 12. Larry Neal, ‘The Black Arts Movement, Drama Review, Summer 1968’, National Humanities Center Resource Toolbox, The Making of African American Identity: Vol III, 1917-1968. 13. Amiri Baraka, ‘Black Art’, in Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, William Morrow & Co, 1979. 14. SOUL!: About the Series, Thirteen: Media With Impact website. 15. Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, ‘The Black Arts Movement Reprise: Television and Black Art in the 21st Century’, European Journal of American Studies 14.1 (2019). 16. Gilles Deleuze (tr. Hugh Tomlinson), Cinema 1: The Movement Image, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 143. 17. Martin, ‘Madeline Anderson in Conversation’, p. 79. 18. Ashley Clark, ‘An Interview with Madeline Anderson’. 19. Martin Luther King Jr. ‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’, Address Delivered at Bishop Charles Mason Temple’, April, 1968. 20. On the difference between strikes and riots, see Joshua Clover, Strike, Riot, Strike: The New Era of Uprisings, Verso, 2019. 21. Harun Farocki (tr. Laurent Faasch-Ibrahim), ‘Workers Leaving the Factory’, Senses of Cinema, Issue 21, July 2002. 22. Alexia Fernández Campbell, ‘A record number of US workers went on strike in 2018’, Vox.com, February, 2019. 23. Michael Sainato, ‘US teacher strikes generated victories. So why are they ready to strike again?’, The Guardian, August 2019. 24. Paul Prescod, ‘Trump’s Assault on Labor’, Jacobin, October 2019.
