On Labour Repression

In a recent Netflix special, the comic Dave Chappelle attempts to push his audience to what in his view is a more radical analysis of the subordination of women, workers, and people of colour. The metaphor he uses for contemporary society is that of the relationship between a pimp and his star prostitute. Prostitutes, Chappelle asserts, can take only so much exploitation: after a certain number of tricks, they refuse to turn any more. At this very moment, the pimp devises a plan. He promises to accept his employee's resignation provided she turns just one more trick. She agrees, but unbeknownst to her, the pimp sends in his muscle to murder the john and make it look like she did it. The prostitute is understandably beside herself in panic, whereupon the pimp swoops in on his white horse to save the day. He says he will bring someone in to take care of the body for a price, and in her gratitude and terror, the prostitute agrees to stay on just a little while longer to pay off her debt.

Now, in this story, there are three actors: the pimp in the leading role, the prostitute in the supporting role, and the hired thugs in a brief but brutal cameo. The main action is between the boss and the sex worker, and it is the former who holds all the cards. Those with the means of violence at their disposal - presumably the state or private security - do the boss's bidding. Chappelle means to tell us that if this is what is really going on, then we must do more than hold placards and charge powerful men with sexual harassment, for the system remains fundamentally unchanged, and it is that system that must be overturned if we want to be free.

Chappelle was denounced for his so-called "pimp story," and while I, too, am critical of his account for many reasons, I think we must take his analysis seriously. Labour scholars know Chappelle's analysis by another name: orthodox Marxism. Orthodox Marxism takes class relations as the motor of history. It frames the state as merely "the executive committee of the bourgeoisie," and it interprets Marx to say that workers, by virtue of their deepening exploitation under capitalism, will see through their pimp-employer's attempt to mystify himself as their protector and will at last overthrow him.

Generations of labour scholars have emerged since the Second International, when such ideas were the state of the art, to problematize this interpretation of Marx and of capitalism, yet we are forced to reckon with it time and again at historical conjunctures when capital is in the ascendant. Doing so is important, as it helps to sharpen our analysis and revisit what we think we know about our movement.

In this sense, I very much endorse the impulse of Andrew Kolin, Rosemary Feurer, and Chad Pearson to focus our attention on the boss. Kolin's book, Political Economy of Labor Repression in the United States, argues that antilabour violence occurs when capital is either in crisis or in transition to a new mode of accumulation. At these moments, employers use violence to exclude labour from decision-making in the state and economy. Feurer and Pearson's edited volume, Against Labor, brings together scholars who take different cuts on the same question: "How have United States employers organized in order to maintain managerial control and stave off unionization?"¹

The shared emphasis on employers redirects our analytical gaze upward, instead of scrutinizing the ways in which organized labour has at turns screwed up or emerged victorious against all odds. Such work reminds us of what happens when employers are left unchecked by the state or civil society. Violence, and repression more generally, has pride of place in the employer's toolkit, and it is good practice to recall that we are...