What is Workers’ inquiry?
By Clark and Dante for Notes from Below. Illustration: Rory Robertson-Shaw
Our society is in a state of constant distress, from Coronavirus to the cost-of-living crisis. Amidst this, we're all forced to get by and earn a living. For millions of us, accessing work is a difficult process to navigate at the best of times, and decent pay and conditions seem a relic of the past. Today, modern workers are instructed to be 'flexible' and 'resilient' and to 'improve' themselves continuously. In other words, we are told to let employers shape us. We are expected to accept their control over the means and conditions of life and labour. We must accept shift schedules that interfere with family life, caring responsibilities, and free time. Bosses decide the rules of engagement, yet workers keep the cogs of industry moving. Workers operate society, but we do not control it. We pave the roads and sit behind the wheels, but we follow the bosses' instructions as to where we should be going. We, the workers, can turn this thing around. After all, it is the workers who understand what they do best.
The tradition of workers' inquiry builds on these ideas. Originally written as a questionnaire by Karl Marx in 1880, the first 'workers' inquiry' encouraged workers to investigate their own conditions, inside the 'hidden abode of production'. By strengthening working-class knowledge about exploitation inside workplaces and uniting workers across different sectors of work, inquiry enabled a divided working class to combine their efforts and share their experiences. One of the first groups to take up this effort were Italian anarchists, who republished Marx's inquiry in the radical paper La Lotta: although the authorities were quick to seize and destroy these publications. Others, including Polish revolutionaries and Dutch trade unionists, spread and circulated their own versions of the workers' inquiry throughout the late nineteenth century, recognising this as a powerful tool of emancipation.
Taking inspiration from the inquiry, many workers have also written about their experiences of labour and struggle. The aim is not only to produce interesting information, but to recognise and share the awareness of potential leverage: to promote unity between co-workers, across sites and sectors. Trade unions have normally been relied on to build this kind of collective workers' power - but the union movement has lost much of its historic strength. While we have seen some impressive strikes over the last few years, with lots of people joining picket lines for the first time in their lives, trade union membership is still largely falling, year on year. Many sectors have almost no union activity at all, and the UK legal system is very hostile to trade union activity. Political parties have little interest in making it easier for workers to organise and take action, and we cannot rely solely on trade union bosses to lead us in the struggle against our employers. Workers who want to get involved with their union, or access support, often get stuck in the red tape of bureaucracy.
To get out of this situation, we need to understand how workers themselves, across all sectors and workplaces, are experiencing their work. Between the WhatsApp chats where we complain about unscrupulous bosses and lunch-break scheming about how to avoid taking on more work, we are all always thinking about the issues that face us when trying to get through the day. The challenge is building up this everyday rage into effective, collective action. A worker's inquiry is a means for doing this. Only you and your co-workers really know how you get the job done, how you can improve things, and how you can ultimately shut things down.
At Notes From Below, we've been publishing workers' writing and inquiry since 2018, as a platform for workers to share their insights on work, and pose questions to others in their industries. In one of our recent issues, Seeds of Struggle, we focused on inquiry across the food and agricultural sector. We heard from migrant workers picking fruit, truck drivers transporting food around Europe, and retail shop workers getting food onto our shelves. Each of these sectors has profound difficulties. Dreadful working conditions, unsafe workplaces, and bosses who break the law are common across the whole sector - especially for migrant workers, who face some of the most extreme conditions. Unions often don't understand these problems or don't want to hear about them.
Growing and distributing food is absolutely foundational to our society, but most of us know very little about how workers go about doing it, or the conditions they put up with. Through inquiry, workers in these industries can share with one another, and help us all make sense of the labour that keeps us alive. We see, for example, that while some people are working out in open fields and others in high-tech chilled warehouses, they are both subjected to similar surveillance from their bosses, and that new technology is always being introduced to push them to work harder and faster. Workers across the sector also have to deal with harsh and highly complex immigration and visa systems in order to work and survive. As ecological catastrophe intensifies the crisis in our food and agricultural systems, we will need to get a sense of what kind of organisations and actions can empower workers inside and outside of their work.
Workers' inquiry is, ultimately, about seeing the world from the workers' point of view. It helps us see how we, as workers, actively make the world we live in - and how we might make it differently. Every workplace and sector is unique, and we need to communicate with one another the specific points of leverage that we hold. While Marx's original inquiry was 101 questions, the point today is not simply to repeat this exact questionnaire, but to continue in the same spirit of solidarity, and expand the project of inquiry itself for working-class emancipation.
Clark and Dante are editors at Notes from Below. You can read more about workers' inquiry at notesfrombelow.org. Readers can subscribe for £5 to receive print copies of each of our issues and to pay for us to help us distribute them free to other workers. Please get in touch if you want to write about your work!
