Friday April 30th, 2-4pm
Rene Rojas - The Crumbling of Consent:
The Breakdown of Factory Regimes and the
Militant Bronx Cookie Strike of 2008-2009
Strikes have become so rare in the US, they have come to be seen as anomalous. In the past, the ‘exceptional’ feature of US industry that social scientists and activists confronted was the absence of labor strife. Today, labor passivity, most emblematically illustrated by the self-defeating givebacks of the erstwhile formidable UAW, has become so commonplace that it is the accepted norm. When workers do engage in collective militant action at the work site, when they strike for instance, it is an extraordinary event. Today, strikes are the anomalies that need explaining.
The classical Marxist formulation whereby class structure translated into a militant proletarian class formation—with its attendant organizational and ideological components—has failed to materialize in the US, especially in the post-war period. The unfulfilled expectations of Marx’s ‘class struggle’ thesis have been explained by an ideologically diverse array of analysts who point to an even wider range of factors that have inhibited his revolutionary predictions. Marxist scholars in particular have persuasively addressed this divergent outcome from many angles (Burawoy 1979, Moody 1997, Brenner 2008, Archer 2008). Every now and then, however, the disappointing American proletariat still rebels. Despite the theoretical claims to the contrary and despite the overwhelming evidence of labor’s acquiescence over the past forty years, American workers still mobilize against their employers. One example is offered by the Sole Rosso workers in the Bronx who struck for almost a year amid unquestionably inauspicious circumstances.