Reclaiming the Workplace as an Emancipatory Learning Site: Dialogue and Disputation

Introduction: Workplace As Learning Domain

Karl Marx designated the workplace as the learning domain within which humans crafted their world out of natural settings. In the domain of work, Marx believed, human beings could acquire transformative knowledge and release the locked-up potentiality to expand social freedom. The basic idea underpinning Marx’s embrace of the workplace as the locus classicus of emancipatory impetus was that the experience of misery in the factories would force them into solidarity, with oppression unleashing the liberatory educative process.

In the early 20^th century, those who were struggling to create participatory democratic workplaces—the worker council movement—drew their inspiration from Marx. But the workers’ council experiments in Russia, Germany, Hungary and Italy didn’t survive the onslaught of counter-insurgents. By the 1960s and 1970s, the provocative ideas of workers’ self-management and industrial democracy were circulating in obscure and marginalized New Left circles in Europe and North America. In countries such as Yugoslavia, Germany and Scandinavia, significant experiments were conducted in democratizing the workplace. The reader, Workers’ control: a reader on labor and social change (1973), crystallized creative thinking about participatory forms of management of work and provided lucid case studies of co-determination in Sweden, Germany and Yugoslavia. In 1985 Robert Dahl published his landmark study, A preface to economic democracy, setting out the fundamental tenets of democratizing workplaces. Welton published his book, Toward developmental work: the workplace as a learning environment, in 1991, where he articulated the “enabling conditions” for meaningful work. And in 2008, Nie-He Hsieh provided a superb survey of “justice in production (“Survey article: justice in production”). The work literature is immense: these texts, and the ones analyzed in this article are selected for their relevance to how we might think about the enabling conditions for meaningful work and participation in the enterprise as autonomous workers and citizens.

However, when the world shifted tectonically to a global neo-liberal agenda in the early 1970s, ending the “golden era of capitalism”, the counter-narrative of workers’ self-management faded quickly from the political agendas of confused social democratic parties and a besieged labour movement. Today in our age of hyper-globalization and identity politics, the workplace as the locus of emancipatory potential has all but vanished from our cultural imagination. Politicians focus easily distracted attention elsewhere; reformers mobilize energy mainly around ecological or identity issues; the academic left has been swallowed into the black hole of hermetically sealed, obscure word games, increasingly remote from suffering reality; adult educators scurry about providing training for frantic workers, abandoning the hard scrabble worlds of work, at home and afar, to those who pay little to feed the consumerist maw of the rich West.

Although Habermas’ thought leaves little space for emancipatory impulses at the workplace (as we will see below), he wonders if the “rat-race society…through the unleashing of competitive struggle, of an orientation towards achievement, and of self-assertive energies, fulfilled its historical mission—namely, the creation of an ensemble of productive forces which has long ago surpassed the utopian imaginings of the last century?” (Dews 1992, p. 141). The work literature in the last two decades has continued to register considerable agony amongst the global proletariat. The experience of misery and oppression at work has not disappeared into cyber-space. The absence of widespread reaction against the increasing insecurity of work in the post-Fordist era has been compensated, to some extent, by real material gains and consumerism. But working people, as Catherine Casey (2003) argues forcefully, are increasingly subjected to instrumental forms of management and governance in the developed countries and appalling treatment in thousands of factories in less visible, ghastly parts of the Third World. An eery silence has been draped, like a huge wet blanket, over the suffering inherent in doing Capital’s work.