Collen Asper

Labor / Organizing

A Brief History of the Workers’ Inquiry introduces and reinvigorates the long tradition of research and inquiry coming from workers’ initiative, as part of their self-activity and organizing against their bosses, and ultimately as the sharpest tool in the arsenal of class struggle: collective intelligence wielded in solidarity against the exploitative and oppressive conditions that extract our time, power, and value from our very laboring together. In this short pamphlet, we enter the “hidden abode” of production, where everywhere our knowledge as workers’ haunts the boss—from contemporary offices and networked workplaces, to the factories where Karl Marx first employed the technique in 1880 in search of “an exact and postive knowledge” of the class struggles, to its uses by the Johnson-Forest Tendency in 1947 in the auto factories of New Jersey and Detroit, to postwar France, where it was again taken up by Socialism ou Barbarie, and then again in the militant struggles of Italy in the 60s and 70s. This long tradition has accompanied many moments of worker militancy, including recent ones, and it's a hypothesis worth testing that it will continue to be an essential tool of struggles to come.