Part 2. Strike & Misère au Borinage

The Melodrama of Proletarian Solidarity: Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) & Misère au Borinage (Joris Ivens & Henri Storck, 1934)

As a “form of collective action,” Joshua Clover suggests in his historical study of class struggle tactics, Riot. Strike. Riot (2016), the strike can be defined as an object of study according to three essential precepts:

1) struggles to set the price of labor power (or the conditions of labor, which is much the same thing: the amount of misery that can be purchased by the pound);
2) features workers appearing in their role as workers;
3) unfolds in the context of capitalist production, featuring its interruption at the source via the downing of tools, cordoning of the factory, etc. (p. 16; emphasis in original)  

Insofar as the strike is a form of struggle corresponding to a particular development in the way that labour is divided and administered under capitalism, Clover’s definition is very helpful. What it necessarily elides, however, is an element of the strike that is not unique to capitalism and wage-labour, but which is instead mediated and reconfigured according to these material conditions: solidarity. A peculiar phenomenon, at once affectively charged and intellectually demanding, working class solidarity emerges at its source from the collective, or at least common, experiences of labour, exploitation, dispossession, and alienation. It simultaneously exerts an affective force or claim over the individual and requires of the individual a perspective or consciousness capable of abstracting from the often messy, conflicting signals of the empirical situation. Such a situation poses the possibility of the proletarian subject simultaneously coming to apprehend of the structural basis of the class conflict to which they are subject, and binding themselves to the particulars of the struggle in the form of personal identification and political will. Solidarity as a structure of feeling glimpsed in the political form of the strike, then, appears as a secondary element of the strike’s “social content,” buried amongst “the principles of the participants, their affects and beliefs,” (Clover, p. 84).

Part 1. Harlan County, U.S.A.

Class War with Musical Accompaniment: Harlan County, U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, 1976)

The protracted historical disintegration of most authentically popular forms of American working class culture in the face of expansive cultural industrial subsumption marks out those peripheral cultural movements that have actually managed to retain an oppositional character as truly exceptional in the precise sense of the term. Most of these movements in recent decades have been tied to the experiences and liberation struggles of nations and otherwise racialized peoples—one can think in the 1960s and 1970s of the flowerings of Black, Chicano, and Asian American arts—as well as to radical women’s and queer cultures that were for the most part concretely proletarian in economic terms (and often politically so in self-conception). Amongst the diverse cultural fronts during this radical postwar period, however, there is a notable anomaly, significant for its articulation of a regional traditionalism reflecting a particular, subaltern formation of U.S. whiteness: the persistence in Appalachia of white proletarian cultural forms, which harkens back explicitly to the revolutionary unionism of the interwar years and beyond.