Isle of Dog – Canary Wharf is a place where the new form of labor becomes dramatically evident – the workers have indeed left the factory, or in this case – the docks, and the managerial and office class of the cognitariat has literally taken their place. This process is made visible in the centrifugal social/class dynamic from the (dis-centered, dislocated) center or the capitalist node of the canary wharf outwards. But when did the process of the demise of the dockers community initiate and how did it enfold? How is the community that once dominated the entire area remembered? And by whom? Is their history unequivocally perceived as something we should remember with nostalgia? Or are the dockers yet another mythical community of the past imbued with contradiction and ambiguity of their political roles in local history? Finally, what is the new form of the sociality that emerged after the radical transformation of the Isle of Dog into one of the largest centres of modern financial capital? What got truly “lost” in that process and what new forms of divisions and barriers emerged form that transition?
The Isle of Dog’s history of social turbulence and transformations could be analyzed as a triggering repository of images, fragments of stories and memories. These memories and experiences are however normally not “shared” but remain confined within diverse, specific social groups and individuals that either reside in the area or commute to it daily. These are mostly unstable, transitory, “instantaneous” communities of commuters, with nothing that connects them to the place outside of the daily pragmatics. The sense of the shared, common life has been radically reshaped through the neo-liberal enclosures and differentiations and the multiplicity of silenced or indifferent voices.
If we would wish to trace the history of the communities of the Isle of Dog we would need to go back to the end of the 19th century, when the naval industry was still at its peak and when the dockers were still a coherent community. Their history might tell us something about the history and the demise of the Worker in the 20 century in the West. It certainly becomes symptomatic when considering the dramatic shifts in the history of the workers’ struggle throughout the century, its compromises and its failures but even more importantly – it becomes instructive for a critical inquiry and intervention into the structural transformation surrounding the notions of labor, work and relations between the worker and modes of production.
How does then the history of the dockers, their strikes and their demise mirror the events throughout the 20th century?
First of all, the 1889 Dockers’ Strike was a turning-point in the history of trade unionism. Over the next few years a large number of unskilled workers joined trade unions. Between 1892 and 1899 membership of trade unions increased from 1,500,000 to over 2,000,000. Throughout the first half of the 20th century the dockers were organised in strong unions and were notorious for their militancy and proclivity for strike. According to some locals, they were they were also perceived like traitors for striking when the country most needed them – in the wake of the WWII. Apparently, the dockers were indifferent to whatever did not concern them directly and formed a tightly knit community on the Isle of Dog, isolated from the rest of the population. Eventually, with the raise of the new forms of international trade – introducing new forms of cargo transports and the use of containers their services became less and less needed. In addition to the rise of the new technologies which minimised the need for human labor the dockers also gained a negative reputation among the foreign traders for their continuous strikes and the fact that a lot of goods would be missing after the workers in the London docks would get their hands on it. Simply put – the goods were being stolen while being taken out from the ships.
One particular event is especially intriguing when it comes to history of the London dockers and their political affiliation. In 1968 after Enoch Powell’s got expelled from the Tory party after his racist speech against the immigration some 1500 dockers marched in his support and many more eventually joined them in the following days. This is a historical fact and it is indeed a very disturbing one. However, it is important to have in mind that the working class was at the time heavily indoctrinated by the idea of being threatened by the immigrants ‘who would take over their jobs”. Needless to say – the fact that the docks became less and less important had nothing to do with the immigration. It was a result of the demise of the naval trade due to the decolonisation, the rise of new forms of global capitalism and the development of new technologies. In addition to this – as Mike Neill from the Greenwich Council argues – the dockers community destroyed itself by continuous strikes, theft and unpatriotic behavior in the wake of the WWII. In other words – it seems that the dockers had long had the reputation of being selfish, isolated and – occasionally racist. However I wish to illuminate at least briefly some of the aspects of the wider political and social context in which the working class ( the dockers) decided to support Powell. At the time, as I mentioned already, the media supported the myth of the “white workers” feeling they have “lost their culture” which is to a certain extent still existing in contemporary and recent UK context (let us recall for example Gordon Brown’s call for “British Jobs For British Workers” probably influenced the construction workers in 2009). By the time of Powell’s “Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, the weak Labour government (elected in 1964) has completely abandoned the workers, introducing a series of austerity measures, deflationary policies etc. The dockers were especially demoralized at that point, especially after a couple of broken strikes. All this enabled Powell’s racism to resonate so powerfully in the dockers community.
Chris Harman (the Socialist Review) brings an interesting quote from the International Socialists, the forerunner of the SWP: “The ready response to his speech has revealed the prevalence of racialist ideas among workers, inculcated by centuries of capitalism and imperialism. Paradoxically it also indicates the extent to which people are fed up with existing society. They are disillusioned with established politics and have lost faith in the succession of leaders who have betrayed their trust. But instead of blaming actual enemies and looking for the real source of their frustrations, they blame the immigrants.”
However, there is another event that Harman wisely emphasizes and that I also wish to underline here: “Nine years after the Powell speech a group of Asian immigrants from East Africa were involved in a bitter strike at the Grunwick plant in north London. Their mass pickets received support from the London dockers, along with other groups like newspaper printers and Yorkshire miners as they resisted police attacks. It showed the existence of a very different tradition to that extolled by those who claim the “white working class” has “lost its culture”.
I would argue however that the dockers case offers us an illuminating insight into a larger scheme of relations between the working class and the modes of governmentality and forms of life within the Western neoliberal democracies. For the London dockers and the British workers in general the strike remained the ultimate means of struggle throughout the 20th century. Was the strike the best possible form of struggle and fight for the workers’ dignity?
At this point I wish to recall the famous differentiation that both George Sorrel and after him Walter Benjamin made while discussing two different forms of strike. Political strike is a mere short term negotiation with the dominant hegemony, a play of sorts with the bosses and the government – it does not lead to any fundamental change but merely perpetuates the pre-egzisting power relations introducing only singular changes and improvements temporary of the standard of living. On the other hand, as both Sorel and Benjamin have claimed, the mass, “general” proletarian strike strives to completely overthrow the existing social relations and operates towards a complete transformation of social and economic relation. We could go so far to think of the political strike is ultimately another way to give in to the capitalist mode of exploitation since it perpetuates the status quo while giving the impression of change. From that perspective, what Mike Neill (our new friend from the Greenwich Council and a brilliant insider in the social history of the area), proposes suddenly becomes true – the dockers did to some extent destroy themselves. To this observation I would just add – as much as the working class in general destroyed itself or at least diminished its political agency. Thus it does not make sense to feel nostalgic about some lost community of the dockers ( as many of the books we encountered on the topic do). On the contrary, if there is something we should mourn it should be the political potential of the class they were the representatives of. That slow death, the irreversible process of self-destruction commenced with agreeing to participate in the parliamentary democracy and making compromises with the political agendas; with the denouncement of the idea of international socialism and with focusing on the particular goals of each singular union etc. Moreover, it meant that the universal values that the international socialism nurtured at the core of its project from the beginning of the 20th century (such as solidarity, equality and freedom) were irredeemably lost in parallel with the loss of the sense of politicality of that community and the Common.
As I suggested above we could observe and analyze the disappearance of the dockers community as the metonymy of the process that the 20th and especially 21st century witnessed on a more general level – that of the systemic demise of the the political agency of the working class. Firstly, the factory (or in our case – the docks) as the physical place of the workers activity but also their physical ‘communion’ has almost entirely vanished in the neo-liberal Western world. The new form of capitalism we live in operates through the deterritorialised, free flow of information, ideas and, more importantly and increasingly in recent years – the unregulated financial markets. In parallel, the working class itself went through a radical form of decomposition (as for example I. Wallerstein demonstrated in some of his recent writings on the subject). Its place (and it is literally so in the Isle of Dogs) was taken by a new class of precarious ‘third sector’ workers completely unaware of their own self exploitation. On a general level, in this phase of late, cognitive capitalism – the mode of work moved from the physical body of the worker to the worker’s mind, to the sphere of intellect and ideas, to the complex flux between the micro entrepreneurial cells of self-exploitation. The new “factories” are now the marketing agencies, the so called ‘creative industries’ and all kind of (financial) service industries. In other words – capital moved from faction to fiction in a silent operation in which complex contemporary forms of precarity continuously manage to deceive us leading us to believe that we ‘manage’ and govern ourselves since there is apparently nothing and nobody above us while we work only in our own self interest. In this scenario there is no community of c0- workers, better yet - there is no sense of community whatsoever. Entrapped in the vicious circle of self – precarisation and isolated from our neighbors in the glass and iron capsules and enclosures of the common, there seems to be no chance of a common vision of future that could be radically, different, more just, and based on those long lost universal ideas of solidarity, equality and freedom.
The high rises at Canary Wharf, located in what was once the heart of the London’s working class becomes the embodied metaphor of this soft forms of entrapment of cognitive capitalism. What is more, this phenomena seems to evade any form of representation. The skyscrapers, the ‘city’ thus becomes the only embodied ‘vision’ in our lonely and depoliticised horizon. From this optics, the Canary Wharf, just one of many international nodes of numerous major investment banks, professional services firms, rating agencies and media organisations (Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, MetLife,HSBC, Moody;s, Morgan Chase etc..) becomes the embodiment of the process of brutal ‘fictionalization’ of capital based on predictions, futures and derivatives, and might serve us as another triggering metaphor which I would here provisionally label the Canary Wharf Casino.
In the seemingly irreversible process from the material (labor, capital and means of production) to the immaterial, the forms of power and economy become undecipherable, unrepresentable, hard to critique and intervene into – how do we then go about challenging the existing relations, contesting them and envisioning a fundamentally different future? How do we first of all “envision” or give image to this new form of capitalism? How do we invoke its true spirit?
In The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money from the 1930s, British economist J.M. Keynes wrote about the “Animal spirits” describing the emotions that impact the behavior of both the consumer and of the investors. Keynes was writing at the time of the Great Depression and the changing psychology of the time which of course has its analogy in the present financial crisis. Keynes wrote: “Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits – a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities”.
Willem Buiter, of the London School of Economics pointed out how “finance is a scary, inherently unstable, essential activity.” Unlike the traditional capitalist mode of economy, the financial market does not take time, it instantaneous. Financial arrangements are quick and without limit. Whenever investors herd together around certain financial assets it is because they are uncertain about the future. “Faced with uncertainty, they resort to whatever conventions they can find to cling to, from popular wisdom to new theories. In a boom, overconfident investors take on bets that they later find themselves unable to discharge.” In a traditional capitalist economy when a price of goods increases that leads to a fall in demand whereas the rising asset prices on the financial market are recognized as a reason to buy. “People take rising share prices as a sign of confidence and a reason to put money into their retirement accounts or mutual funds….For as long as people are optimistic, the creation of credit is hard to restrain.”
What are the effects of animal spirits in contemporary economic life and what are the consequences for those who are not betting but with whose lives it is being bet ? What stories do we tell to ourselves to keep confidence, or confront fear, cope with corruption, fraud and delusion? How do we engage with the unfairness and greed?
Walter Bagehot, an editor of The Economist in the 19th century, observed that “all people are most credulous when they are most happy.” It as at the core of the idea of the new creative class to be optimistic to be positive - we simply must be, we are obliged to be positive, participating, engaged, optimistic. But is there a mode of un-participation that is more empowering and more emancipatory then the vicious circle of participation, cooperation, complicity and normalisation? How do we slow down the instantaneous lives and question the capacity for endless information flux and absorption ? Could we become slow and at least briefly reflect on what we have lost in the 20th century? Could we imagine an over-worked investment banker giving in or giving up, admitting that the life he has been leading does not have sense any more?
We should contemplate on this: ” The entrepreneurs may be “confident” that their revenues will continue to exceed their costs but that does not necessarily mean that they will feel sufficiently spirited to expand their capacity. That requires faith that, in the unknowable future, demand will be higher than it is at present.” That faith are the animal spirits taht move this economy. Could we work with that and reverse it somehow and place faith in a radically different register, for the benefit of community, solidarity and the empowerment of the Common?
In that light we might use the tunnel as a channel, or its physical “other” its reverse, which is a bridge – a polygon for invoking and making visible these animal spirits ? The tunnel in such an equation becomes a magnified human megaphone where the animal spirits start to speak and appear as the ghostly presence behind our everyday existence, not unlike in the spirit photographs from the early 20th century? As such at least briefly they could become visible and thus obvious to everybody, becoming public and open to critical inquiry, contestation and communal reflection which might enable a different kinds of spirits to emerge?
…..
Sources:
http://www.economist.com/node/12957779?story_id=12957779
http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2009/02/12/when-dockers-marched-tory-racist
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/aug/22/animal-spirits-economic-recovery
http://www.rixc.lv/reader/txt/txt.php?id=190&l=en&raw=1
