In 1963, James Boggs, a black autoworker employed for over two decades at a Chrysler plant in Detroit, published a short book focused on the nefarious effects of automation on class struggle in the United States. The story told in The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Workers Notebook begins with the early 1930s, the decomposition of the old craft unions, and a global economy in the throes of an unprecedented near-collapse; it arrives at a high point with the late 1930s, with a now-forgotten wave of sit-down strikes that tore through the tire and auto industries between 1933 and 1937, most famously at the Flint General Motors plant in early 1937.1 This was, in Boggss estimation, the greatest period of industrial strife and workers struggle for control of production that the United States has ever known. But this period also gave rise, under the reformist efforts of the New Deal and in a climate of mass unemployment, to the Wagner Act and the institutionalization of class struggle. The UAW, which just a few years earlier organized the sit-down strikes in the auto industry, had by 1939 banned the tactic in the plants. In the cast shadow of imminent war, the unions no-strike pledge, along with the inevitable encrustation of a bureaucratic stratum more at home in the offices of management than on the workbenches, left workers to wildcat their way through the war. The Second World War witnessed thousands of work stoppages: an astonishing 8,708 strikes implicating over four million workers took place, according to Boggs, over one two-year period while war production was in full swing. Union pledges of discipline notwithstanding, order did not therefore always prevail. Workers, many of them from the rural South, and new to the world of the factory, consistently bucked against the dictates imposed by management and enforced by their own representatives. The wildcat strikes were not, however, always defections from the dictates of union bureaucrats and the boss. In 1943, a UAW-organized Packard plant was the site of a hate strike organized by white workers to push back against the influx of black workers into the factories, and the integration of assembly lines. Soon after, a tumultuous race riot broke out in the city, as white workers attacked black workers who now competed with them for housing. Dozens were killed, hundreds wounded; mostly black, and primarily at the hands of police and the National Guard. The city would be occupied by federal troops for a full half year after. Such was, for better and for worse, the American workers movement at its most militant.
The onset of the post-war economic boomwith its soaring growth, surging wages, and near-full employmentdid little to dampen the combativeness of workers on the line. The wildcat waves continued well into the 1950s, with the movement cresting, in Boggss reckoning, in the middle of the decade. The movement and its off-and-on open conflict with union brass (porkchoppers to rank-and-file) was chronicled in a series of broadsides (Punch-Out, Union Committeemen and Wildcat Strikes) by the irrepressible Martin Glaberman, Boggss longtime comrade in the Detroit-based Correspondence Publishing Committee. At stake in these struggles was what The American Revolution specifies as control over production, the ability of workers on the shop floor to dictate the pace and intensity of work through collective action and novel tactics. Chryslers management responded to this volatile situation with a weapon hitherto mostly under wraps: A new force [
] entered the picture, Boggs writes, as management, with union blessing, began introducing automation at a rapid rate. Where prior efforts to speed up work rhythms met with fierce opposition from thousands of workers concentrated in massive production sites, this capacity for interruption depended upon worker control over the machinery set in motion during production. The stunning productivity gains made possible by the introduction of large-scale machinery and the moving assembly line still depended in large part on worker oversight of the production process. The lure of automation, from the perspective of Chrysler management, was obvious: many tasks performed and decisions made currently by workers could be replaced by programmable computers and cybernetic control systems. The promise of rising productivity in the workplace also entailed compromised worker control over the pace of production, threatening an outright swapping out of labor for capital on the other, with computer-assisted machines replacing potentially tens of thousands of works almost overnight. It was precisely this threat of substitution that, Boggs concludes, was decisive in the quashing of the strike movement in the middle of the 1950s: since the advent of automation there has not been any serious sentiment for striking.
It may be that the history of capitalism is the history of automation. Warnings about the perils of automation are as old as the capitalist mode of production. The first revolts of workers movement produced the myths of General Ludd and Captain Swing, and the insurrectionary forays of the canuts of Lyon. In their wake were left wrecked shearing frames and looms; barns, buildings, and goods were targeted by proletarian arsonists. Yet the development of the productive forces, and the implementation of large-scale machinery in capitalist factories, never quite made workers purely and simply redundant. To the contrary, over the course of more than a century, the demand for labor had grown exponentially, even as millions of peasants poured into cities, and entered into the wages system and the urban cash nexus. But this time, Boggs warned, was different: Automation replaces men. This is of course nothing new. What is new is that now, unlike most earlier periods, the displaced men have nowhere to go (my emphasis). These men and women, many of whom, like Boggs, had left the deep South for the industrial North and its factories and great cities, were loath to return to the countryside, to Jim Crow, rural isolation, and hardscrabble miseries. And the countryside wouldnt have them: advances in mechanized farming across the South dramatically augmented agricultural productivity during the 1920s and after, in a matter of a few decades eliminating what jobs were left in the field. There was no turning back, in any case; these workers would not dare leave the cities, unless it was to get away from the Bomb.
