Verso blog - “Breaking the Casts: Remembering Noel Ignatiev” by Jasper Bernes
Today, on the second anniversary of Noel Ignatiev’s passing, Verso blog published a review of Acceptable Men. Jasper Bernes—comrade, poet and literary scholar—writes with great care for Ignatiev, his memoir and the lessons it poses us for today:
“The forms of “refusal of labor” in the plant [Gary Works] would have to be organized and de-individualized, if such efforts were to be resisted. But one gets the sense that the atomization of workers has as much to do with their lives outside of the plant as much as their lives inside. Jackson and Noel bond largely because they play bridge together after work, a game that marks Jackson as part of the black middle-class. Card playing is central to the novel, and to the bonds the workers build with each other, mostly because it offers good opportunities for talking shit. The main game they play is called “Dirty Hearts,” a version of Hearts in which “each person plays for himself alone” but “if one player gets too far ahead of the rest, the other three will gang up to bring him down.” They collaborate in order to enforce an individualistic egalitarianism: “The players freely discuss the cards they hold, and give generously of their opinions of the skills and individual moves of their opponents.” This seems an apt metaphor for the form of workers’ power observed at the plant—collaborative, egalitarian, but also individualistic, dependent on a form of private life revealed in the incessant jokes the workers make about fucking each others’ wives.
The post-pandemic economic landscape in the United States, in which once burgeoning sectors of the service economy struggle to find willing workers, demands a renewed inquiry into “refusal of labor,” now as then the adversarial fire that heats proletarian struggle. But it also requires a recognition of the ways in which labor refusal can perpetuate atomization even as it wins gains for proletarians. Pandemic social programs, which have lowered the rate of exploitation in the US for the first time since the 1990s, have also changed the rate of labor refusal, and made it so that workers once willing to accept minimum wage positions are waiting for a better opportunity or until they are forced back to work. The popular press speaks of a “great resignation” among workers unwilling to return to the office or classroom after a year of online work, valuing flexibility (in other words, the ability to refuse some labor) above all else. But where, then, are the opportunities for collective refusal, for organized refusal? And do these forms of refusal undermine or reinforce the racialized division of labor Ignatiev places at the heart of American society?”
Order Acceptable Men from AK Press at https://www.akpress.org/acceptable-men.html.