A lot of my paid work this year has been spent converting the VHS-based video library of a fairly old-skool industrial union to DVD. There’s a lot of interesting shit in there, I can tell you! For a start, there’s a really prominent obsession with the mortification of human flesh, which is fairly obvious when you think about it but simply amazing to watch nonetheless: ancient workplace safety films from the 1950s, complete with gruesome footage of industrial accidents, rub shoulders with a detailed examination of the effects of a nuclear bomb on a metropolitan population. And then there’s the concern with what comes after the flesh — surprisingly in-depth documentaries from the early ’80s about artificial intelligence.
They’re a fairly militant union, for what that’s worth, so it’s no surprise that much of the research evident in this archive unconsciously maps the territory in between the inventive, radically strategic thinking of savvy class war, and the self-defeating form of identity-maintenance — the disciplinary imperative to be a proper worker, a stable subject for whom justice can be served within a largely unquestioned context of waged labour — that has been the union movement’s albatross from the beginning. But despite this albatross, and perhaps unlike my many ultraleftist friends, I’m still in awe over how organised, self-resourced and loopy these organisations born of working class struggles can be.
[ tags: class-struggle, flesh, industrial-relations, labour-movement, media, nucelar-war, politics, unions, video ]
