Quelle est la valeur du travail?
Passé, présent et futur de la classe ouvrière
et des études sur le travail
Populisme, extrême-droite et antisyndicalisme
Science and the Far-Right: The Crisis of Scientific Work in Argentina and the Struggles for Its Future
Gabriel Gerbaldo et Fernando Aiziczon
Since the beginning of Javier Milei’s presidency in December 2023, Argentina’s science and technology system has faced an unprecedented crisis. The suspension of new admissions to the research career, cuts in research grants, and the loss of purchasing power in salaries and fellowships have jeopardized the scientific community, particularly the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), the country’s main research institution. This situation has reactivated the union organization of researchers and fellows, giving rise to a series of protests, mobilizations, and collective actions that have gained significant public visibility.
In this context, this paper aims to analyze, from a historical and comparative perspective, the effects of austerity policies on scientific work and the resistance strategies deployed by its actors.The relationship between labor precarization in the sector and the emergence of new forms of unionization will be explored, identifying continuities and ruptures with previous experiences in Argentina and Latin America. The study seeks to examine the impact of defunding on the structure of the Argentine scientific system and to analyze the transformation of scientists into unionized actors, considering their strategies of resistance. Furthermore, it will reflect on the role of science in public debate and the challenges it faces in a context of economic crisis and the rise of discourses hostile to social sciences. Through a historical review, this paper aims to contribute to the understanding of the relationship between science, politics, and labor in times of crisis.
Professionalization, Social Closures, and the Struggle for Workplace Democracy
Michael Arfken
With the rise of scientific management, the inherent tension between the development and refinement of expertise for the benefit of skilled workers and the expropriation of those skills to further consolidate managerial power has grown particularly acute. Whereas guilds once played an important role in defending expertise and worker autonomy, deskilling and automation have erode the ability of skilled workers to collectively retain control over the labour process. In this new landscape, the separation of the conception and execution of work has given rise to both new forms of worker resistance and a new strata of workers – the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) – that has radically transformed the organization of labour and the structure of an increasingly technocratic society. In the twenty-first century, these historical transformation have provided the backdrop for the emergence of right-wing populist movements committed to undermining various forms of expertise.
Drawing on the sociological notion of a social closure, this paper explores how the barriers separating different forms of expert knowledge have not only secured the conditions for the development of expertise but have also inadvertently emboldened political groups committed to radically undermining that expertise.
Fighting ‘the enemies of our great country’: Making sense of the Ku Klux Klan’s Anti-Communism in the 1920s
Chad Pearson
Historians of the second Ku Klux Klan, a reactionary organization that established a presence in regions throughout the US and parts of Canada, have generally downplayed the organization’s anti-communism. Anti-leftism, broadly defined, was even more important to the Klan leadership than racism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Semitism. While Klansmen criticized minorities and sought to bar African Americans, Catholics, and Jews from holding positions of power, they repeatedly insisted that they were uninterested in physically harming members of these groups. This was not always true in practice. Yet the Klan leadership felt a great sense of urgency to fight Marxists of various strips, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) members, and even municipal socialists. Led by elites rattled by the Russian Revolution and postwar strike waves, Klansmen showed a consistent eagerness to fight “the enemies of our great country.” Referring to communists at a speech in 1923, Grand Dragon J. W. Hawkins emphasized the Klan’s desire to remove “all Communists” from the US and ultimately “drop them overboard in midocean.” Not all preferred water as a punishment tool. Speaking in San Pedro, California, following a strike involving IWW members in 1924, an unidentified speaker expressed his preference for fire: “If you don’t like the country you can go back to where you came from and if you have no country to go to–you can go to hell.” Using these and other anecdotes, this paper explores the Klan’s anti-communism and insists that we treat the organization as an employers’ association.
- Elsbeth Heaman
Biographies
Gabriel Gerbaldo holds a Master’s degree in Political Parties and a Bachelor’s degree in History from the National University of Córdoba. He has been a doctoral fellow at the National Scientic and Technical Research Council (CONICET) since 2020, specializing in democratization processes, political parties, the labor movement, and state agencies. He has published book chapters and more than 10 academic and popular articles related to his research topics, including « Labor reforms between democracy transitions in Spain and Argentina trough Caro Figueroa’s political career » in Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea (2024), published by the Complutense University of Madrid. Since 2018, he has participated in various national-funded research programs and projects on the history of the labor movement. Since 2022, he has served as a shop steward for the Union of Educators of the Province of Córdoba at a public school in the city’s capital.
Fernando Aiziczon holds a PhD in History from the National University of Córdoba (Argentina). He serves as a lecturer in the Social History of Argentina course within the Department of Anthropology at the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities of the National University of Córdoba. He is an independent researcher at CONICET. He has published numerous books, book chapters, and more than 50 academic and popular articles related to his research line, which focuses on worker self-management movements, social protests, and left-wing activism from the 1970s to the present. He is the Secretary of Training of the Internal Board of the Association of State Workers (ATE). He leads the research team « Workers, Parties, and Unions in Contemporary Córdoba. »
Michael Arfken is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Prince Edward Island, Chair of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee and member of the CAUT Executive Committee. He is also the former President of the UPEI Faculty Association (UPEIFA) and current Chief Grievance Officer for the UPEIFA. His work focuses on a number of areas including Canadian labour law, Labour Process Theory, and labour organizing.
Chad Pearson is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Texas and is primarily interested in business and labor history. He has written two books: Capital’s Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2022) and Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Additionally, he is co-editor of Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism (with Rosemary Feurer; University of Illinois Press, 2017). He has published essays in Civil War History, History Compass, Labor History, Labour/Le Travail and the International Review of Social History. He is currently writing a book called The Hooded Bosses’ Organization: The Second Ku Klux Klan and the War on Labor for Verso.