Retooling the Class Factory : Response 1
Making Sense of Institutions?
Class, Space and Labour History

Bradon Ellem

The opening observations in Elizabeth Faue's challenging and often moving paper paint a picture familiar to writers and readers of Australian labour history. What, she asks, do we 'make of the road ahead'? In this landscape, be it imagined in Australia or the United States, the road itself is often unclear. To some observers it will seem that there are too many destinations; to others that there are none.	1
My brief in this symposium was to respond to Faue's paper in terms of my research interest in labour movement institutions. I want to reflect as well on some wider aspects of the writing of labour history and to draw upon some scholarship in other disciplines that might help to make sense of the challenges posed by Faue's paper.	2
That someone who has been a union historian should be invited to address questions about the future of labour history is hardly surprising. One of the striking characteristics of the study of labour history in Australia has been its institutional focus. The first labour historians - with the exception of Brian Fitzpatrick and Lloyd Ross - were generally historians of the labour movement's institutions, celebrating the new Australian Labor Party and key unions. Most of these accounts were not only celebratory, they were triumphalist. They seemed to say that 'History' was about progress and that the engine driving this progress was the labour movement itself. 1	3
This overview, familiar enough to readers of Labour History , leads to two initial points of engagement with Faue's paper. Firstly, Faue alerts us to the relationship between two characteristics of this older labour history which are usually considered separately. This style of history could be triumphalist only because of its narrow focus. That is to say, it was triumphalist because of its silences. It repeated the actual historical exclusions regarding gender and race constructed in part by the labour movement itself. Secondly, the role of class analysis in this historiography is complex. To insist that much early writing saw labour movement institutions themselves as the engine of change is a significant claim. It means that neither class contradictions nor class consciousness constituted or fuelled that engine. This suggests that class analysis was not overdone but, rather, under-developed. This is not to contest the now long-held view that gender and race were overlooked both as frames for analysis and as bases for political action. Rather, it points to the validity of the equally long-held view that, in general , labour history tended to be under-theorised. 2	4
Much has changed in the writing of labour history in the USA and Australia since these early years. Most recently Faue and others detect a turn away from discursive approaches towards a 'new institutionalism'. Her paper is critical of calls for 'putting back in' an uncomplicated and reductionist rendering of class and institutions. To some extent, these questions turn on what it is that we are trying to explain. There is something of a tension in the paper between explaining class itself in new and more inclusive ways and using class analysis to explain other personal and social phenomena. Faue, I think, wants to do both.	5
What does her paper mean for writing about institutions? Faue argues that in the USA, the impact of David Montgomery and his followers 'meant more but not necessarily better institutional histories'. She says that there could be better accounts but the tone of the paper suggests that she is not very hopeful that there will be. Indeed, she argues that 'neo-institutional studies of labour unions and the state' have been juxtaposed with, if not opposed to, studies of the 'difficult dimensions of class identity or the subjective meaning of these experiences'. Too much of recent labour history, she says, is constrained by its positivist methodology, without much thought for context and construction of sources. These sins are all-too familiar in the older institutional history in this country. In all, the tone of Faue's paper is very sceptical when assessing whether institutional histories could offer us much. My view is more sanguine, grounded in the belief that the more important question is not what we write but how we write it. That is to say, 'good' labour history is a matter of questions, framework and epistemology rather than subject matter.	6
Despite (or perhaps because of) the current organisational crisis of the labour movement, there is much scope for historical analyses of the organisations making up that movement. These studies need not necessarily be as chronologically comprehensive as they have tended to be in the past. They should be more explicitly informed by and grounded in properly articulated themes. Institutional histories need to be re-problematised, not abandoned. It is true, as Faue insists, that class is made in many locations but one of them remains the workplace and the union meeting or, as the case may be, in the chatting, comings and goings of workers, union and non-union alike. To take one example of both shortcoming and opportunity: studies of union history might begin with the spatiality and gendered nature of the organisation, rather than taking these as given, telling a story of a union or a party constructed more or less on its own terms. The absence and failures of an organisation are as compelling as existence and success. As Faue remarks, by failing to consider what is 'missing', vital questions about subjectivities and power relations of all types are occluded.	7
Turning now to the wider issue of class analysis and labour history, we can ask where Australian labour history stands today in the light of Faue's critique of the work of our American sisters and brothers. I do not wish to understate the importance and implications of Faue's argument but not all of it is new. What is new is the insistence that we confront more fully the felt, as well as the lived, experience of the 'subjects' of our study. In her work, we share people's love and pride, grief and joyousness - all of which in complex ways reflect, shape, make and unmake the meanings of class. Yet the paper and these newer issues are located in one of the great, central questions that all those who have tried to write labour history must confront. The issue, of course, is the relationship between structure and agency, between the material and the cultural. It is one thing to say that class - however understood - is neither the sole defining characteristic of social relationships nor the only legitimate tool of social analysis. Indeed, scarcely any labour historian would say that. It is quite another to work out how to construct stories of individual lives in a way that is neither so atomistic as to be a new form of antiquarianism nor so theorised that these lives simply become bearers or exemplars of some preconceived wider social theories.	8
One way to rethink this is not so much through reworking structure and agency as through a reworking of the assumption that contemporary class structures and relationships are only capitalist in nature. Of the scholars who have thought in these ways, the work of Gibson-Graham is perhaps the most striking. This approach conceives of a simultaneous existence of multiple types of class relationships by recognising the persistence of 'feudal exploitative class process' (which remain dominant in Australian households) and of 'independent class processes' (self-employment) even for those engaged an 'classical' wage labour. This conceptualisation of class also distinguishes between capitalist exploitative processes and capitalist distributive processes, thus confronting, for example, the issue of wage-workers deriving income from shares. 3 As Faue also intends, this allows us to recognise more fully the complexity of the making of classes and to be more optimistic about the continued salience of theory itself. In so doing, it opens the way to more richly contextualised labour histories, including institutional histories.	9
The fact that there are familiar problems and tensions lurking behind Faue's ways to find a new frame for labour history, suggests that one way ahead may lie in engagement with other disciplines. The problems of structure and agency, questions of identity, and the challenge of the 'cultural turn', are common to all the humanities and social sciences.	10
If only implicitly, Faue's paper points towards the work of human geography. For her, it seems, the question of how class is made is inseparable from where it is made: class consciousness is made in the home, the school and the playground as much as it is in the office or the factory. She does not develop this theme as much here as she did in her commentary in the recent Labour History thematic on local labour histories. There she suggested that the emerging interest in 'community' could be sharpened by more explicitly spatialised analysis, especially of class in those communities and '"communities with communities" in major urban centres'. 4 If we put together the commentary and the symposium, then we have a call for more attention to space in order to understand both community and class itself.	11
Labour historians have long been aware of the local specificities of work, family and politics. However, few of these studies have dealt with conceptual issues around space and in particular the role of labour and other social forces in making, as opposed to occupying, space. Other scholars, chiefly in human geography, understand labour as a distinctively spatial agent which has shaped 'the course of capitalist development across a wide range of places' as well as being shaped by that (uneven) development. 5 These writers are critical of accounts which take space as given or which understand it as the product of only the most powerful social forces. Others have worked to bring together what are too often posed as opposites - public and private - in attempting, for example, to conceive of labour markets as sites of connection between the processes of production and reproduction. Insights such as these might provide ways not only to sharpen our attention to what 'community' really means but also to enlarge our conceptions of class. 6	12
That we are now trying to think about and write labour history amid the apparent globalisation of so much production, consumption and culture also points to the importance of being more explicit about questions of space. 'Globalising' is not about the end of geography but its re-making; about the making of new spaces within and between nation states, about new forms of work and struggle for women and men across the globe. The local - in which labour historians have developed a greater interest - becomes more complex as consumption and production, private and public, collide in new ways.	13
If, as Faue says, class needs to be understood in terms of its origins, definition, meanings and construction, then it may well be that it needs to be understood as a process which is not limited to capitalist relationships and which is inseparable from the making of social space. Some will use these insights to try to do as Faue says and 'get beyond the institutional'. Others may yet wish to use them to make sense of the institutional. Much of our thinking about what labour history means, where it has come from, and where it might go, needs to be tied to a more basic question: 'why are we doing this?' That is, what is labour history for ? Understanding the multiple meanings of class and the place of labour institutions within them may still provide some ways to re-imagine and contest the power that class affords some over many.	14
Endnotes * I am indebted to Terry Irving and John Shields for discussing aspects of this commentary with me and to Margaret Walters for particularly helpful editorial suggestions. 1. For overviews of labour historiography, see Verity Burgmann, 'The strange death of labour history', in Australian Labor Party, Bede Nairn and Labour History , ALP, Sydney, 1991; Rae Francis & Bruce Scates, 'Is labour history dead?', Australian Historical Studies , vol. 25, no. 100, April 1993, pp. 470-481; Terry Irving (ed.), Challenges to Labour History , UNSW Press, Sydney, 1994. 2. Many on the 'new left' made this point. The accounts in note 1 refer to this but see also Stuart Macintrye, 'The making of the Australian working class: an historiographical survey', Historical Studies , vol. 18, no. 71, October 1978, pp. 233-53. 3. J.K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy , Blackwell, Oxford, 1996, pp. 57-69. See also J.K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen A. Resnick & Richard D. Wolff, 'Introduction: Class in a Poststructuralist Frame', in J.K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen A. Resnick & Richard D. Wolff (eds), Class and its Others , University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000, pp. 1-16. 4. Elizabeth Faue, 'Community, Class and Comparison in Labour History and Local History', Labour History , no. 78, May 2000, p. 160. 5. Richard A. Walker, 'Foreword', in Andrew Herod (ed.), Organizing the Landscape: Geographical Perspectives on Labor Unionism , University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1998, p. xvii. For a discussion about the lack of attention to spatial concepts in industrial relations literature, much of which might also be related to historical analysis, see Bradon Ellem & John Shields, 'Rethinking "Regional Industrial Relations": Space, Place and the Social Relations of Work', Journal of Industrial Relations , vol. 41, no. 4, December 1999, pp. 536-60. 6. Herod, for example, concedes that 'this does not mean that labor is free to construct landscapes as it pleases' but he insists that labour does shape these landscapes, in contestation with capital. See Andrew Herod, 'From a Geography of Labor to a Labor Geography: Labor's Spatial Fix and the Geography of Capitalism', Antipode , vol. 29, no. 1, 1997, pp. 1-31. For the argument about labour markets, see Jamie Peck, Workplace: The Social Regulation of Labor Markets , Guilford Press, New York, 1996, especially p. 39.

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