WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, UCL AL #355 - Trade Unionism, Read Dominique Pinsolle: When Workers Sabotaged (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 If workers in struggle want to scandalize and draw attention to their

cause, there is a simple (but perilous) way: threaten to sabotage
production, or even machines. Even if the threat is not carried out, it
will unleash the media. This is a bit of a lesson that could be learned
from Dominique Pinsolle's remarkable book, a broad and meticulous study
of worker sabotage between 1897 and 1918 in the two countries where it
made the most headlines: France and the United States. Figures to back
it up. ---- Pinsolle measured the occurrences of the word "sabotage" on
the front pages of the French and American press over the period
1897-1918, with a peak in France in 1911, and in the United States in
1918-1919.

"Bad pay, bad work" is the motto of a tactic of struggle, ca'cany ("take
it easy"), which originated in the Glasgow dockers' strike in 1889. The
anarchist Émile Pouget echoed it, then the theoretician in France, and
had "sabotage" adopted at the CGT confederal congress of 1897. But the
activists soon realized that the weapon was difficult to handle. Harshly
repressed, and therefore necessarily clandestine, sabotage was practiced
solo, or even in small groups. The union could whisper the slogan, but
hardly control its application...

Despite these difficulties, different forms of worker sabotage were
used: slowing down production, shutting down machines, "sabotage by the
open mouth" (equivalent to the current "whistleblowing" in companies),
go-slow strikes, work-to-rule strikes, targeted vandalism... Until 1914,
the CGT leadership publicly defended "intelligent sabotage" which was
detrimental to employers and beneficial to consumers.

The actual practice reached its peak in 1911, when anarchist and union
groups went at night to cut telegraph cables to force railway companies
to reinstate the railway workers dismissed following the 1910 strike.
This was the time when, in the far-left press, sabotage was personified
by "Miss Cisaille". But it was also a swan song. The practice
experienced a sharp decline from 1912... when it had just crossed the
Atlantic.

In the United States, a small revolutionary trade union organization
close to the CGT, the IWW, took it up and loudly claimed it. Pamphlets
and songs praised sabotage symbolized by... a clog, but also by the
sab-cat, this black cat of bad omen for the bosses - and which, decades
later, the French CNT would make its logo.

As in France, however, the practice was, in reality, little appropriated
by the workers. On the other hand, what publicity, what a scandal! The
IWW were decapitated by the trials. And, noting that sabotage attracted
more repression than worker victories, the organization ended up
officially abandoning propaganda in 1918.

However, as the author rightly points out, the temptation of sabotage
resurfaces from time to time, when the strike stalls, when there is
nothing left to lose. Nowadays, it is on the ecological front - the book
How to Sabotage a Pipeline by Andras Malm is a symptom of this - that it
is experiencing a resurgence of interest.

Guillaume Davranche (UCL Montreuil)

Dominique Pinsolle, Quand les travailleurs sabotaient. France,
États-Unis (1897-1918), Agone, 2024, 456 pages, 25 euros.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Lire-Dominique-Pinsolle-Quand-les-travailleurs-sabotaient
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca