Watching the current University and College Union (UCU) picket lines from afar – I’m a postdoctoral fellow based in Germany – I was trying to think if I’d ever come across any psychological writings on striking, and, more specifically on picket lines. Of course, as Chris Millard has pointed out already in this series, strikes are not primarily expressions of feeling; they are withdrawals of labour. Indeed, references to strikers’ ‘deep’ or ‘strong’ feelings in letters by university Vice-Chancellors seem to downplay the material demands being made by striking workers. I was nonetheless interested in finding out whether theorisations of the psychological experience of picket lines – as specific spatial, temporal and interpersonal phenomena – already exist.
Perhaps unsurprisingly a search of the multiple psychoanalytic journals included in the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing database for ‘picket line’ yielded just fourteen results. I looked at the two earliest examples that appeared on this list and in both cases the picket line appeared as a fraught symbol for individual bourgeois analysands. In a discussion of compulsive hand-washing from 1938 a female patient writes a short story whose protagonist is based on her hotel maid’s participation in an elevator operator strike. The patient took up the workers’ cause, organising meetings in support of their actions. In this period of political involvement, the analyst reports, that patient’s hand-washing stopped. As soon as her involvement with the strike ceased (interpreted by the analyst as a form of sublimation), her ‘compulsive’ behaviour resumed.[ref]George S. Goldman, ‘A Case of Compulsive Handwashing’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 7 (1938), 96-121.[/ref] In an article from 1943 a ‘frigid hysteric’ patient dreams of a bus trip being cancelled due to a transport strike. In the subsequent interpretation of the dream, which includes a long cutting from a newspaper article on a strike of charwomen the patient had read, the analyst interprets her reaction to the story as relating to her ‘desperately struggling for male status’; she did not ordinarily support strikes on political groundsm but did so in this case due to the gender of the workers.[ref]Edmund Bergler, ‘A Third Function of the ‘Day Residue’ in Dreams’ Psychoanalytic Quarterly, (1943) 12, 353-370.[/ref] In neither example are the patients themselves involved directly in the strikes and neither have first-hand experience of picket lines; the strikes’ psychic significance is tied to existing individual neuroses. Of course, it might be that non-psychoanalytic theories, with less sinister assumptions about group psychology, might be a better place to start for approaching the question at hand. But instead I found myself thinking about the possibility of approaching the question from different fields altogether.
While researching for a recent article reflecting on commemorations of the 1917 October Revolution I found myself reading about early twentieth-century mass spectacles, left-wing pageants and revolutionary dance troupes in the Soviet Union and America.[ref]https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/revolutionary-commemoration[/ref] In many of these cases the relationship between ‘actual’ historical events and ‘fictional’ theatrical reenactments proved to be blurry. As the title of a 1933 piece Edith Segal choreographed with the Needle Trades Workers Dance Group in New York indicates – Practice for the Picket Line – workers in union or party affiliated dance groups would create scenarios drawing on their own experiences, which would in turn function as rehearsals for future political action.[ref]Ellen Graff, Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 43.[/ref] But as a historian of the ‘psy’ disciplines with an interest in affective histories of the left, I was particularly intrigued by how the psychological function of such performances was articulated by their creators, participants and audiences. Perhaps these examples, though remote from the ‘psy’ disciplines, could provide material for thinking through the psychic dimension of the collective experience of picketing.
In January 1913 silk weavers and dyers in Paterson, New Jersey went on strike after four workers were fired for complaining about the introduction of a new four-loom technology that required a less skilled workforce. With the strike still on-going but little coverage of it in the mainstream press, activists and intellectuals in New York collaborated with the striking workers to produce an elaborate pageant in Madison Square Gardens on June 7 1913 , sponsored by the International Workers of the World (IWW). The pageant was intended to publicise the strike and raise money for the strike fund, which was urgently needed as the striking workers and their families were at risk of starvation. But the pageant’s purpose was financial, propagandistic and educational, it was also emotional. The Pageant saw 1,029 strikers reenacting the dramatic events of the picket lines punctuated by familiar songs from the labour movement in which the audience was invited to join.[ref]For the programme of the pageant and other associated primary documents, see: ‘Paterson Strike Pageant’, The Drama Review: TDR, 15, 3 (1971), 60-71.[/ref] The dramatic, fast-paced temporality of the staged strike differed markedly from the drawn-out nature of the real one but the worker-performers found the rehearsal process gave them a chance to reflect on and process their experiences. Almost 15,000 people watched the performance which was then described in detail in New York newspapers. The sympathetic leftist publication Solidarity claimed that the performance ‘seized the imagination’, while the hostile New York Times accused it of ‘stimulating mad passion against law and order’[ref]These reviews are cited in Steve Golin, The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 166, p. 169.[/ref]. Although these accounts differed in their political assessment of the production they both emphasised its psychological power. Although the strike was simulated, the passions the reenactment stimulated were real.
The pageant failed to raise significant amounts of money and many subsequently declared it a failure, which distracted workers and took them away from the real pickets outside the mill.[ref]See, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, ‘The Truth About the Paterson Strike’, Rebel Voices: an IWW Anthology, ed. Joyce Kornbluh (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965 pp. 214-226.[/ref] Indeed, the organisers produced the spectacle at a loss. The Paterson silk strike itself was soon defeated. Workers began returning to the factory in July and many of their demands were never met. Yet some discussions both by contemporaries and historians insist that the pageant succeeded not only as an aesthetic innovation which inspired future artistic endeavours – John Reed, one of the New York intellectuals who instigated the production would soon leave for Europe; his book Ten Days That Shook the World would become a defining account of the October Revolution inspiring Sergei Eisenstein’s October in turn – but also as a cognitive and affective interpersonal experience which similarly outlived the performance itself. Though sufficient funds were not raised, consciousnesses were raised (to use the vocabulary of the pageant’s participants and chroniclers).[ref]See, for example, Leslie Fishbein, ‘The Paterson Pageant (1913): The Birth of Docudrama as a Weapon in the Class Struggle’, New York History, 72, 2 (1991), 197-233, Linda Nochlin, ‘The Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913’, Art in America, 62, 1974, 64-68. In her discussion of Segal’s performance Ellen Graff writes that ‘Radicals hoped that mock demonstrations… would prepare workers for actual confrontations as well as engage their sympathies and raise political consciousness.’ Stepping Left, p. 43.[/ref]
The terms ‘class consciousness’ and ‘political consciousness’ in reflections on the performance function as psychological concepts despite rarely having been explicitly understood as such, and as concepts which seem to have gone largely un-thematised within the ‘psy’ disciplines. One starting point for trying to think more about the psychology of the picket line would be to think more carefully about how these terms were used in this context, how they allude to political concepts elaborated by Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, György Lukács and others, but also depart from or complicate them. I’d be interested in thinking about how an emphasis on gaining a broad intellectual understanding of a political situation was combined with an insistence of the importance of immediate emotional experiences, how emotional experience can allow individuals to situate themselves within a collective, and so on.
Perhaps more central, however, would be a consideration of the function of re-enactment as a form of reflection upon political action (and even as a form of political action in its own right) enabling strikers and their supporters to better understand and communicate their struggle. This might open up ways of approaching the (necessarily very different) forms of reflection, representation and dissemination that attend current disputes. Of course, there is often a kind of theatricality to the picket line as has been evident during the current UCU strikes – which can function to communicate demands, alleviate the tedium of standing around in the cold all day, attract more people to the picket etc – but the example of the pageant brings into focus a slight different set of questions about how striking workers represent and communicate their struggles to themselves and others to forge and sustain the solidarity necessary to resist capitulation. This seems particularly urgent in a context in which collective memories of labour organising can be hard to locate.
The current strikes have not succeeded yet, but UCU branches’ rejection of the deal proposed on Monday (March 12th) indicates that something has shifted during this dispute, which may mark the beginning of a broader resistance to the wider marketization of higher education in the UK. University vice-chancellors’ insistence on invoking the ‘deep’ or ‘strong’ feelings of their striking employees can be read as attempts to reduce picket lines to sites of emotional fracas, or coordinated temper tantrums, strangely divorced from the collective withdrawal of labour. But attending to the psychological dimensions of the picket line could potentially do something very different, offering space for acknowledging the anxiety, frustration, boredom and anger associated with striking, while also allowing us to explore how joyful interpersonal collective experiences can participate in building and sustaining political movements.
Hannah Proctor is a Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin.
Image attribution: The accompanying image, ‘Bus load of children of Paterson, N.J., strikers (silk workers) in May Day parade – New York City] [graphic]’ has been sourced form the online catalogue of the Library of Confress. There are no known restrictions on reproduction. The original can be viewed here: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3b00599/
