Gegen die Arbeit

Michael Seidman (US-Professor für neuere spanische und französische Geschichte)

Worum es uns geht

Die Diskussion um „die Arbeit“ hat zu heftigen Erschütterungen geführt: die Herausgeber des Buches von Michael Seidman werfen Kritikern des Buches vor, das „wissenschaftliche Renomeé“ des US-Professors Seidman in Frage zu stellen oder gar beschädigen zu wollen. Was für eine Lachnummer!

Wer Zitate fälscht, aus dem Zusammenhang reißt und sich letztlich rühmt, keine „historische Aufarbeitung“ der Spanischen Revolution und ihrer Niederlage leisten zu wollen, nun, der ist uns extrem suspekt.

Es ist auch mehr als bezeichnend, warum in fast keinem (!) der uns bekannten spanischen Auseinandersetzungen um die geschichtliche Bedeutung und Hintergründe des Bürgerkrieges und der Sozialen Revolution die als Buch erschienen sind – die Positionen des umtriebigen Professors Michael Seidmann übernommen wird.

Aufgesetzt wirkt auch der an den Haaren herbeigezogene Zusammenhang, daß „innerhalb der FAU und der libertären Öffentlichkeit die Diskussion um Arbeiterselbstverwaltung“ einen neuen Schub erhalten haben soll, „als der Historiker Michael Seidman im Oktober 2011 anlässlich der deutschen Erstübersetzung seiner bereits 1991 unter dem Titel Workers against Work erschienenen Studie über die Arbeiterkämpfe in Barcelona und Paris 1936-39“ (Leitartikel in der FAU-direkte aktion # 210 vom März/April 2012) vorstellte.

Wir bringen nachfolgend einige Beiträge, die sich mit Seidmans Studie befassen. Aber festhalten, es wird kritisch!

• Seidmans Plakat-Märchen – mit vielen Beispielen

• Helen Grahams Rezension aus der IISG-Zeitschrift International Review of Social History (1992)

• Rezension von Helen Graham zu Seidman weiterem Spanien-Buch Republic of Egos (2003)

• Über Seidmans Zitat-Manipulationen anhand von D.A. de Santilláns Originaltexten

Was will Seidman wirklich? Statt die Revolution zu verteidigen, für den libertären Kommunismus zu kämpfen und dafür Plakate wie »Rettet die Produktion!«
zu kleben, hätten die anarchistischen Revolutionäre die Arbeiterklasse wohl lieber auffordern sollen, sich Franco zu unterwerfen
und auf die »schöne neue Welt« des Faschismus mit Konsum und Arbeit zu hoffen …

» …  ein interessantes, aber zutiefst unzulängliches Buch«

Redaktionelle Vorbemerkung

Helen Grahams Rezension der Originalausgabe von Michael Seidmans Buch »Gegen die Arbeit« – die wir hier erstmals in deutscher Übersetzung vorlegen – erschien 1992 in der Zeitschrift des Amsterdamer Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (IISG) [1]. Seidman erwähnt in dem Manuskript des Vortrags, den er zur Vorstellung der deutschen Übersetzung seines Buches im Oktober 2011 in verschiedenen deutschen Städten hielt, und der in der »graswurzelrevolution« und im Internet veröffentlicht wurde [2], diese Rezension in Anmerkung 8 seines Vortragsmanuskripts – eigentümlicherweise aber allein im Zusammenhang mit den »älteren Schwestern« einer »neue[n] Generation von Feministinnen«: diese »älteren Schwestern« hätten »dem Buch anfangs recht kritisch gegenüber gestanden«, während die »neue Generation (…) die Anerkennung zu schätzen« wußte, »die Gegen die Arbeit der besonderen Rolle der Frauen als Widerständlerinnen entgegenbrachte, insbesondere ihren hohen Fehlzeiten und ihrer relativ geringen Identifikation mit dem Arbeitsplatz«. Michael Seidman unterstellt damit offenbar, daß Helen Grahams Kritik sich auf seine Beschreibung der Rolle der Frauen im Kampf »gegen die Arbeit« konzentrieren würde – ein Aspekt, den sie, wie hier unschwer nachzulesen ist, lediglich in ein paar Sätzen abhandelt.

Karl Heinz Roth und Marcel van der Linden ignorieren Helen Grahams Rezension in ihrem Vorwort zu der deutschen Ausgabe [3] von Seidmans Buch übrigens völlig, obwohl sie diverse Kritiken der ersten Ausgabe aus dem akademischen Spektrum anführen. Diese schätzen sie durchgängig ein als »eher ratlos« oder »Randprobleme« – wie »eine mögliche Überschätzung der Stärke der französischen Bourgeoisie oder die mangelnde Berücksichtigung komplementärer Studien über den Arbeiterwiderstand in der Sowjetunion« – diskutierend, oder daß sie »Anstoß an der explizit betonten Konfrontationsstellung, die Seidman gegenüber den dominierenden – modernisierungstheoretischen und marxistischen – Strömungen der Arbeitergeschichtsschreibung« nehmen werden.

[J.S.]

Hier als pdf-Datei die Rezension im Original. Spannend ist übrigens, daß Marcel van der Linden in seinem Vorwort, das er zusammen mit Karl Heinz Roth schrieb,  eben diese Rezension nicht erwähnt. Und das, obwohl er Forschungsdirektor des Amsterdamer Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (IISG) und Professor für die Geschichte der sozialen Bewegungen an der Universität von Amsterdam ist.
Außerdem ist er Vorstandsmitglied der Bremer Stiftung für Sozialgeschichte – zusammen mit Karl Heinz Roth.

Er die Übersetzung lesen möchte, möge sich dann mal die barrikade kaufen.

Helen Graham Seidman

• barrikade # 7 – April 2012

* * *

Dies war unser Aufruf zur ausführlichen Diskussion dieses Buches!

Lest es und schreibt uns Eure Meinung dazu, gerne ausführlich. Wir finden es schon erstaunlich, daß dieses 20 Jahre alte Buch nun veröffentlicht wird – ausgerechnet von der Graswurzelrevolution und übersetzt von einem FAU-Mitglied (sic!). Seidman selbst stellt in seinem aktuellen Vorwort heraus (2011), daß sich mittlerweile die wissenschaftlich-soziologischen Betrachtungsweisen geändert hätten und sein Buch ‚Gegen die Arbeit‘ »den kollektiven Charakter des Widerstandes gegen die Arbeit« überbetont hätte. Es vermeochte nicht, die »individualistischen Grundlage der Verweigerungen« herauszuarbeiten und damit seine „Geschichte von unten“ auf »eine solidere Grundlage zu stellen«. Recht hat er – auch wenn sein Buch sicherlich »sachdienlich« und diskussionswürdig ist.

Für Genoss~innen, die sich an Kollektivität der Klasse weiterhin orientieren und Klassenkampf und Arbeitersolidarität als Leitmotiv ihrer Aktivitäten sehen, ist die Intention dieses Buches ein Schlag ins Gesicht, denn Seidman propagiert ganz offen den Individualismus: »Individualität ist das Einzige, was Menschen gemein haben.« (Leitmotiv seines Buches ‚The Republic of Egos‘, 2002). Bezeichnenderweise belobhudelt  Karl Heinz Roth dieses Buch mit einem überschwenglichen Vorwort. Das macht die Sache mehr als bedenklich. Er versteigt sich zu folgende absurden Theorie: »… die ArbeiterInnen verweigerten ihren neu installierten Arbeiterregimes die Gefolgschaft« und »In Spanien avancierte die CNT zum Vorreiter einer repressiven Wiederherstellung der Arbeitsdisziplin, und die Volksfrontregierung fuhr unter dem Einfluss des Syndikalismus einen weniger harten, aber dennoch ebenfalls eindeutigen Disziplinierungskurs.«

„Anders als frühere Generationen von Linken, die davon ausgingen, dass die ArbeiterInnen für die Revolution arbeiten würden, sind sich viele ihrer heutigen Erben darüber im Klaren, dass das größte Problem vielleicht nicht darin bestehen könnte, die Bourgeoisie zu stürzen, sondern darin, die Lohnabhängigen dazu zu bringen, für die Sache zu arbeiten.“

Vortragsmanuskript Michael Seidman, nach GWR #363 – November 2011

• Michael Seidman: Gegen die Arbeit. Über die Arbeiterkämpfe in Barcelona und Paris 1936–1938. Verlag Graswurzelrevolution 2011, 482 Seiten, ISBN 978-3-939045-17-5, Preis 24,80 Euro

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»… a defence of neo-liberal economic individualism«

Wie Professor Seidman mit den Fakten und der Spanischen Revolution verfährt, zeigt diese Rezension von Helen Graham aus England/UK aus dem Jahre 2003, das sich mit Seidmans Buch „Republic of Egos“ auseinandersetzt. Vorab geht es erstmal und das Buch Creating Spaniards (Die Formierung der Spanier) von Sandie Holguín – auch interessant und mit wichtigen Hinweisen.
Wir veröffentlichen hier als Einstieg die Original-Besprechung … die Übersetzung folgt in der BARRiKADE # 7:

Holguín, Sandie, Creating Spaniards. Culture and National Identity in Republican Spain.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, 264 & xi pp.
ISBN: 0 299 17630 4 (cloth); 0 299 17634 7 (paper)

The historiography of the Spanish civil war (1936-1939) has developed along lines similar to that of twentieth-century Europe as a whole – albeit with a time lag deriving from the longevity of the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975) born of the war.  First came the works of diplomatic, high political and economic history dealing with the rapid internationalisation of the conflict and its implications for the great powers.  These were mainly the product of research done outside Spain, since the dictatorship did not permit access to sources, except to its own propagandists, or publication, except of apologia and hagiography.  By the later 1970s and early 1980s new work was appearing – including by Spaniards, as the arrival of political democracy initiated a slow thaw. This analysed the internal political development of the warring sides in Spain and their relationship to European polarisation in the 1930s.  Included here were the initial analyses of Francoism in relation to European fascisms, and research on the International Brigades that fought with the Republic – work that is ongoing, in the latter case not least because of the opening of the Moscow archives. Over the past decade, however, work by a new generation of historians inside Spain has come to focus on the war as a civil conflict involving the whole of society.

This new research looks at the long period of `uncivil peace‘ with its mass killing and incarceration that followed the Francoist military victory of 1 April 1939.  It does so for reasons that clearly connect history writing to the claims of memory and reparation in present times.  In particular historians are interested in how and why Spanish society and state were reconstructed by means of the brutal exclusion of specific groups.  Of major importance here is work on the pivotal mechanism of Franco’s repressive machinery: denunciation. This created dense webs of complicity between regime and society through which `ordinary Spaniards‘ became profoundly implicated in the repression of their Republican compatriots.  At its best, this new work achieves the difficult synthesis that social history requires in order to explain change (or the lack of it) and, most particularly, to explain how such processes and conditions are shaped by the interaction of macro and micro levels of power.  For a convincing historical analysis of modern society must be alive to the complex relationship between national and international politics and economy on the one hand and the dynamics of everyday life on the other. It must also take account of the multiple interactions between political authority, the historically contingent, but eclectic, traditions and values of society, and the full range of collective identities and individual subjectivities therein.

Beyond Spain too, Hispanist historians are now similarly focusing on social and cultural themes, as indicated by the University of Wisconsin Press books under review here.  Sandy Holguín’s is an important and unexplored subject: the attempt by progressive governing elites in 1930s Spain to nationalise/republicanise the masses by means of cultural projects that were innovative in their form, if less so in their content. These included theatre troupes that took classical drama to the villages of Spain (although in practice this meant mainly villages in Castile, Spain’s centralist heartland) and the misiones pedagógicas, the peripatetic educators whose most crucial task was to impart basic literacy to the rural masses. Holguín’s is a conscientiously assembled study with some wonderful archival photographs. But it is descriptive rather than analytical and ultimately too narrowly focused. The material on cultural policy is presented virtually without reference to its reception or to the bigger picture of Republican reform and the forces that challenged it.  The lack of such context means Holguín cannot fruitfully address the central theme of `creating Spaniards‘. Indeed her use of  `Spain‘ and `Spaniards‘ (also `Europeans‘) when referring to the 1930s begs many questions.  The final chapter on the civil war is by far the most problematic, however, containing as it does numerous errors of fact and interpretation.  Rather than engaging in counterfactual conjecture about cultural policy after a putative Republican victory, Dr Holguín would have been better advised to examine the actual resurgence of the Republic’s liberal paternalist cultural project during the state reconstruction of 1937.

Seidman, Michael, Republic of Egos. A Social History of the Spanish Civil War.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, 304 & xi pp. ISBN: 0 299 17860 9 (cloth); 0 299 17864 1 (paper)

Michael Seidman’s canvas, in Republic of Egos, is also the civil war, and again viewed mainly from the perspective of Republican Spain. The author lays explicit claim to have written a social history. But this turns out to be problematic for a number of reasons. First, the strangely static thematic structure adopted by Seidman precludes analysis of how material conditions, social experience and the varying meanings groups and individuals attached to them evolved across the war. Although the general reader would probably not grasp it from reading this book, 1938 was a world away from 1936 in terms of the conditions of daily life in Republican Spain and the population’s varying expectations of the future. It was so not least because of the deteriorating international diplomatic climate and the impact of the economic embargo that operated against the Republic as a consequence of the policy of Non-Intervention imposed by the European powers. This had a direct and cumulatively destructive effect on the Republic’s ability to supply its army and civilian population and thus on every aspect of life in Republican Spain. In the end, the resulting material crisis, which led to serious hunger, would erode everything, including the political legitimacy of the Republic. Yet Seidman’s account ignores the fact that the daily life he describes was intrinsically shaped by this `bigger picture‘. For some reason the author seems to think this can be separated off as the subject of an entirely different sort of historical enquiry.

Seidman’s structure is highly problematic in other ways too. Its almost total disregard of chronology means the author falls into numerous contradictions. Sometimes these are real (on page 27 the civil war is described as a conflict in which the masses were not involved, while on page 41 the author cites the military rebels‘ own view that the working masses were against them, without further comment of his own). On other occasions the contradictions arise as a collateral effect of the flawed structure: the Republican militia were effective (p. 29; p. 34) then they weren’t (p. 42 & ff.). In fact they were efficient in urban street fighting, but weak when deployed in conventional warfare in open country against regular troops. Seidman doesn’t make this difference nearly clear enough, given its pivotal importance for the evolution of military, political and social organisation in Republican Spain. But, whether real or only apparent, such contradictions (of which there are many) will cause serious confusion among general readers and students looking for a coherent analysis of developments over time.

Frequently what we get in this book is not really a historical analysis at all but rather a skidding across the surface, a descriptive compendium of archival or bibliographically derived snippets that lead nowhere in particular. The primary and secondary referencing is at times careless (some of the archival references are very odd indeed) and the frequent use of superannuated Anglo-American bibliography is unacceptable when an extensive specialist Spanish historiography is now readily available. As the detail accumulates so too do the sweeping asides. These beg any number of crucial questions and are, at times, startlingly ill considered. Where is the evidence that a `shared Catholicism acted to restrain the most brutal aspects of the war‘? Psychological and physical annihilation was frequently visited by fanatical, ultramontane Catholics on those they considered the worst of `heretics‘ precisely because their lives combined social modernity and liberal Catholic belief. In the civil war what it meant to be a Catholic, just as what it meant to be a Spaniard, was brutally contested.

But the most profound flaw in Seidman’s work – whether as social history or as history tout court – is its failure to understand the intimate links between mass political mobilisation, cultural change and individual identity/subjectivity in 1930s Europe. Ideology was not a `bolt on‘ extra as Seidman would have us believe. It was an integral part of social consciousness, of people’s sense of self – and by `people‘ I mean `ordinary people‘, not just a political vanguard. Of course there were social constituencies that remained marginal to the war experience (one exceptional case is sketched by Norman Lewis in Voices of the Old Sea). But Dr Seidman doesn’t really explore this question. Instead he seeks to deny something to which even his own empirical evidence points: that political mobilisation in Republican Spain was a mass social and cultural event – indeed a psychic event. He himself discusses the opportunities that Republican mobilisation opened up for thousands of young women. There are abundant testimonies indicating how personal and political transformation were inextricably entwined in the lives of young Spanish women who joined the socialist-communist youth organisation (JSU) that mobilised hundreds of thousands during the war. A gender and generational revolution was occurring in people’s heads as well as on the streets. Youth exploded onto the political scene in wartime Republican Spain – the evidence for it is everywhere in the sources if one knows how to look. Michael Seidman’s reductive text tells us less about the social history of wartime Republican Spain than it does about how the present political moment has caused the 1930s to recede far further than their actual chronological distance. So it is fortunate that innovative social history is moving to provide a corrective by examining the psychic life of mass left politics in Europe in the inter-war period.

Seidman’s weddedness to ‘universal individuality‘, a fundamentally ahistorical notion anyway, is all the more strange for a social historian whose remit includes precisely identifying the specificities of culture and enquiring into how and why mentalities change across time. The startlingly static and opaque categories of `cynicism‘ and `opportunism‘ that he deploys are ill suited to a social historical analysis whose function ought to be to explain behaviour in relation to the specific course of Spanish social and political development before and during the civil war. But for the author ‘mass apathy and inattention’ is a static category across the 1930s, indeed across modern Spanish history (p. 26), Seidman’s analysis of which is largely devoid of shade and nuance. (This lack of analytical purchase is also a problem in the Holguín book – see, for example, `Spain’s seemingly aimless history…‘ (p. 4).) One avenue that a social historian might explore would connect `opportunism‘ to a traditional and deeply ingrained clientelist or patronage-based understanding of politics and life. People joined political parties or other organisations for reasons of material benefit or social and professional advancement rather than because of an element of shared political vision. Nevertheless, one of the fundamental points about the 1930s in Spain, as a time of transition, is that politics was frequently about both things simultaneously. `Cynicism‘ was also in important part derived from the many and varied forms of war weariness that inevitably intensified by 1938 as the conditions of daily life and the Republic’s international position both deteriorated dramatically.

By far the most bizarre feature of the whole book is Seidman’s introductory statement that the men, women and children of Republican Spain, in doing what they had to in order to procure the basic necessities of life in a time of war-induced economic dislocation and scarcity, were, with their `acquisitive, consumerist and entrepreneurial impulses‘ laying `the foundation for the present-day consumer society‘. No case for this is argued. Nor could it be since, for all Seidman’s invocation of `the individual‘, nowhere does his text explore the interiority of his historical subjects – whether soldiers or civilians. But without this how is it possible to know what libidinal investments people made in the food and staple products they gathered? In fact, the failure to consider subjectivities in a book littered with references to `the individual‘ gives the reader an important clue as to authorial intent. It is not a historical reconstruction of consciousness(es) that concerns Dr Seidman, but a defence of neo-liberal economic individualism – so much, then, for the `death‘ of ideology he prematurely announces.

Social history, by including the dimension of interiority, allows people to `be themselves‘ above and beyond their simultaneous membership of collective categories such as class or gender. Dr Seidman is very critical of historians‘ use of such categories. But his own are much less flexible or nuanced. What good social history can really show us is how people in the past were as different from us as we are from ourselves. Yet Michael Seidman seems intent on confining them (and us) to his own narrow and standardised consumerist categories. His limited and limiting analysis of Republican Spain in the 1930s conveys nothing of its potentialities, nothing of its energy or dreams. Against the author’s crude and triumphalist teleology, we might bear in mind that there were better futures in that past than the one we have today.

• Helen Graham – Professorin an der Royal Holloway University of London, zu Michael Seidman, “Republic of Egos. A Social History of the Spanish Civil War” im Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Vol. 4/2003