Martin Kley, University of Texas at Austin, martin_kley@yahoo.de

Martin Kley, University of Texas at Austin, martin_kley@yahoo.de

Drawing examples from working-class literature within the German context (from Weimar proletarian writers such as A. Grünberg and W. Bredel, the “Bitterfelder Weg” in the GDR, the “Dortmunder Gruppe” in West Germany, and post-unification Germany), I will re-evaluate dead-ends and chances that the synthesis of material and cultural production reveals. My paper’s basic premise is that, while it once was fully justified to criticize the ideology of production of much of working-class literature (e.g. by pointing out the transition from the factory to the “social factory”, or by shifting the focus from production to re-production), today the task for practitioners and theoreticians of working-class culture is to again recognize material production beneath consumption and “symbolic” production, and to point out that the former, as opposed to the latter, allows for collective practice in labor, culture, and the social fabric as a whole.

In particular, I will argue that Register’s narrative is one that finally sustains and perpetuates the capital/labor divide as we know it by continuing to imagine labor’s dependence on capital. While the text rages against the gross inequality in the U.S. and the lack of respect accorded labor, in its attempt to restore dignity to labor it glorifies working-class life in a way that fails to imagine the re-organization of work and economy in the U.S. On the other hand, Brady’s novel develops a narrative of working-class resistance that transcends traditional models of union activism and capital/labor relations, innovatively imagining labor becoming or taking over capital and organizing production on its own behalf. While the workers in the novel “successfully” negotiate a contract through collective bargaining, they come to see that this type of labor/capital relation sustains their dependence on and subjugation to capital and instead seek to explode this binary by opening their own factory. In foregrounding self-determination as the end of working-class struggle, the novel, I will suggest, provides a utopian narrative for working-class studies.

One such intervention is the company magazine. Company magazines have long been used by corporate publicity and advertising departments to represent a particular vision of the corporation to its employees, and a particular vision of the workers to themselves. Often inaugurated with the goal of building “communication” or of increasing “understanding” between management and the work force, this communication and understanding typically goes one way, from the company to the workers. J&L’s company magazine, Men and Steel, largely conforms to this type. However, in its early years of publication, especially from 1947 to the mid-fifties, Men and Steel stood out among other steel industry company magazines in that it evidenced a remarkable level of participation on the employees’ part. Workers would share personal stories and send in family snapshots of vacations, holidays, weddings and graduations, and compete for the honor of having a photograph chosen for use as a magazine cover. This paper examines the ways in which this level of worker participation and self representation in the company magazine seems to suggest a certain kind of “ownership” of the publication on the part of the employees, and also makes the Men and Steel of this era particularly effective company propaganda.