ILPC 2026

This writing explores the links between the kind of class identity of the workers and their role in a specific work process. With this perspective, we made a comparative approach in an international scale, studying the case of the agricultural machinery workers of the Argentine Pampas and the American Midwest, at the beginning of the 21st century. From our theoretical stand point, the comprehension of the working-class subjectivity doesn’t finish in the analysis of a practical function in an isolated productive process, and not even in the social conditions in which it is done. But it’s not understood without attending to these factors either. Even though, this sets out the challenge of leaking these dimensions of the rest of the historical, cultural and political factors that take part of the most global working-class experience in a certain social formation.

As a response to these theoretical and methodological questions, we made an experiment applying the same questionnaire to the same kind of agricultural workers -who realize the same tasks to produce the same goods with identical technological resources and similar labour relations-, but socialized and inserted in very different social formations: Argentina and the United States. That is to say, we assumed that the "external" influences regarding the moment of production would be different, and that there would only remain constant a common work process where the tasks are done in a practically individual way (unlike the big industrial conglomerates), on the basis of certain skills (unlike the taylorist ideal of an exchangeable worker), and keeping high degrees of workers control on the pace, the way and the result of the tasks (unlike the fordist line of production).

What we observed was the emergency of a very similar class subjectivity, characterized by a marked individualism associated with: a) their daily isolation and with the scanty collective cooperation demanded by their tasks; b) the empowerment that they experience making the machines work for them, activating and controlling directly the forces of nature, without big social mediations to transform and domain the environment; and c) the feeling of personal accomplishment that they find in the result of their work, after concentrating almost the whole process of wealth creation in their individual hands. All that enables another common emergent: the subjective connection with the content of the work. In other words, they like to do it and do it as good as possible, feeling projected in the product of their work as a reflection of themselves. This way, so much for the individual control of the work process, as for their subjective connection with it, the agricultural workers find ways of withdraw from the double alienation of the waged condition –of expropriation and subordination-, building a class identity just slightly antagonistic in front of their employers, and with scanty bridges of affective solidarity regarding other kinds of rural and urban workers.