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Everyday forms of popular resistance
Monthly Review, Nov, 1988 by Don Nonini
There are other benefits to working people of participating in the underground economy. The income they earn in this way provides them with economic support beyond the reach of the large-scale corporate sector within which many have to work during "regular" working hours, and thus enhances their strength in their day-to-day struggles in the workplace with their employers. Moreover, and perhaps just as significantly, because they have freedom to determine the kinds of work they do within the "underground economy," their hours and working conditions, many have a vision and a reality of rewarding work which is counterposed to the oppressive conditions of their jobs in the corporate economy. Even during regular working hours, many spend timeplanning or preparing for their off-hours work, thus making their "regular" jobs more bearable. Working people do not need to have read Marx's depiction of nonalienated labor in communist society in The German Ideology ("to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon," etc.) to know from their own experience that work need not be the tedious, humiliating, and exhausting activity that it is within the capitalist labor process.
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As in the case of young men refusing to register with Selective Service, many and perhaps most of those participating within the legal part of the underground economy have an extremely constrained set of options for resistance, and are exercising what little room for maneuvering they have against the capitalist state. We must be wary of condemning such activity out of hand as "selfish" or "individualist." Perhaps the best way of determining whether or not it is resistance is to ask: is it part or ]ot of a beggar-thy-neighbor strategy? That is, is the behavior directed against other working-class people, or other people of color-or against the state and monopoly capitalism? Most of the actions by working-class people mentioned in this essay are not directed against others similarly situated, and are therefore forms of resistance.
But-as in other kinds of action mentioned here-participation in the underground economy may take an exploitative form. For instance, employers who hire workers such as undocumented immigrants "off the books," are able to engage in "superexploitation" by denying them fringe benefits or the minimum wages paid elsewhere. Furthermore, working-class women appear to have far fewer opportunities to earn legalsource income within the "underground economy," and when they do, it is at disadvantageous terms relative to those offered to men. The point, then, is not to offer gross generalizations or idealizations, but to call for the careful study of each situation to locate points of resistance where they do exist, and integrate
them into more inclusive and politically conscious strategies of opposition in day-to-day struggles. "Employee Theft": A Reconsideration
Like the legal side of the underground economy, "employee theft" an"pilferage" represent a major form of' resistance by industrial, service, and clerical workers against the abuses of capitalist exploitation which have been intensified during the last decade, in what Piven and Cloward have calle"the new class war" against working people. Often, if not always, "employee theft" should be regarded as a successful attempt by workers to challenge the terms of exploitation set formally by the wage-labor bargain. These terms have become even more disadvantageous during the Reagan years because of the massive deindustrialization of the U.S. economy, the anti-labor practices of the administration and its appointees (e.g., on the NLRB) , and the union-busting tactics of large-scale corporations. Here I should also mention in passing other forms of covert worker resistance which often accomplish the same effect: worker absenteeism, sabotage, work slowdowns, and other challenges to the "effort bargain" between capitalists and workers.
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