BRUCELAS COMISIÓN DE LAS COMUNIDADES EUROPEAS; CCE 2002.

The strategies outlined above that developed largely out of workers’ relations and experiences with private employers were also adopted by unions who sought to direct them into a dialogue with the receding state. In the beginning of 2006, Andon

Majhoshev, acting in his capacity as the president of the local Union branch in Shtip, edited and published a small booklet called The Black Book, Stories From Shtip and

Karbinci. The booklet is a collection of short statements by local town folk who experienced the demise of the socialist industrial giants and found themselves either with no work or in a very different working environment. Majhoshev described to me the serendipitous occasion of its inception:

“I was sitting in my union office and a couple of the workers who lost their jobs from the old enterprises and were unemployed for several years came up to see me. They were seriously distraught because of their situation, and one of the women asked me ‘Is there a black book somewhere where I can write down my suffering so I can get this heavy burden off my soul?’ And I happened to have a black notebook in the drawer in my desk and I said yes I have a black book! And that's when I got the idea that workers should write down their stories so that people can hear them. And then it wasn't difficult to get more people to come over and write down their stories and get statements. People wanted to come so they can be heard. I gathered about 142 stories of which we included about 100 in the black book. I then distributed the books to all the major political parties and officials and even journalists came and took interest in the Black Book. I even met with the then Minister for Social Care and Labour as part of our negotiations between the union and the government and gave him a copy. I remember him saying ‘Let us hope there will be no more Black Books to write.’”

What the minister received was a series of short statements that together represent a litany of complaints and accounts of hardship, suffering, humiliation and uncertainty

with the future peppered with expressions of solidarity. Majhoshev gathered a total of 147 statements, 73 from men and 74 from women, 85 percent of which were aged between 41-60 years which meant that the vast majority of those included came of age and had a history of employment during socialism. The statements are divided into four main sections, those being: workers from bankrupt former SOE’s, garment industry workers, pensioners and public sector workers. The book does well to capture the diverging categories of workers that were being released on the labour market, each with different challenges and priorities, but whose appeals nonetheless shared the same underlying logic of seeking out new forms of dependence. The majority of the

statements are addressed directly to the state, personified by politicians and the labour inspectors immediately charged with the responsibility of eradicating economic abuses.

In a tradition very familiar to anthropologists, Majhoshev writes in the introduction that the purpose of the book is to provide “vulnerable citizens” with “a space where they can voice their anger and disenchantment due to the accumulated social problems and at the same time give them hope that someone will read about them and help them.” That “someone” is explicitly defined as the “relevant state institutions” that have turned a deaf ear to the plight of workers. He adds that “the best part of these people have never been asked how they live, how they feel and what are their expectations of the future.” The act of giving voice to the voiceless and simply being “listened to” is presented as a starting point for change and improvement and is even seen as having the potential of becoming a “new form of union struggle”.

A fifty year old male former employee in a socially owned firm wrote: “If during

socialism we were seeing in the dark, in today’s pluralist democracy and freedom we do not see at all. We are left without work, without existential means, and many young people abandoned us and went abroad. All of the above is in my opinion the result of

bad politics, corruption and anarchy.” This description of the transition directly

translates the experience of “disorder” on a cosmological scale. In their focus on human tragedy as an onset of chronic suffering, they trace the experience of a ritual passage from subject to outcast (ibid) and are a form of protest against the loss of social status and the protracted state of liminality (Caraveli-Chaves 1980: 138, cited in Fishman 2008: 272).

Another former employee in the garment manufacturing giant Astibo wrote: “I was left with no employment from Astibo after 30 years or working. My husband is also

unemployed. He works on the black market for [three Euros] a day. We have two children who are students. We’ve had to recall one of them as we cannot support his studies anymore. I am very disappointed about the conditions in the country because together with my husband we have worked for a combined 63 years and now we are on

the street9. I am unhappy because my children are unhappy and apathetical and want to go abroad to work. The government has to do something to stop the children from leaving abroad. I feel we are losing the future of the country. If they shorten the

maternity leave to three months or to six I think that the Macedonian nation will vanish. That has to be stopped.”

A 59 year old garment factory worker wrote: “My son and daughter in law are

unemployed. They have only one child. They do not want to have another because they have no work. If the crisis continues in this way soon the population will grow old and

9

The closing of the factories and the experience of becoming surplus labour is usually described as “being left on the street”. This is not a reference to homelessness which is an exceptionally rare

consequence of unemployment. Most workers in Shtip (of all generations) still reside in extended family households capable of providing a roof for several generations of family members. It is instead a reference to being deprived of a workplace that used to be the converging point of people’s social universe; leaving workers to aimlessly wonder the streets to fill in empty time (see Graan 2012: 179). This usually legitimate leisure activity loses its meaning when separated from its opposite, i.e. some kind of productive enterprise and becomes a symptom of social decay ultimately embodied in the former workers.

there will be no one left to replace the current workers.” Two younger garment workers in their thirties wrote: “I feel humiliated because my boss is breaking my basic human

rights so that I cannot raise my children as I should because he keeps me at work all day”; “I am very sad because my children grew up without a mother because I work all day in the garment factory. I feel I am losing control over them and that they no longer feel I am their mother”. A former worker from Astibo with 28 years of working

experience wrote that for her family time was also slipping backwards and out of

modernity with the closing of Astibo: “Our only son has become depressed. He wants to leave the country. You should know that as an honest family we are very disappointed and every other month they switch off our electricity and we eat with candles and live like in the middle ages.”

A key recurring element in the statements is the introduction of the national dimension. What it highlights is the gradual relaxing of the Marxist language of class and

proleterianization to make space for the (ever growing) discourse of the national community and the corollary language of kinship. Instead of a corporate “class” workers here become an inseparable and vital part of the national community and the “health” of workers becomes directly linked to the “health” of the nation. The shift is significant in that it allows workers to tap into a pool of widely shared symbols of the (imagined) moral community of the nation as the “listener”. Women, who represent the more likely garment factory workers, are particularly important in the value matrix of the nation as responsible for its social and biological reproduction. As a result,

complaints about female overtime labour and exploitation in the factories focuses on the disruption this cause in the unpaid economy of household labour. The lack of “worker’s rights” translates into an interference of the basic tasks of rearing the next generation.

The last section of the booklet contains statements from civil servants employed in the public administration expressing their support for the plight of factory workers and are inserted as examples of “listening”. One of them, identified only as a 29 year old woman states “I work in a public enterprise and I am doing well, but I stand behind the workers who have no rights, work all day long, are not paid for it and are humiliated, disenfranchised and terrified.”

As Zigon points out, complaints can be seen as doing a kind of “ethical work” by explicitly identifying a moral transgression for the listener, and thereby, bringing them “into the context of the transgressive moment” (ibid: 141). As such, the laments are directed above all at a listener who is assumed to share the moral assumptions of the disenfranchised, such as the fictitious kinship community of co-nationals (Alexopoulos 2003: 115). We can thus look at the short statements in the Black Book as a cluster of performative speech acts working on social reality by working on, and mobilizing, others. Through their complaints expressed in the Black Book, workers are not just addressing the state but mobilizing the discourse of the national community, and the traditional gender norms built into it, in order to situate themselves within a larger whole.

This “connecting” of economic activity with the moral community of the nation and the gender norms governing the intimate work of reproduction, allows workers to link their interests with the interests of “society” as a whole. The hope is that by reciprocating the indignation the listeners will participate in the collective recognition of a moral disorder and its condemnation. On the one hand, this allows workers to “transcend … the limits of purely economic class” and contest the co-option of the State as the organ of one particular group, i.e. the new capitalists (see Gramsci 1992: 181-182). But in doing so workers consciously step away from the idea of class unity and autonomy, reify

established gender hierarchies at home and in the workplace, and cement the patriarchal image of the state-as-guardian (not to mention further alienate non-nationals from the struggle.) The reason this is not seen as problematic, however, is precisely because within such forms of dependence workers can at least be recognized as moral persons towards which those in power have some kind of obligations that go beyond the mere exchange of labour for cash on the market (Graeber 2011b: 191). As Ferguson remarks, “for those thus abjected, subjection can only appear as a step up” (2013: 231; italics in original). With this in mind, I now turn to another struggle of the abjected: that of the labouring surplus.