Mollona 2005

Article
Gifts of Labour
Steel Production and Technological Imagination
in an Area of Urban Deprivation, Sheffield, UK
Mao Mollona
Goldsmiths College, London
Abstract The article focuses on how the workers of a small tool factory located
in Endcliffe an area of urban deprivation in Sheffield, UK conceptualize,
experience, and talk about the value of their labour and how changes in the
wider politico-economic environment affect their notion of labour value. The
article combines a Marxist analysis of the capitalist labour process with an
anthropological focus on the ideology of gift and commodity exchange, and
explores the cultural specificity of processes of labour commodification. It
argues that the combined effect of state neoliberal policies and extensive
subcontracting by local steel corporations in Sheffield have turned small factories into hybrids between economic and welfare institutions, with mixed
commodified and non-commodified labour on the same shopfloor. In challenging much of the recent anthropological literature on alienation, the article
claims that alienation is the consequence of the workers (con)fusion of the
ideology of labour as a free gift and the ideology of labour as a purely utilitarian
activity, rather than of their sharp separation.
Keywords de-industrialization Europe exploitation fetishism imagination
political economy politics of production
This article is a Marxist exploration of the imaginary forms taken by

labour under capitalism. I describe the labour process as a process of
fabrication of social relations through the exchange of objects and information. Through the production and circulation of artefacts, the workers
build sensuous and material connections, make cuts and separations
between themselves, their objects of production and the environment.
Under capitalism, technology is the imaginary fetish1 through which the
workers conceptualize the connections between people and things. It is
the symbolical operator that mediates between the world of the objects and
the world of subjects, and the arena where social relations are negotiated
and reproduced. My ethnography focuses on the technological fetishism of
the workers of Morris, a small tool factory located in Endcliffe,2 an exindustrial neighborhood of Sheffield. In Morris, the younger workers talk
of the machines as alienable labour, whereas the older workers talk of
their machines in terms of inalienable capital. In the article I treat technology as an ideological construct and an enchanting artefact3 and I
Vol 25(2) 177198 [DOI:10.1177/0308275X05052022]
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Critique of Anthropology 25(2)
suggest that the workers conflicting versions of technological fetishism

obscure their common subsumption to capital.
In the article I combine the tradition of industrial sociology that developed from Marxs seminal study of the capitalist labour process (1976
[1867]) and his focus on the commodified nature of wage labour with
recent anthropological studies on labour commodification (Carrier, 1992;
Goddard, 2000; Hart, 1983) and the politico-economy of gift and
commodity exchange (Parry, 1986; Parry and Bloch, 1989; Strathern, 1988;
Thomas, 1991). These anthropological studies have variously incorporated
Marxs symbolical analysis of labour commodification and combined it with
a Maussian understanding of exchange as total fact. For instance, Maurice
Bloch in his Marxian study of the symbolical construction of the representation of the mode of production by Merina peasants (1989b: 175) pairs
the worship of money and commodities under capitalism with the Merina
worship of tombs and ancestors. According to Bloch, Western commerce
and Merina tombs are ideological constructs through which the dominant
classes obscure human productiveness and reproduce the political order.
Similarly, the anthropologists Lisette Josephides (1985) and Maurice
Godelier (1996) show that the ideology of generosity of Melanesian Great
Men is a misrepresentation of their exploitation of womens labour. These
anthropological studies provided a structural link between ideologies of
exchange and ideologies of production, and a theoretical framework for
comparative studies on alienation in capitalist and non-capitalist societies.
For instance, Jonathan Parry (Parry and Bloch, 1989) suggests that the
ideology of the pure gift as opposed to the ideology of commodity
exchange emerged in societies with an advanced division of labour, a
strong state and world religions. On the same line, James Carrier (1992)
suggests that labour commodification and the experience of alienation
developed in Europe and North America as a consequence of the modern
system of factory production.
Carrier (1992) in his historical sketch of the emerging alienation in
relations of production draws on Thompson, Braverman and Polanyi to
argue that modern capitalist production entails a split in the workers
personalities between two opposite moralities. The morality of economic
institutions is seen to be impersonal and regulated by abstract forces as
the market , while the morality of the family is seen to be personal and
regulated by personal forces like affection, creativity or bonds between
people (1992: 553). Carriers formalist reading of the notions of technology, working class and alienation under capitalism leads him to draw
a historical divide between the non-alienated pre-capitalist world and alienation under capitalism. In my analysis, I focus on the subjective, experiential and symbolical ways through which manual workers imagine themselves
and the relations of production in which they are embedded. I suggest that
ideologies are not as sharp and static as Carrier makes them, and I focus
on the opacity of the categories of capital and labour; on their historical
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Mollona: Gifts of Labour
continuity (Hart, 1983); and their strategic permutability and convertibility (Thomas, 1991) in the contexts of the factory, the family and the neighbourhood.
In fact, the workers of the same shopfloor have ambiguous and conflicting views of the value of their labour. Some workers consider labour as
inalienable social capital that can circulate only in the form of gift among
related individuals. Other workers consider labour as a commodity that
they exchange anonymously in the production process. The workers
complementary narratives one of pure generosity and one of pure
interest reflect and reproduce the capitalist ideology or cosmology
centred on the free and alienable nature of labour in modern factory
production. On the one hand these oppositional moralities obscure the
fact that the workers pertain to the same space of poverty outside the
factory, while on the other, they allow the workers to articulate long-term
strategies of reciprocity.
My article follows up on Stratherns project of an anti-humanist anthropology. Strathern, in her Gender of the Gift (1988), challenges Josephides
claim of womens alienation in Mount Hagen and suggests that Melanesian
people cannot possibly be alienated because they dont subscribe to the
Western myth of possessive individualism. Strathern conceived of her
attack on the myth of possessive individualism as a challenge to the
Thatcherite myths of individuals and society that informed neoliberal
and Marxist social science in the 1980s (Ingold, 1996: Part II). Nevertheless, she overlooked the long tradition of Marxist critique of possessive individualism from Marxs 1844 Manuscripts (1963) to Louis Althussers
Humanist Controversy (2003) that preceded and possibly informed her
work. In so doing, she depoliticized anthropology by drawing a divide
between alienated Westerners and non-alienated Melanesians. In my article
I go back to this tradition, and I suggest that a truly anti-humanist project
must provide a serious critique to the myths of capitalism.
My focus will be mainly on the shopfloor. In the first section I describe
the organization of labour and the physical layout of the shopfloor. In the
second section I describe the technological system of Morris, both in terms
of the social history of the machines and of the social distribution of the
knowledge that is necessary to operate them. In the third section I reconstruct the workers narratives of labour and show how their poetics shapes
their politics of production. In section four, I reframe the workers narratives and practices of labour in the wider politico-economy of the neighbourhood. At the end, I draw some tentative conclusions on the nature of
alienation in modern factory production.
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Part 1: The shopfloor

Preface: The magic of capitalist production
In his seminal article on technology, Gell claims that the Trobriand people
tend to assess the value of labour according to magical criteria. For
instance, they evaluate the standard of actual Kula canoes against the
standard set by the mythical flying canoes and through the notion of effortless labour. The magic of production in Morris consists in the fact that
Mr Greed, the owner of the firm, evades taxes through CISCO, a small
ghost firm that was built during my fieldwork inside the Morris shopfloor,
under the worried glances of the workers.
By fragmenting the workforce into two legally distinct firms, the owner
benefits from legal concessions accorded to small firms. In fact, firms with
fewer than 20 employees are not compelled to compile balance sheets, and
are granted tax relief and reduced duties in terms of employees welfare.
By shifting income and workforce between the two shopfloors, the owner
is able to under-declare the profits of CISCO and to keep Morris at the
break-even point, that is, on the verge of bankruptcy. In fact, in Morris the
costs are inflated by the costs of production of tools for CISCO. Morris
insolvency also allows the owner to benefit from the exemption from the
minimum wage legislation granted to firms facing financial hardship. Thus
CISCO is an empty box producing profits and Morris is a collection of
second-hand machines and obsolete workers producing losses. The profit
of the former thus originates from the losses of the latter, and from the
lack of legal status of its workers.
Mostly Mr Greed profits from the externalization of the welfare and
organizational costs of production onto the workers themselves. In fact in
Morris the workers provide both for their own social protection and for
their capitalist supervision. What is magic about Morris is the workers
denial of their social productiveness and their technological imagination,
which sees the shopfloor as split between totally human and entirely alienable labour. As for the Trobrianders, in Morris technologies of production
reveal the invisible power of external agents and the effortless nature of
human labour, split between priestly rituals and workers toil.
The shopfloor
Morris is located along the River Don, in Endcliffe, Sheffield. The presence
of an ancient grinding wheel right near its back door, together with an
ancient weir, reveals one of the many industrial stages that have been
witnessed and powered by the water of this river, that is, the long period of
industrial production of steel initiated by the Earl of Fitzwilliam in the 17th
century. His family kept the control of the cutlery trade until the end of
the 19th century and actively fought together with the cutlers trade
unions against the introduction of machinery into the developing
capitalists mills. The many derelict mills reflected on the surface of the
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River Don described by Marx as the outcome of the new despotic capitalism in 1865 have had a long history of expansions, nationalizations,
rationalizations and closures before reaching the calm state of desolation
in which they may be found today. These ancient and unsafe mills are still
in use, in spite of the fact that the people in Sheffield believe that they are
not and that nowadays steel is produced almost entirely in big, modern and
fully mechanized shopfloors. One day, following the rhythmical noise of
Tommys hammer, I walked into Morris asking for a job. Under my eyes I
found a big open space, approximately 80 meters long, filled with around
100 machines, the majority of which dated from 1914 while a few of them
had been made in 1860, when the firm was founded. After a brief
consultation with the others, one of the forgers decided that I could stay
and start my apprenticeship on his machine.
There are two main entrances to the shopfloor, located in a small street
between the Elysium brothel and a derelict red-brick building. One
entrance leads into the office and is used by the manager and by the owner
only, whereas the other leads into the break-room and is used by the 23
workers when they come to work at 6 oclock in the morning. Later on, a
huge blue door kept closed during the early morning opens slowly as
the day unfolds, letting the air from outside free to circulate inside. This
door is used mainly by the workers located on the hot part of the
shopfloor, who freely walk in and out through it. The workers of the hot
department have lost the sense of their bodily temperature by working near
the fire, but they constantly complain about the hot air surrounding their
machines. For this reason, they open the big blue door every morning, no
matter what the temperature is outside. During the summer, they have the
privilege of having big white fans near their machines that they keep
constantly running. The workers of the cold department are always cold
during the winter and hot during the summer, constantly complaining
about the drafts coming from the big blue door during the winter and
about the lack of ventilation during the summer. Thus a subtle net of drafts
and currents divides the shopfloor into two distinctive microclimates.
Hot and cold workers not only perceive distinct temperatures on the
shopfloor, but also different kinds of noises. In fact, the noises of the
hammers used in the hot department are regular, low and rhythmic,
whereas milling machines and grinding machines produce irregular,
electric and acute sequences of noise, which are refracted and multiplied
in the small space where the cold workers are crowded. From the point of
view of the workers health, the former sorts of noises produce deafness,
whereas the latter produce stress and high blood pressure.
Light is distributed on the shopfloor very unevenly. The cold department uniformly reflects the light of the sun coming from the big window
overlooking the river and of the powerful neon lamps located high up on
the ceiling. Conversely, the hot department has no window; it is dark, with
a scattering of feeble neon lights hanging from the distant roof above each
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machine, which oscillate rhythmically, following the movements of the

machines. Obscurity punctuated with sharp rays of natural or artificial
light and red waves of heat coming from the ovens surrounds the hot
workers, while artificial uniformity surrounds the cold ones. The darkness
of the hot department is constantly lit up by the red waves coming out of
the ovens by each machine, whereas the light of the cold department is
refracted between the white wall at the back, the blue coolant liquid of its
machines and the silver reflections of the polished bits of steel. As a result,
the same dark green machines appear to be violet in the hot department
and pale blue in the cold one.
Because of the lack of light, dirt, grease and oil appear to be a natural
extension of the machines located in the hot department, whereas in the
cold department particles of dust are clearly distinguishable in their silver
reflections in the light of the sun. Dust can be seen all around the
machines, colored by the artificial coolants, the bright yellow chemicals and
the silver blue of the polished steel. The hot workers are more preoccupied
with dirt and fumes, the cold ones with dust, and their opposing attitudes
towards air circulation also reflect the different degrees of volatility of their
environment and different perceptions of its cleanliness. In fact, in order
to breathe properly, the hot workers need to create circulation, whereas
the cold workers need to prevent it. In order to have a clean machine, the
former have to dissolve the dirt, the latter to concentrate it in one place.
As a matter of fact, the hot workers control the air fluxes either through
their control over the big blue door, or through the control of their fans.
To prevent both the dust from dirtying their clothes and the cold from
stiffening their bones, the cold workers wear blue overalls on top of their
normal clothes. Hot workers dont wear overalls and each of them has his
own peculiar style of working clothes: coloured shirts open on their chests,
T-shirts tight on their muscles, track-suit bottoms or denim trousers.
Getting changed is part of the hot workers daily routine, during which they
take pride in publicly displaying their semi-naked bodies. They arrive at
5.30 a.m., clock in, open their lockers, warm up their clothes near their
ovens and get dressed near their machines. The cold workers arrive at 5.50
a.m.; they clock in and quickly add their overall on top of their clothes.
Thus, sensuously perceived, the technical system expands and dissolves
its boundaries into waves of colours and smells, warm spaces veiled with
smoke, and dark corridors crossed by dust and cold air. The workers
perceive and absorb differently the colours, smells, drafts and dust coming
from the machines according to their different location in the production
process, but they also reshape their technical and social boundaries by
manipulating the microclimate of the shopfloor.
The market
Morris was founded in 1860 to produce cutlery, augers and wood-boring
tools for railway construction. According to Tommy, one of the workers in
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Morris, the job of hand-boring the wood for the railway was so repetitive
and exhausting that in the past it was used to rehabilitate prisoners. From
the 1920s, the tools of Mr Morris were exported to China, Africa and India,
where they are still used today for railway construction. In these countries,
according to Tommy, workers are like slaves in that they still hand-bore
the holes for the railway sleepers. Bill cannot give me any rational explanation for the fact that both London Transport and London Underground use Morris bits for the same purpose.
Today, Morris produces about 20 different kinds of wood-boring tools
and sells them to big DIY chains, such as B&Q, and to local tool shops. The
sale of tools to local shops and in small orders allows the firm to survive in
times of economic stagnation. Apart from this primary market, the hot
workers sell or exchange their skills and products in a variety of hidden
markets: Bob fits the machines in several firms of the area and subcontracts,
with Tony and Brian, semi-finished products to local small firms, Teddy
trades alcohol, and they sell broken machines to local scrap dealers. As I
show later, Mr Greed (the owner) tolerates these informal transactions by
part of the workforce, as long as the production of chisel bits runs smoothly.
The factory organization
The production process is the following. The workers of the hot department (the forge) heat bars of steel inside small ovens and forge them into
rough drill bits by using ancient hammer machines. The rough bits are left
to cool down for a few hours in the cooling area before the workers of the
cold department (the machine-shop) finish, grind, polish and pack them
into boxes that go into the warehouse.4
In the hot department the production process is organized and
controlled by the workers and follows the slow pace that they impose on
their machines. Forging involves very skilled knowledge that is communicated silently, by doing, and through apprenticeship.
In the cold department the work is fast, repetitive and regulated by the
pressure to produce more and to maximize the bonuses. The cold department is organized to maximize the flexibility of the workforce in responding to the markets demand. In fact the workers rotate on different
machines and adapt their production to the new orders every morning.
Wages
There are three levels of wage at Morris. At the first level are the staff,
with a basic weekly wage of 220. At the second level the skilled and semiskilled workers earn 180. Big Dave the only unskilled worker earns
160. The staff includes Graham, the old man who carries small boxes of
finished bits from the rack to the warehouse, John (the manager), Philip
(the supervisor and quality controller) and Linda (the secretary). On top
of the basic pay, a bonus adds to the weekly wage. Bonuses vary from 5 to
50 per week, according to the different kind of bits produced. The cold
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department is responsible for the weekly bonuses for the whole workforce
and the bonus level is calculated on the amount of products that enter into
the warehouse. Bob (the fitter) fixes the piecework rates by deducing them
from the standard qualities of the machines. Cold workers constantly
complain to John about the fact that Bobs piecework rates are too tight
and that he never shows up in the cold department when the machines
break down. Bob claims that he fixes tight piecework rates because otherwise the cold workers would break the machines by setting them up with
hammers, rather than with spanners, and by burning the milling machines
arms in their attempt to intensify production.
Burawoys (1985) hypothesis that the workers participate in their own
exploitation by playing the same game of production revolving around the
firms wage system doesnt apply to Morris, where different individuals
agree on different rules of the game and have conflicting notions of profitability and accountability. For instance, the wages of the hot workers are
totally independent of their daily production. In fact, because the bonus is
measured on the weekly amount of products worked in the cold department, the hot workers could easily stop working until the cooling area is
empty and still receive their weekly wage. Their disconnection from the
pressure of the bonus system allows them to take part in a variety of
informal economic transactions which parallel the main production
process, and to conceive of their weekly wages simply as part of their profit
deriving from the informal economy of the neighbourhood.
Differently, the cold workers produce for the bonuses and not for their
wages. In fact if their weekly bonus is calculated on the totality of the bits
produced, their basic wages dont include the chisel bits that are sold by
CISCO. They look at the firms sales and not at the owners profits. Thus,
the game of production in Morris follows conflicting and inconsistent rules.
The hot workers are preoccupied with increasing their profits and protecting the value of their capital (the machines), the cold workers with increasing the firms sales.
Burawoys conclusion that capital reproduces itself on the shopfloor
through labours consent does not apply in Morris, where the workers
perceive capital in different ways and consent to produce for different
reasons. The cold workers think about capital in terms of money to be
maximized through the intensification of production; the hot workers
think of capital in terms of machines that are necessary for them to cultivate their transactions in the neighbourhood. If the cold workers reproduce the factory regime, the hot workers adapt it to their moonlighting
activities. If the cold workers are really subsumed to capital, the hot workers
are only partially so, as I will show in the next section.
Informal organization
The hot workers are on average above 50 years of age and old Endcliffe
residents. They are the only official breadwinners of households with an
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average of five members of whom at least two are unemployed or long-term

disabled. Thus, in order to sustain their families they have to add to the
50006000 pa that they receive in Morris (they are on short-time or off
work for around three months each year) through a variety of heterogeneous sources of income: state benefits, casual labour, illegal activities,
informal revenues and free services exchanged in the neighbourhood.
During the working day Tommy and Bob make some extra profits through
informal production and exchanges in the neighbourhood. For instance,
Bob fixes the carcass-processing machines at the chicken slaughterhouse
on the other side of the street and the oven of Teds bakery, and Tommy
repairs the furnaces and rolling mills of the local steel factories. The older
workers of the hot department also work as subcontractors for bigger tool
factories5 located near-by, and they subcontract the production of the bits
that are less advantageous in terms of bonuses to smaller tool factories, for
instance to the factory run by teenagers in Fowley Road. Hot workers coopt into their informal production the younger apprentices and cold
workers, whom they remunerate with cash given in the form of gift at the
end of each week. Tommy and Bob also control the local trade of scrap and
second-hand machines through their precious connection with Ned, the
local scrap merchant, whom they meet every Friday night at Khaleds, the
local pub. In the committee room at Khaleds, the hot workers deal scrap
and steel with petty capitalists and steel merchants, allocate jobs and welfare
resources locally and negotiate the pay of their children as prostitutes,
pub stewardesses, steel apprentices, pimps, dealers or drug carriers with
local entrepreneurs and Yemeni bosses.
Thus, the older workers of the hot department complement the wages
that they receive in Morris with social capital that they cultivate through
informal production and exchange in the neighbourhood. Social capital
in the form of ties of kinship and friendship with local customers, producers, scrap merchants and second-hand machine dealers insulates them
from the volatile economy of the factory, and at the same time increases
their power on the shopfloor. In fact, their stable network of subcontractors, customers and suppliers sustains the profits of the owner, who therefore accepts the delegation of his authority and control over the production
process to the hot workers. As a consequence of their control over the
piecework rates, the layout of the machines and the recruitment and
apprenticeship of new forgers, hot workers substitute Philip and John in
the managerial function of the firm.
The workers of the cold department are generally younger, sons of
unskilled steel labourers who migrated from the Endcliffe slums during the
1960s. They own houses recently built on ex-mining estates located at the
periphery of Sheffield and pool their income with the income of their
wives, employed in the local call centres that have replaced the mining and
steel industries. They enjoy an annual income of 13,000 and a lifestyle
new homes, cars, education for their children that makes them look
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better off than the inhabitants of Endcliffe. Nevertheless, younger workers

have no control over the labour process, the system of apprenticeship or
the internal labour market. In fact, unlike the hot workers, their recruitment follows formal channels (newspaper adverts, job centres) and
requirements (GCEs; diplomas; previous work experience), and it is
directly supervised by Mr Greed, whose only concern is that the workers are
not members of any union.
The cold workers lack of control over the apprenticeship and recruitment system, the firms internal labour market and the informal economy
of Endcliffe makes them totally vulnerable to the volatile cycles of the wageeconomy. When some engineering firms of the area close down, the
workers made redundant and expelled from the primary labour market
enter into the so-called marginal labour market now occupied by Morris
machine-shop workers. In times of recession this allows Mr Greed to recruit
better-qualified machine-shop workers at the same cost as the Morris ones.
When made redundant, the cold workers who have not been lucky enough
to be taken as apprentices at the forge sink into long-term unemployment.
They are unable to find temporary or casual employment due to their lack
of social connections in their newly developed estates, and their wives
under-remunerated and short-term jobs dont cover the living costs of the
nuclear family. Cold workers made redundant often migrate to Endcliffe,
as their distant relatives did in the past, looking for casual labour, cheap
accommodation and social connections.
Thus, in Morris, the hot workers are only formally subsumed to capitalist production, as they control the recruitment and apprenticeship
systems of the forge, and complement their wages with profits linked to the
informal economy of the neighbourhood. Unlike them, the cold workers
are proletarians, fully dependent on the wage economy of the factory for
their survival, and on the older workers for stable jobs at the forge and
informal incomes. Thus the authority of the older workers over the younger
workers of the machine-shop overlaps with the authority of Mr Greed so
that the conflict between capital and labour is experienced as a generational conflict within the workforce.
Part 2: The machines

A short social history of the life of the machines
As Marcel Mauss pointed out, when a generation transmits to the next the
science of its gestures and of its manual acts, there is as much authority and
social tradition as there is in linguistic transmission (1979: 104). Machines
accumulate life histories that span several generations of the workers lives.
Through their fascinating and enchanting stories, some machines acquire
power and visibility on the shopfloor and increase the status of their
holders. The histories of the machines are incorporated in the workers
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practices and exchanged on the shopfloor as metaphors of past social

relations to be reproduced through the invisible force of tradition.
The workers describe the hot and cold department as respectively
forge and machine shop. Forging involves the transformation of molten
steel into a shaped object through the use of a hammer. In Greek mythology, Prometheus a clever semi-human god stole fire from the gods and
gave it to the humans, teaching them how to forge metal. By teaching them
how to manipulate the fire and to craft tools to be used for agriculture and
war, Prometheus gave to humans the power to challenge the gods. In the
17th century, with the spread of the use of cutlery in court etiquette, the
small hammers of the blacksmiths transformed themselves into giant waterpowered hammers operated by several workers employed by the Duke of
Norfolk for the mass production of knives and forks for the tables of the
international aristocracy.
Until 1890 the duke who owned the rights over the Endcliffe meat,
fish and tool markets and the industrial land along the River Don regulated the prices, quality and brands of the tools produced and ensured that
the trade between the local small capitalists and the journeymen followed
fair rules of conduct. The capitalists didnt employ the artisans on a stable
basis but hired them for small production tasks. In fact, because of the small
amount of capital required, and the technical interdependence of the
different phases of tool production, the forgers, blacksmiths and grinders
controlled and organized their labour in dense productive networks shared
among the families that lived in the cottages along the River Don or in the
same yard of the back-to-back houses in Endcliffe.
At the end of the 18th century, merchant-capitalists organized the
production of tools and cutlery in small workshops and, when Marx came
to Sheffield, he described the newly patented Ryder Hammer as an
anthropomorphic mechanical creature whose four hammers could be used
in strict sequence by individual operators. With the increase in the scale of
production of tools, milling machines developed as mechanical versions of
the grinders hands and a transformation of their horizontal movement
of friction into a sequence of circular cutting operations. Circular mechanical cutting allowed tools to be worked with more precision and on a bigger
scale than with grinding and, during the 19th century, as reported by E.P.
Thompson (1967: 279), a new category of working class the mechanics
replaced artisans and grinders in the production of modern tools and
weapons.
During the capitalist expansion in the two world wars, the mechanics
were incorporated into the integrated plants for the mass production of
steel (developed at the eastern periphery of Endcliffe), their milling
machines expanded to accommodate the customer specifications of the
Admiralty, their tasks mechanized through cranes, cars and ladles and their
wages standardized following the negotiations between the government,
the emerging trade unions and the capitalists. As a consequence of the
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nationalization of the steel industry, in 1967 bulk steel and engineering

became two separate branches of the steel industry so that the 60,000 steel
workers of Sheffield were split between the public workers of the big and
heavy factories mass-producing bulk steel and the private workers of the
small and light engineering workshops facing each other along the River
Don. In the 1980s, with privatization and de-industrialization, skilled
artisans blacksmiths, rollers, forgers, cutters migrated from the big and
heavy factories into the small workshops of Endcliffe again. The fragmentation of the social body of the steel workers was followed by the decomposition of the big and heavy machines of mass production and the barter of
their mechanical parts in local or global second-hand markets. Following
the flow of labour, the machines of early capitalism the Ryder Hammers,
Cutters and Spring Hammer described by Marx with fear and fascination
returned onto the Endcliffe shopfloors, such as Morris, where they are used
by the workers today, together with other ancient hammer machines.
The history of steel in Sheffield shows the circular trajectories of industrial capitalism. During industrialization, capitalism foresaw modernity as a
transformation of small-scale, individualistic and hierarchical artisan
labour into mass-producing machines and magnified proletarian workforces. Today, modernity is re-imagined in terms of fragmented workforces,
miniaturized machines and individualistic and artisan forms of production.
This circular and inconsistent history also shows that the factory and the
workshop, proletarians and artisans, machines and tools are not
historically distinct social and material formations but different versions of
the same capitalist imagination.
Reproducing technical monsters: the social distribution of knowledge in
Morris
In this section, I follow up on Tim Ingolds (2000) critique of Harry Bravermans hypothesis in his Labour and Monopoly Capital (1974) of the inherently de-skilling and alienating nature of the capitalist labour process.
Ingold claims that alienation is not a matter of social relations of production but the consequence of specifically Western cognitive/cultural understanding of technology and of the labour process. Unlike Ingold, I suggest
that cognitive understandings of the production process are inscribed in
wider capitalist ideologies or cosmologies of labour that both encompass
and transcend specific forms of labour organization. This capitalist cosmology consists in the belief in the free nature of wage-labour. From this point
of view, alienation is more about people believing that they are free, rather
than about people believing that they are not.
In Morris, the hot department is conceptually perceived and organized
by its workers as a blacksmiths workshop, where work is individually
performed, according to Keller and Keller (1996), following non-linguistic
and non-codified constellations of practical tasks associated with
specific tools. The authors highlight four features of the kind of knowledge
189
associated with the manual forging of steel and iron. First, it relies on individual notions of relations between means and ends and is structured into
isolated and self-enclosed tasks. Second, it is memorized and retrieved
through sets of physical movements and doesnt require thinking in the
words of Bloch (1998), it is implicit. Third, when it is communicated
linguistically it is not communicated through technical language, but
through a language that describes the morphological traits of the material
processed in terms of colour, shapes and metaphors. For instance, in Morris,
hot workers communicate about their job in terms of the redness, roundness and patchiness of the bits they are working, or of the inner movements or noises of their machines. Fourth, this kind of knowledge is
ephemeral because it is pulled together and held in mind as long as is appropriate for a given task. Because of these four factors, the knowledge of work
in the hot department is embedded in human bodies and socially organized
in subjective, fragmented, ephemeral and centripetal spaces of action.
The forgers talk about their labour as an immaterial and invisible
essence that becomes visible during the process of apprenticeship. Apprentices are young, male, unemployed, willing to work free for a period of trial
(lasting sometimes up to one year). During the apprenticeship, the older
artisan reveals the language and metaphors of the job; moulds the apprentices body to his posture and personality; discloses the aristocratic history
of his machine; maps its invisible idiosyncrasies and the capricious microclimate surrounding it. The apprentices reciprocate the masters gift of
their knowledge of labour with free labour. Their mutual denial of the
economic aspect of the relationship and emphasis on its personal, intimate
and familial aspect legitimizes the masters gift of cash to the apprentice at
the end of the week. The intimacy of this relationship is also increased by
the fact that apprentices are often relatives or younger friends who live in
the area. Labour is not only indissolubly linked to the masters body but
also to his machine. Machines in the hot department are not seen as
external functional apparatuses of production but as symbolical extensions
of the workers bodies, metaphorical appendages of their sexuality,
powerful technologies of enchantment and markers of social status. In the
forge men humanize machines with photos, calendars and small personal
objects; and machines progressively de-humanize workers by drawing them
into their self-enclosed mechanical spaces.
Thus, in the hot department labour is perceived as inalienable for two
reasons. First because it is not quantifiable and is entirely embedded in the
personalities and bodies of the workers or in their machines and only circulates in the form of gift between master and apprentices. Labour is indissolubly embedded in social relations. Second, because the labour in the
factory is rooted in the wider social texture of the neighborhood the
family or the pub where it is considered an inalienable social capital of
the community and circulates in the form of moral obligation rather than
of economic transaction.
190
The seven millers of the cold department organize their knowledge in

a totally different way. A milling machine contains two mechanical arms
that cut the tools with precision. Workers use two round gears to control
the mechanical arms inside the machine. Each gear is framed with small
numbers that translate the position of the mechanical arms in terms of
space and speed. This mapping of the workers labour through standardized temporal and spatial dimensions allows them to rotate on different
machines and to collectively adjust their labour to the standardized nature
of the customer specifications that becomes relevant only in the final phase
of production performed in the cold department. On each machine, chalk
inscriptions translate the speed of the arms into piecework rates so that
each operator working on the machine knows with certainty the level of
speed below or above which he is not allowed to go to meet the standard
bonus level agreed by the workforce.
The cold workers spend most of their mental energy in translating
measures of speed into measures of bonus; making small chalk inscriptions
on their machines to remember the complex arithmetic of their production; collectively exchanging their individual productive ratios; and
comparing them with old Grahams fragile recollections of former
workers outputs. As a consequence labour in the cold department is depersonalized, de-composed into bits of human effort, objectified in
standards of production, externalized in mnemonic supports, publicly
exchanged in competitive tournaments of value and ultimately dissolved in
the continuous flow of production. As bits flow from the forge into the
warehouse, they slowly transform themselves from raw pieces of steel into
polished geometrical objects. The metamorphosis of raw steel into finished
products is paralleled by the metamorphosis of labour on the shopfloor:
from the individual and inalienable property of the workers into alienable
commodities in the cold department increasingly adapted to the morphology of the market as they approach Grahams warehouse.
In conclusion, in Morris the labour process is conceived in terms of
progressive personalization and individualization of human labour in the
forge and progressive de-personalization, de-composition and de-materialization of human labour in the machine-shop. Embodied in strong personalities in the hot department and dissolved in magnificent objects in the
cold department, labour is seen as inalienable in the former and alienable
in the latter. This workers imaginary understanding of their labour
revolves around their belief in machines as technological fetishes. In the
forge, machines are seen as mechanical reflections of the workers personalities; in the machine-shop, machines are seen as technological monsters
engaged in deadly competitions with the workers labour.
In both cases, machines are powerful fetishes that hide the workers
contribution to the production process and make labour entirely free and
personal in the forge and totally coercive and impersonal in the machineshop. The workers common belief in technological monsters, and in the
191
inherent conflict between human labour and mechanical capital, hides

wider structural inequalities and polarizes the workforce into capitalist
forgers, who work for pure self-gratification, and proletarian machine
workers, who work only for money.
Part 3: Narratives of labour

Discussion about value in the break-room
At 10.30 a.m. the workers have a half-hour break. During the break, the hot
workers regroup according to the hierarchical criteria of skill, whereas the
cold workers gather together in the break-room, a small empty room with
ten tables where the workers sit in pairs. Only a big clock adorns the otherwise empty walls. The less-skilled hot workers join the cold workers inside
the room, eating their sandwiches and exchanging copies of The Sun,
fishing tools and superficial conversations. The anonymity of the white
room, together with the peculiar small square coffee tables scattered in it,
emphasizes the public nature of the workers informal interactions and
almost transfixes them into staged dialogues. Measured statements, calculated irony and desultory conversations seem to mirror the workers strange
encounter on the shopfloor, whose old machines are framed in the long
window of the break-room.
One day Alan made a bitter remark to me about Bobs habit of keeping
his tools locked up. According to Alan, Bob is very selfish and self-centred
when he works, and he is extremely possessive both of his tools and his
machines. This remark was echoed by Steve who, interrupting his reading
of The Sun behind us, claimed that they [the hot workers] are selfish,
because in their job they care only for their machines, whereas we [the cold
workers] need each other to do our job.
According to Alan, the cold workers are a modern kind of worker
because they work only for money and for the bonus, and without getting
personally involved in their job like the hot workers, whom he incidentally dismissed as prima donnas. He added that the cold workers
modern attitude to work is due to the modern nature of their machines
and of their labour organization that he proudly claimed give real
value to Morris production. In fact, according to Alan, the value of
production depends on the collective efforts of the workers rather than
in individual acts of production. Unlike them, hot workers are egotistical
and selfish because they are shut in the ivor y towers of their machines and
never dirty their hands working with other people. In the machine-shop,
Alan added:
. . . we are the same kind of people. Our labour is worth all the same and our
hands are dirty all the same. We turn out money and bonuses for the whole
firm. Forgers are like Mr Greed. They dont care for the firm. They only care
for their machines and for their own profit.
192
Tommy reacted to Alans accusations with mannered pride and

objected that cold workers are greedy and reverted snobs due to their
obsolete class mentality that makes them value labour in terms of collective
bonuses and wages rather than as mechanical knowledge, human capital
and personal commitment to the job. In a sudden burst of rhetorical inspiration, he claimed that the gap between the skills of the hot workers and
the skills of the cold workers could be described in terms of the difference
between a butcher extracting a liver from a dead chicken and a surgeon
operating on a human patient in a private clinic. Forging, according to
Tommy, is more a form of art than a mechanical operation and goes back
to the times of the medieval blacksmiths whose tools and cutlery were
produced in very much the same way in which the hot workers forge their
tools today. As the conversation unfolded around the small tables, Alan
insisted that the final value of production depends on the cold workers
maximization of bonuses and variable capital, and Alan replied that it
depends on the forgers preservation of the firms machines and mechanical capital.
During the conversation, Alan and Steve translated matters of
economic value into a discussion about modernity and equality, whereas
Tommy explained economic value in terms of individual knowledge, of
timeless tradition and personal motivation. Thus, the workers illusion of
market relations and their technological imagination provide the workers
with two opposite narratives according to which they experience and talk
about the value of their labour. The forgers of the hot department frame
their labour in a specific pre-capitalist ethos of work, symbolized by the
status of its older workers; transmitted through implicit, subjective and
bodily6 forms of knowledge; incorporated in powerful machines and
embedded in the informal economy of the family and the neighbourhood.
In the cold department the workers think of their interdependent, fragmented and flexible labour as being in deadly competition with the firms
mechanical capital, and in constant transmutation into codified, public,
numerical and monetary forms shared by the same homogeneous class of
workers.
Staged inside the break-room, this opposition recreated the usual equilibrium in Morris, between the long-term worries of the hot workers for the
firms machines (what economists call fixed capital) and the short-term
involvement of the cold workers in the monetary bonuses (in the words of
the economists, variable capital). Enclosed inside the white and artificial
atmosphere of the break-room, the more fundamental contrast between
labour and capital was turned into a routinely staged antipathy between
different generations of workers, whose labour crystallized into capital with
different degrees of mobility. On the shopfloor, these narratives create
solid boundaries between the hot and the cold workers, between the
market and money that motivate the former, and the passion and
tradition that inspire the latter. Between the pure generosity that makes
193
labour inalienable in the forge and the pure interest that makes it entirely
alienable in the machine-shop.
In spite of their conflicting market moralities and technological imaginations the hot and the cold department, the informal and the wage
economy, gifts and commodities artisans and proletarians are two sides
of the same capitalist coin. Younger workers maximize Mr Greeds variable
capital and absolute surplus, whereas the older workers maximize the value
of his fixed capital and relative surplus. The workers are aware of the
fictional character of their mutual opposition and that they pertain to the
same space of poverty. Nevertheless, they also believe that the very existence of imaginary boundaries makes the coexistence between their two
forms of labour possible.
Part 4: Spaces of poverty

In this section I will show that, in spite of their micro-conflicts and separation on the shopfloor, from a macro-economic perspective, the workers of
Morris pertain to the same space of poverty.
State fiscal policies in the UK have formally deregulated the use of the
peripheral workforce and fostered small-scale capitalism that thrives on tax
evasion, exemption from legislation on the minimum wage, trade union
representation and welfare provisions to the workers. Welfare policies have
shifted emphasis from tackling unemployment as a collective problem to
enhancing individualistic economic strategies in the low-paid sector of the
economy. Housing policies have increased the benefits to lone parents and
fostered the formation of extended households. Local regeneration funds
have been diverted from the industrial to the voluntary sectors. The overall
effects of these policies has been to redistribute income from the wageworker in the steel industry to the older artisans of Endcliffe.
Artisans like the hot workers of Morris diversify their sources of income
rather than maximizing their wages. They mix the process of production
inside the firm with a variety of economic transactions in the neighbourhood and combine productive and reproductive strategies of survival. As I
have shown in Morris, they are not only wage-workers, but also steel subcontractors, middlemen, scrap merchants and petty capitalists, extracting
surplus labour from young apprentices. As a consequence of state housing
and welfare policies of local regeneration, their households are mutating
into extended working groups made up of relatives and loosely related individuals who pool their incomes and exchange welfare services between
each other. This fact increases the portfolio of activities on which the older
workers of the forge can rely for the subsistence of their families. As heads
of the enlarged family, they negotiate with local bosses and petty capitalists
the pay and working conditions for their children or wives in the drugs, sex
or scrap trade, or in informal factory work. As a consequence of the
194
blurring of the social and economic spaces of the family, the pub and the
factory, wage work mixes with informal and illegal work. The labour that
is exchanged as commodity among unrelated individuals blurs with the
labour that circulates as a gift among friends and kin.
Proletarians like the cold workers live in nuclear families that survive
entirely on the volatile wages of the spouses. State neoliberalism and extensive subcontracting push them into long-term unemployment. Due to their
lack of social connections outside the shopfloor they are not able to shift
between the economy of the shopfloor and the economy of the neighbourhood.
Both categories of Morris workers rely on precarious strategies of
survival. In fact, the social capital of Endcliffe is embedded in its ageing
social network, in derelict estates and in shrinking informal labour markets,
whereas the wealth of the cold workers is linked to invisible and volatile
industrial capital and to unstable and unprotected female employment in
the service economy. Besides, these two kinds of strategies seem to be
closely related to each other, each of them being functional for the reproduction of the other. In fact, in Endcliffe, the younger primary labour force
finds new jobs in the marginal labour market, and the older marginal
labour force is contracted in the primary labour market of the progressively
privatized steel industry.
My reconstruction of the history of the machines shows that since the
distant past the working class of Endcliffe has been fragmented between
artisans and proletarians who turn their social fragmentation into a
framework for mutual cooperation In fact, the flow of scrap machines and
unemployed proletarians into the informal tool workshops of Endcliffe is
counterbalanced by the flow of skilled artisans and recycled capital into the
proletarian and middle-class spaces of the steel industry. Since the distant
past, Endcliffe has been a space of poverty, where the unemployed re-use
their skills, derelict machines start up their ancient movements once again,
boarded-up buildings perform again their old social functions and forgotten economic spaces re-emerge as profitable businesses.
Today artisans and proletarians face and feed each other in the
claustrophobic spaces of Morris. In times of economic expansion, the
younger workers redistribute wealth and economic capital to the older
workers in the shape of bonuses or free labour. In times of economic
slump, the older workers give them back their precious mechanical knowledge and their social connections in the neighbourhood. The workers
narratives of separation, technological disjunctures and their illusion of
class antagonism on the shopfloor obscure not only this invisible mechanism of social redistribution and mutual cooperation at the level of the
neighbourhood, but also the structural condition underpinning their ideological and material fragmentation.
195
Conclusion: emerging alienation in modern factory

production?
Today, as a consequence of the combined effects of extensive subcontracting from transnational steel corporations and of state welfare and
economic policies of local regeneration, the formal economy of the factory
has blurred with the informal and illegal economy of the neighbourhood
and the family. In these blurred spaces of poverty two economies and two
kinds of workforces coexist. The global economy of steel consists of global
markets, a standardized technology of production and a proletarian workforce living in the post-industrial spaces at the periphery of Sheffield. The
other economy is the economy of tools, consisting of local markets, craft
techniques of production and a variegated army of peripheral workers who
cohabit in the same Victorian back-to-back houses of the Endcliffe slums.
In Morris, the workers reproduce and reconcile the global economy of steel
and the local economy of tools on the same shopfloor along the fragile line
that they trace between the hot and cold departments, through drafts,
dust, noises, technological narratives and working moralities.
Thus the cold and the hot departments using the words of Bourdieu
are two structural variants of the same class-disposition. Bourdieu, in his
seminal book Outline of a Theory of a Practice (1977), claims that in societies
without a self-regulating market, people build economic relationships
through the idiom of generosity and by maximizing social prestige and
status. On the other hand, in capitalist societies, people build social
relations in the idiom of self-interest and by maximizing money and
economic capital. This is true not only in the realm of circulation but also
in the realm of production. According to Bourdieu, in peasant societies the
relationship between labour and its product is socially repressed, whereas
in capitalist societies the productive qualities of labour are socially emphasized. The evidence of my fieldwork challenges Bourdieus opposition
between peasant and capitalist economics and rhetorical strategies and
suggests that, in Morris, two moralities of labour coexist in the same
shopfloor. Like the Kabyle tribesmen described by Bourdieu, the workers
of the hot department claim a morality of pure disinterest and of free
labour that re-evokes the myth of the archaic world of the medieval blacksmiths and grinders. This morality legitimizes personalistic strategies aimed
at maximizing their social networks and at exploiting the labour of young
apprentices, and sex and drugs workers. On the other hand, the cold
workers, like modern economic men, embody the illusion of pure productivity and maximize their wages through the discourse of labour commodification and of working-class solidarity rooted in the disappeared
world of the nationalized steel industry.
The short-term and utilitarian morality of the cold workers and the
passionate commitment of the hot workers are not in conflict with each
other, but are in fact functional to the reproduction of the condition of
196
structural deprivation in which they have germinated. In fact, the illusion

of market transaction in the cold department and the illusion of social
intimacy in the hot one the maximization of economic capital in the
former and of social capital in the latter hide the fact that both classes of
workers pertain to the same space of poverty.
Carriers claim of the increasingly alienating nature of modern factory
production portrays factory production as more modern than it actually
is. In fact, in Morris early and modern capitalist technologies and social
relations are blended together on the same shopfloor. The world of the
forgers is a world of intimate connections between objects and persons, of
permeable boundaries between human and machines; of inalienable
labour that circulates between the factory and the family, and among
individuals bonded by a mixture of social, economic and familial obligation. The world of the machine workers is made of cuts, disconnection,
separations between objects and people and of alienable and decomposable labour that is transacted among anonymous individuals between the
factory and the global steel market.
In conflict with teleological histories that depict industrial capitalism
as a radical break with the feudal past, the history of steel labour in
Sheffield does not read as a linear progression from the customary, hierarchic and simple system of production of the cutlers to the alienated system
of modern factory production, but rather as an awkward embrace between
these two worlds. This strong embrace between the past and the present,
and between inconsistent forms of production and imagination, provides
capitalism with its power of self-regeneration.7
The evidence of my fieldwork suggests four conclusions. First, that the
blurring of the times and spaces of production and the times and spaces of
reproduction and the re-embeddedness of economy into society pace
Polanyi and Thompson translates itself into a transfer of the organizational
and welfare costs of production from the capitalists onto the workers themselves, rather than in an improvement in their living conditions. Second,
that Carriers sketch of modern factory production does not apply to
Endcliffe, where the coexistence of the morality of pure interest and the
morality of pure generosity within the same space, more than their sharp
separation, reveals the emerging alienation of late capitalism, that, like
early capitalism, imagines labour both as entirely free and as totally alienable. Third, that the workers exploitation is not only to be related to the
appropriation of surplus labour from the capitalist taking place at the level
of the shopfloor, but also to their mutual dependence and coexistence in
the space of poverty outside the shopfloor. Finally, my case shows that what
distinguishes capitalism from other forms of alienation is its ability to
reconcile opposite and inconsistent moralities and ideologies of human
labour, rather than, as for Strathern, its stubborn belief in immutable forms
of individual labour.
197
Notes
This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the anthropology departments of Brunel, Cambridge and the LSE. I am particularly indebted to the staff
and students of these departments for their useful feedback and comments.
1
2
3
4
5
6
On the notion of technological fetishism, see Pfaffemberger (1988) and Harvey

(1997).
All the names of places and people are pseudonyms. Mr Greed is the workers
nickname for the owner. The author worked in the factory as forger apprentice and lived close by for 18 months.
Alfred Gell defines technology as a form of enchantment for the reproduction
of the status quo (1992: 163).
The hot and cold departments can also be read as respectively capital- and
labour-intensive. The technical and social interactions that take place between
the hot and the cold workers also recur in companies or industries that
combine capital- and labour-intensive production processes.
In an example of this kind of activity, Fevre (1987) shows the widespread use
of local cowboy subcontractors by BSC (British Steel Corporation) in Port
Talbot, South Wales.
Maurice Bloch (1989a: 38) claims that messages carried by the language of the
body become ossified, predictable and repeated . . . the acceptance of this code
implies compulsion. According to Bloch, bodily communication structures
authority more solidly than linguistic communications.
For a similar view, see Meiksins Wood (2002).
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Massimiliano Mollona is a lecturer in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths College

and is one of the editors of Critique of Anthropology. In September 2002 he published
Ceux du chaud, ceux du froid. Fabriquer des outils a Sheffield (Terrain 39, Paris).
He has two more articles forthcoming, one in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute. His current research interests are economic anthropology and globalization; the anthropology of Europe and visual culture. Address: Department of
Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW, UK. [email:
ans01mnm@gold.ac.uk]

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Article

This article is a Marxist exploration of the imaginary forms taken by

suggest that the workers conflicting versions of technological fetishism

Part 1: The shopfloor

machine, which oscillate rhythmically, following the movements of the

average of five members of whom at least two are unemployed or long-term

better off than the inhabitants of Endcliffe. Nevertheless, younger workers

Part 2: The machines

practices and exchanged on the shopfloor as metaphors of past social

nationalization of the steel industry, in 1967 bulk steel and engineering

The seven millers of the cold department organize their knowledge in

inherent conflict between human labour and mechanical capital, hides

Part 3: Narratives of labour

Tommy reacted to Alans accusations with mannered pride and

Part 4: Spaces of poverty

Conclusion: emerging alienation in modern factory

structural deprivation in which they have germinated. In fact, the illusion

On the notion of technological fetishism, see Pfaffemberger (1988) and Harvey

Massimiliano Mollona is a lecturer in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths College

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