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What could everyone do together, if everyone would get together?
Madeleine Bernstorff
The question about the type of government for self-help cooperatives is quickly decided in the 1934 New Deal film Our Daily Bread, financed by the director King Vido himself: It is not immortal democracy, nor a form of socialism, not even profit control, but preferably still the big boss. Productive self-organisation has already reached its limit. However, the actual upset of the film is a blonde who sabotages the cooperative’s happiness. The hero barely manages to get his act together, regains the collective trust, and – in the course of two acts – all dig a gigantic irrigation ditch. A rhythmic apotheosis of labor, filled with self-sacrifice, the men shovel until exhausted, then throw themselves into the ditch in order to direct the flow of water; the women light up the darkness with torches. Finally, the water reaches an almost parched cornfield, which the soundtrack celebrates with hymnal singing and the film ends. Our Daily Bread treats the reversible figure of the New Deal, its anti-neoliberal emergency measures1 to combat unemployment, and the monumental totalitarianisms, as seen in the architecture not only of Rome, Moscow, and Berlin, but also of Paris, Washington, Geneva and London, with shirt-sleeved simplicity.
According to systems theory, self-organisation exists when an operatively closed system has available only its own operations in order to build structures which it can then use, change or not use and forget. Here, there is no hierarchy among the participants who make decisions and those who carry them out. Ford and his hierarchical routines contrast with and contradict this self-determined self-organisation. In the meantime, everything is self-made again; work is done on the marketability of one’s own body system. In this “liquid modernity” (Zygmunt Baumann), one claws one’s way from project to project, which does not prevent me from seeing the verve of people to get together and resist unjust distribution as a perspective for the future.
During the late 1960s, Cristina Perincioli, a Swiss citizen, studied film in Berlin. The politicisation of that time brought her into contact with the tenant association of the Märkisches Viertel, a satellite town in the northern part of Berlin. The tenant association was a grass-roots group; the men made the decisions while the women sat with them silently knitting. In other situations, Perinicioli noticed that these women were militant, and she decided to do her final film project with them. A whole summer long, they met every Sunday in the “tenant’s shop” and discussed the project. The women immediately dismissed Perinicioli’s dramatic idea about a woman who kills her child in desperation. Instead, together they developed the story of the demand for equal pay and a wild strike. “The most important thing for us was to show how women can be in solidarity because this seems to be the biggest barrier for many women. The double burden should also be dealt with, the women’s problems with men and their claim to private happiness should not be left aside.” (Cristina Perincioli). So Für Frauen 1. Kapitel (For Women Chapter I) emerged, with the song by Ton Steine Scherben: All changes if you change it, but you cannot win as long as you are alone. The attraction of this story about a wild strike is the process of its development, which shines through all adaptations. In his almost six hour-long film about the Paris Commune of 1871, La Commune (Commune) (1999), Peter Watkins later researched the question how the principles of self-organisation and collectivity, as well as the contradictions of the commune can be adequately represented.
Pierburg: Ihr Kampf Ist Unser Kampf (Pierburg: Your Struggle Is Our Struggle), a moving documentary about the struggle against substandard wages called “light wage category II” and the dual exploitation of migrant women, belongs to a similar story of self-organisation in film. Workers at Pierburg AG near Neuss and filmmakers shot the film during the summer 1973, and filmmakers Edith Schmidt and David Wittenberg cut and edited it in close collaboration with the strikers, and then made it available to activists for their political work. The film, put together from a wide variety of material, has no credits. This strike was organized mainly by migrant women and was successful: The “light wage category II” was abolished and no one was fired. The union’s ambivalent stance towards migrant women workers was also questioned.2
Finally, the earliest film is the 1934 Erwerbslose Kochen Für Erwerbslose (Jobless Cook For Jobless) by Ella Bergmann-Michels. Joris Ivens had recommended a small Kinamo, a hand-size, silent 35mm camera, to the director. In Frankfurt of the 1930s, she used this camera to make a film for a Jewish nursing home built by Mart and Ella Stam, to observe “illegal” street vendors, to film a commercial for the soup kitchens for the unemployed, and in 1933 she filmed the last elections, materials that remained uncut because she was arrested during the filming. The film about the soup kitchens was shown in the streets and in movie theaters before the feature film in order to raise money for the soup kitchens.
In the fall of 1971, Caroline Goodden, Tina Girouard, Rachel Lew, Suzanne Harris and Gordon Matta-Clark founded the restaurant Food at the corner of Prince and Wooster Street. For three years, it was a meeting place, business, conceptual art work, and part of a self-sustaining network to which the magazine Avalanche, the action space 112 as well as the artist think-factory Anarchitecture also belonged. Caroline Goodden: „I wanted to show off my/our cooking to ‚the world.’ I wanted to have a place to eat with food that I liked that was open when I needed it to be, and I wanted to create a work place for artists that had no restrictions on how many hours a day or days a week the artist worked so that they could be free to suddenly drop out as needed to produce their show and still have a job when they were through. It was successful on all counts. Food supported 300 people during our time.“
1 Among the measures were: establishment of a minimum wage, the right to
unionise, introduction of social security, collection of inheritance taxes
from the rich and farm subsidies, as well as public works projects.
2 Complete Text on the film: Pierburg: Ihr Kampf Ist Unser Kampf by Martin Rapp and Marion von Osten: http://www.igbildendekunst.at/pic.bildpunkt/06/bp06fr.pdf
A selection of Documentations and video works of and on self-organised working contexts
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