Over nearly ten years, Notes from Below has consolidated a political practice organised around the method of workers’ inquiry and the framework of class composition. Through inquiries across care, education, hospitality, platform work, art and culture, and beyond, it has sought to generate situated accounts of class struggle grounded in workers’ own experience of contemporary conditions of work. These accounts are not conceived as neutral reportage, academic sociology or organising conversations, but as forms of political knowledge rooted in the antagonistic relation between labour and capital.

In our recent collective discussions, one question has reoccurred more than others: namely, what role does ideology play in this practice? The contemporary resurgence of reactionary politics in Britain (nationalism, racialised border regimes, authoritarian populism, revanchist patriarchy) has made this question politically unavoidable. The cohering of fascist ideology, as has been the case historically, is not external to the world of work, the economy or class experience. Nor can it be explained solely by reference to ‘culture’ detached from material conditions. Such ideological formations circulate in workplaces, shape how workers interpret their own conditions, and mediate the possibilities of collective political action. They also, in our experience, shape how workers approach inquiry. The workplace may not be the ultimate source from which reactionary ideologies originate, but it is a crucial site in which pre-existing and revived values and narratives are lived, reinforced, contested, and reconfigured in everyday social relations.

Within the framework of class composition used by Notes From Below, ideology has not been systematically interrogated as a constitutive dimension of how classes are composed. The purpose of this text is to address that absence. It proceeds in three sections: first, a reflection on the absence of ideology within the theory of class composition; second, an interpretation of workers’ inquiry and the role ideology plays within it; third, a reconstruction of Louis Althusser’s conception of class struggle as integral to the composition of production and the political role of workers’ inquiry in disrupting the reproductive function of ideology; for both the worker and the militant.

Ideology in Class Composition

Notes From Below uses the schema of class composition to help analyse workers’ inquiry (which Jamie Woodcock’s essay in this issue also elaborates upon). Technical composition refers to the specific configuration of workers in a given workplace (what workers do, under what physical and temporal regimes, with which technologies, under what forms of supervision and discipline, and in relation to whom). Social composition maps how workers’ lives are organised beyond the immediate workplace (migration status, housing conditions, familial responsibilities, access to welfare, community ties etc.). Political composition refers to the organisational forms through which workers attempt to transform their situation collectively.

Under capitalist domination, these dimensions converge in the reproduction of class relations: i.e. a social division between those who own the means of production, and those who only have their labour-power to sell. Broadly, capitalist production is technically organised to maintain a command structure that guarantees the extraction of surplus labour from workers. Social policy and legal frameworks sustain a differentiated labour force, often stratified by race, gender, nationality, living standards and immigration status. While political institutions additionally constrain collective action through bureaucratisation or legal regulation. In this sense, technical, social, and political composition operate as mutually reinforcing mechanisms of decomposition, fragmenting workers and limiting their collective capacity.
However, in order to maintain capital accumulation and neutralise its integral class antagonism, capitalist production must constantly update its configurations of workers, technology, policy, management practices, physical infrastructures, labour processes and social and cultural norms. This process of recomposition internal to capitalist development, generates new conditions for class composition and political opposition from within.

This schema does not explicitly articulate the role of ideology in binding these levels together, neither for capital’s ability to ensure its smooth reproduction nor workers’ ability to disrupt that circuit. Ideology appears, if at all, as an external factor - something that is perhaps implied in social and political composition, but which is not given a clear status. What remains insufficiently theorised is the way ideological formations are woven into the organisation of production itself, into the lived experience of work, and into class struggle itself.

Consider sectors shaped by restrictive migration policies. Immigration law is not merely an external legal constraint; it structures the labour supply, determines who is recruitable and who must accept informal employment, and produces differentiated vulnerabilities within the workforce. But these legal mechanisms operate in tandem with ideological narratives: migrants as threats, competitors, temporary guests, or as ungrateful beneficiaries of national generosity. Without these myths, workers might simply see technical and social changes as arbitrary and unfair attacks, counterproductive to getting the job done. Therefore, these narratives mediate how technical arrangements used to support a command structure (shift allocation, task assignment, wage differentials, status hierarchies) are perceived, and ultimately shape the collective imaginary of a workforce.

Similarly, managerial discourses of “teamwork” “professionalism” “entrepreneurialism” or “work ethic” are not superficial. They shape how workers understand their own labour, whether as collective cooperation or individual performance, as imposed necessity or chosen opportunity. These are systems of meaning which derive their appeal from existing attachments to more ‘fundamental’ values such as community, morality, competition, paternalism, individualism, creativity etc. The ideals and principles through which individuals understand themselves and measure the value of their own lives are themselves part of the arsenal employers use to wage their struggle against workers. They are mobilised in workplaces to secure consent from workers to willingly submit to their own exploitation. And so, the fragmentation and domination of the working-class is often accompanied by ideological rationalisations that present them as natural, beneficial or even fulfilling.

Ideologies might be able to account for technical or social transformations of the class, thereby minimising the politicising effects of capital’s offensives. Or they might become overburdened by the realities they are supposed to explain or compensate for: for example, when our living conditions become unsustainable. In the case of the former, we can think of the way ideas of responsibility and entrepreneurship have been used to rationalise the effects of austerity on social welfare. In the case of the latter, we can think of the way Covid-era populist patriotism (‘In It Together’) fell apart in the face of a cost-of-living crisis and state-backed wage suppression. It is here, today, that elements of fascist ideology are taking root, providing explanations for the ways work is changing under the current crises of capitalism.

Without an explicit theorisation of ideology, class composition risks treating these mediations as secondary. It may describe the fragmentation of the workforce due to compositional changes without fully analysing how that fragmentation is legitimated and internalised through semi-coherent systems of meaning, or how ideologies are reconfigured or break-down in moments of political rupture. Class composition may identify structural divisions without tracing how they are reproduced through everyday meanings and practices, which offer workers a spontaneous justification for continuing to submit to exploitation. At the same time, it might be unable to properly capture the deeply personal experiences of self-transformation (when ideologies crumble) that characterise militant confrontation with authority.

To address this absence, it is useful to turn to the question of subjectivity: how workers process their experience of work, and how ideology structures that processing.

Subjectivity and Experiences of Work

For Notes From Below, workers’ inquiry is understood as a practice grounded in self-activity. The worker, as living labour and as the material support for the accumulation of capital, has a direct practical link to the world described in an inquiry. This proximity confers a distinctive political position and relation to knowledge production. The worker can produce knowledge of the organisation of their workplace and their experience of their work not as an external observer but as a participant whose daily activity, and material need, sustains the system under investigation. This is important for two reasons. First, the knowledge produced in a workers’ inquiry is not inserted into the head of the worker from the outside, it is the result of a process of analysis, description, reflection and essayistic composition. In the best cases, this involves a process of self-teaching - as opposed to the instrumental application of knowledge developed from elsewhere. Second, the worker is in a unique position to embody the transformative perspective which an inquiry carries, in a way that any outsider reading a given inquiry does not. The knowledge generated through inquiry therefore carries a political charge: it emerges from within the antagonism it seeks to illuminate.

At the same time, workers’ inquiry presupposes a distinction between how we directly experience work and the way that experience is mentally processed and understood. By and large, our direct experiences of work are organised by capital. Managers determine tasks, allocate shifts, structure communication, delimit access to information, and regulate movement within the workplace. What workers see, hear, and know about the total plan of production is shaped by this organisation. The labour process is thus the practical arrangement of our direct experience of work. But while workers experience this arrangement with their bodies, they are simultaneously invited to understand this experience according to a workplace ideology and the wider ideas which are dominant in society.

Ultimately, however, what workers carry in their heads about their work is neither a direct reflection of their embodied experience nor the version promoted by powers over them. It is an active, selective, partial, and mediated processing of all these elements. When someone is asked, “What’s your job like?”, the answer is rarely a comprehensive and objective account of the labour process they inhabit. Nor is it a direct reflection of the prerogatives of managers. It is a condensation: a narrative shaped by values, emotions, grievances, aspirations, frustrations and other categories available for interpretation. Routine features may recede into the background; extraordinary incidents may be foregrounded. Patterns of control may be naturalised; moments of conflict may be personalised.

This subjective processing is not neutral. It is shaped by a negotiated relation to ideologies. As we have already seen, ideology does not merely consist of explicit opinions about politics. It includes the implicit frameworks through which experience is rendered meaningful, which often pre-determines thoughts and feelings about politics. These frameworks filter perception, organise attention and shape relationships. They provide ready-made explanations for success and failure, for fairness and injustice, for shame and pride etc.

Workers’ inquiry operates within this terrain. It does not access raw, unmediated experience; it engages workers whose understanding of their own labour is already structured by subjective processing and negotiated engagements with ideologies. The task of inquiry is not to extract a pure description of the labour process untouched by ideology and to present to the world an objective (in the scientific sense) version of what goes on in the hidden abode of production. Rather, it is to create a space in which workers can recompose their experience, mentally rearranging its elements, identifying patterns, relating subjective impressions to objective conditions - so that they can understand and feel this experience differently, and ultimately change the way they act!

On this point, it is useful to think of the analogy between literary and political composition. Just as a writer selects, orders, and emphasises elements to produce a meaningful narrative, the worker engaged in inquiry selects and orders aspects of their experience. This recomposition can be transformative. It can reveal connections that were previously obscured, bring routine mechanisms of control into focus, and relate personal frustrations to structural features of the labour process.

To take ideology seriously within inquiry, therefore, it is important to recognise that workers’ (already active) subjective processing of experience is both the starting point and a terrain of struggle. Inquiry should neither romanticise spontaneous consciousness nor dismiss it. Its function is to create conditions in which workers can encounter the limits of what they think they know, without having those limits pre-defined by an external script. In this light, it is just as important to theorise the role of the external militant in workers’ inquiry, and in particular, the ideological presuppositions that they themselves bring to co-research.

Althusser: Class Struggle, Technical Composition, and Ideological Reproduction

So far, I’ve argued that the question of ideology cannot be separated from the structure of the capitalist mode of production itself. In this respect, the work of Louis Althusser is instructive. In the Marxist tradition, Althusser’s name is most commonly associated with the term ideology, primarily due to his essay on ideological state apparatuses. Less well known is his theorisations of class composition and writings on workers’ inquiry. In 1971, Marta Harnecker, the Chilean revolutionary, asked Althusser to write a preface for the second edition of her textbook on the principles of historical materialism. This had been one of the most widely circulated introductions to Marxism in Allende’s Chile. The text which Althusser produced for the preface, ‘Marxism-Leninism and the Class Struggle’, would be his first articulation of certain theoretical shifts that would come to characterise his writings of the mid-seventies. In particular, the preface was the first occasion Althusser described class struggle as an antagonism immanent to the technical makeup and reproduction of the capitalist mode production – a conception that he often distilled with the phrases: ‘the primacy of the contradiction over the contraries’ or ‘the primacy of the class struggle over the classes’.

For Althusser, there are no purely technical forms of production within capitalism. The organisation of the labour process does not simply reflect the most efficient arrangement of productive forces at a given level of development. Rather, the organisation of production is permeated by class struggle at every moment. The division of labour, the hierarchy of supervision, the introduction of machinery, the pacing of work, these are not neutral scientific or technical decisions concerning the most rational way of producing things. The organisation of production is always shaped by the capitalist class’s obligation to maintain domination over the working class, to enhance exploitation, and to secure the reproduction of the wage relation.

This leads to a crucial thesis: the productive forces are not separable from the relations of production (i.e. the social division between the classes). The ‘technical base’ of production is simultaneously the material support and the historical form of existence of relations of exploitation. To separate productive forces from relations of production is, in Althusser’s terms, an economistic and technocratic illusion. We can’t think of a steam engine or a digital labour platform as an objective application of science to production. All technologies, their design, and implementation within a workplace, already have class struggle embedded within them. From this perspective, the technical composition of the working class (the concrete organisation of labour in a given workplace) is itself a historical form of class struggle. Managerial authority, surveillance systems, workflow design, employment conditions, wage hierarchies: these are material crystallisations of the antagonism between capital and labour. They are strategies aimed at subordinating workers, rationalising production to maximise surplus extraction, and preventing disruptions to accumulation.

At the same time, workers’ resistance is not an external addition to this process. It is immanent to it. Workers may comply, subvert, slow down, refuse, or reinterpret managerial instructions. They may recognise authority as legitimate or as serving particular interests. In this sense, the classes are always already enveloped in class struggle within production itself, prior to any explicit political self-identification or ‘conscious subjectivity’.

Althusser’s emphasis on the question of reproduction - i.e. the concrete mechanisms by which capital’s exploitation of workers continues and expands - is central to his thinking here. The capital-labour relation does not reproduce itself automatically. It must be achieved under specific technical, legal, political, economic, and, most importantly for the purposes of this essay, ideological circumstances. Given that capitalism maintains itself by constantly aggravating its underlying class antagonism, the reproduction of the social relations of production requires ongoing adaptation.

So then the question of composition becomes central: what are the historical forms of existence of the class struggle, in other words, how are the classes composed in the process of the reproduction of social relations, and consequently, what does the composition of classes through the class antagonism in production, mean for revolutionary political strategy? The centrality of this question means that inquiry into the historical forms of existence of class struggle is crucial for understanding the concrete mechanisms of capitalist reproduction - and by extension, the disruption of capitalist reproduction.

The similarities with the Italian Workerist tradition are obviously quite clear; the political necessity to carry out research into the changing technical and social modalities of class struggle as they play out concretely within production. Where Althusser might depart from Operaismo is in the scope of his understanding of the capitalist mode production, and the importance of tracking the mediation of the class antagonism through levels that exceed the site of production per se. And this is where Althusser would deploy the Leninist methodological dictum: ‘concrete analysis of the concrete situation’. What Althusser had in mind with this phrase was a program of research that tracks the historical forms of existence of the class struggle through its various degrees of mediations. Such an analysis would move from the technical composition of the class struggle in the workplace, to a study of the complexion of inter-firm competition, monopolies and trusts. It would track national and international movements of capital, the specific forms of imperialist conflicts between national powers and fractions of capital, and the forms of anti-imperialist resistance which meet these. And ultimately would seek to understand how these degrees of mediation impact upon the concrete aspects of the antagonism itself (ideologically, technically, politically, legally and so on). It is therefore aimed at building a conception of the historical existence of the class antagonism, through a synthesis of multiple determinations.

This research project, which Althusser promoted throughout the seventies, was conceived as a corrective to the manner in which the French Communist Party formed its understanding of specific historical conjunctures and, on that basis, determined its political actions and strategies. In short, the Party relied on a superficial grasp of the conditions of the working-class, often depending on fixed and abstract notions of social relations. At the same time, its organisational structure stifled genuine democratic debate about strategy among its members and remained disconnected from its base, particularly from working-class militants who directly experienced the historical forms of class antagonism. Althusser’s call for ‘concrete analysis’ was an attempt to confront and remedy these shortcomings.

On this latter aspect - the Party’s direct link with the experience of the working-class - Althusser offered his criticism on two separate occasions, and these were given as methodological prescriptions for militant workers’ inquiry. In his letter exchanges with Maria Antonietta Macciocchi in 1968, while she was canvassing for the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in Naples, Althusser outlined an approach to eliciting the knowledge and experience of workers which he would later reformulate in his posthumously published What is to Be Done? In the latter case, Althusser frames his methodological prescriptions precisely in terms of the role of workers’ inquiry within a concrete analysis of a concrete situation, and pitches this against the passive reporting of worker voices that appeared in l’Humanité, the Party’s daily newspaper. Of the vanguard Fiat workers who demonstrated an exceptionally high level of ‘consciousness’ about the class struggle in the automotive industry, and talked confidently about what they knew on a television documentary, he says that their words represent material for a concrete analysis, but they are not, in themselves, a concrete analysis.

Across both his advisory letters to Macciocchi and his appraisal of worker representation in the public sphere and Party media, Althusser offers a common set of instructions for how one should approach a workers’ inquiry. Althusser’s correspondence with Macciocchi came at a moment when she was becoming increasingly disillusioned by the instrumental electoral strategy of the PCI. Parachuted into Naples, with no real links to the region, Macciocchi eventually abandoned her immediate electoral responsibilities in order to focus on building direct connections with the Neapolitan working-classes. In one of her early letters she asks for advice on how to draw insights from the underclass of women and children who form the largely invisible informal economy of Naples. By this point, it had become clear to Macciocchi that this fraction was structurally integral to the reproduction of the regional economy. Engaging this strata, however, remained an issue.

To this prompt, Althusser suggests the following:

You have to listen to them. But in order to be able to listen, you also have to make them speak, and you yourself must therefore also speak, not, of course, at any random moment or in whatever form strikes your fancy. To make others speak by letting them speak (letting them say everything they have in their heads and in their hearts) is the passive approach. There is also an active approach, making people speak in the sense of knowing how to listen politically (in the most general sense), of having a politico-sociological ‘hearing’ which helps you discover which are the points you yourself have to discuss. When people speak, they say certain things on their own. But there are also things that they hide or disguise, things they often consciously, but most often unconsciously, avoid.¹

Here, Althusser draws a distinction between a passive/active approach to inquiry. An active approach, the one advocated here, entails a particular approach to listening, a political listening, or ‘politico-sociological’ hearing, which determines when the militant should and should not intervene in the interaction; and determines the nature of that intervention, the precise formulation of questions, and the questions to avoid. Althusser cautions against an open-ended interview form, in which the worker is encouraged to say everything they know about their situation. This he considers to be a passive approach to inquiry, and one which does not generate political knowledge. Here it is a question of moving beyond the workers’ spontaneous knowledge of their own situation in order for the militant and worker to learn what the worker does not know (spontaneously) about what they do know about the effects of their conditions. And this movement beyond spontaneous knowledge production, is precisely the outcome of this particular type of political listening and intervention in the inquiry exchange.

Althusser goes on to further elaborate on this notion of spontaneous knowledge in What is to be Done?:

Assuming they say everything they know, one thing is certain: they always know much more (or much less) about things than they think they do. They do not say this ‘much more’, because they do not know that they know it. As for this ‘much less’, it is masked by what they think they do know…The fact that workers know more about things than they know, or less about things than they know, brings out a reality with which Marxist theory is well acquainted and which it has revealed to us: the effects of ideology. The conditions of life, work, exploitation, struggle, and the reproduction of labour-power are not things in plain sight that we can observe the way we observe what goes on in a train station. Even if, as Marx remarks, the machinery of big industry reduces workers to the state of appendages to itself, human beings are not ‘machine animals’. They are, rather, ‘ideological animals’. They have what we call ‘ideas’ about themselves, their work and the world.²

And then goes onto specify how the militant might relate to this spontaneous knowledge in his exchange with Macciocchi:

The thing that permits you to discover these ‘silent areas’, and which permits you to overcome them, is your political experience based on Marxist-Leninist theory. In this scheme of things, the militant is somewhat analogous to a psychoanalyst: he ‘knows’ more than the person he listens to, but what he ‘knows’ is on a different level than that which the speaker ‘knows’, which is the specific contradiction. The militant does not ‘know’, a priori and in specific detail, just what the lives of the persons he listens to are made up of and what the major contradictions are; he learns this by listening to them and discovering a great many things he previously did not know…[Marxist-Leninist theory] is what permits the militant to ‘comprehend’ beyond what he is told. It permits him, in particular, to ‘diagnose’ the sensitive spots, which are generally those ‘silent areas’. It is at this stage of the ‘analysis’ that he can and must raise pertinent questions of his own in order to break down these silences and make the speaker discover things that he knows, but that he is not aware of knowing because they are disguised, - clouded over, repressed - covered over by causes that go to the very heart of the conditions in which these people live and to the heart of the pitiful means by which they try, in spite of everything, to get by. In this type of sociological-political ‘hearing’, a ‘non-directed’ interview is a trap.³

The spontaneous knowledge of workers, which either appears as totalising (the worker seems certain that what they know is all there is to say) or provisional (the worker seems certain that there is more to say, but they do not have access to that knowledge) takes the place of deeper levels of knowledge which are not immediately accessible but which can be accessed through the contradictory encounter between the militant and the worker.

But Althusser is explicit in insisting that the structure of the relation between the militant and the worker is not that of pedagogical inequality. His claim is not that the militant would have more knowledge, or more accurate knowledge than the worker about the true determinations of their situation. Rather the militant inquiry forms a contradiction in the encounter of two distinct types of knowledge: first, the militant’s knowledge drawn from a ‘concrete analysis of the concrete situation’ and second the workers’ knowledge drawn from direct experience of the historical conditions of existence of the class antagonism. These are two distinct levels of knowledge, which offer different insight into the same antagonism. Neither of them however is immune from ideology. Both knowledge drawn from concrete analysis and from direct experience can present themselves as totalising. As such, they are conditioned by non-knowledge (something beyond what is thought to be known) which manifests in silences appearing alongside what is in fact said by the worker or what operates as the interpretative framework applied by the militant. Aspects of questions or issues which are passed over in silence tell us just as much about a worker’s situation as what they actually say about it. It is the militant’s task to remain attuned to what these silences signify in relation to what is actually said, and to discern how best to bring forth what remains unspoken but has nevertheless left a clear imprint on the workers’ subjective experience.

So, for Althusser, the best case scenario is one in which the worker and the militant are forced, through the contradictions of their respective knowledge bases, to interrogate the unspoken/repressed knowledge which condition their apparent understanding of the situation. This is usually the site where ideological explanation takes the place of new understandings. This necessitates, as Althusser argues, a reciprocal openness to learning. On the part of the worker: they learn of what they know about their own situation at a higher degree of critical understanding – the limits of what they thought they knew become apparent through the exchange. On the part of the militant: they learn about what their concrete analysis could never ascertain without going into the field. That is, the worker’s direct experience of the class antagonism – including its ideological character – which constitutes the antagonism’s immediate historical form of existence.

The knowledge generated by the militant workers’ inquiry is thus, in Althusser’s words: political knowledge. That is, knowledge which exceeds the spontaneous understandings that both the worker and the militant begin from – which is the seat of ideology, (which is for Althusser, as we have seen, a crucial site through which social relations of production are reproduced).

Althusser therefore outlines methodological pre-requisites for a militant workers’ inquiry aimed at producing political knowledge. First, it must involve an active dialogue that probes the contradictions arising from the encounter between two distinct forms of knowledge: that of the worker and the militant. The aim is to encourage reflection on the spontaneous understandings each party brings to the situation, exposing the limitations inherent in both perspectives. Such an inquiry should not only describe the experiences and historical conditions of class antagonism but also foster a critical awareness of the role of ideas in politically shaping how these experiences and realities are understood and explained. In this way, the workers’ inquiry becomes a political intervention, disrupting the spontaneous ideologies that shape how both workers and militants understand class struggle and which form the ideological basis for the reproduction of the social relations of production.

By way of conclusion, I leave a scene which dramatises the necessary reciprocal political effects of the encounter between the worker and the militant. The scene comes from one of Macciocchi’s letters depicting her efforts to connect with the working-class women of a proletarian district of Naples:

At this moment I go back inside and take out the microphone and begin to invite them to the meeting - all the while trying as hard as I can not to seem like a circus barker. ‘We have come here to let you speak up. So come on down and give us your point of view, tell us about your problems.’ Even as I pronounce it, I realize that the word ‘problems’ - constantly on my lips - is meaningless here in Naples. You have to say ‘your situation’ or ‘your affairs’ and so I belatedly switch terminology. I ask, I insist, I invite, trying every kind of cajolery my fantasy can bring up…I get out the van clutching the microphone in my fist like a holy-water sprinkler and, advancing towards a woman, I ask her if she wants to speak. I ask her name. It is the simplest possible question you can ask anyone. ‘Filomena Niola,’ she answers. Her voice, her first and last names, spread out like a sonorous wave first over her, then over the entire street. This is the new fact: ‘You, Filomena Niola….,’ as they say in solemn declarations. She is speechless at this magic, at her familiar name which now echoes around her as if she were a celebrity. I keep it up, though I am positive that I am more panicky than she and, having decided to push things further, I ask her what she does. ‘I’m a domestic. I get 40,000 lire a month, I have seven children, and I have to lay out 8,000 lire for our place…’ I suddenly see that the simplest most direct questions are the ones which find an instinctive response, an echo; they work, while the more complex questions just float out into the air. ‘What about your husband?’ I ask. ‘He is out of work,’ she says, already in a flowing tone as if she were speaking to herself, ‘he is looking for a job, anything. I have to look after our seven children, and they are in the streets the whole time I am gone, from morning to night….No, I have no insurance stamps, nor a pension, nor any sickness benefits….they treat us like dogs.’ Like dogs! Her voice echoes from step to step in the street, it reverberates off the walls and plunges into the heart of Naples. Now everyone is starting to come out in the street, wanting to know what is going on. What is happening is that, ‘Filomena, she’s giving the speech!’ In terms of time, it is not a long experience, for her; yet it is highly effective, because it represents a new form of struggle, her against society, and she is aligned against society as a single individual more deeply than she ever could have realized before now. Her courage, or her strength, comes to her ‘contesting’ life in the quarter, from the painful burden of all her children. In fact, what she says is, ‘I am like the Madonna of the Seven Pains’. I tell her to go on, asking whether it has always been like this, or whether she has ever been happy. ‘No, it has always been like this; we are all in the same boat.’ With this, she wheels on the others, as if enraged, and says, ‘Hey, come on, speak up for yourselves, or maybe you are better off, eh? Maybe you’re all princesses…what’s the matter with you?’....

In this reverse speech, letting simple folk speak for themselves, you realize three things: (1) that the women are by far the most courageous speakers; (2) that they denounce working conditions that the men do not even mention, and they are actually the ones who discuss their husband’s work; (3) that while what they are doing as they speak is a fleeting experience, it is one which already contains with it, in kernel form, a break with existing society.⁴