The People’s Houses

People’s houses have had a long history that began at the end of the nineteenth century. Many have been closed, but several have managed to survive for a century and a half and some are still places of collective action. The example of people’s houses could be useful for sick contemporary society. They were and sometimes remain completely supra-individual, collective practices, usable things, tools within reach of many hands, like the collective action from below hoped for by Paolo Virno. According to Margaret Kohn, the careful analysis of these places can strengthen a concept of democracy that is useful today. Owen Hatherley wrote: these ideas and these buildings are relevant in an era when the radical left has to rebuild itself from scratch; it doesn’t have the infrastructure, the materials, the money; but neither did the Belgian Workers’ Party in the 1890s; what workers did have was enthusiasm and the ability to channel it into small-scale cooperatives and grassroots organizations, which then stamped their presence on the city and, in the process, sought to create spaces where life was, in a microcosm, better and fairer. But there is much more, as will be seen in a reconstruction of the different configurations of the people’s houses in Europe between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In various experiences, they were the places of an operating collective subjectivity and of the elaboration of an alternative proletarian culture, which was indispensable for finding specific methods of collective action capable of actually solving workers’ problems and thus achieving the self-emancipation of the proletariat. Thus, intertwining the same development of the proletarian movement at the time of the first industrialization, at the end of an old world and at the making of a new world, the people’s houses required long, complicated, and tiring processes. If the conditions in which they took place are considered, their realization and diffusion were somewhat miraculous. In the years between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the “possible modern popular reform” was based on the elaboration of an alternative proletarian culture as a discovery of the ways of reconciling individual and collective interest for a wide range of objectives: from the progressive construction of a new social order from below to the awareness of the historical necessity of the proletariat’s dictatorship. The same elaboration process also included the continuous torment given by the clash, which was often violent, between those very different positions where the supporters of each accused the others of utopianism. The national experiences in Europe were very complex. The English, German, French, Belgian, Italian cases all present their own characteristics and particular connections between different functions and different declinations of the alternative proletarian culture. The English workers’ clubs were people’s houses of the “third type”: spaces used as places of congregation; with regular user-actors; salient features of the purposes of cultural, recreational help and self-help; salient features of the results were unspecified and dependent on users and management; symbolic value and image of eventual-potential community. They were practical instances of democracy, but not like elsewhere in Europe—of a proletarian culture completely alternative to that of the dominant classes. This apparent paradox was influenced by the early and regular process of British industrial development that made the revolt difficult and not very useful and very quickly differentiated the composition of the working class. The legacy of Owenism had an influence, from which the affirmation of education as a priority lever for the emancipation of the subaltern classes derived. The construction of a suitable way of thinking by the socialists had an influence, they adhered to the Owenist perspective, were influenced by widespread ideas and were taught by the Chartist failure which was interpreted as a lack of education of a decisive part of the militants. The clubs were local schools of democratic self-management in which it was demonstrated that middle-class guidance was unnecessary (a degrading nonsense) to accomplish the moral and social improvement of the working class. But the general conditions were prevalent and adverse to the creation of more demanding people’s houses and of a fully alternative proletarian culture. The German case presents, compared to the English one, the affirmation of an alternative proletarian culture in the full sense, people’s houses (called union houses) that were larger and more important, but not subjective acting units, a partial welding between the alternative culture actually created and the people’s houses. In Germany, unlike in England, two general conditions were favorable: the hostility of the ruling class toward the subaltern, and the flourishing network of moderate Catholic initiatives in competition with the union houses that could reassure the upper classes. But the rather centralized organization of the German unions weighed heavily, and the local determinants were unable to counterbalance it: the settlement in the major cities contributed more to a sort of alienation than to rooting and interaction in and with the specific territorial realities. The Belgian people’s houses were of the “fifth type”, the most demanding: spaces used for the establishment of an agent subjectivity; activists and recruitable user-actors; salient features of the purposes of everything useful to strategies specific to the people’s house itself; salient features of the results collectively specified, pursued, and obtained; symbolic value and the image of a strong unified agent community. They arose and grew through long processes not only because they were large and expensive but also because such long processes were fundamental for the mutual experience of “truth” in collective confrontation for the common good. And they were created because the general determinants interacted with the local determinants pushing in the same direction. The accelerated industrial development according to the export-led model and foreign direct investments was built on local bases. Belgian socialism, favorable to cooperatives and grassroots initiatives of the proletariat to make up for low wages, was functional to this model by at least partially obviating the social costs it entailed. The strong local initiatives supported each other through the network of cooperatives and the socialist party itself. The French people’s houses were also of the “fifth type”, even though they were called Bourses du Travail. In the years of their growth until the eve of the First World War, the Bourses du Travail were fully-fledged collective agents and places for the development of a true alternative proletarian culture, as they were integrated or meshed with the social, economic, and political reality of their specific territory. This meshing was inscribed in the long elaboration and realization of their original function as employment services, objectively and absolutely linked to the local labor market. It was from this origin and from the slow maturation of related ideas and practices that their functions developed, until they constituted the central institution of a possible federalist socialism, even if it was later considered utopian. They were a central institution, as the Bourses du Travail supported each other, forming a system through their Federation. In Italy, people’s houses were a widespread but very complex reality, including all types. There were some houses of the “fifth type”, but also of “types one and two”: spaces used as almost “non-places” or meeting places with anonymous users; indefinite or recreational features of the purposes; random or user-dependent salient features of the results; absence or temporary sociality symbolic value. But it was actually the Italian people’s houses that in their tricky history applied in the most evident way the application of the formula faith against science and science against faith (but the case of Halluin will be examined in the next chapter). And this was precisely because of their differentiation according to needs and possibilities. Faith in one’s own abilities and resources, however poor and small they might appear “in the face of the needs of the disinherited, victims of every kind of speculation, dishonesty, and parasitism of which the less well-off classes are victims”. Against science that “in the face of the enthusiasm and certainty of the success of certain socialists” warned to realistically consider it “neither possible nor useful to venture” into similar difficult enterprises. But then, for their lives, application of science against faith. The science of socialist doctrine and the experiences of others that explained the importance of a “fulcrum around which to make all the institutions of the proletarian movement live and prosper, an element of order and a peaceful progressive instrument of its material and civil elevation”. Against faith, that is, the desperate belief “that there was an iron law, according to which the rich are made to command and the poor to serve”. Faith against science and then science against faith that gave rise in a very characteristic way to achievements that conformed, on the basis of specific resources, to local realities responding to specific needs. The case of the Italian people's houses suggests that the formula applies in collective action especially when the need for inclusive innovation is acute. In Italy, industrial development was backward while the teaching that came from the experiences of the proletariat in more advanced realities was known and available. Therefore, the perception of a very accentuated and evident distance between needs—desires and reality was widespread. From this emerged the urgency of innovation and inclusion, that is, of a collective action of emancipation of the subaltern classes expanded. Expanded in its locations, adapting to specific needs so as to be able to serve and involve the greatest possible number. Expanded also as a multiplication of locations in many settings, even very different from each other.