>Re Jessica's observation: "I don't believe there is no class
>consciousness; in fact I think class consicousness is growing."
>
>I don't know whether this squares with the idea of rising class
>conciousness, per se, but there certainly is rising envy and resentment
>about windfall gains in today's casino economy, even among winners. See
>today's Wall Street Journal (headline and subheds): "Amid Economic
>Boom, Many of the 'Haves' Envy the 'Have Mores' -- They Know They're
>Well Off, But Can't Help Coveting Neighbors' Big Bonanzas -- 'Where's
>the Justice in This?'"
I just read Vanneman & Cannon's 1987 book, The American Perception of Class, which argues, using existing survey data and original research, that (working-class) Americans are far more class conscious than anyone realizes. Since the book is over 10 years old, I looked at some more recent polls (General Social Survey, New York Times, ABC) and found there's not much reason to change that conclusion. But consciousness is one thing - a thing deeper and more complicated than self-naming even - and action is another. People do think of themselves as working class, but do they act politically on it?
Or, as my new pal Zizek says in his leftist plea for Eurocentrism in the Summer issue of Critical Inquiry:
"To put it in Alain Badiou's terms, it is crucial here not to translate the terms of this struggle, set in motion by the violent and contingent assertion of the new universal truth, into the terms of the order of positive Being with its groups and subgroups, conceiving of it as the struggle between two social entities defined by a series of positive characteristics. Therein resided the "mistake" of Stalinism, which reduced class struggle to a struggle between classes defined as social groups with a set of positive features (their place in the mode of production, and so forth). From a truly radical Marxist perspective, although there is a link between the working class as a social group and the proletariat as the position of the militant fighting for universal Truth, this link is not a determining causal connection, and the two levels are to be strictly distinguished. To be proletarian involves assuming a certain subjective stance (of class struggle destined to achieve redemption through revolution) that, in principle, can occur to any individual; to put it in religious terms, irrespective of his (good) works, any individual can be touched by grace and interpellated as a proletarian subject. The limit that separates the two opposed sides in the class struggle is thus not objective, not the limit separating two positive social groups, but ultimately radically subjective; it involves the position individuals assume towards the Event of universal Truth. Again, the crucial point here is that subjectivity and universalism are not only not exclusive but are, rather, two sides of the same coin. It is precisely because class struggle interpellates individuals to adopt the subjective stance of a proletarian that its appeal is universal, aiming at everyone with no exceptions. The division it mobilizes is not the division between two welldefined social groups but the division, which runs "diagonally" to the social division in the Order of Being, between those who recognize themselves in the call of the Truth-Event, becoming its followers, and those who deny or ignore it."
Doug