Pecunia non olet? (was: Gender, Race, and Publishing on the Left)

[zippycat at erols.com]

Yes, I absolutely agree.  I was very crudely generalizing about the attitudes
of the American middle class, and I am very aware that working people
are generally much more sympathetic in their attitudes toward society's
outcasts.  I just wanted to point out the perhaps uninteresting point that
bourgoeis culture, as dominates the mainstream media, warmly embraces
sex work when it meets the paradigm of success.  And while this "winner/
loser" dichotemy may be strictly bourgeois, I am constantly depressed to
find how thoroughly it has permeated the ranks of some working people.  For
example, when this "welfare reform" business went down, I was thoroughly
disheartened to find that the most vocal advocates of workfare that I met
were struggling working mothers who were angered by their perception
that welfare mothers did not have to make the same kinds of compromises
that they did--that they got a "free ride" to indolently raise their children
instead of having to scrap their way through lousy day care and crummy jobs.
This attitude is of course completely understandable--many working mothers
are racked with guilt by choices they have been forced to make.  But rather
than scream for better subsidized day care and better jobs they vented their
anger on those just below them on the economic ladder.  This is what
happens in the lack of a viable and well-articulated left.  You'd think it
would be easy enough to create a potent class consciousness in a society
with the grotesque economic disparities and completely undemocratic
workplaces that we have.  But it is ever fragmented for reasons we have
all discussed, theorized and analyzed--and the reason I joined this list
is to be kept abreast of left analyses of our scary neoliberal economic
order, and perhaps learn how better to argue with those who, as someone
else on this list  put it, are afraid to kill the goose that laid the golden
egg.

And for that reason I will try to shut up and read for a while.  And yes,
I am thoroughly familiar with the culture of romanticized failure in this
country as well, especially the hard-boiled detective genre, as
well as Westerns of the loser/drifter variety, punk rock, much of the
better modern fiction, etc.  But I still think that in the absence of any
alternative political presence in this country, many, if not most, Americans
are left with a neurotic fear/disgust/etc. of/at those at the bottom of
the heap.

Regards,

Ingrid

Dhlazare at aol.com wrote:


> What do vague generalizations like these mean?  What do you mean by
> "Americans"?  American workers?  American capitalists?  Actually, Americans
> have long romanticized failure as well as success.  Westerns, to cite just one
> example, have long celebrated the loser/drifter and denigrated the middle-
> class townie.  Hard-boiled detective fiction, I understand, does the same.
> Besides, this loser/winner dichotomy is strictly bourgeois.  If socialism is
> about anything, it is about busting up the bourgeois concept of "success" and
> redefining it in the interest of the people as a whole.
>
> Dan Lazare
> Ingrid writes:
> <<  It's just that many (and if not most, then the most visible) sex
>  workers
>  do exist on the margins, and Americans have a culturally ingrained revulsion
>  towards perceived failure or loser-dom.  Americans love a winner and
>  will shun perceived losers almost out of a fear that failure is itself
>  contagious.  And because economic marginality causes cognitive dissonance
>  for Americans who like to believe that in this country anyone who works hard
>  can achieve success, they are quick to blame the poor for their own misery.
>  Thus "street walkers," like welfare mothers, are viewed with public scorn.
>  Which is why it's so damn impossible to develop any serious left in this
>  country. >>