>In virtually all large blue collar workplaces attempts to fuck with
>identity are rigidly policed: and it doesn't have to be a very grand
>project to attract hostility - just wearing the wrong colour shirt or
>using the wrong swear words can spark it off. In many of these places
>there is a rearguard action against mutable identities; people are aware
>of the loss of defined gender roles, sexual orientation, etc. as a
>general social trend, and natural conservatives attempt to reconstruct a
>nostalgic certainty for themselves.
>
More than just identity politics might be at stake here. It might be a form of maintaining of certain form of social solidarity that is essential for certain modes of production. For example, individualism (e.g. competitiveness and getting ahead of others) were found to be highly discouraged in peasant economies of Eastern Europe, because such attitudes were highly disruptive for the basic unit of production - the household.
When transplanted to urban/industrial environment, the anti-individualistic norms and collectivist norms of behavior would still persists among those groups.
Of course maintaining worker solidarity was essential for the success of struggle with the management.
So the real question is to what degree such working class policing is 'functional' i.e. necessary to maintain working class solidarity or an expression of that solidarity, and to what extent it is a relict of the nostalgic past, a ritual, and exercise of identity politics.
Regards,
Wojtek Sokolowski