cultural politics/"real" politics

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Wojtek comments on loobyloo:
>At 02:25 PM 5/5/98 +0100, loobyloo wrote:
>>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.

Wojtek's framing of the 'real question' comes very close to saying that
sexism, homophobia, etc. might be 'functional' to 'working-class
solidarity.' His framing casts the working-class in implicitely straight
male terms as well.

Besides, whatever 'anti-individualist' or 'collectivist' norms may have
prevailed among peasants, enforcement of sex/gender norms in factories
isn't a matter of peasant 'attitudes' carried over to the urban/industrial
environment.

Yoshie