It might not be a 'politically correct' form, but it might be the prevalent form among working class men. Again, that is an empirical hypothesis, not an assessment of situation.
In any case we need to clarify what the concept 'working class solidarity' means. Is it a normative concept that describes a ceratin political ideal? Is it a functional concept describing the form of bonding that brings together members of the working class, as opposed to cross-class forms of bonding. Or is it whatever form of bonding happens tro prevail among working class men and women?
>I also think that male bonding tends to create a _cross-class_ solidarity
>among men, instead of working-class solidarity. (I am thinking of the
>sexual harassment case at a Mitsubishi plant that made news a couple of
>years ago, for instance.) Male bonding rituals are used to create a
>military culture as well, to induce soldiers from the working class to
>identify with their superiors (the and ruling class).
>
That would imply the functional meaning I refer to above.
>Can hunting or fishing be truly compared to the enforcement of sex/gender
>norms at work places? To me this analogy doesn't sound particularly
>illuminating, in that the enforcement of sex/gender norms isn't a hobby
>that only a minority take up once in a while.
It certainly can if the comparison serves a useful purpose. IMHO, hunting, fishing and male bonding are virtually defining features of the white working class in America. All of them are ritualistic behaviors as well (meaning; they serve no apparent utilitarian purpose). However, both hunting and fishing were once not only basic utilities of life, but also symbiols of self-reliance and independence of the lower class (as opposed to be land tenants who depended on their landlords). IMHO, it is that symbolic aspect of hunting and fishing that made it survive long after their life utility had expired. My question is, can the same be said of the rigid enforcement of gender roles?
>Ask a wrong question, you only get a wrong answer, I say. Asking if X is
>_functional_ to Y already implies a certain theoretical framework, which
>isn't simply a matter of the empirical. Asking if the enforcement of
>sex/gender norms is _functional/necessary_ to working-class solidarity
>seems to imply an answer as to who is the working class and what
>working-class solidarity is.
The main problem of functionalism is not functions but teleologism and circular reasoning. The question about functions can be stated in the form of testable empirical hypotheses, instead of a priori assertian that everything that exist must be functional.
My question was to what degree the behavior in question was functional and to what degree it was not -- and that implies the possibility of falsification - thus making it an empircal hypothesis. Functionalist 'truths' are true by definition (everythging that exist in a society must serve some social function) without any possibility for falsification.
To reiterate, I cannot see how you can avoid talking of functionality (in an emprical sense) of certain behaviour for woreking class solidarity (as outlined above) -- without falling into either purely normative or ex-post facto assertions.
>Carrol: I would imagine a good deal of spontaneous workers' culture (and
>not just blue-collar workers) (a) Is mostly a way to "get through the day"
>(Doug has discussed this recently) and (b) has its dark side, as any
>culture developed in direct subordination to capital would, no doubt. Part
>of the task of marxists, etc. is to help sort out the usable from the
>destructive.
'Spontaneous' could be a misnomer here. Culture and power, and for that matter, anything social does not exist in a vaccum. Hierarchy is a like malaria, to eradicate you must eradicate not just the disease itself, but also its vector (the mosquito) _and_ its breeding ground (the swamp). In the same vein, it is not enough to eradicate hierarchical relations themselves, but also their vectors - hierarchical knowledge systems -- and their breeding grounds - a myriad of cultural instituitions especially the academe and the family.
Here we have the perenial problem of 'false consciousness' - we may ax the bourgeois hierarchies and property relations, but the blue print for them will survive in the swamp of institutions like the holy family and the academe. The tragedy of Eastern Europe is that the system that gave the sons and daughters of peasant and workers a chance of getting education in the name of eqality and social justice, turned these your people into reactionaries who lusted for hierarchical social order with them on the top. The main grievance of the Polish intelligentsia (mostly of the peasant-worker origin within two generations) was that 'socialism" put them on the equal footing with the 'robole' (a Polish neologism that means both 'workers' and 'worms').
One would expect more humility form the sons and daughters of peasants and workers. The point is, however, that their minds were poisoned with the lust for hierarchy (epitome of rationality) by _higher_ education.
Regards,
Wojtek Sokolowski