> Unlike Carrol, I wouldn't put the lack of
> action on race/gender chauvinism. Fact is that
> workers were not ready to support themselves,
> let along the 'other.'
You will have to find a different formulation on this. The evidence is that *most* workers-- that is, women (employed and unemployed) and non-whites historically have been quite willing, all too willing in fact, to support the "other" (i.e., that minority of white, male, industrial workers), despite the reluctance of a substantial part, probably a majority, of that minority to return the support.
I hope on another day to take up Gary's queries on leftist treatment of aesthetic questions, but let me in a preliminary way note that (in many different guises) decorum has always been at the core of attempts to establish a literary theory, and that in reference to contemporary working-class fiction/film/drama one would have to see the coherence (another word for decorum) dependent on its placing of women and non-whites at the *core* of the current U.S. working class. Fiction that does not do that may be in many ways admirable, even profound, but it is almost by definition *not* working-class fiction.
Switiching back to pure politics, within the "traditional" industrial / unionized working class, the chief political battle is to bring those workers (or at least the white male minority among them) to acknowledge that they are working class, that is to see their interests as tied to the interests of black and female workers. Otherwise, no matter how blue their collars and how dirty their hands, they are in terms of class-consciousness Dickensian servants, not workers.
Carrol
P.S. I have not the slightest idea how relevant this is to Moore's films. I'm not trying actually to judge those films, but to work out the aesthetic/political criteria for judging them *as working class films*. Stendahl, Austen, and Dickens (my three favorite novelists) are far from being "lightweight," but that is because their decorum does not depend on their relationship to the working class.