Newitz on white trash studies

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Justin:
><< The "underclass" is not a valid category for leftist social analysis either
> (unless one examines it only to point out how the concept is used by
> ideologues).  That is an ideological category employed in racist and often
> anti-urban discourse and stands in sharp contrast to the Marxist
> understanding of class. >>
>
>"The 'dangerous class,' the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown
>off by the lowest layers of the old society, may here and there, be swept
>into the movement by a proletarian revolution: its conditions of life,
>however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary
>intrigue." --Marx & Engels, The Manifest of the Communisy Party, Part I.
>
>But what do you expect from a couple of German intellectuals, anyway?
>Ideologues all, with no grasp of the "Marxist understanding of class."

I think that given the war on crime, etc. in the USA, it is best to drop
the concept of "lumpenproletariat" out of Marxist theory -- it occupies
little weight in Marx's work to begin with and has no political utility
now, only the danger of misuse.  Besides, you know the ideological use of
the concept of the "underclass" is _not at all_ the same as Marx's use of
"lumpenproletariat" in any case.  In American journalese and sociology, the
"underclass" is used in such a way to exclude from consideration the idea
of the "reserve army of labor."  The concept of the "underclass" divides
the working class into the "honest, law-abiding Americans" and those
"trapped in the culture of poverty" (which is explained in terms of
individual behaviors and family structures, not the rate of unemployment,
disinvestment in urban infrastructure, etc).  The concept is often used in
a racist manner to describe urban blacks.  It was often employed in the
ideological work of the Right leading up to the "welfare reform," in which
the fear of the "underclass" was linked to that of the mythical fertility
of poor black women.  Have you read _The "Underclass" Debate: Views from
History_ by Michael B. Katz (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
c1993)?  Katz points out that the concept of the "underclass" is merely a
new name to reanimate the old distinction of the "deserving" and the
"undeserving poor," one of the ideological weapons against the expansion of
the social rights & income support of the welfare state.


>PS, how's things in cow-town, Yoshie?

The campus area of the OSU is slated to be massively gentrified.

Yoshie