aleX writes:
>Undoubtedly. And I think some of that aversion might lead to Third
>Worldism/Weatherman type stuff, as you suggest, but the flipside of that
>is that some middle-class radicals divorced from the working classes
>lapse into romanticism and fetishism, ra-ra for the workers, by people
>who've never even bothered to talk to workers and find out what they're
>thinking.
well, i rarely see any of this romanticization bizzo out here: i was specifically typing about what gets typed on this list. like you, aleX, i'm working class, degreed, but working class nonetheless [and pls, carrol, i hope we've cleared up what i and many other folks gen'ly mean by that]
>>If you are reacting against patronization of the
>>masses, I think that is well-taken when there is
>>a legitimate target for it. I don't see any in
>>the other posts.
>
>I do. Kelley came down on me
hmmm. actually i think i responded to doug's post and i was 'coming down' [if you insist on calling it that] on a general phenom on this list that rears its ugly tail far too often. i don't know why i'm astounded--still--after all these years when i read what lefties have to say about workers/working class folks/the masses/etc.
clearly, i was not patronizing the working class by romanticizing them. like you, alex, i know better than to do such a thing. i know altogether too well just how apathetic, narrow-minded, etc they can be. however, if my experiences, particularly teaching, have taught me anything at all, it's that we have far more to worry about than apathy, bigotry, racism and sexism among working class folks. there's heaps of all of that and more among the more erudite and supposedly educated, scribbling classes, as wojtex calls them. what the upper middle class learns is how to talk the talk and give the 'socially acceptable response'
i simply tire of reading on this damn list of all places about rednecks, yahoos, and other colorful expressions that signify joe sixpack and suzie winecooler [and yes, that's disparaging too]. i've called people on it more times than i can remember--and so have other folks, margaret and eric in, i suppose, a rather more polite way.
>for my musing about whether or not people
>really desire freedom, taking it as a slam of "the masses" and suggesting
>that such speculation is what turns people off from the Left. Please. I
>doubt if any of "the masses" give a fuck about what I have to say about
>JFK.
perhaps not what you have to say alex. dunno. but i do know without a doubt that, if you talk to workers for any length of time about this topic, then you will eventually find an expression of what sennett and cobb once aptly called 'the hidden injuries of class'. indeed, i'd suggest a list reading, since PLOP was such a plop. it's an oldie but goodie, i think, and writing this post prompted me to have a look at it again with fresh eyes, since i last read it completely in 1984 as a first yr college student. the intro takes on new meaning, as i didn't quite understand much of it back then. and funnily enough,i did not yet know i was 'working class' --an old story, of course, but there it is.
here's a teaser synopsis:
they start out recapturing an argument between two communist labor organizers about why communism failed. one sees it as a failure of the party, the other as a failure of the workers. [familiar? gad, reading this is slaying me.] they move on to public intellectuals like Willaim Pfaff, _condemned to freedom_, and sartre, both of whom had taken similar positions. pfaff maintained that workers had more reason to be conservative because they wished to secure their hard won material gains. sartre, after 1968, in an interview claims that the party betrayed workers.
the authors point out that, despite their different assessments, all of them share the assumption that rebellion is a rational choice. but, after talking with workers [manual laborers and their families] they came "to see that both sides...think more simplistically about workers than workers think about themselves....[workers] themselves, no less than their critics, are aware of the momentous change in their lives...these working people of boston are trying to find out what position they occupy in america as a whole. to create images of their place, however, they use a language more complicated , more puzzling, than the computations of material well-being their interpreters use. for the people we interviewed, integration into american life meant integration into a world with different symbols of human respect and courtesy....the changes in their lives meant more to them than a chance, or a failure, to acquire middle class things. for them, history is challenging them and their children to become "cultured" if they want to achieve respect in the new american terms; and toward that challenge they feel deeply ambivalent."
[an interview with frank rissarro exemplifies what they mean]:
"rissarro talked to the interviewer in a peculiar way: he treated him as an emissary from a different way of life, as a representative of a higher, more educated class before whom he spread a justification of his entire life...the interviewer became a representative of a class of people who could do what they wanted and who made him feel inadequate. it was risarro's chief concern to show why circumstances had not permitted him to take charge of his life in the same way.... the word 'educated' as used by rissarro....stands for a whole range of experiences and feelings that have little to do with formal schooling.... rissarro believes people of a higher class have a power to judge him because they seem internally more developed human beings; and he is afraid that they will not respect him. he feels compelled to justify his own position....in turn---when he thinks just of himself and is not comparing himself to his image of people in a higher class--all of this is set a gainst a revulsion against the work of educated people...and a feeling that manual labor has more dignity.
[note: i'd add that this is true to my research: working class men treated me as if i already had the phd, even tho i was clear about still being in grad school; managerial men treated me as aspiring to be like them and, interestingly enough, they often went into a little rant 'educating' me about what it was like out there for a girl like me. hah. hilarious doug, i should dig those interviews up for an issue of lbo--and all the sexist b.s. too. scary]. [...]
"one way to make sense of these confusing metaphors of self-worth is to recast them as issues of freedom and dignity.....what happens to the dignity men see in themselves and in each other, when their freedom is checked by class?" [...] "the one bit of information appearing so far that will becrucial for understanding how the struggle for freedom and dignity has become destructive in americqa is the value men like frank rissarro and james put on knowledge. knowledge thru formal education they see as giving a man the tools for achieving freedom--by permitting him to control situations....as things actually stand, however, Certified Knowledge does not mean dignity...indeed, it is the reverse, it is a sham. what needs to be understood is how the class structure in American is organized wo that the tools of freedom become source of indignity" [...] something hidden and perverse is at work in our society so that people lose conviction of their dignity when they try to take responsibility for either an increase in or a limit on their 'freedom'"
i really think this book would be an interesting read for the list. not only is it simply a classic, but it also speaks to something i've long thought about: given that people have more access to higher education and are, increasingly, working in the kinds of jobs that signify 'clean' 'mental' labor, then what might sennett and cobb's work have to tell us today. they'd captured the socially mobile ethnic [white] working class as some of them became 'upwardly mobile' but this was largely structural mobility.