>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.
[...]
>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.
Jeez. Have you been peering at my bookshelf? I just finished this book a couple of weeks ago, and the one I read before that was Barbara E's Fear of Falling, which you quote in another post. Damn.
I agree that Sennet and Cobb's book would be an excellent read for the list (I would read it again). Partially I think this because it could preach a lot more effectively than I can. ;-) For instance, a few weeks ago Carrol Cox, who objects to kelley's perfectly valid "upper middle class" designation but who seems to have no problem expounding on the failures of the working class (though he doesn't name them as such), went on a long rant about how workers should not be admitted past the Gates of Eden, that they don't deserve utopia, because they are so racist. Lord knows where this comes from: mass-media caricatures, intellectuals' self-flattery, 60s students' and media's designation of "hardhats" as a racist, reactionary monolith based on a few pro-Nixon, pro-war protests (this is one that Ehrenreich outlines so well),* probably even a bit of reality. Whatever. These stereotypes, and other equally harmful ones, are out there and represented very well on this list. Sennet and Cobb's book absolutely destroys them. Not that they try to glorify the revolutionary potential in the wc, and neither do they look past the racist elements in said, but they show where these come from and how, in most cases, it is a misdirected frustration at their station and all the conflicting expectations (both self- and society-induced) in their lives. The hidden injuries, meaning they are hidden from both the injured and the injurors(?). Okay, I'll stop debasing their arguments now. But it's an excellent read, even outside the pedantic purposes I have arrogantly raised.
I kept thinking while I was reading it that we need an updated version, a late-90s, Internet-era version. Sounds like Kelley has the ideas and background. I nominate her.
Eric
*For someone who was born in 1969, BE's history of how the wc became "right" and the middle class (she calls it the "professional middle class") became "left" is astounding. In my life the popular image has always run thusly. Thirty years, even a hundred years, before the late 60s, it was the Great Unwashed who joined labor unions and communist parties and did all those other lefty things. Now its the wc who opposes affirmative action and free immigration and such. She says that this shift has less to do with reality than with the ideological needs of government, media, society, and the pmc's feelings of fear, guilt, and inadequacy. She convinced me.