Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1999 22:44:37 -0600 (MDT) From: Anderson Bob <band at unm.edu>
http://www.chronicle.com/colloquy/99/workingclass/background.htm CHRONICLE of HIGHER EDUCATION -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Seeking Solidarity in the Culture of the Working Class In an academic era dominated by talk of race and gender, some scholars assert the importance of economic disparities By JEFF SHARLET
Race, class, gender. Race, class, gender. Is there a more familiar mantra in fin de siecle academe?
Quick, then: What is your race? What is your gender? That's easy, you might reply, and roll off ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- ALSO SEE http://www.chronicle.com/colloquy/99/workingclass/workingclass.htm Join the debate: Have academics focused too much on issues of race and gender, to the exclusion of important questions about the role of economic class? What should the role of working-class studies be in the academy? (The responses)
A List of New Scholarship on Working-Class Culture
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two short words. Or: Interesting question, you might say, and go on about the social construction of identities.
Now: To what class do you belong? It's in response to that question that most people begin to stammer, says John Russo. Well, come the equivocating answers, middle class, I guess. Or: Middle class, but my daddy was a coal miner. Or: Middle class -- my neighbor has two Mercedes, and I have only one.
Or: Don't we live in a classless society?
No, says Mr. Russo, we don't. A labor-studies professor at Youngstown State University, he is a co-founder and director of its Center for Working-Class Studies. And one of the first things he wants people to know is that we are not all middle class.
Driving through the urban wreckage of contemporary Youngstown, Ohio, once a bustling industrial center, Mr. Russo explains that when asked where they would situate themselves on the economic spectrum, nearly all Americans describe themselves as middle class, but that if offered a choice of designations, more than 45 per cent call themselves working class. That discrepancy alone suggests the cultural component of class. To Mr. Russo, it also reveals an enormous blind spot. Like race and gender, class is a topic that many people need prompting in order to discuss.
And yet, when academics tackle the trio, class often gets short shrift. Mr. Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon, an English professor at Youngstown State and co-founder of the working-class-studies center, noticed a few years ago that whenever the academic associations to which they belonged discussed diversity, the category of class was neglected.
So, in 1994, they applied for a grant from the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The title of their application was "Will the Working Class Be Invited to the Diversity Banquet?" The association's response, says Mr. Russo, was, in effect, "God, yes, we forgot."
With that grant they got started, and they have been busy since. They had held their first conference in 1993 and have sponsored subsequent meetings every two years. They began the center in 1996. Instead of putting its funds and energy into an academic journal, they started an education program with Local 1375 of the United Steel Workers of America.
Crucial to that endeavor, they felt, were practical accommodations for their students -- classes are held on a swing-shift schedule at Local 1375's Quonset-hut union hall -- and a class-conscious curriculum. "If it is valuable for women to study women writers as a source of critical self-understanding," asks Ms. Linkon in her introduction to a new essay collection she has edited, Teaching Working Class (University of Massachusetts Press), "why wouldn't it be valuable for working-class people to read working-class writing?"
But if it is difficult to say who is working class and who is not, the question of what makes a novel or a poem working class is even more complicated. Obviously, working-class literature should be about the working class. But does it matter how an author depicts the working class? The canon indisputably includes writers such as John Steinbeck, Theodore Dreiser, and Willa Cather. Trickier is whether to include writers popular with the working class, such as Zane Grey, or writers who depict the working class negatively. William Faulkner, for instance, makes the list for some scholars, while others scorn him for his portrayal of working people as solitary, insane, violent, or absurd.
The willingness of working-class studies to wrestle with such questions is a part of what distinguishes the field from labor studies, which mostly focuses on unions. Working-class studies, as the Youngstown center practices it, takes its cues from cultural studies and supplements the Marxist definition of the working class -- those without the means of production -- with that of Max Weber -- a status determined by a combination of factors, including income, occupation, and education.
Nor does the new working-class studies stop at the factory door. Stanley Aronowitz, a professor of sociology at City University of New York and one of the de facto deans of cultural studies, made that point in a keynote address at the center's most recent conference, in June: "What the class struggle is about is who has control over time. And the class struggle is therefore displaced from the factory floor to the classroom, to everyday life, to television, to every other thing that can be imaginably connected with time."
Mr. Aronowitz, a former steelworker himself, began his talk by recollecting an ethnographic study of an auto factory in Lordstown, Ohio. "What I saw in Lordstown was the great impulse of the working class," he declared, "which is to do as little work as they can. To f--- off. To smoke dope in the washroom."
He argued that rather than romanticize the working class, the goal of working- class studies should be to get rid of it. "The whole point is the abolition of alienated labor," he said. "The abolition of as much necessary work as we can get, so that we can spend all of our time doing something else."
That something, he suggested, is play. But play, he was quick to add, is important work itself. Mr. Aronowitz distinguishes play -- as essential as sleep -- from leisure. "Leisure," he argued, is the "surplus of labor," free time allowed only when all of the toiling is through. As such it is susceptible to manipulation -- a carrot dangled before working-class people by their bosses.
Play, meanwhile, is the means by which we create both our selves and the communities in which we live. Mr. Aronowitz's goal is to get the chores -- the "necessary labor" -- out of the way in order to make time for the play he considers more productive than the hours spent riveting bolts or prepping chickens. Asked whether the time he spends writing books is work or play, he replied that it is both.
Jim Courim, a steelworker who is also a student of Mr. Russo's, would agree that work can be a form of play. The day before the conference began, Mr. Courim had spent some time off from the Warren Consolidated Industries steel mill (one of three left of the dozens that once operated in the area) working on an extracurricular project. It was work that clearly delighted him.
A tall, burly man who normally wears a skeptical expression, Mr. Courim was grinning as he applied the skills he'd learned in a video-editing course under the local's education program to duplicate a surveillance tape of workers picketing at a titanium plant. The company had fired one of the workers after charging him with the manufacture and detonation of explosives; the tape, which Mr. Courim was copying for a grievance hearing, showed that the man had simply been pumping compressed air into plastic soda bottles and popping them to while away his time on the picket line.
Mr. Courim affected a more studious demeanor when asked for his own definition of working-class studies. Fetching his transcript from the front of the union hall that serves as his university, he read off a list of courses that included, in addition to video editing and conventional courses on negotiations and worker-safety regulations, the studies he had undertaken on representations of the working class.
"I went out and I talked to the guys that used to work in the mills," he said. "I asked them what it'd been like. Then I looked at the old contracts, studied the language, what they said about how it would be on the floor. Somewhere in between what the contracts said and what the older people remembered, that's culture. I find culture in the terminology of a contract."
Mr. Russo thinks that's as good an explanation of working-class studies as any. He and others in the program resist identifying the field with a particular ideology, though most of its members are left of center. (They are open to scholars with conservative views, he insists, but so far few of that breed have cared to identify themselves with working-class studies; none, as far as he knows, have attended a conference). They envision their conferences as forums for scholars to debate definitions and agendas, where working-class studies should start from and where it should be heading. The center, Mr. Russo says, is a clearinghouse, not an assembly line.
Barbara Foley, a professor of English at Rutgers University at Newark, was among those ready to rumble on the question of class at the June conference. Speaking with colleagues after Mr. Aronowitz's talk, she said she'd admired much of what he had said, but had also found his presentation "accommodationist." Although he had stressed his belief that scholars of working-class studies should not stop their investigations at "the moment of identity," she thought the discipline should dismiss that moment altogether.
Identity distracts scholars from real issues of political economy, she argued. To her, working-class studies is inherently Marxist. Opening the door to what she considers the softer side of cultural studies -- for example, looking for working-class culture in sports bars, as Mr. Aronowitz discussed doing -- struck her as a dangerous detour into identity politics.
As far as Eric Schocket is concerned, any politics -- much less scholarship -- that is based on Weberian notions of identity threatens the future of the field. Mr. Schocket's career roughly parallels the life of the Youngstown program; eight years ago, he delivered his first academic paper at the program's inaugural conference. Now an associate professor of English at Hampshire College, he decided this year to diagnose the condition of the field.
Delivering a paper titled "Problems in the Study of Working-Class Culture," Mr. Schocket took on the race-class-gender triumvirate. "The implication," he warned, "is often that all three terms name analogous sets of identity positions." Class, he argued, is not an identity, but a set of relations, "structured along an axis of inequality that prevents them from ever being part of an affirmative politics of 'inclusion.'"
On the other hand, he said, working-class studies needs to maintain its distance from labor studies, which is more strictly economic. Since that discipline has focused on labor unions, he explained, it has tended to reflect the white, male demographic traditionally predominant in unions. And because labor-studies programs are usually located in management or economics departments, they often ignore the primary subjects of working-class studies: art, literature, song, film, and folklore.
Then again, Mr. Schocket also worries that the methods of cultural studies, as practiced in the United States today, tend "to make culture the essential term, to grant it greater and greater autonomy -- to loosen, if not in fact sever, its connection to economic structures and practices."
The terrain of working-class studies, apparently, is vast. A bibliography of working-class fiction that Mr. Schocket compiled for the center's Web site (http://www.as.ysu.edu./~cwcs/) has 426 entries, including not only such obvious books as The Grapes of Wrath, but also such forgotten works as Grace Lumpkin's To Make My Bread and best sellers such as Barbara Kingsolver's Pigs in Heaven. Getting lost in that landscape is easy. No one has yet drawn a map that everyone can agree on.
Which is not to say that there is no solidarity in working-class studies. Most scholars agree on a few broad characteristics of the working class: a high value placed on loyalty to one's community, sometimes at the cost of self-advancement; a lack of a sense of entitlement to privilege; and, if not necessarily class consciousness, a shared resentment of perceived arrogance in wealthier classes.
The fact that Americans have so little class consciousness is one of the central dilemmas of the field. The proletariat may be international, but working-class studies is at this point largely a domestic affair. Noting the vocal nature of the working classes of European and Asian nations, Paul Lauter, a professor of English at Trinity College, in Connecticut, explained at the conference that "working-class studies is in part about why the working class in America is so different."
Mr. Lauter spoke with The Chronicle shortly before delivering his own keynote address at the conference. An editor of an anthology of working-class literature for classroom use forthcoming from Addison-Wesley, he said one of the factors contributing to greater interest in the working class is the growing number of young scholars of working-class backgrounds unwilling to renounce their own pasts.
"When I went to college," recalled Mr. Lauter, the son of a court stenographer, "I learned to pass -- to dress a certain way, to speak a certain way, to not talk with my hands." Today, he said, many younger scholars are interested in mining their origins for the virtues of the working class.
But he warned that while scholars should look for value in working-class cultures, they should also avoid their celebration. "The point isn't whether working-class life is preferable," he said. "The project is how do you maintain its values, like solidarity, without its detriments, like financial insecurity?"
That's a question Robert Bruno asks in Steelworker Alley: How Class Works in Youngstown, a mix of memoir and ethnography recently published by Cornell University Press. Mr. Bruno, an assistant professor of labor and industrial relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, embarked on his study after returning to his childhood home of Struthers, near Youngstown, to visit his ailing father. He realized that much of the labor history he had read did not explain either what he remembered about growing up in a working-class community or what his father had told him about working in the steel mills.
Many scholars, he notes, have used trends such as rising income and suburban migration as proof that the working class vanished long ago. Yet as he spoke to his father's former co-workers, he encountered a sharply coherent class identity. His subjects were neither radicals nor even especially active unionists, but they spoke in terms of class conflict -- "us versus them" -- that Mr. Bruno recognized from his study of the labor struggles of the 1930s.
When it came to play, they also defined themselves through their work. In 1948, writes Mr. Bruno, Struthers held a "Cradle of Steel Pageant." The program included an anonymous poem, which read: Oh give me a job where the smelters roar, Where the fiery monsters gulp the ore Where the thundering furnaces rock the earth And labor hard to bring the birth Of steel, America's natural cream. ...
Not much steel gets born in Youngstown anymore. Standing outside the center's offices on the morning of the conference, looking down a hill across the quiet city, Mr. Russo pointed to one of the few contemporary buildings in sight: a massive construction of silver squares and red brick, with almost no windows. "Former steelworkers guarding former steelworkers," said Mr. Russo, adding that the prison was one of four in the area, with two more in the works. "From Steel City to a nice place to do time."
Dire straits such as those, said Mr. Lauter, are what give birth to new movements, and he believes that working-class studies has the potential to be one. The increasing disparity between rich and poor even as the economy booms, he said, is forcing scholars across academe to ask themselves which side they are on.
Or, as Mr. Aronowitz said in his address, "historically, intellectuals had to be semi-class traitors to identify with the working class." These days, he argued, more and more academics are realizing that they are working class.
"'Solidarity' is not just the title of an old song," said Mr. Lauter. For scholars in working-class studies, it is a way of looking at themselves and at the world.
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NEW SCHOLARSHIP ON WORKING-CLASS CULTURE While the working class is hardly an unexplored topic in academic literature, few books deal with its American branch. Even fewer examine not only the economics but also the culture of the working class. Following are some titles -- from a variety of disciplines -- that constitute a reading list of recent scholarship in working-class studies.
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holliday, by Angela Y. Davis (Pantheon, 1998). [How to buy this book]
The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, by Michael Denning (Verso Books, 1997). [How to buy this book]
>From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America, by Vicki
L. Ruiz (Oxford University Press, 1999).
[How to buy this book]
Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, by Nan Enstad (Columbia University Press, 1999). [How to buy this book]
The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape, by Don Mitchell (University of Minnesota Press, 1996). [How to buy this book]
River Jordan: African American Urban Life in the Ohio Valley, by Joe William Trotter (University Press of Kentucky, 1998). [How to buy this book]
The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, by David R. Roediger (Verso Books, 1999). [How to buy this book]
Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America, by Steven J. Ross (Princeton University Press, 1998). [How to buy this book]
Yo' Mama's Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America, by Robin D.G. Kelley (Beacon Press, 1997). [How to buy this book]
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