Kelley has quoted some more extracts, but the book title, "The Hidden Injuries of Class" has diverged as a thread to cover wider philosophies, so I have altered the title in this post to one of Sennett and Cobb's themes as I am picking it up.
It incorrectly describes as class differences those between the class conscious working class and the educated working class, who call themselves middle class.
The title is potentially patronising in that it appears to emphasise suffering, but the book is about an honest journey for two writers from the educated intelligentsia, in discovering what they call the "complexity of working class consciousness".
They are not proceeding from marxist or standard left wing categories but through personal narrative. The subjective perception of the considerable differences in the strata of those who sell their labour power may be an important determinant of why people take or do not take up left wing political positions. But Sennett and Cobb go beyond a personal guilt trip. This makes their work critical also of subjective left-wing intellectual responses which just impose simplistic categories on the consciousness of working class and then fall into cynicism when these are not fulfilled.
Sennet and Cobb include themselves in the narrative approach:
"Richard Sennett [born 1943] grew up in the Middle West, attending a military and then public schools. The adult world he knew had passed through the political storms of the 1930's with some of its members wounded, some crushed. He came to believe that a revolution is necessary, but that the workers of America have been too thoroughly integrated into its riches to make the revolution.
Jonathan Cobb [born 1946] grew up in a well-to-do New England family. His politics are not an inheritance, but of his own making. Cobb came of age conscious of his own privileged isolation, and with a conviction of, as Sartre puts it, "a terrible, unseen denial" among manual laborers, an inquity in the lives of people he had never known. He came to believe in a working-class politics coupled with a sense of estrangement from the upper-class environment into which he was born.
We are not replicas of Arnold and Sidney [two left wingers, 30 years older, who open the book comparing the class consciousness of the 1930's] because our points of view up to a few years ago were not the product of any personal involvement in the lives of working people. The more we talked with each other, the more our differences were expressed and our ambivalences explored, the more it seemed we ought to create that involvement.
Since neither of us is adept at practical affairs, and since it would have seemed a presumptuous beginning, we could not repeat Sidney and Arnold's experience of "organizing" workers who were strangers. What we could do is talk. One of us by professional training, both by personal temperament, leaned to intensive and probing conversations as the best way to get a sense of what the distance we have referred to was all about. We hoped to learn what issues now engage a group of American manual laborers and their families that bear on this classic division between culture and the masses of society.
Having defined, perhaps too clearly, our vague purposes at the start of our work, we must explain why this book has bcome more than a report on a series of conversations. As a result of those conversations, we have come to see that both sides in the argument about workers, rebellion, and culture think more simplistically about workers than workers think about themselves. The complexity of working-class consciousness demands of the listener a fresh theory to explain what he is hearing, a theory that, in this book, involves speculation and generalizations far beyond the boundaries of the conversations themselves."
Chris Burford
London