Ok, but what exactly is 'BS'? Is BS the opposite of 'common sense', with all the problematic things that this signifies? (BTW. 'hackers' also pretty much define themselves as 'no-BS' types, in contrast to 'pointy haired bosses' (a Dilbert reference) and 'lusers')
The title of this book - The Dignity of Working Men - says a lot about how the blue collar working class has often been seen, and is so often portrayed in fiction (see for instance the 'good 'ol working class' films of the like of Brassed Off, Full Monty and Billy Elliot). As Lamont points out, this dignity is linked to the 'ability' (in quote because ability makes it sound like an individual, innatte attribute, which it is not) to support a family - i.e. survival. This idea of dignity slots in perfectly to Massimo de Angelis' discussion of dignity in his piece on the Zapatistas and internationalism: http://www.acephale.org/encuentro/globpt32.html
"What is dignity in contemporary society? How is it expressed in a society built around the capitalist principle of subordination of every sensuous aspect of life (love, hate, pleasure, pain ...) into a thing, into a means to an end?[20] Comandante Tacho recounts what dignity was for the government negotiators who told the Zapatistas delegation:
... that they are studying what dignity means, that they are consulting and making studies on dignity. That what they understood was that dignity is service to others. And they asked us to tell them what we understand by dignity. We told them to continue with their research. It makes us laugh and we laughed in front of them. They asked us why and we told them that they have big research centres and big studies in schools of a high standard and that it would be a shame if they do not accept that. We told them that if we sign the peace, then we will tell them at the end what dignity means for us. (La Jornada 10/6/1995)
Interestingly enough, the Mexican government position regarding the meaning of "dignity" is very similar to the one adopted by the authors of the scientific rationalization of racism, the Bell Curve:
In economic terms and barring a profound change in direction for our society, many people will be unable to perform that function so basic to human dignity: putting more into the world than they take out (Murray & Herrnstein 1994).
Left to this unqualified definition, not only wage labour, but even slavery, child labour, prison labour, and all situations in which people are forced into "putting more into the world than they take out", would be an expression of human dignity. Marx's Das Kapital would become an treatise on how workers become dignified in being exploited!
Power's definition of dignity, therefore, is a definition which accepts as dignified a condition of exploitation and oppression. In its eagerness to turn any social relation into a measurable and quantifiable relation, power defines dignity in abstraction from self-determination. In a society based on exchange values, dignity (self-worthiness, recognition of one's own value) can be acquired only through access to value (access to illusionary wealth).Such a conception would, of course, help the legitimation and the acceptance of such oppression and exploitation. Lacking this, lacking money, dignity is acquired through participation and identification in illusionary community (football fan clubs, the state, etc.), as well as adaptation to its parameters and institutions.
This dignity, this sense of self-worthiness and recognition of one's worth by others which depends on the acceptance of one's role, imposed by the requirements of capitalist accumulation, I call "thing-like dignity", that is, dignity acquired through one's subordination to the work and market machine. I believe this is far from being human dignity. Thing-like dignity requires an individual to demonstrate being somebody by means of external evidences such as money, status, job, or power. Lacking any of this external evidence, one is invisible, and therefore cannot be a dignified subject . On the contrary, human dignity is not acquired through access to external evidence; it does not require dead things to rule life for human beings. Human dignity is based on the treatment of things as human products , and not as human rulers. Thus, one is somebody simply to the extent he or she is involved in the human endeavour, in actively claiming one's place within the human community, in reclaiming direct links with other human beings, links that have been cut loose by the rule of money. Thus, human dignity is to by-pass the mediation of money, capital, market and competition and assert direct reciprocity among human beings. If this is dignity, and if globalization has necessarily led to link human beings in competition with each other in the four corners of the world, then the fight for dignity cannot be restricted to national frontiers. In the words of Marcos:
[D]ignity ... is that homeland without nationality, that rainbow that is also a bridge, that murmur of the heart no matter what blood lives in it, that rebel irreverence that mocks frontiers, customs officials and wars. (DoR1)
Dignity is a bridge; it is to be for humanity.
In a society such as ours, in which one continuously faces the rule of capital, human dignity, the establishment of direct human relations noT mediated by things, often implies struggle. It is here that the atomized subjects get together, and recognise each other as "somebody". The moment of struggle, therefore, is first of all a moment of human recognition and positive identification. Secondly, the global character of the rule of capital necessarily extends this process of human recognition and identification to the global level, across the global wage hierarchy.[21]"
Peter P.S. quoting Massimo's footnote # 20:
Within the constraints of capitalist accumulation, a citizen can express her self-value to the extent she negates herself, she accepts abuses without screaming on the job or while talking to the dole officers, she does her job professionally or accepts her role as job-searcher.
-- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844 k*256^2+2083 OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B