[lbo-talk] Unemployed Pride

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Thu Dec 2 06:24:00 PST 2004


Tom Walker timework at telus.net, Wed Dec 1 23:13:05 PST 2004:
>You know what the problem really is, Kelley? Just about everybody
>who's unemployed wants to just be an unemployment tourist. Very few
>want to embrace it as a calling, especially very few with the
>education, eloquence and political motivation to really make a
>career out of unemployment. Is it because being unemployed is hard
>work -- harder work than having a so-called job?

There was a brief period of time (the post-World War 2 economic boom) when half the working class aspired to -- and some of them did get to -- make a career out of unemployment. However, unemployment was disguised as marriage, and the unemployed were called housewives, so it did not serve to counter the ruling-class imperative to stigmatize the unemployed. Men generally did not recognize working-class marriage as a form of solidarity and resistance: solidarity of sharing resources and resistance of withdrawing as much labor as possible from the market. Few (if any) working-class husbands said to their wives, "I'll work for wages, so you can go out and do political organizing." Rather, their prevailing attitude was, "I work all day, so you take care of kids and serve me when I come home." Sexism, as well as the dominant ideology's refusal to give any public recognition to those who are not "economically active," made marriage tougher for women than men, so more and more women got fed up, preferring wage work to unemployment. The triumph of liberal feminism (aka the equal right to exploitation and self-exploitation) rather than working-class feminism helped to stigmatize the unemployed even more than before. Not just men but also women are scorned today if they fail to engage in wage labor. -- Yoshie

* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * "Proud of Britain": <http://www.proudofbritain.net/ > and <http://www.proud-of-britain.org.uk/>



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