Joanna
snit snat wrote:
> In response to Dwayne's question, I thought it worthwhile scanning
> this. I think MacLeod's right on when he talks about "what is to be
> done" since he manages to do it in a way that isn't pie-in-the-sky.
>
> (from Jay MacLeod's _Ain't No Makin' It_, pp. 261-267)
>
> ... Better schools" has been the standard rallying cry for social
> reformers concerned about sustained economic inequality in the United
> States. If only poor children had access to quality education,
> opportunity for individual mobility would be equalized across social
> classes and the gap between rich and poor substantially reduced. But
> the problems with this approach are substantial. First, we have seen,
> schools actually maintain and legitimize social inequality. Second,
> educational reform leaves the underlying structure of economic
> inequality untouched. Still, though no substitute for fundamental
> structural change, improved schooling could help countless individuals
> like the Brothers and Hallway Hangers.
>
> My first recommendation is that the achievement ideology must be
> replaced with ways of motivating students that acknowledge rather than
> deny their social condition. When used to cultivate discipline by
> highlighting the eventual reward of educational attainment, the
> achievement ideology is neither effective at drawing obedience and
> attentiveness out of students nor conducive to the development of a
> positive self-image among working-class pupils. The familiar refrain
> "Behave yourself, study hard, earn good grades, graduate with your
> class, go or college, get a good job, and make a lot of money"
> reinforces the feelings of personal failure and inadequacy that
> working-class students are likely to bear a matter of course. By this
> logic, those who have not made it have only themselves to blame.
> Because it shrouds class, race, and gender barriers to success,
> achievement ideology promulgates a lie, one that some students come to
> recognize as such. For those pupils whose own experiences contradict
> the ideology and in an urban public high school there are bound to be
> many--it is often rejected, and rightly so. Teachers are left with
> nothing to motivate their students and it is no wonder that "acting
> out," aggressive disobedience, and unruliness predominate. School
> officials can round up the offending students and label the "slow;'
> "learning impaired;' "unmotivated;' "troubled;' "high-risk' or
> "emotionally disturbed" and segregate them, but the problem is much
> more deeply rooted.
>
> Teachers do not promote the achievement ideology because they want to
> make working-class students miserable. Nor are they intent on
> maintaining social or, and cohesion in the face of class inequality by
> contributing to the legitimate function of the school. In my
> experience, most teachers are well-intention hard-working men and
> women who are striving to do a difficult job as best they can. They
> parrot the achievement ideology because they think it will motivate
> students, because it probably does not contradict their own
> experiences, and because they believe it. Most middle-class Americans
> do. As Willis writes, "What kind of bourgeoisie is it that does not in
> some way believe its own legitimation. That would be the denial of
> themselves."...
>
> If students like the Hallway Hangers are to be motivated to achieve in
> school must not be at the expense of their self-esteem but in support
> of it. Schools serving low-income neighborhoods must help students
> build positive identities working-class, black and white, young men
> and women. Rather than denying the odds and vow to overcome them
> instead of resigning themselves to the marginalized fate of the
> Hallway Hangers. When their passion and intellects are stimulated by
> indignation, youths are often moved to challenge the heretofore hidden
> social, political, and economic forces that weigh so heavily upon
> their lives. For some, this means an intensely personal drive and
> ambition. Others begin struggling to create a better world. In still
> others, these impulses coexist; such youths work for social,
> political, and economic reconstruction as well as personal
> transformation. For all of them, in contrast to the boys in this
> study, education has recovered its mission: It has become emancipatory.
>
>
> Class Dismissed
>
> The experiences of the Hallway Hangers and Brothers, properly mined,
> highlight failures in economic, social, and educational policy, and
> the preceding pages offer a rough sketch of the book's broad policy
> implications. But this study points an accusing finger at one dominant
> dogma, itself a major obstacle to political change: the persistent
> belief that poverty is caused by the personal vices and cultural
> pathologies of the poor. Distinctively American, this old notion was
> rejuvenated in the 196os by Oscar Lewis and Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
> who argued that a "culture of poverty" characterized by fatalism,
> family instability, and social irresponsibility promoted persistent
> urban poverty. Yet both Lewis and Moynihan contended that this "tangle
> of pathology" was rooted in sustained social immobility and chronic
> unemployment.
>
> Today, the link between economic opportunity and lower-class behavior
> has been completely cut in the popular press and the popular mind.
> Liberals such as Nicholas Lemann, keen to blame the poor for their
> plight, long to give ghettos an injection of bourgeois mores to cure
> the cultural malaise that black migrants allegedly brought up from the
> South, a theory he borrows from Edward Banfield,27 Meanwhile,
> Banfield's arch conservative heirs such as Charles Murray have set
> about convincing the public that welfare programs cause rather than
> contain poverty and that the social safety net should be scrapped
> altogether.28 Egged on by Republican and even Democratic rhetoric,
> more and more Americans bewail the waste of their tax money on "the
> mythical black welfare mother, complete with a prodigious reproductive
> capacity and a galling laziness, accompanied by the uncaring and
> equally lazy black man in her life who will not work, will not marry
> her and will not support his family:'29 The war on poverty has become
> the war on the poor.
>
> This book confirms that structural inequality causes poverty. The
> presumed behavioral and cultural deficiencies of the lower class are
> the consequence rather than the cause of poverty. Culture of poverty
> theorists consistently cite lack of ambition as a barrier to
> lower-class advancement. But the leveled aspirations of the Hallway
> Hangers can be directly traced to the impermeability of the class
> structure. Moreover, the ample ambition of the Brothers has been
> drained away by the tilted playing field under their feet. Over and
> over we discover beneath be- havior cited as evidence of cultural
> pathology a social rationality that makes sense given the economic
> constraints these young men face. Born into the lowest reaches of the
> class structure, the Brothers and Hallway Hangers variously help and
> hinder the inertia of social reproduction. Their individual choices
> matter and make a difference, but the stage is largely set. Even the
> Hallway Hangers, far from authors of their own problems, are victims
> of a limited opportunity structure that strangles their initiative and
> channels them into lifestyles of marginality, and then allows the
> privileged to turn around and condemn them for doing so.
>
> But it is not merely the man driving by in the BMW who blames the
> victim. The Hallway Hangers and Brothers largely blame themselves for
> their plight. Schooled in the rhetoric of equal opportunity, the young
> men themselves confuse the consequences with the causes of poverty.
> Their self-blame is not total; many of the men in this study feel the
> constraining forces of social reproduction. But structural insight
> usually collapses into a feeling of personal responsibility for their
> failure to get ahead. Both the Brothers and Hallway Hangers see
> themselves as basically undeserving.
>
> Class is not in the vocabulary of the Hallway Hangers and Brothers any
> more than it is in the vocabulary of other Americans. And yet class
> determines the grammar and idiom of their existence, if not the
> precise syntax. Yes, Frankie and company chose to follow the example
> of their older brothers and to hang our in doorway #13; chose to smoke
> and sell marijuana and angel dust at age thirteen; chose to deny
> rather than defer to teacher authority; chose to apply themselves to
> stealing rather than studying; and chose to drink and fight and assert
> their masculinity in displays of street aggression. Just as Benjamin
> DeMott imagines, a boy on the other side of town chooses to follow the
> example of his father (an engineer) and develop a science hobby in
> junior high (taking over the basement lounge for a lab ); chooses to
> develop a research focus on robotics under the guidance of his
> brilliant young physics teacher (who already has two Young Scientist
> finalists); chooses at MIT to specialize in space robotics; chooses to
> take the NASA fellowship offer; and so on and on. In the American
> mind, life is about individual choices; social class matters not.31
>
> The Brothers and Hallway Hangers live in a class society committed to
> the denial of class. Their lived experience attests to the power and
> pervasiveness of social class, but in the absence of any organizing
> and overarching ideology, their awareness of class is politically limp
> and inchoate. Where is such an ideology to be found? Democrats and
> Republicans fall over each other to please the mythically
> all-inclusive "middle class:' Apart from conspicuously failing to
> address poverty as an issue, politicians pepper their public speeches
> with references to the "decent;' "responsible;' "hard-working"
> families they are so keen to court. "Symbolically cast out of the
> civic community;' the poor, far from being a viable constituency, have
> become a political football to be kicked around in the debate about
> crime.32 Politicians of all stripes want simply to lock up the likes
> of the Hallway Hangers, as if criminality and economic opportunity
> were not inextricably linked. Once again, social problems are reduced
> to problems of individual morality and pathology. In contemporary
> American politics, there is no critique of the class structure;
> instead, the poor find themselves pushed beyond the political pale.
>
> If the tide and toll of advanced marginality in the United States is
> to be checked, new organizational forms of popular mobilization need
> to be nurtured: grassroots organizations, women's groups, community
> organizing outfits, and coalitions campaigning on issues of health,
> housing, schooling, child care, crime, and local neighborhood
> concerns. Political parties and trade unions alone are ill- suited to
> stop the steady advance of new forms of social inequality.
>
> In many countries, trade unions still carry the cause of workers and
> promote class consciousness. But the American labor movement has been
> crippled by red-baiting, right-to-work laws, racism, corporate power,
> and its own conservatism. In today's post industrial economy, unions
> are consumed by the fight for survival, , and a comprehensive critique
> of the class system is far from their agenda. Still, some unions serve
> their members and instill class solidarity. If it weren't for his
> progressive hotel and restaurant workers' union, Frankie might still
> be strung out on coke. Mike, the other union member, makes far more
> money than the other men in this study. And as much as he rants about
> welfare cheats and raves about oceans of opportunity, Mike quotes with
> approval the literature distributed by his postal union about how "the
> Republicans are fucking us over, selling the working class down the
> river." Alone among the subjects of this study, Mike speaks of the
> "working class." And yet he is also the most reactionary, variously
> characterizing the Hallway Hangers as "fuckin' rejects;' "fuckin'
> trash;' and "a bunch of lazy, loser, fuck-up bums." Mike has forged
> his working-class identity by distancing himself from the "lazy"
> subproletariat. The class solidarity he articulates is de- fined as
> much against those below as against those above. Unfortunately, Mike's
> attitude is symptomatic of a working class that is severely fragmented.
>
> The top tenth of the population owns 86 percent of the nation's
> wealth. But the rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to
> turn those in the bottom nine- tenths against each other. The working
> class is divided. White-collar workers vaunt themselves over manual
> laborers; skilled workers look down on the unskilled; those in
> low-status occupations belittle the unemployed. For the bulk of the
> workforce, there are always groups like the Hallway Hangers to whom
> they can feel superior. And the Hallway Hangers themselves, their peer
> group dissolved, seek solace and superiority in sexism and racism.
> They sense that the odds are stacked against them, but under the sway
> of New Right rhetoric and in the absence of any alternative political
> philosophy, the Hallway Hangers believe that they are victimized as
> white men. Victimized they are, but by a class system so clothed in
> the rhetoric of classlessness that the Hallway Hangers can be
> persuaded to pitch their tents with the powerful in a circle that
> excludes thr Brothers. That is their tragedy, and ours.
>
>
>
> "We're in a fucking stagmire."
>
> --Little Carmine, 'The Sopranos'
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
> .
>