A european form of capitalism would be nice, but getting there would not require a social science that focuses on the ways "trailer trash" are responsible for shitty jobs. Nor would it help us to understand why Republicans support George Bush and the war. Aside from which, there is a ton of social science already focused on the culture of poverty thesis and it guided social policy throughout the 80s. ` Although I suspect you are joking, I'm not sure what analytic accuracy there is to claiming that Mike's family or anyone like him is among the lumpenproletariat. That seems like a truly bizarre def. of lumpen.
Off the top of my head, the classics in the field of poverty/working class research, take a very evenhanded approach -- none of them avert their gaze from pathologies. Examples would include Code of the Streets, Streetwise, All Our Kin, Learning to Labor, Ain't No Makin' It, Potter's Addition , When Work Disappears, Worlds of Pain, Hidden Injuries of Class.
Although I'm sure people aren't reading this anymore, David Harvey (_Potter's Addition_) makes some excellent points. I thougth we all knew them, but I guess I was wrong:
"One final irony typifies the poverty debate of the last few years. Even as social scientists deny class and the poor, and study poverty from what appears to be a safe distance, they are continuously being schooled in the possibility of their own academic superfluity .<...>
The same process that produced the present age of diminished expectations has resurrected the necessity that all Americans be reschooled in the economic fear that drove earlier generations. Having been reintroduced to the ever-present threat of their own fall into superfluity, many Americans cloak their fear in a newfound moralizing that has transformed past compassion for the poor into a hatred for those who have already fallen. This fear, now turned to hatred, is often at the center of what Michael Lewis (1978) calls the "calculus of estrangement." He elegantly sets forth what that calculus is, and how we have been schooled in it: <...> In one sense, this calculus of estrangement is nothing new. The cycle by which liberal, egalitarian reform gives way to radical schism and ends in the estrangement and cultural reaction of the middle strata is periodically played out in class-based societies that are ruled by a democratic ethos. In its most recent incarnation, begun in the late sixties and con- tinuing to this day, it is the vehicle by which the fear and sub-rosa ressentiment of the nonpoor express themselves in a virulent form of scapegoating. Even the social sciences have not been immune to this res sentiment and scapegoating. As we have already noted, it surfaced in the area of poverty research itself during the 1980s, when reactionary dogmas were pawned off as scientific certainties and were used to guide national policy .
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I do not deny , of course, that pathology exists among the poor. I have noted many individual cases of pathology in this work. I have also documented instances in which early pathologies were overcome and converted into strengths in later life-for example, the women of Potter Addition. If in their youth they are often uncertain, weak, or rebellious hell-raisers, in their mature years they are often something quite different. From among those who survive those early trials of daughter/ mother-siblingship, there often emerges an emotionally solid, verbally articulate, and clear-headed adult. By the time these women become mother/grandmothers, they possess an aggressiveness and intelligence that makes them much more than Lucy Parsons's (1969, pp. 167-73) "slave's slave." If they are battered by the hidden injuries of class, or carry with them an ineradicable guilt for having failed their parents in adolescence, or are now living down a promiscuous past, or still seem to have learned little when it comes to men, mothers, or children, they can also be hard, uncompromising, and compassionate champions of their grandchildren and passionate defenders of their community .This was underscored again and again on my return to Potter Addition.
Contemporary commentators who insist on treating poverty and its subculture as merely pathological seem to have missed the fact that such people live shut off from us, ready to make their communities better places to live. They also miss the fact that such women and their male counterparts, if given the resources and the chance to act, can be a valuable resource for social renewal. They are a latent cadre that could be used to renew poor communities-if renewal along democratic lines is really what we want. Indeed, if the untapped capacity of the Martins, the Stoners, and the Walshes of our world to move heaven and earth for the betterment of themselves and their grandchildren is ignored, then one has little choice but to portray poor communities as Nicholas Lemann (1986) has done: as decapitated bodies whose intellect, morality , and will have fled to the suburbs.
On the basis of my experiences in Potter Addition, I must reject this type of collective stereotyping of the poor and their communities. In countering imageries such as those raised by Lemann and others, I would merely refer the reader to Mary Stoner and Freida Walsh, and the strong, aggressive mastery that each exercised over her crumbling environment. I would invite the reader to review Sue Martin's and Mary Graham's narratives once again, and have him or her note that lying beneath the grammatical flaws of everyday speech there is a depth of intelligence and degree of verbal skills that has taken flight among all but the very best of our all-too-conventionaL all-too-bourgeois university students.
It seems safe to predict that if the resources and political opportunities that opened up twenty years ago were to emerge once again, these women and men could be organized into such effective and mean-tempered advocates that we might well need a dozen or more Green Amendments to quell their demands for social change and social justice. Were this to happen again, then the prevailing myth of the 1970s turned big lie in the 1980s could be laid to rest. That lie, now turned litany, is that the antipoverty programs were well funded, were allowed to operate for a sufficient length of time, and were free enough from parochial restraints to prove their interventionist efficacy , and that when they failed, they fell of their own weight and illogic. If we wish to test that lie, along with our resolve to create a society of equals, I wager that the poor we have encountered in these pages would be more than willing to call our hand.
There is yet another problem with explanations that equate pathology with the subcultural practices of the poor. They overlook the fact that the alleged and real pathologies of poor persons are more often than not our pathologies as well. The pathologies of the poor may seem larger and more bizarre than ours. It may even be true that the frequency of deviance is greater among the poor than among other classes. But this instance does not warrant the conclusion that the poor as a group have a monopoly on vice and pathology and that their poverty springs from that pathology. Whether the "sick person" drifts into lower-class communities because of a "disease" contracted elsewhere in the class structure or merely succumbs to it because of a life of grinding poverty, the pathology and its symptoms reflect not just the class niche, but the contradictions of the larger social order of which that niche is a part.
When properly understood, the pathology of the poor tells us not only of the impact of a life of need upon a person, it tells us something about the sicknesses that haunt us all. Insofar as the subculture of poverty incorporates into itself the hegemonic norms of the larger culture, adapting them to the particular needs of its niche, it also assimilates the contradictions of the hegemonic classes. The pathologies we so readily recognize among the poor are often little more than our own sicknesses, distorted and rendered garish by the stresses and strains of material need and radical uncertainty .
I have tried to communicate this viewpoint throughout. The distortion of social relations and the pettiness induced by kinship reciprocity prac- ticed under the conditions of extreme material need have their counterparts in other classes who also have "deadbeat" kin who cannot be shaken for love nor money. The poignant struggle of mother against daughter, the internal contradictions of male socialization, the exclusion of the son-in-law, the jealousy of affines, the shrewishness of mothers destroying their daughters, the destruction of sons and daughters at the hands of those who love them, daughters spending the rest of their lives trying to repay and appease their mothers for youthful transgressions, and the heroism and perseverance of people building a life from practically nothing should strike a resonant chord somewhere in each of our own genealogies.
There is in the stories of the Norris, Graham, and Stoner clans a family resemblance to the strength and weaknesses of those heartland bourgeoisies whom Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, and sinclair Lewis so ambivalently inscribed in their poetry and fiction. There is in the lives of Potter Additionites that same proprietary darkness and gothic under-current of panicky normalcy that sherwood Anderson in his Winesberg Ohio called "grotesqueries." There is the same cruel acting out of morality plays in Potter Addition that one finds in Grand Prairie-plays that glory in perversity , even as they puritanically denounce it-scenarios that reaffirm eternal verities that no longer count. These morality plays, imbued with a complex spirit of loving intimacy and unwarranted cruelty, draw their subject matter and actors from the community itself.
They have as their centerpieces, whether it be in Potter Addition or Grand Prairie, sotten aunts, closeted uncles, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, adulterous mates, bastard offspring, and families ruined by scandal and drink.
Each class has its own chiaroscuro of light and dark, which it combines into its own singular and explosive unity , as it taps the common pool of virtue and vice that binds humans together. Because they are part of the same dynamic social whole, each class shares its pathologies with every other class. And even as it shares its own special sicknesses with other classes, each hones its own special pathology so as to make it vengefully appropriate to its niche. Each class subculture is, hence, that fusion of cultural strengths and weaknesses that give it its unique style and identity .Once this is realized, the entire neo-Malthusian, moralizing enter- prise can be scrapped and replaced with a more correct axiom: The structure and culture of poverty , as riddled with pathology as it may or may not be, cannot be reduced to pathology . It is, instead, an assemblage of well-honed mechanisms that enable the poor to survive a class niche that would otherwise destroy them. Within the admitted, but insignificant husks of individual pathologies there is an irreducible body of adaptive cultural content that many poor persons embrace and practice. Before we ask them to jettison what they have so painstakingly forged, we might well reexamine their culture and ours and ask if we do them or ourselves any favor by demanding that they emulate us."
_Potter Addition: Poverty, Family, and Kinship in a Heartland community_ David L. Harvey
-- Perhaps the most cited classic in the field is Carol Stack's _All Our Kin_. In that book, Stack describes a culture of solidarity born of the need to band together to survive. You are expected, like the people in Africa sending money home to their families, to help one another out. If you happen to get a raise or make some money in the lottery or Uncle Charley leaves you his apartment, you will find your relatives and friends at your door, expecting help, loans, a sofa to crash on.
As such, anyone who wants to get out of the ghetto can only do so by renouncing the culture, refusing to share. After all, if they share, they will never save up for a downpayment. If they look after Aunt Haddie who's gone blind froma stroke, they won't have the spare time to get through night school.
Eli Anderson's _Streetwise_ and _Code of the Streets_ deals marvelously with the majority of "decent folk" in Philly's poor neighborhoods, but the author never lets you avert your eyes from the barbarous lives of the "street people" who follow the "code of the street." Plenty of structural analysis, plenty of cold, hard facts about young men who pretend to woo girls, fuck them and dump them, of young men who come looking for handout on "Mother's Day" (welfare check day), and young girls who spend lots of money on fancy outfits for the 16 month old, parading them in the street every Sunday, as if the baby was a status object, who then drop the kid on grandma's doorstep when it turn 3 and is no longer a cute li'l baby.