shag wrote:
>
> i don't know why, but i'm flashing back to when a feminist mentor told me
> that, back in the 60s and 70s, it was common for academics to point to
> their roots in the blue collar / manual laboring class as a way to
> authorize their position or gives themselves the patina of a kind of street
> cred. apparently, there were "more working class than thou" wars going on
> altogether too frequently. i thought it was just hearsay, but then i read a
> couple of accounts of the 60s last summer and apparently there was enough
> of it going on -- and a lot of shaming people from coming from backgrounds
> that were "too" privileged for them to be able to contribue in any
> meaningful way - or so it was claimed.
>
> which seems to get it totally bassackwards -- the kind of i.d. politics
> carrol was bitching about not too long ago -- i think.
The relevannt paragraph was as follows:
Unfortunately, for 150 years working-class politics have not been class politics but idenitity politics, the assumption being that class gives identity, and that "working class"is an identity, a classification that gives knowledge of the items in that classification as individual items. This is true of the class "bumblebee," as I pointed out recently, but it is not true of the category/class, "working class."
===
Let me emphasize this. There has _nenver_, in the histsory of capitalism, been a serious class politics. It has _always_ beenn the politics of an identity group, i.e. some sector within the working class which at a particular time was in motion would be defined as THE working class, and its "life style" would be defined as the only "real" working-class lifestyle. (This incidentally led to the "New Working Class" nonsense of the '60s. Unable to escape identity politics, those theorists just tried to invent a new identity to call working class.
Working class is a relation. It is impossible to predict which 'sectors' of the working class will be politically active in the next great upsurge. The student movement of the '60s was of course as much a working-class movement as the CIO drive of the '30s or the IWW or the Russian Revolution.
Carrol
(This is probably full of typos since I didn't paste into a word file with bold face & large characters to write it.