Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Why should looking at the world from the underside of an
> automobile make you wiser than someone who reads, writes, and talks
> for a living?
That auestion is far less interesting than the question of _why_ someone should _believe_ that to be the case? Why assume _either_ the professor or the mechanic is more or less "wise" than the other?
The assumption itself is an expression of identity politics! 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."
Carrol
Carrol Cox wrote (Thu, 15 May 2008 14:25:06 -0500):
>
> Robert Wrubel wrote: "I can't let this statement go unnoticed! And
> while there is a shocking contrarian truth to it, like many of your
> comments, Carrol, I wonder what we use in place of "working class" when
> we are thinking about how to produce radical social change?"
>
> We categorize for different reasons in different contexts, and our
> categories vary accordingly. The context here is when, by knowing the
> category, we also no the individual entities that make up the category.
> If you tell me, "P is a bumblebee," I know a great deal about P without
> examining it. If you tell me "P is a worker" or "P is a grad student" or
> "P is an evangelical" or even "P is a woman" or "P is a Latino" you
> haven't really told me very much, concretely, about this particular P.
> This was the context of all my posts on this topic. You really know
> nothing about a particular grad student just by knowing she is a grad
> student - you don't even possess a statistical probability that she will
> exhibit this or that feature.
>
> And of course working class is a crucial category in _talking about_ or
> theorizing social change, because in doing that we are not talking about
> individuals or claiming to know something about any individual or group
> of individuals. We are not talking about "Worker" as "Identity." Rather,
> we are taling about the abstract social relations which constitute
> capitalism as capitalism and not something else. And in periods of
> working-class militancy (or when, as the old terminology goes, the class
> becomes a class for itself) to say P is working class STILL doesn't tell
> us much about P as an individual, or whether she is a teacher, a welfare
> client, a systems analyst, etc - rather, it tells us she is potentially
> one of those in self-conscious motion and that she will (probably)
> understand an agitational slogan advanced in class terms.
>
> An an observation on list practice. Too often on this list when posters
> refer to some category (grad students, leftists, academics,
> evangelicals, mullahs, what have you) the purpose is denigration.
>
> Carrol