NRIII
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> 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
>
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>
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>
Dr. Nicholas Ruiz III Associate Professor Department of Humanities, Cultural and Studio Arts Daytona Beach College PO Box 2811 Daytona Beach, FL 32120-2811 Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org