[lbo-talk] Working Class & the '60s was Black Panther

[Alan Rudy]

Marv, I think your point is spot on but misses Carrol's concern.
Carrol is arguing that the middle and upper middle income students were
working class kids and that, waged or salaried, folks who work for a living
are in and of the working class.  I've argued this point and found that
embrace of it is quite uneven on this list.
Like you, I think the material conditions and social institutions within
which students reside can generate a certain transience to their commitment
and sustained effectiveness, though I think it is also selling a good number
of folks active between 1960 and 1980 during college under the bus to
suggest that they did not - after college - generate and/or look for
post-graduate political organizations to be part of independent of whether
they were directly related to their places of work.

On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 10:50 AM, Marv Gandall <marvgand at gmail.com> wrote:


>
> On 2010-11-03, at 10:05 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > One of the sillier and misleading comments on the '60s movement is that
> it
> > did not involve or did not "reach" "the working class." This exibits, to
> > begin with, a profound misunderstanding of the mdern working class, a
> > misconception which, unfortunately, too many members of the '60s movement
> > shared.
> >
> > It _was_ a Movemnt of the Working Class, and like _all_ such movements
> (past
> > and future) it involved particular _sectors_ of the class: Blacks, Women,
> > Young White Workers. (The students were working class, and ANY serious
> > working-class movement in an urban society will be made up _mostly_ of
> > students, i.e., young workers, because that is where young workers are to
> be
> > found. Near the end it was beginning to expand to other sectins of the
> > working   classd: older people (Gray Panthrs), welfare -ricipients and
> > social workers, members of the already shrinking industrial working class
> > (Lordstown), and so forth.
>
> It's true that many male and female students on the campuses, where the
> 60's protests were disproproportionately concentrated, came from working
> class families.
>
> What you're overlooking, however, is these students a) were not themselves
> workers, strategically located in factories, offices, mines, and ports with
> the potential power to shut down parts or all of the economy and b) were
> transient, lacking any material incentive to organize enduring institutions
> in their self-interest on campus, defining their self-interest instead as
> securing well-paid employment on graduation.
>
> This is why students, regardless of family background and future employment
> as salary earners, have typically been seen on the left as "peripheral" or
> "allied" to the working class, rather than, as you suggest, an integral part
> of it.
>
> Often what you sniffily dismiss as "silly" and "not worth discussing" turns
> out to be otherwise on closer examination.
>
>
>
>
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>

-- 
*********************************************************
Alan P. Rudy
Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
Central Michigan University
124 Anspach Hall
Mt Pleasant, MI 48858
517-881-6319