Furthermore, it sets a seemingly essentialist standard - with what you appear to see as small realms of blurred boundaries - that translates badly across movements, treating different movements as essentially different - workers movements are really only for people who are objectively workers and their "supporters" who aren't workers (including the unemployed?), feminist movements are really only for people who are objectively female and their "supporters" who aren't women, race movements are really only for people who are objectively in particular historically oppressed racial groups - and their non-racial "supporters", queer and environmental and .... movements are really only for queers and environmentalists and ... and, most importantly, all are discrete from the others. Such divisions reinforce the ideas promoted by power elites that there's natural scarcity or resources and programs and movements and special interest groups - as they put it - are competing in a zero sum world for inherently constrained access to power and success.
I think this approach misreads the synthetic character of historical movements - what I don't love about revisionist left histories, and it strikes me as just plain bad politics given the synthetic nature of contemporary social problems - which is a huge part of what drew me to O'Connors theorization of shared interests between labor, environmental, feminist and cosmopolitan movements (even though EVERYONE reads out the latter two).
On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 8:04 AM, Marv Gandall <marvgand at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2010-11-03, at 5:38 PM, Alan Rudy wrote:
>
> > so, just to be clear, children from working class parents are excluded
> from
> > the working class until they get a job themselves...? what if they had a
> > job in high school, or have jobs over the summer? does the fact that
> these
> > jobs were prior to college, time-bounded during college, or seemingly
> > unlikely to be embedded in a future career mean that they're insufficient
> to
> > include these young people from the working class?
> >
> > This strikes me as a rather intense form of hyper-materialism that'd
> exclude
> > never- or only-periodically-employed (house)wives of working class men
> from
> > the working class as well as a wide variety of folks who are able to
> survive
> > on sporadic and diverse forms of day labor... not to speak of suggesting
> > that non-traditional students who held jobs in their late teens and into
> > their twenties (and beyond) fall out of the working class if they start
> > full-time schooling.
>
>
> I'm still satisified with the conventional understanding of a worker as
> someone who sells his or her labour power to an employer - recognizing that
> there is some blurring of the boundries in modern economies, where many
> workers in extensively hierarchical public and private corporations both
> supervise and are supervised by other employees, where there is increasingly
> more part-time, casual, and contract employment and lifetime movement
> between workplace and school, and where apprenticeship training for
> industrial and service sector jobs is now conducted at the postsecondary
> level. But there are still means of distinguishing on a case by case basis
> between who is effectively a worker and who is not, and I'm familiar, as you
> may be too, with the criteria which are used.
>
> That having been said, if a full-time student or a housewife, or for that
> matter a self-employed businessman or businesswoman, wants to self-identify
> as a "worker" in support of working class causes and institutions, I would
> not discourage them from doing so. I would be all for it. But we need to
> recognize also that business owners and politicians who are opposed to
> working class causes will sometimes appropriate the identity to promote
> class harmony on the basis that "we all of us work for a living, and are
> equally deserving of what we earn". In the same vein, some habitually
> describe retirees as retired workers, obscuring that they are no longer tied
> to the workplace and, as a consequence, may be apt to oppose, as taxpayers
> and investors, the same improvements in working class standards they
> previously favoured as being in their self-interest as employees. When
> retirees do support working class causes, it is as as allies, no longer as
> workers - either primarily for ideolog!
> ical reasons (as on this list) or because their interest as retirees
> aligns with those of workers in matters of government spending on medicare
> and other social programs. The same may be said of students, farmers, small
> business owners, and others whose primary source of income is not derived
> from employment.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319