That was Habermas's argument about legitimation crises. When crises threw the legitimacy of the economy and government into question, people responded by seeking to shore up their identities. This led to what people called new or identity social movements on one hand, which could have progressive elements, but to identity formations and movements that sought to find comfort in group identities that were conservatizing, culturally and politically. Shag
.***********
Of course the labor movements of the 19th & 20th centuries were essentially "Identity" movements: this was essentially Thompson's (unmarxist) view of the working class in his classic work on the making of the British working class. The discipline of "working class studies" at the present time continues this hopeless hunt for a "special" working-class culture: which reuires that one reject the legitimacy as working class of about 2/33 or more of tall workers. Marx wanted not an apotheosis of the proletariat but the proletariat's self-abolition. (This is a quick and dirty summary of Tamas.) Marx himself contributed to the myth when he and Engels hypothesized a non-existent "aristocracy of labor" created by the super-profits of Briish imperialism. Charles Post traces this whole sad historyof the myth of labor aristocracy in a recent issue of HM.
Carrol
This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm