Re: [Marxism] RE problems with 'the making of the english working class'

[Josh Saxe <joshsaxe@xxxxxxxxx>]

First, thanks a lot Mark for expanding your brief comments into a
longer post, I appreciated it and will try to respond below.  Thanks
for your response Ilyenkova, clearly you are more versed in this
literature than I but I think we share similar impressions of
Thompson, Gutman and Roedigger - I haven't read "The Many Headed
Hydra" yet - sounds interesting.
First let me take up this statement by Mark:

> Thompson argued that class has to do with how people process their
> EXPERIENCED social realities.  Labeling that as "idealism" rather makes
> me think, with Karl, that I am not a Marxist.

First I don't think Mark's above statement captures exactly what
Thompson was arguing, but I get the impression, as Ilyenkova says,
it's how Thompson has been interpreted, and his successors have gone
even farther towards a focus on and a privileging of the perceptions
of historical subjects, their culture, and consciousness.  In doing so
they have privileged, basically, cultural explanations for history
over material ones.
Ilyenkova quoted from the intro section where T writes:
"The class experience is largely determined by the productive
relations into which men are born - or enter involuntarily.
Class-consciousness is the way these experiences are handled in
cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value systems, ideas and
institutional forms."

This is right on, something Marx or orthodox Marxists would agree
with.  Here clearly Thompson is not arguing class simply has to do
with how people "process" experience.  Class comes out of economic
relationships between people no matter how they process these
relationships.  These relations form a sort of experiential "base."
"Class-consciousness is the way these experiences are handled in
cultural terms ..."
The dichotomy is essential but Thompson himself does not always stick
to it!  He blurs the distinction between class (objective economic
relationships) and class-consciousness in statements like this: "Class
is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end,
this is its only definition."  Clearly this is a departure from
Marxism.  Mark, I think you are taking the statement quoted in this
paragraph as Thompson's view, whereas he states a contradictory and
better view in the above paragraph.  Would you agree the distinction
between experience and consciousness is apt, that class and
class-consciousness cannot be collapsed into one?
Although Thompson's book is great and generally theoretically sound we
should take seriously his incorrect reduction of class as an
historical phenomenon (in some parts of the text) to a segment of
self-identity, perception or consciousness.  When class becomes simply
an attribute of consciousness that can come and go, scholars can argue
(as some of my professors do!) that maybe we should dispense with the
notion of class in social history altogether (at least in given
periods/places)!  In periods when class-consciousness or
class-centered political discourse all but fizzles out (say the
present period, or the 1920's), historians can argue that class has
died!  I think a conflation of class and class-consciousness leads to
this ridiculous conclusion.  The whole debate in history over the
relative importance of race and gender over class treats class as a
potential attribute of consciousness and not the central fact of the
social structure - so if white male workers identify with their
whiteness or maleness over their class it can be said that race and
gender are "more important."  In fact, the interface between the
struggle to survive in a capitalist economy and prevailing culture is
what sometimes leads to intensified identifications with whiteness and
maleness I think.  See, for one example of explicit theorizing of this
idealist culture-privileging history, Herbert Hill - "The Problem of
Race in American Labor History."
My opinion at the moment is that only materialist analysis that takes
as its starting point survival strategies for securing subsistence and
mental health can explain gendered and racialized popular behavior.
"Toward a Unified Theory of Class, Race and Gender" by Karen Brodkin
published in American Ethnologist, 1989 (you can get it on JSTOR) is
very good in this regard, as is "On Gender and Class in US Labor
History" by Johanna Brenner in Monthly Review.  Brenner argues that
working class people pursue survival strategies which sometimes
include a defense of white privilege, imperialism, and masculinity and
at other times seek to break down these barriers in collective
struggle depending on historically specific circumstances.  But the
key point is that whiteness and maleness, for example, cannot be
understood separately from the struggle of the subject to reproduce
himself and his dependents.
I would go farther and say that as Clifford Geertz argues in any
society there exists a reservoir of cultural forms from which
individuals draw, and which they mold and reorient in pursuing
interests, real and perceived.  If a shop steward wants a job as a
union rep she might adopt the linguistic tropes, political attitudes
and condescention towards the rank and file that might increase her
job prospects, for example.  If a white worker perceives he will be
more secure by excluding Mexicans from his workplace, this may
encourage him to adopt racist views.  The process occurs more subtly
of course, and I would guess there is a kind of natural selection of
cultural forms within individual and collective consciousness which is
driven by a pursuit of subsistence and interests.
Karen Brodkin discusses the role of women and the production of gender
in working class communities in the reproduction of labor-power
through housework, child-rearing, and finds in women a special
oppression often related to their economic roles without reducing
their oppression to economics.  Interestingly she redefines "working
class" as communities dependent on wage-labor for survival - this is a
more inclusive construction that could incorporate housewives, small
day-care providers, small vendors, lumpen elements, etc, into
"working-class" by virtue of their essential role in reproducing
labor-power and sustaining labor's unemployed reserve army.
Anyways, those are just some thoughts.
Mark - about academia, its role in society, etc.  I am in my third
quarter of graduate school and have certainly found it confusing.
It's interesting what you say about it not being scientific, certainly
it seems that history as a discipline does not really even have the
pretense of being scientific.  It seems like a lot of posturing goes
on and there is the perception that fighting for correct, non-racist,
non-sexist views among scholars is a kind of activism that makes a
real contribution to the oppressed, something I'm not really convinced
of.  If we convince a few professors not to be racist and sexist I
don't know how that changes the balance of forces in society. What is
the role of revolutionaries in graduate school and academia, where is
the most strategic place for someone seeking to do revolutionary
political work, at a community college, working class school (like the
Cal State system in CA) or at a research university?  What do you and
others think?
Josh

On Sun, 3 Oct 2004 14:18:38 -0400, Mark Lause <mlause@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Two points for Ilyenkova@xxxxxxx:
>
> Isn't comparing Rediker and Linebaugh's, _The many-headed Hydra_ to
> Thompson's _Making of the English Working Class_  a bit like comparing
> apples and oranges?  The latter is going to be "more parochial" because
> its subject is about England rather than the Transatlantic.  There are
> plenty of problems posed by positing a trans-Atlantic working class,
> btw, not the least of which is that matter of how it perceives itself.
>
> Thompson argued that class has to do with how people process their
> EXPERIENCED social realities.  Labeling that as "idealism" rather makes
> me think, with Karl, that I am not a Marxist.
>
>
> ML
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Marxism mailing list
> Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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