Chapter Four
Common Sense and Market Rationality in
Sociological Studies of Class
Copyright: Robert Lanning, 2009
You cannot just sample Marxism.
—Georg Lukács
Restating the themes from the previous chapters, the major emphases have been that class is meaningful only when it coexists with consciousness and struggle with an opposing class, and that consciousness of this complex is directed toward the historically necessary actions of the working class. Sociological analyses of class are contrary to this perspective, where they concentrate on recording discourse, attitudes, and political ideas as if working people were overwhelmingly determined by capitalist relations, and where politically partisan orientations to class are deemed to be intrusions into the everyday lives of workers. The latter claim represents the sociologists’ need for neutrality in research and interpretation of results, their “group myth” as Alvin Gouldner called it. Such neutrality is not universal in sociological studies, as readers can often detect the interest researchers take in their working-class subjects, such as Sennett and Cobb’s concern for the “hidden injuries” of class (1973) and the “worlds of pain” of Lillian Rubin’s research (1976), although such implicit empathy does not extend to the revolutionary potential of the working class, nor is it expected that a thorough comprehension of the tension between fact and value in research should become standard sociological practice (cf. Goldmann 1980, 57–59). The approach to class that ignores or rejects fundamental Marxist criteria of
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class such as surplus labor and surplus value, and the rejection of strategies or programs of action that might bring about a radical consciousness has at its core a concern for conflict attenuation. In such studies, class has become largely a description of social divisions by way of occupational stratification, and a term of culture in which the multifaceted everyday lives of working people are the objects of exploration, each component equal to all others. This orientation has roots in E. P. Thompson’s historical research, which has encouraged the inclusion of varied features and experiences of everyday life in rough equality to one another, although it has demonstrated that class is more than economic relations. While this has been an important development it is nevertheless an approach that has, in recent studies especially, caused class analysis to be distanced from political activity and purpose either in terms of its origins in the economic structure or the struggle Marx saw as necessary to achieve socialism. Ethnographies of working-class children and youth offer an understanding of the means by which the system of stratification is reproduced through geographic and cultural segregation in schooling, the institutional preparation of youth for working class jobs, the effect of limits on mobility and self-esteem, and differences in patterns of childrearing (e.g., Brantlinger 2003; Lareau 2003; Willis 1977). Such work provides important insights, but the focus has been on the problems of stratification and social mobility framed and confined by the largely subjectivist and apolitical criticism of hegemonic relations, the primary focus of which is said to illuminate the experience of being working class. Thus, the empathetic approach evident in some sociological studies may be regarded as a kind of interested neutrality in the presence of their self-imposed disciplinary limitations: interest in what are perceived to be the immediate problems of working people while taking an essentially neutral position on the way in which those problems may be addressed.
Three studies of class will be examined to illustrate their differences from the Marxist perspective discussed in the previous chapters. We will be able to show that the conception of the working class that may be drawn from such studies by workers or
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academics is severely limited with regard to the potential development of class consciousness and political action.
“Them” and “us”
Thomas J. Gorman’s study of working- and middle-class families represents one example of this approach. For Gorman, class is defined by occupation; class membership is divided along lines of blue collar/white collar, level of skill, professional, semi-professional, business, and so on (2000a, 100; 2000b, 699). He employs aspects of E. O. Wright’s work (1978) that distinguished classes by such factors as economic ownership and the amount of control over the physical means of production and the labor power of others. This brings Gorman’s criteria within range of Marx’s basic conception of class, but it is a course he does not pursue. His discussion concerns the perceptions of class in two basic categories: subjective attitudes and experience with institutional arrangements such as education. Gorman’s interview questions use occupational and status divisions to draw out the attitudes of his participants toward members of other classes. He notes that few of his interviewees used the term “class” in response to questions, but that 65 percent of the working-class participants self-identified with their class (a smaller proportion than for his middle-class subjects), a figure that confirmed for Gorman what he considered to be some degree of class consciousness. Their self-identification was based on occupation, the level of education required for particular jobs, physical appearance in terms of occupationally-related apparel (the presence or absence of a suit, for example), and hard, physical work. These rather simplistic identifiers suggest to Gorman that members of the working class understand their “position in the social class structure” and can distinguish it from that of others (2000a, 109). People who live in poverty or wealth or somewhere in the broad space between may understand their position in a stratified society in this sense, but this is not the same as understanding class as an intentional component of the capitalist relations of production, and as an intentional placement of individuals and groups in the context of those means and relations of production. Comparisons of paychecks and the assumption of physical
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labor being honest work were criteria his subjects used (and which Gorman affirmed) to indicate they were working class.
Such formalization of characteristics intended to delineate class lines allowed for the reduction of the differences between working and middle class to “them” and “us.” Cultural capital was significant as well in delineating class boundaries; language, disposition, and behavior were useful for differentiating the middle-and working-class viewpoints among Gorman’s respondents. Opinions about people belonging to a class by those of another class were subjective, often ill-thought remarks using superficial or stereotypical criteria that revealed no critical awareness of the conditions others of a different class might experience and their response to those conditions. The entire exercise seems to be another form of operationalism in which the immediate identification of class lies in the tools used to measure it—in this case appearance and attitude.
Gorman argues that postsecondary education is the core of the dominant ideology in contemporary American society and serves as a distinguishing feature of working- and middle-class life. One “working-class” woman remarks, for example, “I have a niece who’s gone through 8 years of college for an MA in art and now she’s a waitress. I baby-sit for professional people [a child psychologist] which think I have no common sense. They drive me crazy. They’re book smart and life stupid” (Gorman 2000a, 103). A “middle-class” woman counters with the following: “If you’re asking whether I categorize people, I definitely do. If someone doesn’t have a college education, I definitely view them differently, which is bad. I see them as a little bit less sophisticated. I see their views as a little narrower” (2000a, 107). Gorman and his research subjects understand that there are informal barriers, forms of subtle and obvious discouragement and bias, that shape people’s aspirations and achievements. Formal education and the acquisition of credentials is seen as a means of social mobility, an individual resource by which people may overcome the problems posed by an economic system that increasingly requires specialized skills with no guarantee of employment security. The subjective focus in these responses is central to Gorman’s argument.
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While it could serve as the basis for a more substantive analysis, he chooses to offer only simplistic quantification as an objective measure of the subjectivism of his research participants. Quoting Rubin’s Worlds of Pain, Gorman notes that when working-class subjects reflected on school experiences, they “were reminded of ‘all they didn’t learn’ [Rubin 1976, 127], making them feel inadequate and deficient. Working-class respondents in research recall four times as many negative accounts of schooling as compared to the middle class respondents” (Gorman 2000b, 704).
An important absence in Gorman’s discussion is the economic and political purposes that formal education serves. Education as a means of social mobility brings with it the potential for the mobility of interest and, therefore, a different content of consciousness, neither of which require a denigration of the working class. It is instructive in this regard to find interviews with working-class people without the pretense that it is the interviewer’s value neutrality that assures a candid expression of the experience of class divisions. Ike Mazo, a Chicago steelworker interviewed by Studs Terkel (1988, 172), considered education differently: “I would want my children to go to college. But I never shared the idea that you strive and work and struggle so your children can rise above your class, which is the working class”. In other words, higher education itself does not catapult people from their class roots. Sennett and Cobb explored something of this problem in The Hidden Injuries of Class. They suggested that working-class people they interviewed saw education as a “cover term . . . for a whole range of experiences and feelings that may in fact have little to do with formal education.” For them, education was a means of acquiring certification for purposes of social mobility and they felt quite accurately that there was unequal access to such credentials that were not only an indication of skill and knowledge but something of one’s self as well. Sennett and Cobb ask rhetorically on behalf of their interviewees, “Why should one class of human beings get a chance to develop the weapons of self more than another?” (1973, 24, 25). What was at stake for the participants in their study was the loss of potential, the structural discouragement or barriers that inhibit
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the realization of aspirations, whether these were known at the time or not yet discovered.
Unlike Gorman, Ike Mazo does not sense that education produces an irreconcilable dichotomy of “them” and “us.” His awareness of his working-class position is discussed in terms of what he and his co-workers have achieved as well as the constraints on their efforts. There is a strong sense of self-awareness and objective knowledge of what drives the social system. “I went to the Marine Corps at seventeen. . . . I was pro-Vietnam, I was one hundred percent. It was really funny because I came home and my father [also a steelworker] was involved in anti-Vietnam demonstrations. . . . I started readin’ and readin’ in depth . . . the news more than the sportspage. You gradually start to change. Plus there was a great deal of influence out there.” Mazo also understood the workings of the economic system, barring older workers from jobs, removing benefits instead of increasing them, using low wages to drive a wedge between workers. “I’ve heard it many a time. Them people don’t wanna work. There’s jobs out there for six dollars an hour and they won’t take ‘em. When I was in high school, they told you: Go out, work hard, make something of your life. Now they tell you you’re not a good citizen if you’re not willing to accept less. . . . It’s an attack on the living standards of workers” (Terkel 1988, 171, 173).
Gorman affirms the impressionistic view of class expressed by his participants, accepting their reduction of class structure and differences to stereotypical characterizations of appearance and educational levels. We get a sociological description that uncritically views clothing or everyday conversations as formal sociological categories. As a sociology “interested only in what people actually think” (Goldmann 1977a, 32), Gorman’s interviewees indicate how some people view themselves as working or middle class in terms of apparent opportunities and assumptions about resources and actual life opportunities. What we do not get in Gorman’s study is any substantive appreciation of whether his participants have an interest in acquiring more comprehensive and more critical knowledge of the system in which they live, a sense of why class divisions must exist in capitalism and what these
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may mean for raising awareness of the intentionality underlying class formation, differences, and antagonism.
Of course, this is not to suggest that Gorman’s interviewees are not capable of acquiring such knowledge. Rather, the issue is whether Gorman is interested in exploring and explaining class in terms that go beyond the simple categorizing of impressions.
“Common sense” as class resistance
More problematic issues of class and consciousness are raised in Thomas Dunk’s ethnography of working-class men in Thunder Bay, Ontario (1991). Dunk draws his understanding of class from multiple sources. Like Gorman, he is influenced by Wright’s criteria: control over the physical means of production, over the labor power of others, and over investment and accumulation. In addition, Dunk notes Marx’s analysis of social relations between classes generated and sustained by the production and appropriation of surplus value (1991, 5–6). He also remarks on the limits of a purely economic formulation of class, arguing for an approach that considers multiple aspects of culture without being “overly culturalistic.” The latter approach is one in which the relative affluence of sectors of the working class contribute to the cultural convergence of classes, a perspective that sees all as middle class and promotes the ideological claim of classlessness (1991, 31).1
Developing his approach further from Thompson’s work, Dunk argues for the inclusion of everyday experience of working people, such as language and beliefs. This is necessary, he argues, to understand how they live, how they think, and what is important to them. Two aspects of working-class lives evident among Dunk’s research participants are their racist and sexist language and attitudes. His findings and argument in this regard are similar to Paul Willis’s study of English working-class lads, the Hammertown Boys (1977). In the ethnographic method used by Willis and Dunk, all aspects of the lives of people are equally and rather uncritically viewed as representations of “class.” Ethnographic studies rest largely on observations that are confined to the visible and spoken moment. This means that “class” in Dunk’s and Willis’s studies is devoid of any substantive sense
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of the historical structuring of relations, conditions and ex-pectations. The racism and sexism of their working-class subjects is understood as a form of “resistance” to the dominance of the capitalist social order and the cultural hegemony of middle-class and bourgeois values in dress, language, education, and other matters.
For example, Dunk’s “Boys” (actually adult workers) regard Indians in a stereotypical manner. The Boys assume that the vandals who trashed cars in a local dealer’s lot were Aboriginal, because “lots of Indians live around here.” Although they have no evidence, they assume Aboriginal people were also responsible for destroying the baseball diamond on which the Boys play ball (107–8). Dunk relates an incident in which an Aboriginal youth and his grandfather appear at a ball game to watch the youth’s mother play. They stand momentarily beside Dunk and some of the Boys. When the pair moves off to the bleachers “one of the Boys beside [Dunk] took off his baseball cap and rubbed his hair. ‘Just checking to see if it’s all still there’” (83). Stereotypical attitudes toward women and the cultural legitimacy of male dominance were also evident among the Boys, as they were with Willis’s Lads.
Dunk’s work, like Gorman’s and much other sociological and anthropological research of this kind, seems little more than journalistic reportage. What is difficult to accept is an analysis in which the Boys’ attitudes are not seen as problems, not only for women and Aboriginal people who are the objects of the Boys’ regressive attitudes, but for any present or future collective interests of working people. In fact, it is the persistence of such attitudes and the use of degrading language that inhibits the unity and collaboration of individuals and different ethnic groups within the working class. Like Willis, these attitudes are explained as resistance to dominant, middle-class culture, and resistance to the impositions of a social and economic system that has placed the Boys in positions subordinate to others. To explain this, Dunk explores the common sense used by the Boys in his study. He argues that they use common sense to make clear their superior understanding of how the world works in contrast to the inferior thinking of more educated people (133–35). The dichotomy created by separating the working class from the “educated” serves at least two purposes: it sustains the
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simplistic “them” and “us” dichotomy adopted by Gorman, and it avoids (for both authors) the problem of working-class individuals (regardless of education) who are politically aware and active, and who resist in ways that are more problematic for capitalism and, apparently, too risky for some academics. This dichotomy might be shaken by the appearance on the baseball diamond of someone like Ike Mazo or a host of other working-class activists who have overcome, or who never accepted, the negative attitudes of the Boys toward women and visible minorities. Dunk acknowledges that common sense corresponds to anti-intellectualism among his subjects; that is, a rejection of, or at least reluctance to develop, more comprehensive and critical perspectives on their own and others’ experience. Surprisingly, yet consistent with a subjectivist analysis, Dunk defines anti-intellectualism as “a powerful element of working class culture . . . a set of cultural practices and beliefs, and which is formed in opposition to the perceived characteristics of other cultural practices associated with those deemed by society for various reasons to have intellectual skills” (136).
The logic is unavoidable: working-class men employ common sense as their means of understanding the world they live in; common sense rejects comprehensive, historical knowledge presumed to be held by persons who are more educated and outside the working class. Common sense and its equivalent, anti-intellectualism, therefore comprise the content of working-class opposition to the dominance of other ways of thinking or the substance of more developed consciousness. In other words, from Dunk’s point of view, working-class culture requires anti-intellectualism in order to sustain its cultural and intellectual distinction from the middle class. Anti-intellectualism, Dunk argues, “is a way of thinking about the world and what really matters in it, a mode of approaching problems and issues that favors certain kinds of interpretations over others” (136).
The racist and sexist attitudes held by the Boys along with the anti-intellectualism that explains “what really matters” about the world, are expressions of their alienation from the commonalities of interest that could develop from a more just and collaborative relationship with those who are also targets of the dominant social
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forces Dunk claims they are resisting. The methodological and theoretical orientation Dunk employs, both the ethnography and the social-scientific neutrality, requires constructing a “workingclass culture” that the researcher (and reader) seem only able to uncritically affirm. Dunk presents no argument about social structural or institutional barriers to the acquisition of knowledge that might explain why such regressive attitudes can be said to be among “the things [the Boys] most often have to think about [that] are not valued by the dominant culture” (136). He does acknowledge that common sense is “a means by which the status quo is preserved” but affirms the use of common sense as a preferred way of thinking for the working class because it is a “reaction to the unequal way different kinds of knowledge are validated in society” (151).
Although the section of Dunk’s study in which he takes up the issue of common sense is most concerned with the division between manual and mental labor, he uses that division to explain problematic expressions of his subjects that may serve to represent something of the “worlds of pain” subjectivism of Rubin’s studies. Like Gorman, however, his approach does not attempt to address this essential division within capitalism except as one in which some people acquire social status from which they derive self-esteem, and others do not. What is absent is an analysis of the capitalist division of labor and its consequences beyond their immediate and subjective impact. There is a glaring absence of even the standard sociological premise popularized by C. Wright Mills (1959) that people should become sufficiently aware of their world to move out of their “private orbit” in order to understand how their personal troubles relate to broader public issues. Even a liberal historian provides a more critical understanding of anti-intellectualism as an aspect of culture than does Dunk. Richard Hofstadter wrote, “The common strain that binds together the attitude and ideas which I call anti-intellectualism is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life” (1966, 7). Hofstadter’s view is evident when the Boys question Dunk’s need for more comprehensive explanations.
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“When I suggested,” Dunk writes, “that it was possible that someone other than Indians may have been responsible [for the destruction of the ball diamond], they did not understand why I needed to invent a more complex theory about the episode. Indeed, they feel that anyone who will not accept the ‘obvious’ explanation is either emotionally weak and not able to face reality, or lacking in intelligence” (134–35). Given what Dunk had written earlier, this is a narrow expression of “what really matters” in the world? It is not the discoveries made in the research itself but the analysis that does a disservice to the object of research by cutting off a more politically charged perspective on class. Not surprisingly, in order to affirm the working-class culture he observes and to sanctify the subjective, Dunk finds it necessary to reject an important element of Lukács’s work—imputed class consciousness. Essentially, Dunk argues for the legitimacy of his own method and analysis due to its resting on a refusal to consider Lukács’s perspective, for that would violate the imperative of neutral description that avoids confronting the experience of the participants in his study. This methodological and ethical neutrality requires, by its very nature, a denial of any perspective that appears to suggest that a group of people could or should adopt a particular point of view. The rather commonly accepted but erroneous view of Lukács’s position is summarized by Dunk. “Thus, Lukacs is concerned primarily with what the consciousness of the working class ought to be according to Marxist theory, rather than with the actual thoughts and practices of workers. Actual beliefs are either ignored or encapsulated in the catch-all notion of false consciousness” (25). We will explore Marx’s perspective on “the actual thoughts and practices of workers” in the next chapter. But as we have seen in the previous chapter, and will develop further later, Dunk’s view of Lukács reflects either a lack of understanding or a deliberate distortion of his perspective. True, Lukács did not survey or interview even small numbers of workers to obtain their thoughts on even a limited range of issues; and, therefore, he did not offer a descriptive account of their attitudes. True, he was, like Goldmann, critical of what some workers actually thought. He was, however, particularly interested in what working people
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thought and did because it represented reification, the central problem of his research.
Equally problematic is Dunk’s appeal to Gramsci to support his cultural analysis and to legitimize the Boys’ anti-intellectualism. At the beginning of his study, Dunk sees affinities with Gramsci’s “spontaneous philosophy” related to common sense (26), and he returns to this toward the end of the book, suggesting that common sense is nowadays “used in everyday speech to refer to down-to-earth thinking as opposed to theory” (134). He then quotes Gramsci on the “merit” of common sense. But the passages Dunk cites do not wholly represent the meaning Gramsci gave to the concept. Dunk fails to include crucial passages in which Gramsci writes of common sense as fragmentary, incoherent, embryonic, and chaotic, especially as common sense relates to an underdeveloped conception of the world. Furthermore, Gramsci argues that “the philosophy of common sense . . . is the ‘philosophy of non-philosophers’, or in other words the conception of the world which is uncritically absorbed by the various social and cultural environments in which the moral individuality of the average man is developed” (Gramsci 1971, 419–20). Unlike philosophy, Gramsci argued, neither common sense nor religion constitutes an “intellectual order” (1971, 325). He also writes that beyond the notion that “everyone is a philosopher” lies a “second level” of philosophy of “awareness and criticism. That is to say, one proceeds to the question—is it better to ‘think’, without having a critical awareness” or “is it better to work out consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world and thus . . . take an active part in the creation of the history of the world ” (1971, 323).
When Gramsci wrote of the formation of a “conception of the world” he recognized that it could be merely one of conformism with regard to the dominant mode of thinking, with no critical approach on the part of the subject. Gramsci’s preference, of course, was a critical approach in relation to “the most advanced thought in the world,” the only way such a conception could become coherent. The self-critical approach is based, in part, on knowledge of oneself “as a product of the historical process,” and a result of becoming aware of “specific problems posed by reality” (1971, 324).
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Ignoring this more comprehensive and critical discussion of philosophy and common sense while rejecting imputed class consciousness, allows Dunk to cloak his subjects in a protective shield against expectations of a more self-critical appraisal of working-class life and for greater self-activity in the development of knowledge and consciousness. Needless to say, Dunk is one of many academics who are pleased to appeal, even inaccurately, to the radical Gramsci while apparently feeling obligated to remove Gramsci’s writing from its historical context of class struggle and, above all, his commitment and activism as a Communist.2
Cultural divisions are real and effective, but they do not fully explain the intentionality within the structure of capitalist productive and social relations that sustain the system as a whole. The solutions that cultural explanations propose are fundamentally individual. Gorman (2000a), for example, affirms his subjects’ emphasis on postsecondary education as the most important means of social mobility; that is, moving out of the occupational strata that are identified with the working class. Other academics employ the culturalist perspective to lament being “educated out” of the working class as if the acquisition of comprehensive formal education unavoidably results in a devaluation of one’s class origins (Lacey 2000, 41). The “resistance” of Willis’s lads or the sense of victimization and passivity of Dunk’s Boys have no connection to a collective sense of being or responding to the world in which they live. Adoption of such a perspective would be the beginning of an approach to a critical comprehension of class and capitalism.
While Dunk avoids the issue of class consciousness as it has been posed by others examined here, he nevertheless asserts that the Boys are “working class.” Considering the perspective discussed in the previous chapters, the more sustainable view of class is that which consists of a necessary body of knowledge and intentionality, consistent with the capacities Marx insisted distinguished human beings from animals, especially the capacity for critical self-activity. Given a commitment to that perspective, questions must be posed about the viability of the cultural analysis practiced by Dunk. For example, what purpose is served by uncritically
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articulating sexist and racist attitudes of the Boys? What is even more puzzling is why a researcher would create an analysis that is satisfied with what amounts to a loss or refusal of the relative autonomy of his research subjects and their adoption of regressive language, ideas, and values, while justifying such attitudes as if working people had no alternative. At the core of this problem is an assumption that the subjectivities of the Boys are sanctified by the interested neutrality of the researcher. In one of Lukács’s discussions of realism in literature, he makes a point relevant to this social-scientific attempt to heighten the significance, in isolation, of subjectivity: “by exalting man’s subjectivity, at the expense of the objective reality of his environment, man’s subjectivity itself is impoverished” (1963, 24).
Dunk criticizes Lukács for wanting to ascribe the content of working-class consciousness, and for the assertion that there could be such a thing as false consciousness. But Dunk accepts as “resistance” the ill-thought and reactionary views of the participants in his study. Class, in his view, while claiming to be based on occupational position is obviously more than that; for the Boys it is a social position from which consensus regarding the established social order of capitalism is affirmed and reproduced, if only because a critical approach to its actual substance and structure does not enter their consciousness. Naming the Boys as victims of capitalist culture without an adequate critique of their attitudes or of the economic foundations of the culture that develops from capitalism is to affirm that liberal social science is complicit in the process of its social reproduction. Furthermore, this approach affirms that the static description, reportage, and affirmation of regressive attitudes is itself a degradation of the people Dunk studies because it legitimizes their removal from conceptions of class and consciousness that have the potential to provide the means of liberating them and those they demean.
There is no space in Dunk’s discussion in which the Boys might learn a different conception of the world. Dunk validates the anti-intellectualism of his subjects, shielding them from intellectual intrusion by Lukács, as well as Dunk’s favored though misrepresented theorist, Gramsci. Dunk’s picking and choosing
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from the latter implicitly confirms his paternalistic approach to workers. Like Lukács, Gramsci was clear that if the organization of workers was important, it could not be achieved without intellectuals. That cannot be scoffed at as simply another imposition given Gramsci’s well-known advocacy of developing new, organic intellectuals from the working class (Gramsci 1971, 5–16, 334).
As we will see further in the critique of Seccombe and Livingstone’s work below, Dunk’s approach amounts to a refusal to accept the necessity of progressive intellectual development or political engagement. There is no inherent barrier to Dunk’s Boys (as with Willis’s Lads) offering either active or indirect support to a right-wing or neofascist political movement willing to affirm their subjectivist view of the world, just as there is no certainty that they will align with a political organization that challenges their attitudes and opposes those beliefs. In fact, Dunk sets up the Boys for the former political turn when he asserts that “Marxism as a formal political doctrine is a bourgeois intellectual product. As such, it is not, and never will be, popular among people like the Boys, at least not in its academic formal version” (159). While the “academic formal version” is never discussed, this approach gives credence to the Boys’ own view of “what counts as knowledge” and acknowledges the limits to developing “a full and systematic critique of the system.” It serves moreover to affirm that behind the guise of the researcher’s empathy and interest lies a paternalism and condescension toward working people that in turn serves the most convenient of sociological concepts in this context: the self-fulfilling prophecy.
Class and workers’ “market rationale”
Seccombe and Livingstone (2000) introduce their concept of class noting that it was confirmed by listening “closely to Hamilton steelworkers and their spouses who offered us their analysis of the world today” (7). The authors have intentionally limited their analysis of class consciousness to the responses of their research participants, workers at the Stelco plant in Hamilton, Ontario. Here we have another study of class that goes little beyond the affirmation of what people say, rather than a comprehensive and critical
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analysis of their views in relation to a systematic theory. The authors argue that “personal experience ought still to be accorded a general priority in the formation of social consciousness” (2000, 43). Their emphasis on workers’ pragmatic approach to their social circumstances is consistent with Dunk’s; both acquiesce to the reifying conditions of capitalism, an explicit purpose of which is to get beyond the purported limits of orthodox Marxism. Along with Gorman, they are concerned to preserve workers’ subjectivist assessments of their place in capitalism.
Seccombe and Livingstone differ in one respect from the other two authors in that they directly confront Marxism. They argue for a “provisional alternative” to be developed by “progressive social theorists” in order to recover class from the assault by postmodernists, counteract a general decline of interest in sociological analyses of class, and call for a revitalizing of class that is necessary to save it from the “well-worn ruts of Marxist fundamentalism” (2000, 7). In their reworking of Marxism, they argue for “a multilateral conception of social interest; [and] a culturally immersed understanding of group identity” (7). Their attempt to save class from reductionism or “Marxist fundamentalism,” however, has its own reductionist motivations and outcome. A reconstructed theory of group identity, they argue, should include “an episodic account of people’s propensity to engage in collective struggle that relies more upon their sense of the prospects for success, fluctuating as the situation changes, than on the cumulative impact of deprivation and grievance which lays the emotional groundwork for rebellion” (7–8). Indeed, caution is warranted in all tactical decisions and strategic planning and, thankfully, political theory and the history of class struggle are full of examples of well-organized attention to such caution. But here the authors’ solution to the problem of conscious development and agency is more of acquiescence to the conditions of a period of relative decline in trade-union power and what they see as the diminished viability of left-wing political parties. Their solution rests on the claim that workers are instinctively inclined to pragmatic action. The authors do not critique the pragmatic urge, but affirm it as legitimate and sufficient. Their attempt at revitalizing
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or reconstructing the concept of class largely settles on a claim that workers know what they are doing, even if their outlook is contradicted as a consequence of the varied stresses of social life in capitalism, even if the urge to cooperate and compromise with their bosses weakens the cohesion of their “group,” and most of all, even if workers’ political and historical perspective is underdeveloped, fragmented, and a counter influence to an organized political program in opposition to the very effects of capital the authors find problematic.
Seccombe and Livingstone claim that their work is based on the historical-materialist premise that being determines consciousness. They even quote (albeit in a footnote) that famous passage from Marx: “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (Marx 1970, 20–21, qu. in Seccombe and Livingstone 2000, 116, n. 13). Nevertheless, they seek to “amend” this “classical materialist thesis,” an undertaking that might be of importance if the project was intended to elaborate accurately on the original idea and develop it dialectically with regard to changed historical conditions. Their emphasis, rather, is to get beyond a view of class that is purportedly grounded only in productive relations to one that rests on the pluralism and fragmentation of culture. Their commentary on Marxism, as well as their amendments, leads to a reductionist analysis of class and of historical materialism.
Their revision of Marxism centers on an elaboration of three aspects of their view of the assertion that social being determines consciousness. The first concerns how people perceive or understand social phenomena when their social location is equated with their position in the process of production. “People’s locations in a communication field determine the information they routinely receive” (Seccombe and Livingstone 2000, 21). But if we extend that “communication field” to the field of production relations and then to contexts outside the immediate arena of economic production, can it be maintained that one’s position in the production process limits what information one receives? No, the contexts inside
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and outside the relations of production are too complex. They are often open and fluid, thus allowing more than one perspective to be voiced and heard. “Position” and “received information” cannot be equated.
The second aspect of their approach denotes the limitation of options for action by “the routine responsibilities . . . the performance of . . . duties” that are “imposed on” people. “Pragmatic knowledge of this sort is intimately related to viewpoint”; namely, the individual’s position in the relations of production. Thirdly, “People typically seek to justify their actions, to themselves and to others, by reference to the responsibilities of their position.” The overwhelming implication is that people are their social position and that social position’s role as the determinant of consciousness is affirmed by those who populate such positions. Their perspective “assumes the normal operation of self-interest and the propensity to project one’s own interests onto the community-at-large” (21–22). This is an expression of Weber’s view of interests directly governing behavior, noted in chapter 2. They impute a literal and mechanistic interpretation to the Marxist principle of being determining consciousness: being is equated with a spatial location that contains either limiting or liberating conditions depending on its place in the relations of the capitalist economy and production. Presumably, a person working in the depths of a coal mine under oppressive management that restricts efforts to organize a trade union, or to establish the most basic conditions for health and safety, will develop a consciousness as constrained and constraining as the workplace. This would have been a curious notion to the hundreds of class-conscious miners in Cape Breton at the beginning of the twentieth century (noted in chapter 1). On the other hand, by this logic a university professor is higher on the socioeconomic ladder, possesses more autonomy of action on and off the job, and has access to varied and wide-ranging resources. Therefore, the professor should develop a level of consciousness consistent with this social position and as a result will have a better comprehension of the social whole. There is no question that social structural conditions constrain the development of some and provide more freely accessible and varied opportunities for
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others. But, for Seccombe and Livingstone’s assertions to be true, one would have to ignore the facts of global working-class history in which trade union and political action was initiated and developed in the midst of the most oppressive conditions.
Seccombe and Livingstone briefly qualify Marx’s premise that being determines consciousness in what they call a “defensible version” of it: “that the context-specific views of most people who come to occupy similar positions in an organization will tend to converge over time” (23). The ultimate expression of this convergence is articulated later: the pragmatic necessity of cooperation between labor and management. The authors do not develop an analysis of different degrees of power within groups of people or within specific organizational or institutional contexts. Thus, curiously, in apparent contradiction with their interest in a cultural analysis, the authors qualify this convergence. “We do not say all views, but simply those directly related to the institutional context in which people find themselves. The effect of their association on other matters will be more diffuse, their views more likely to remain divergent” (23). How can this analysis be consistent if consciousness is considered broader than consciousness at (or of) the site of production, as the authors imply with their appeal to a broadly based cultural analysis? If this perspective is sustained, one can only conclude that there is a distinct consciousness for the site of production and another for each of the other social sites, such as family and leisure, in which individuals participate. Such analysis leads to the conclusion, for example, that trade-union consciousness on the shop floor is not only distinguished but distanced from some notion of “cultural consciousness” outside the workplace. Such fragmentation is a constraint on development, precisely one of Marx’s criticisms of capitalism from which he fashioned his concept of alienation, and Lukács his concept of reification. Real human beings in concrete circumstances, about whom Seccombe and Livingstone claim they are writing, cannot be treated as isolated from relations pertinent to productive or other contexts, even if those appear to have only indirect and momentary influence. If the authors are to be successful with the inclusion of culture, it is difficult to imagine how such
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an argument can be conducted on the basis of a consciousness determined by a being grounded in social relations only “directly related to the institutional context.” Thus, they argue for both the inclusiveness and separation of such sites as labor, leisure, and other social activities.
This indicates something of the central difficulty of their interpretation: its unabashed relativism. Seccombe and Livingstone suggest that their understanding of “being determines consciousness” “offers a compelling account of many persistent aspects of consciousness” (22). An example they offer concerns the difference between politicians’ campaign promises and how they “change their tune” after being elected, which they consider to be “weak accountability in our electoral form of government and the image-driven nature of contemporary politics.” Their emphasis lies in a “materialist analysis” that explains politicians’ “evolving consciousness as their objective position changes” (23). The views people hold are not static or innate; views do change, but from the account these authors give, the revision of perspective is governed solely by one’s social location. Apparently, people are drawn along the current of scripted responses to whatever they encounter through their social or occupational positions. While this interpretation may not suggest that the precondition for a point of view is an innate characteristic in the individual, it nevertheless suggests—equally problematically—that a point of view, a perspective or basis for interpretation, is inherent in particular social and/or economic positions.
Whether or not Seccombe and Livingstone have consciously adopted aspects of Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, that fragmentary and relativist outlook appears particularly evident in their work. Both affirming and contradicting the significance of totality in social theory, Mannheim’s theory of ideology held that ideas were nothing more than a function of social position (1971, 70). Aware of the philosophical and practical problems of relativism, he renamed his perspective “relationism,” explicitly retaining its connection to pragmatism. Despite the metamorphosis, Lukács regarded it as nothing other than “the night of thorough-going relativism, in which all cats looked grey and
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all perceptions relative” (1980a, 634). Concerning the problem of truth in relation to ideologies, Lukács pointed out Mannheim’s pragmatic assertion, one closely aligned with Seccombe and Livingstone’s evident view that “standpoint provides the biggest chances of an optimum of truth” (1980a, 634; cf. Watnick 1962, 156). Mannheim’s system of positions in relation to knowledge is an apt expression of a functionalist perspective and the problem of reification.
Seccombe and Livingstone’s discussion of what they consider to be Marxist materialism deepens the problem. Rejecting class reductionism, they nevertheless offer a reductionist approach to the absence of knowledge about capitalism that justifies workers’ confusion and false impressions. They insist, correctly, that “being determines consciousness” is only a starting point, that “social being is multi-sided,” and that “people’s interests are multi-lateral and often conflicted.” They qualify their view, however: “As materialists, we insist that these conflicts are objectively given; they do not stem from confusion, misperception or ambivalence” (36). That is (as they proceed to argue), workers may be confused and ambivalent, but this is a product of their place in the system and relations of production. Surely, this is little more than a reduction of human beings to persons thoroughly determined by the economic positions they occupy, whose potential consciousness has yet to be tested because it is deemed unavoidably restricted by economic conditions. The authors’ empathy for workers serves as cover for an outright appeal to subjectivism and relativism. Their revision of the fundamental premise of Marx’s historical materialism is clearly devoid of both the self-active quality in Marx’s work and any mediating elements to be found in society that might facilitate a more comprehensive and critical view of workers’ social and productive contexts.
With this perspective on class consciousness, a crucial question is brought to the fore: is there a place, as Marx argued, for the expansion of consciousness through workers’ relatively autonomous self-activity? Seccombe and Livingstone imply that there is, but in doing so they illustrate the confusion of a Mannheimian description of socioeconomic status with a Marxist discussion of
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class. They offer as an example a Black woman who rises to the level of a supervisor in a factory: “she hikes her income, enhances her corporate authority, and improves her class location” (32). We are not told what that class location is. Has she moved to the top rank of the working class? Is she now lower middle class, however either of these class locations might be defined? Her improvements are to income and occupation, there is no discussion about how this improved position contributes or relates to class consciousness, except for the implied premise that class consciousness is enhanced by the inherent qualities of her new location in the workplace and its differences relative to other positions.
What is discussed here is a change in socioeconomic status; it is clearly not class with the necessary criteria and relationships discussed in chapter 2. To the extent that occupational position contributes to the shaping of a point of view, it would be appropriate to ask how particular individuals understand the construction of class within capitalist society, whether they regard other classes with hostility, and how their improved circumstances relate to the other components outlined by Ollman. With some evident differences, Seccombe and Livingstone’s analysis is similar to Gorman’s in the sense that both studies are shaped by a kind of formal sociological categorization. Gorman is content to accept that workers wear clothing style A and educated others wear clothing style B. Seccombe and Livingstone are satisfied that the being of position C necessarily produces different knowledge and consciousness than does the being of position D. The experience of mobility is important subjectively, but it is important objectively as well, because it indicates that once-rigid boundaries between levels of socioeconomic status are now penetrable. And we would be eager to cite the organized working-class struggles that have been the chief means by which that change has occurred. But the scenario offered by Seccombe and Livingstone suggests little in terms of class consciousness as a comprehension of the social and economic structure as a whole. Above all, the analysis offers no recognition of the need for radical, socialist organization of working people in order to secure their historical and individual achievements. Rather, Seccombe and Livingstone’s example and
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their confirmation of the material benefits of improved social status merely sets the stage for their belief that views relevant to specific positions within the division of labor eventually converge. We will return to this topic later, but here we can emphasize that differences in the relation between class consciousness and position cannot “be referred back to socio-economic causes” (Lukács 1971a, 79), but can only be understood in terms of the objective possibility of developing degrees of consciousness with respect to those positions within the society as a whole. Examining one essentially functionalist perspective that reflects the position of Seccombe and Livingstone, Mészáros makes the point that class consciousness is not a “‘by-product’ of the capitalist economy,” and cannot be understood as a “one-sided mechanical model of determination” (1971, 86).
These sociologists might be interested in a project that Lukács suggested: the production of “a typology of the various strata,” which would likely result in an assessment of the “actual” or “psychological” levels of consciousness among those working within the various strata. But if such a project were conducted we would still be faced, Lukács argues, “with the problem of whether it is actually possible to make the objective possibility of class consciousness into a reality” on the basis of psychological consciousness alone. Lukács’s solution, of course, was “the inner transformation of the proletariat” (Lukács 1971a, 79). The major distinction between his view and that of Seccombe and Livingstone and others, is that one’s social or economic position cannot be fragmented from the totality of relations in society, including the system of production.
Lukács’s perspective attempts to avoid the fragmentation of production into separable “roles.” We have already noted the evident connection between Seccombe and Livingstone’s approach to workers’ supposed pragmatic impulse and Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. It is perhaps helpful to note a passage from Mannheim that Lukács cited in his critique of irrationalism, for it indicates how easily Mannheim could slip into a conservative structural functionalism. Mannheim’s “situation-bound” epistemology affirmed for Lukács a fragmentary and pragmatic outlook:
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“There is no ‘thinking in general’,” Mannheim wrote, “on the contrary a living being of a specific type thinks in a world of a specific type in order to fulfill a specified function in life” (qu. in Lukács 1980a, 634).
It is useful to return to a point from Lenin, discussed in chapter 2, concerning the introduction of class consciousness “from outside the economic struggle.” It is essential that one aspect of the interpretation of this view is that the introduction of “outside perspectives” is outside the immediacy of any position in the system of production. For Lenin, it was crucial to break the internal logic of such relations, to break through the immediate relevance for the worker of his or her contractual relation with the boss, which served to provide food, some form of shelter, and a measure of security.
Seccombe and Livingstone ask their readers to understand the perspective of workers. They do not ask readers to follow as they critically analyze workers’ views, demonstrating how certain views may have been constrained by objective social forces, or how the process of reification has limited the consideration of other options. Rather, they ask their readers and working people in general to accept subjective interests and interpretations as confirmation of the pragmatic orientation. From Seccombe and Livingstone’s viewpoint, pragmatism is the only source of redress for the difficulties workers face. This is the subject of one of their “six friendly amendments to the being-determines-consciousness thesis” (25–26). One aspect of these amendments contradicts theirargument about positions within the production system since it rejects “the assumption that material circumstances dictate specific courses of action” and asserts that it is “a mistake to separate out the material and the ideological dimensions of social structure.” The first point implies that Marx’s perspective is grounded in determinism, while the second actually sustains the false dichotomy between objective and subjective factors, although Seccombe and Livingstone claim to reject this view. The amendment begins with the statement: “Working class people are renowned pragmatists” (25), but this does not imply, they argue, that there is a “universal common sense” among working people, but that people’s
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“calculative rationality” is based in the “culture-specific” norms that produce standardized responses and make alternatives seem infeasible. This is, again, the essence of Weber’s argument concerning interests. Like Weber, these authors do not see that calculative rationality based on existing normative expectations of interaction (economic and otherwise) in which the appearance and instrumentality of rational relations is appropriated for its immediate and superficial value, was precisely evidence of reification.
“Calculative rationality” is equally evident in what the authors say about workers’ erroneous ideas and impressions of others. Rather than explore the manner in which reification dominates or influences people’s consciousness, Seccombe and Livingstone proceed to naturalize reification. “In our view, the big problem with the orthodox Marxist conception of class consciousness is that people’s material interests are typically conflicted in all class, race and gender positions” (28). This is an appeal to a pluralism of social life that merely acknowledges the existence of conflicting ideas, loyalties, and interests among individuals and within social groups. There is no question that this occurs. But, implicitly in support of the pragmatism at the core of their perspective, the authors attempt to further their rationale regarding consciousness. Discussing conservative views on race and affirmative action, they maintain that the reason why working people appropriate such views is not that they “cannot think for themselves” but because the “market rationale” they have adopted “is well-suited to the defense of their interests as they construe them along race, gender and class-sectional lines” (71–72). This is a clear expression of false consciousness as Marx and others understood it, and which we will discuss in the following chapter. But it cannot be named as such, apparently, because it might offend the subjectivities of the interviewees’ “perfectly understandable” “market rationale.” It is, rather, a case of the researchers imputing to workers’ cognitive capacities the lack of relative autonomy in thought and action necessary for organized class action.
The more pragmatic approach, for which working people are said to be renowned, indicates the appropriate course of action
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through their “market rationale.” “Workers have an interest in fighting capital to improve their wages and working conditions; they also have an interest in cooperating with their employers in order to protect their jobs” (28). While the authors acknowledge the problems of capitalist and globalizing pressures on basic industries like steel, their statement is curious given that only fifteen pages into their book, they provide figures that show a 60 percent reduction in the labor force at Stelco in Hamilton between 1980 and 1996. It begs the question: what kind of cooperation was practiced while so many jobs disappeared?
Their perspective raises a major point: that working people in the most oppressive circumstances have managed to organize an oppositional response to their oppressors without assessing their plans in relation to the dominant “market rationale.” While Seccombe and Livingstone argue for a stronger working-class movement in this regard, they very clearly reject a Marxist inspired movement for social change because it would, presumably, undermine the pragmatic cooperation between labor and capital (101).
It is essential to advocate a development of consciousness that contributes decisively to the understanding of the source of such conflicts, whether of direct or indirect influence. This is essential if the dialectical resolution of conflicts is considered necessary, whether that determination is motivated initially by objectively social, or subjective, psychological discovery. This Seccombe and Livingstone cannot do because of their narrow selection of Marxist theory and practice. While they offer affirmation for various courses of action workers may take, their premise is limiting: “reasonable people, acting rationally, normally have several possible ways to interpret their situation and to advance their interests” (28–29). The rational actions of people in this regard are, however, based on the normative expectations of interaction that formed the core of Weber’s instrumental conception of interests. These are important to acknowledge, but in themselves only exhibit workers “renowned” calculative rationality, not a systematic, organized, and sustainable confrontation with social and individual problems. For these authors, workers’ choices are centered
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on cost-benefit analyses: “When people are ambivalent—torn between a conservative risk-aversion response and a grievance-identified course of action—the decisive variable is often how they see the future unfolding” (30). How the future unfolds is, of course, not a matter of speculation or simply based on an empirical tracking of the probabilities of economic fluctuations, public opinion, or life chances.
What social forces mediate the “unfolding” of the future? This is a conundrum that has historically plagued the lives and strategies of working people throughout the period of capitalism. The problem is well described early in Seccombe and Livingstone’s work, in a brief history of the Hilton works at Stelco covering a period when the availability of cheaper steel worldwide and new technology provoked labor action because of its effect on the reduction of the workforce. “Customary family subsistence strategies were disrupted . . . ‘fear of falling’ became palpable ” (14–15). Apprehension among working people occurred not only because of the possibility of layoffs but also because most workers at the time had low levels of education and job-specific skills, conditions not favorable to transfer to other kinds of employment. In this regard, Stelco workers are much like any other group of workers in their concerns about personal and familial security. Under such circumstances, one course of action is obviously to protect whatever income and job security remains. This pragmatic “choice” may have been tactically necessary under the circumstances. However, the authors do not even consider the need to critique this choice in light of the likely scenario awaiting these workers, i.e., continued assaults on their income and job security in the interests of corporate profitability. Nor is there an attempt to point out the problematic relation between this choice and the response of some workers to socioeconomic problems. For example, citing voting patterns, the authors point out that the steelworkers’ “fierce devotion to staving off insecurity is often accompanied by fear and resentment of the poor, who appear from their vantage point, to lead dissolute, disordered lives, depending on the state for handouts. The message of neoliberal parties vowing to cut income taxes while reducing welfare payments often finds a receptive
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audience among the upper layers of the industrial working class.” (16). This comment suggests something of the regressive political content of the workers’ pragmatic choice, but it is not fully articulated or critiqued.
United Steelworkers, Local 1005 (the union at Stelco) has a long history of militant action, including strikes against the employer. But the question that emerges from the social and structural effects of global competition and the consequent changes to lifestyle is to what extent these and other workers consider their present or future dilemma to be a class problem, rather than something “directly related to the institutional context in which people find themselves” (23) or, indeed, the fault of the poor.
Seccombe and Livingstone discuss the relative autonomy of action which their subjects exercise at the point of production; they also discuss the extent of community involvement of many of the steelworkers. But the “market rationale” approach they have taken toward workers’ confusion and troubled states of mind is ultimately paternalistic and condescending. Thus, the authors ask, “how is collective action possible?” (29). Their answer is multifold; it concerns trust, solidarity, anger, the size of the movement, and other matters. But the possibility of collective action seems to be grounded in workers’ perceptions of its probability of success or failure prior to their involvement in such actions. If success seems a real (pragmatic?) probability, workers will throw their energy into collective action. If a movement or issue does not appear to be achievable, then workers will withhold their support. One might say the same about the influence on workers’ choices of different “sizes” of social movements. Unfortunately, this is a failure to acknowledge both the history of class struggles, successful or incomplete, and the forms of organization that have carried out such actions. Recall Gramsci’s comment near the beginning of chapter 2, that the working class weighs situations as “favourable” or not, but it does so as an organized social force and as a “force of will.” In other words, the calculation of the likelihood of success is made as a coherent social group, after people have made the initial choice of forming themselves into a body for collective action. But, in this case, it is as if the researchers operate outside
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the history of working-class organization and action in Canada and elsewhere. It is as if the relative autonomy of action of which the authors write is important to cite as long as it is detached from the actual history of class struggle, and especially the political interests that have guided many of those efforts. In Seccombe and Livingstone’s approach, there is an absence of any mediating element in the relations between social structure and working people.
Beyond the matter of accuracy with regard to Marx’s ideas, the implications of their argument are not only relativist; they are also paternalistic. “They [working people, the dislocated, etc.] don’t need left-wing analysts to tell them there is no invisible hand benevolently guiding the tiller of the world economy” (101). Here the authors’ anti-intellectualism is evident. Might not working people and others need left-wing analysts, especially those with a concrete political strategy in mind, to help organize collective action on the basis of that everyday knowledge? A more comprehensive development of knowledge has already been rejected by these researchers: workers do not need a scholarly treatise on the labor theory of value; that is, they do not, by implication, need to know how capitalism works, how economists, politicians, and academics rationalize the mechanisms of capitalist exploitation and subordination under the guise of an unavoidable cooperation with their corporate masters. Rather, it is sufficient, the authors argue, that workers come to know of this theory simply “as an instinctive feeling of being ‘ripped off’” (78). What shallow interests they impute to working people! It is an argument clearly inconsistent with the views expressed in previous chapters.
Seccombe and Livingstone let their interpretation of Marxism rest on their guarded selection from Marx and Engels’s work without drawing into their analysis some of the voluminous output of those who have explicitly considered and developed Marxism. Marx seems only to serve as a straw man for their pragmatist and relativist orientation, an approach that suggests an affirmation of such recent apologetics as Giddens’s new form of politics (1994) and O’Neill’s civic capitalism (2004). The claims they make about Marxism seem intended to ensure its rejection. There is no attempt to recognize Marxism’s relevance to the areas they
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regard as important. They note several aspects of Marx’s work that have proven to be incomplete or bound to a particular historical moment. They are able to do this by being selective, by ignoring certain aspects of Marx’s work as well as developments of it by intellectuals and activists alike. They regard as “wishful thinking” Marx’s arguments about the unity of the proletariat as a class and the possibility of international solidarity among the working classes of various nations (34). Instead, they offer a fragmented working class engaged in intraclass conflict between “the upper layers of the regularly employed labor force, overwhelmingly white men” and racial and ethnic minorities and women who constitute the marginalized sectors of the working class. Such intraclass divisions are indeed evident, but with apparently no prospects for solidarity in service to a political objective (apparently “wishful thinking”), their argument serves to negate any search for other, more critical actions of workers’ and socialist movements throughout the world.
Seccombe and Livingstone’s strategy is ultimately anti-Marxist, rather than concerned to “amend” and update. Their argument is a slight against socialism and other movements that have historically shaped the relationship between workers and their bosses, and which have also been largely responsible for the improvement of conditions in the lives of working people. Their argument should not be treated as simply objective sociological analysis, but as an active counterpressure against the relatively autonomous development of the politically driven organization of collective interests that will contribute to still viable and growing social movements against capitalism. Their prioritizing of experience diminishes the theoretical principle of the possibility of something existing beyond itself, the consciousness of relations in their totality, which establishes both knowledge of existing relations and a basis upon which the class, the subject, and the existing relations as such, can be dissolved in order to realize a qualitatively different set of relations.
Among other problems of Marxist analyses, according to Seccombe and Livingstone, is “that they [Marxists] typically equated the trade union movement with the working class”;
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another is that class is given priority over other forms of social subordination; and a third is that Marxists ignore social sites outside the point of production (36). This is either narrow scholarship or simple deception. One is struck by the claim that Marxism has not taken seriously the complexity of working-class experience in what might be considered its own class culture or the broader culture. The authors might have referenced even a few of the numerous developments of Marxism in this direction: the wider range of understanding of everyday life in English history by members of the British Communist Party’s Historians Group; the Frankfurt School’s concerns with the unconscious, racism, and anti-Semitism, and the consumer culture of capitalist society; Wilhelm Reich’s concern with sexuality; Agnes Heller’s development (in her Marxist writings) of Marx’s concept of need and her treatise on emotions; and the extraordinary devotion of time and creative energy to literature and literary criticism in communist and left-wing journals worldwide since the mid-nineteenth century. Dialogue about and criticism of these efforts may well be considered, but the point remains that the studies discussed in this chapter conveniently ignore developments in the theory they criticize, and they ignore the history of organized working-class activism. Apparently, these absences occur in the name of academic objectivity, or in the name of a more pragmatic—and safe—approach for the working class to meet their perceived needs. Perhaps the underlying problem for these academics is that many of these sources in the development and propagation of Marxism have been politically motivated by socialist and communist activists and scholars who intentionally developed their analyses with a view to encouraging movements devoted explicitly to socialism.
To summarize, like Dunk’s Boys, the common sense of what is important in the world—the pragmatic choice—gives priority to immediate, simplistic explanations of the social world. The concentration on and legitimation of immediacy as an orientation to thinking and analysis limits the development of class consciousness from both inside and outside the class. Two points of Ollman’s paradigm are illuminated by their absence in workers’ attitudes discussed by the authors under consideration in this
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chapter: “something of the dynamic of capitalism uncovered by Marx . . . [and] the broad outlines of class struggle and where one fits into it” (Ollman 1993, 155).
Finally, it must be concluded that aspects of these studies are grounded in an irrationalist perspective. The appeal to common sense and to market rationality suggest that only a limited knowledge of reality is available; it also implies a refusal to view social problems as solvable. The authors advocate instead a paternalistic assessment of social conditions that requires accommodation. A remark by Lukács is relevant here: “If we take the broad perspective of centuries, it almost seems unbelievable how important thinkers have halted at the threshold of a problem nearly resolved, and indeed have turned round and fled in the opposite direction” (1980a, 100).
NOTES
1. The “myth of classlessness” has been described by Porter (1965) and Lanning (1996) in their studies of class in Canada. A variant of this—the historical perception that America has no classes, yet everyone is “middle class”—has been analyzed by Blumin (1989).
2. This sanitizing of Gramsci is widespread. For example, in Mayo (1999), Golding (1992), and many of the authors in Borg et al. (2002), Gramsci’s activism in and leadership of the Italian Communist Party is virtually absent or treated as marginal. Well before Gramsci became popular among the academic Left, Louis Marks (1957) introduced the first English translation of selections from Gramsci’s work by placing him squarely in the heat of political and theoretical battle as a Communist. Boggs (1976) also retains this connection.