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The Politics of Identity: Class, Culture, Social Movements / Stanley Aronowitz

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The Politics of Identity: Class, Culture, Social Movements / Stanley Aronowitz ~ POLITICS OF VH VHVHVH This page intentionally left blank ~ POLITICS OF M(A'1vM M CLASS, CULTURE, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS STANLEY ARONOWITZ ~l Routledge ~ ~ Taylor & Francis Group New York London Published in 1992 by Routledge 711 ThirdAvenue New York, NY 10017 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint ofthe Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 1992 by Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging In Publication Data Aronowitz, Stanley. The politics of identity: class, culture, social movements / Stanley Aronowitz. p. em. Includes index. ISBN 0-415-90436-6 (hard).-ISBN 0-415-90437-4 (pbk.) 1. Social classes-United States. 2. Group identity-United States. 3. Middle classes-United States. 4. Working class-United States. I. Title. HN90.S6A76 1991 305.5'0973-dc20 91-40561 CIP British Library Cataloguing In publication data also available Contents Acknowledgments vii Preface ix Introduction 1 1 The Decline and Rise of Working-Class Identity 10 2 Marx, Braverman, and the Logic of Capital 76 3 On Intellectuals 125 4 Theory and Socialist Strategy 175 5 Working-Class Culture in the Electronic Age 193 6 The White Working-Class and the Transformation of American Politics 210 7 Why Work? 225 8 Postmodernism and Politics 253 Index 273 v This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments Many people have read, edited and otherwise improved these es­ says. Chapter 1 has benefitted from the ideas of Robert Viscusi, Ellen Willis and Juan Flores; chapter 3 owes a debt to Bruce Robbins, who provoked me to write it; chapters 6 and 7 were developed with Bill Difazio, my friend and collaborator. I dedicate this book, with love, to Ellen Willis, my sharpest critic. vii This page intentionally left blank Preface Class, at least as the defining and structuring category in both ideology and social life, has retreated over the past two decades into the background of contemporary American politics. But its agency, I remain persuaded, has not-even if it has been displaced in other identities. Of course, by the term "displacement" I do not mean, for example, that genderand race are simply derived from class oroccupy its space, in which case one clings to the centrality of class. Instead, I want to argue that we share multiple social identities, but these are not always "in evidence" in specific political contexts. What has occurred in the last quarter century is that, on the assumption that the working class shares in the general level of material culture, class has been removed ideologically and politically from the politics of subalternity, at least in late capitalist societies, and has been replaced by new identities or by conceptions according to which the "new" middle classes-hardly oppressed social categories-have emerged as political agents, but in their own behalf. In Chapter 1, "The Decline and Rise of Working-Class Identity," I offer some grounds for holding that this assumption no longer obtains for a substantial fraction of workers. The transformation is often expressed as the change from regulated to "disorganized" capitalism, terms that are linked to the distinction between the Fordist and post­ Fordist eras. Chapter 2, "Marx, Braverman, and the Logic of Capital," first pub­ lished in Insurgent Sociologist (Fall 1978), is a critique ofsome tenden­ cies in the Marxist theory of labor and directly discusses the question of workers' agency in the labor process. Concretely, I reject the propo­ sition, ascribed to Marx and Harry Braverman, that working-class resistance is overwhelmed by the "logic" of capital. Alternatively, I ix x / Preface argue for a conception of relatively autonomous concrete labor that is not (entirely) subsumed under capital. Chapter 3, "On Intellectuals," first appeared in a different form as an essay in Intellectuals, edited by Bruce Robbins (University of Minnesota Press, 1990). It attempts to assess the agency of the "new" middle classes, considered in a historical perspective. This essay con­ siders the work of Antonio Gramsci, Alvin Gouldner, and Georg Kon­ rad and Ivan Szelenyi, all of whom, in various ways, have argued for the pertinence of intellectuals in both revolutionary and stabilized historical conditions. Chapter 4, "Theory and Socialist Strategy," is a consideration of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy from the standpoint of the theory of the subject. It first appeared in Social Text #16. Chapter 5, "Working-Class Culture in the Electronic Age," concerns the relationship betweenworking-class identityand its representation in various media, particularly recent film and television. It first ap­ peared in Cultural Politics in Contemporary America, edited by Ian Angus and Sut Jhally (Routledge, 1989). I take my thesis of displace­ ment to describe how workers' culture has been treated in the media. Chapter 6, "The White Working Class and the Transformation of American Politics," discusses the significance of the recent decline of working-class economic and political power for American politics. It appeared in Fall 1991 in a collection published in French by the journal Autrement. I discuss the crucial roles race and gender, linked to social movements, have played in the rightward tendencies ofwhite working-class males. Chapter 7, "Why Work?", first appeared in Social Text #12 (1986). It revives a traditional issue in the labor movement, namely, whether, in the light of the historical transformations in the technical basis of labor, work can remain a defining human activity. Chapter 8, "Postmodernism and Politics," addresses the political significance ofthe large-scale estrangementofunderlying populations in Western countries from traditional politics. It appeared first in Social Text #18. Introduction The Politics ofIdentity Ever since 1981, when the Air Traffic Controllers suffered their historic, but humiliating defeat at the hands of the Reagan Adminis­ tration, the conventional wisdom has asserted that as an instrument of labor's economic strategy, the strike weapon is all but dead. Yet, after the demise of Eastern Airlines after a long strike by an unprece­ dented coalition of unions, and the victory of the Allied Printing Trades in the New York Daily News strike less than a decade after the long slide began in the fortunes of U.S. unions, reports of the death of the strike and, with it, the labor movement are, to say the least, premature. In both of these prolonged struggles organized labor had learned well the fairly simple lesson: without solidarity among work­ ers within a single company or industry and with the general labor movement, victories against large, well-financed corporations are nearly impossible. The second lesson is that it is no longer enough, as in earlier strikes, for workers to withhold their labor; "replacement workers," the dress­ ed-up name for scabs, can and often will be legally employed and easily recruited by management. What management cannot do is insure that other working people, newsstand owners, and travel agents will buy their products. And, these strikes show that corpora­ tions cannot expect, automatically, to control public opinion, even when the press and television networks are entirely subservient to them. As usual, the media echoed management's claim that union successes are due, exclusively, to the use of violence. In order to get the message across, workers and their unions are obliged to use many approaches, including reaching retail and wholesale outlets, bill­ boards, giving talks to union and civic organizations as well as the major commercial media. In short, both the News and Eastern Airline strikers saw themselves as an embattled "movement" rather than one 1 2/Introduction of the self-interested contestants in traditional conflicts. Moreover, the strikers understood their strike as part oflabor's fight for survival. The News unions made some errors. Most notably, they did not begin their boycott early enough but relied, almost exclusively at the beginning of negotiations, on collective bargaining even when it was apparent to everyone that the paper's owners, the Tribune Co., were not really interested in a settlement unless the unions completely caved in to the demand that management be granted the right to make all decisions at the workplace. Yet, when they finally decided to pullout their most potent weapons-reaching out for labor and public support and limiting, through direct action, management's ability to distribute the newspaper-the unions grabbed victory from probable defeat. Unlike the unions during the Controllers strike, they were not detained by threats of legal reprisals and decided to conduct their struggle by any means necessary to win. Within weeks after the strikers effectively reduced the News' circulation, the largest of the paper's advertisers pulled out, even the notorious anti-union depart­ ment store Alexander's. By the endofthe strike only 27 of600 advertis­ ers remained loyal to the paper's management. Just as the unions prepared for the next stage, a direct attack on the parent company by means of what has become known as a corporate campaign where stockholders are contacted to pressure management and lenders are urged to withhold their capital, the Tribune Co. declared that, unless a buyer was found for the paper which, by the end of 1990 had lost more than halfofits 1 million daily circulation and millions ofdollars, it was shutting down by March 15. At the last minute, a buyer, British publisher Robert Maxwell, came forward-but not before he obtained substantial concessions from the unions, most importantly, the right to reduce the labor force by one-third.
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