Citation

Contents

Author

context:

 

class theory has been deeply influenced by what is known as the “cultural turn.” the idea that social practice cannot be understood outside of the ideological and cultural frames that actors carry with them—their subjective understandings of their place in the world

some central arguments for cultural mediation are undoubtedly correct, and potentially devastating to an economic theory of class. Any response to the cultural turn, then, has to take account of these worries and show that, whatever arguments there are in favor of materialism, they have to acknowledge the ubiquity of culture.

Thesis:

 

In the classical account, the class structure is taken to generate class consciousness, which in turn induces workers to build class organizations. I have tried to argue that, in fact, class consciousness is the consequence of class organization. Since the latter is an arduous process, highly vulnerable to disruption and precarious at its foundation, so is the formation of class identity.

Methodology

 

focus on workplace organizing experience to show the actual difficulties of organizing, and how it should not be taken as a given.

Key Terms

 

class consciousness

Criticisms and Questions

 

Notes:

Challenged to Materialism:

-class action does NOT take place outside of meaning and values like any other social practice

-once a class structure does not generate a particular set of subjective identities — of belonging to a certain class and of wishing to pursue a political agenda prioritizing that identity.

Sewell – for structures to become causally efficacious, they have to be interpreted by agents

-but two different questions a)social structures must be interpreted to take effect b) but are there some structures that radically reduce, or even extinguish, the contingency in meaning construction ie. class

-class is different than other social roles because it is tied economic viability ie they set the rules for what actors have to do to reproduce themselves. they force proletarians and bourgeois to accept their class positions. contingent culture accepted as long as it doesn’t get in the way of structure.

– challenge for  materialist theory: how how possible for workers’ class location to converge around a strategy of collective resistance, but also a strategy of individual accommodation. Class consciousness is a product of some very particular conditions that might have to be produced and sustained, rather than assumed to fall into place through the internal logic of class structure.

-past accounts of class consciousness fail to describe those aspects of the class structure that mitigate against collective course of action.

– Class consciousness can then be understood as a product of some very particular conditions that might have to be produced and sustained, rather than assumed to fall into place through the internal logic of class structure.

-two main obstacles:

1) workers’ baseline vulnerability against the power of employers

– common for class orientation in which one’s welfare is secured by non-class forms of association.

2) generic problems that arise in collective action.

– interest aggregation (from Claus Offe and Helmut Wiesenthal, “The Two Logics of Collective Action”)

-workers must seek agreement although their welfare effected in various, uneven ways

-some workers would have to subordinate their immediate welfare to the larger agenda

– free-riding

all three of these factors reinforce the atomizing effect of the labor market and dilute the impulse toward collective action and class consciousness.

class structure underwrites its own stability by making individual reproduction more appealing than organized contestation.

there is no easy road from Marx’s class in-itself to a class for-itself, but cultureal phenomena play crucial role in building working-class associational power

-By cultural, what is meant is the construction of a solidaristic ethos

– working-class identity is an act of social intervention, it is not a social construction.

-Because of great risks, workers can rationally chose not to be organized. (blamed in the past as  false consciousness)

-It is possible to accept the premise that all social action is filtered through culture while resisting the conclusion that class structure is therefore fundamentally shaped by it.