From akriman@darwin.helios.nd.edu Sun Dec 31 11:11:24 2000 Received: from mxu4.u.washington.edu (mxu4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW00.12) with ESMTP id LAA45874 for ; Sun, 31 Dec 2000 11:11:22 -0800 Received: from mailspool.helios.nd.edu (mailspool.helios.nd.edu [129.74.250.7]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id LAA04454 for ; Sun, 31 Dec 2000 11:11:22 -0800 Received: from darwin.helios.nd.edu (darwin.helios.nd.edu [129.74.250.114]) by mailspool.helios.nd.edu (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id OAA17403 for ; Sun, 31 Dec 2000 14:11:17 -0500 (EST) Received: (from akriman@localhost) by darwin.helios.nd.edu (8.10.1/8.10.1/ND-cluster) id eBVJBIh08388 for classics@u.washington.edu; Sun, 31 Dec 2000 14:11:18 -0500 (EST) Date: Sun, 31 Dec 2000 14:11:18 -0500 (EST) From: Alfred M Kriman Message-Id: <200012311911.eBVJBIh08388@darwin.helios.nd.edu> To: classics@u.washington.edu Subject: Working Classics It has been claimed that there is strong resistance to the idea that the US has class distinctions. I think that was certainly true when the Lynds published their landmark _Middletown, a study in contemporary American culture_ (1929), and still partly true when Vance Packard published his popular _The Status Seekers_ (1959), but I really doubt that there is that level of resistance to the notion today. The resistance was due not only to an ideological commitment to a particular vision of democracy and opportunity in America, but also due to opposition to Marxism on the tails of red scares of those periods. Today, neither ideal seems to excite the same passion, despite the feints at a food fight here yesterday. David Meadows quoted Patrick Rourke > >If Steve and David do not like the term "working class" because they don't > >agree with socialist theory or because they feel that it denigrates the > >labor of the mind, then I ask them to consider, being confronted with the > >terms "middle class" and "upper class," what my idiomatic choices were in > >extending the question beyond the middle and upper classes? and replied > I would suggest that what is necessary is to call that thing with which one > digs a spade and simply use the term "lower income" and then try to define > what qualifies as "lower income" from a standpoint that is appropriate for > the discussion. There's a whole lot of baggage attached to the notion of > "class" which really isn't useful in the present discussion (and really > doesn't jibe with reality, near as I can tell). I haven't been following the discussion very closely, but I thought it was clear that PTR was trying to preserve a distinction between low-income and working-class -- to observe something like the distinction sociologists make between status and class. The Lynds' study observed that the difference between the working class and -- managerial class, did they call it?, the library's closed today for some reason -- was not so much of income level as of expectations and behaviors. Many in the working class, two thirds of the population of Middletown (Muncie, In.), had incomes comparable to members of the higher class. One major distinction in labor was that working-class employment was much less secure. Of course, the rise of labor unions, and particularly the industrial-union legislation during WWII, reversed the situation so that blue-collar work became in many cases the most secure work. From the seventies, things have changed again. Any definition of working class is arbitrary, since generalizations about the labor organization of an entire country or even city are bound to be approximate. That income does not define class must be obvious from the fact that those who claimed the US was a classless society could hardly have denied the existence of poor and rich. That some high-status professions are low-*wage* is more than well known: literary editors and professors in the best colleges were rather poorly paid earlier in the century, because they were generally expected to be (men) of independent means. It is only the growth and democratization of those professions that made it possible to live on the wages of those sins. Forgive me recycling part of a two-year-old post, again relevant: > One of my fellow graduate students years ago was doing a dissertation > on quantum gravity. He attended a block party in his fiancée's home > neighborhood, where her father and brothers took him aside for a > traditional old-country _serious talk_. When they asked him what his > career plans were, he explained that he hoped to become a professor of > physics. Their reaction (reported by him): ``What -- you want to be a > teacher? Don't you have any ambition?'' Today he's a MicroSoft VP. Update: fabulously wealthy and retired former MS VP. .