Vitia faults / sins / abuses

Big Fat Marxist

In my notes here on working through Julie Lindquist's excellent book A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working-Class Bar, I've tried to point out how Lindquist privileges an occupational definition of class: her observations on the phenomenon of class in America are complex and careful, and she seems to do her best to let the perspectives of her study's informants shape her conclusions, but it's also clear that she knows exactly what she thinks about class, and for Lindquist, the individual experience of class is first and foremost caused by one's relationship to work, by what one does for a living, by one's occupation. I've talked in previous posts about what I see as my evidence for this claim, and about Lindquist's interesting perspective on the nature of productive work; this post is more just a hodgepodge of some scattershot observations on the book's fifth chapter.

A few days ago, I noted my interest in the implications Lindquist's perspective holds for the labor of academics. When Lindquist writes that "Smokehousers -- unlike most white-collar workers -- are fairly close in space and time to the products of their labors" (89), I think she's indicating that the productive work of those she names as the working class produces tangible material goods. And this serves to underscore the importance and accuracy of Rob's observation that our contemporary vocabulary of class is deeply inadequate: the term "working class" is so freighted with the imagery associated with the materially productive laborer that it becomes difficult for us to identify today's low-status laborers of immaterial production as "working class" in the same sense.

So when Lindquist observes that "the subject of class is rarely discussed as such at the Smokehouse. Class is a felt identity, a logic enacted phenomenologically" (74), I want to think that part of that "felt identity" is the experience of exploitation that transcends the merely occupational definition of class. I think I'm guilty of the same analytical impulse I'm finding problematic in Lindquist's book: in attempting to separate out the various causal and definitional factors of class, I'm turning everybody (myself included) into class essentialists. Lindquist writes that "Smokehousers will tell you class is an economic state, but the implicit connection in their narratives between upward mobility and social displacement suggests that they experience it as a cultural phenomenon" (75), to which I might respond: are economic states ever not experienced by individuals as cultural phenomena?

Oh, hell. Does that last question just make me a big fat Marxist?