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Response: Beyond Time and Money

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Victoria de Grazia
Victoria de Grazia
Affiliation:
Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis
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Extract

Next to the extinction of communism, nothing has disconcerted labor historians as much as the proliferation of cultural studies about mass consumption. By contrast, the critique of economism begun two decades ago under the influence of E. P. Thompson was a snap, for workers and the making of the working class remained the main focus, even as emphasis shifted from workplace to community contests over pub life, public parks, and other arenas of popular culture. Cultural studies of mass consumption, however, challenge whether it is still valid, much less possible, to focus uniquely on workers, except perhaps to deal with their unmaking as a class. Some are influenced by the “linguistic turn” associated with poststructuralism and deconstruction, putting pressure on labor historians to relate complex processes of signification to the changes in strategies and structures that are the meat and potatoes of the labor-history field.

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Type
Responses
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International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 43 , Spring 1993, pp. 24 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1993

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References

Notes

1. Cross, Gary, “Productivity and French Labor. 1910–1931” (MA thesis. University of Wisconsin, 1973).Google Scholar

2. Cross's books include A Quest for Time: The Reduction of Work in Britain and France, 1840–1940 (1989): A Social History of Leisure Since 1600 (1990): and Worktowners at Blackpool. Mass Observation and Popular Culture in the 1930s (1990).Google Scholar

3. Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture (London, 1993).Google Scholar

4. See, in particular. Clarke, John, “Pessimism sersus Populism: The Problematic Politics of Popular Culture.” in For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into Consumption, ed. Butsch, Richard (Philadelphia, 1990)Google Scholar; and idem.The Devil Makes Work. Leisure in Capitalist Britain (Urbana, 1985).Google Scholar

5. Gruher, Helmut, Red Vienna (New York, 1991).Google Scholar

6. Jackson, Julian, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934–1938 (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; and Seidman, Michael, Workers Against Work (Berkeley, 1990).Google Scholar

7. See. for example. Furlough, Ellen, Consumer Cooperation in France: The Politics of Consumption, 1834–1930 (Ithaca, 1991).Google Scholar

8. Lawrence Glickman. “A Living Wage; Political Economy. Consumerism, and Gender in American Culture, 1880–1924” (unpublished paper). My gratitude to the author for sharing with me his major arguments.

9. Peiss, Cf. Kathy, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986)Google Scholar; also my How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley, 1992)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 7.

10. Abrams, Lynn, Workers' Culture in Imperial Germany (New York, 1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Cohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

12. See my “Mass Culture and Sovereignty; The American Challenge to European Cinemas”. Journal of Modern History 61 (March 1989): 53–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar