Class, the poor relation, is finally getting the attention it deserves. In a single Sunday New York Times not too long ago, the editors saw fit to offer a long review article on class inequality in the world's wealthiest nation and feature Caryn James's funny and wise gloss on class mobility myths in recent Hollywood films. The next week brought more analysis of the economic and cultural dimensions of class in America and around the world.¹

I applaud her desire to build upon the lessons of the new social movements and the insights of cultural theorists in helping reinvigorate class politics in the twenty-first century. Like most readers of ILWCH, I too believe that having social movements in which class is taken seriously is a laudable goal. Such movements are necessary if political and economic power is to be more equitably distributed and more of the world's people are to have security and dignity.

At the same time, I find myself in disagreement with the overall thrust of the essay, which in the end is a call to resuscitate an antiquated class politics that is better left in the past. Granted, it is now rechristened and blessed in the waters of “identity politics.” But the mewling baby is still the same.

Individual pieces of the argument are as problematic as the whole. Burg-mann and I differ in how we understand the nature and history of the “new” social movements as well as the “old,” in what can be learned from “identity politics” and from cultural theorists about class and class politics, and what is needed to encourage future movements for social and economic justice. Let me expand on these points of disagreement and then turn to why a class politics for the twenty-first century needs to leave behind the model Burgmann proposes.

How ‘Old,’ How ‘New?’

Burgmann follows the unfortunate fashion of dichotomizing the “new” social movements and the “old,” leading to a misreading of the character and history of both. In many ways, the movements were as much alike as they were different. As Burgmann herself later points out, labor movements also organized around “identity” before the mid-twentieth century (as well as after, it could be argued). Indeed, worker group solidarity in the US was not built solely or even mainly on “class identity.” Rather, at different times and in different places, workers formed strong collective bonds based on overlapping solidarities of gender, ethnicity, race, trade, occupation, industry, place, profession, and class as well as other political identities.

Of equal importance, the so-called “new” social movements concerned themselves with class distinctions, and they addressed the class needs of their constituents. Take the civil rights or the women's movement in the US. Both of these movements paid attention to “redistribution” and to economic inequality. The 1963 March on Washington slogan “Jobs and Freedom” coupled social and economic rights and its demands for higher minimum wages and full employment spoke to those on the bottom of the class ladder. The feminist class action suits of the 1960s and 1970s, which opened up higher-paying jobs for women, or the pay equity campaigns of the 1980s also were about redistributing wealth and raising the wages of low-income workers. In other words, the labor movement is not the only social movement in which class inequality is being addressed. To claim otherwise is to deny that African Americans or women are workers or that race and sex discrimination have no effect on perpetuating class immobility and injustice.

Burgmann is right, however, to criticize many of the post-1960s social movements for an insufficient attention to class difference. All too often the priorities of those with class privilege dominated, and the needs of those without cultural, social, or economic capital were marginalized. William Julius Wilson, Judith Stein, and others make a convincing case that measures such as equality of opportunity ended up primarily benefiting those with the capital to take advantage of such opportunities.⁴

I agree with Burgmann that the social justice movements of today have much to learn from the successful movements of the past. But embracing “identity politics” is not one of the lessons they teach. The “new social movements” should not be conflated with “identity politics” nor can their success be explained by it. Academic and activist journals on the left are full of hand wringing about the hazards of the kind of reductionist “identity politics” Burgmann appears to be endorsing, and rightly so. Basing group allegiance on a single attribute that is attached to the person such as their sex, their race, their sexual orientation, or their youth may facilitate group bonding but it creates other problems in its wake. A politics of race or a politics of sex can end up substituting for the often harder but necessary discussion of defining a group's political goals. A shared identity takes the place of a shared vision and a shared strategy of how to realize that vision.

Real people, past and present, have multiple and changing identities that don't mesh well with a single predetermined and static notion of self or of community. Successful social movements, no matter their constituency, define themselves as vehicles for the multiple identities and aspirations of their members. They recognize that solidarities are constructed across social and cultural differences and that the only bonds of solidarity that are lasting are based on acknowledging difference as well as sameness. What we need on the left is a fully developed and viable political program to address multiple and varying class inequalities, including a consensus on overarching goals and the best means to achieve them. What we don't need is the old class politics dressed up in identity clothes.

The ‘Death of Class?’

I also draw different lessons from the postmodernist retreat from class theory and “class conscious” movements than does Burgmann. There are a number of reasons why “class” as a category of analysis and as a subject of study lost out to gender, race, and other sexier topics after the 1970s. Some have to do with the desire of elite academics to avoid discussions of class privilege as Burgmann duly notes. But I'm also inclined to agree with Sheila Rowbotham's recent analysis of the shifting scholarly currents among British academics. As workers lost power in the society at large in the 1970s and 1980s, she argues, and no longer appeared capable of achieving the heroic revolution that their armchair observers desired, they became a less attractive object of study.⁵

Moreover, for many analysts, class lost much of its explanatory power as they confronted the spectacle of mass uprisings against authoritarian regimes that had wrapped themselves in the language of class struggle and worker liberation. Class theory needed rethinking. And it is in part because of the failure of class theorists to do such rethinking that the “retreat from class analysis”(2) became a stampede. New academic enthusiasms over the cultural, psychological, and linguistic dimensions of power offered one way forward. But often, class scholars stood on the sidelines, distancing themselves from these trends. Class as a subjective experience and a psychic wound, the now infamous “hidden injuries of class,” remained largely unexplored, for example.⁶

The postmodern critics had other things to say about class analysis and class politics that bear repeating. The old class politics was problematic because it offered itself as a grand meta-narrative, claimed to be “always already” the most fundamental structure of domination, and attached itself firmly to a two-class productivist model of society. Much of this criticism was as much a rejection of certain philosophical traditions of class analysis as it was, in Burgmann's words, “hostility to class as a salient social division”(1). Calling for the next social movement to adopt class rhetoric in its propaganda may be inspired by the postmodern insight that the “formation of social identity is accomplished in large part in and by language”(3). But it is an inadequate response to the theoretical challenges to class analysis that have poured forth over the last half-century. It is also a reading of cultural theory and the turn to language at its most superficial and literal.

Labor History Before and After the Great Divide

The essay becomes even thinner gruel as it ladles out its labor history. Here is where we are treated to a history of labor in the twentieth century that posits a fundamental discontinuity in the character of labor movements in industrial societies around the mid-century mark and that giddily celebrates “the class consciousness of revolutionary industrial unionism”(5), a tradition, according to Burgmann, best expressed in early twentieth century “syndicalism” but glimpsed again in “Seattle” and other recent demonstrations, large and small. Although Burgmann includes the “laborist” formations prior to the mid-century among her “class conscious” groups, it is “revolutionary industrial unionism” that is closest to her model for future successful social movements. It made me want to weep. Yes, I listened to the Rolling Stones “Street-Fighting Man” on my way to Washington, D.C. in 1969 and for one afternoon believed that breaking bank windows would bring down the empire. But it was a short-lived fantasy! And the vast majority of people, workers included, don't even have such delusions for as long as I did. This is “class identity” of a very particular and limited sort.

Let's pause for a second to think about what it would really be like if we could revive the “revolutionary industrial unionism” of the Wobblies. Now don't get me wrong. I realize the Wobblies were a heterogeneous and complicated movement, and I always try to get my students to sympathize with those who penned the opening salvos of the IWW preamble: “the working class and the employing class have nothing in common. . . . Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system.” I lecture them on the violence of industrial capitalism, particularly in the US, on the ravages of unregulated markets and the cultural dispossession, social dislocation, material deprivation, and class shame that fueled revolutionary sentiment. But is their “class consciousness” really what we want to emulate? In Melvyn Dubofsky's complex account of the IWW beliefs in the US context, they were “a peculiar amalgam of Marxism and Darwinism, anarchism and syndicalism.” He continues: “Capitalism and thievery were synonymous,” and surely “the working class, or proletariat, would rise up in wrath and destroy the capitalists,” inaugurating “the workers' paradise.” No wonder one of their main competitors was the Salvation Army. A “primitive millenarianism” existed side by side with “modern revolutionary goals.”⁷

I've always admired the Wobblies for their use of music, theatre, and art to transcend pain and inspire alternative cultures and politics; for their tactical creativity in the free speech movements and other campaigns; their inclusiveness; their bold affronts to bourgeois sexual respectability, and their willingness to mock a work ethic gone haywire. And despite their messianic rhetoric, they too, like the AFL, spent much of their time engaged in less-than-dramatic skir-mishes with employers over wages, hours, and working conditions. But Burgmann seems intent on perpetuating the weaknesses of the Wobblies and not their strengths.

And God save me from the “Proletarian Schools” for working-class children in Scotland and South Wales where I would have to read The Fat Bourgeois and recite the “Ten Proletarian Maxims”—which, among other promises, would include my pledge to “wage class war.” This “proletarian science,” Burgmann appreciatively tells us, even mounted a “critique of gambling couched in class rather than moral terms” (7). If this is “science,” not “moralizing,” then so was the messianic litany of the Baptist church in which I grew up! I would imagine a steady diet of this top-down propaganda would make many young adherents long for escape just as I did.

At bottom, the politics she is celebrating rests on simplistic personalizing. It is not a social and economic analysis but a moral categorizing of social types. It is about character rather than social structure. It dehumanizes and ridicules. It's a politics of anger, name-calling, and demonization that can breed self-righteousness and intellectual rigidity. It can also fuel and justify violence against those perceived as the immoral “parasitic” enemy.

Indeed, if there is a rhetoric that needs shelving it is the one Burgmann admires of “parasites,” “boodlers,” “shirkers” and “Mr. Fat.”(6). This is a moralistic language mired in the gnarled overgrown roots of a perverted Protestant work ethic. As Dan Rodgers has shown, it is these very categories of “parasite” and “producer” that hobbled the reform vision and capacity of the US labor movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was a movement too stuck in a language premised on a literal reading of the “labor theory of value” to understand that workers deserved more than “the fruits of their labor.” To make matters worse, it was this same language that came back to haunt and cripple the American left in the postwar era when it tried to mount a campaign for the guaranteed annual wage and enhanced income supports for the poor.⁸

A viable language of class would eschew these moral categories. Rather than simply turn meritocracy on its head, it would challenge the very notion that an individual's moral character can be inferred by his or her wealth or poverty. It would help workers perceive the structural realities of class by calling attention to the structures that privilege some over others but that also inevitably limit us all.

Proletariats Arise?

Unfortunately, to the degree that there is a structural analysis of society in the tradition Burgmann is recovering, it is obsolete. The two-class buggy should go the way of the Model T. We need an analysis of society that reflects the multidimensional and multileveled class structures in which we move today. As Raymond Williams reminds us in Burgmann's essay, there is a “common condition” that can be “the basis for a new bond against new forms of bondage.” But we will need more than “resistance” or a politics of negativity to forge it. A politics of resistance and of destroying the capitalist class is not one that the majority of workers in any society ever voluntarily embraced. We need a vision of a future society that is credible as well as desired and a strategy for how to bring about such a world that is worthy of the end being sought.

The most successful movements for economic and social justice historically have been multi-class and social democratic. They were not “homogeneous exclusively proletarian movements” that made no room for “middle-class socialists” and other allies. Nor did they develop that virtuous ideology that aimed to “save civilization by eliminating the middle-class”(6). They sought inclusion and equity for those at the bottom, and they relied on parliamentary democracy, mixed economies, and regulated markets to achieve their goals. Burgmann conflates “class politics” with “anticapitalist slogans,” a mistake most labor movements avoided.

In the Progressive Era US, for example, revolutionary syndicalism never held the appeal of ballot box socialism, of farmer-labor populism, or of contract unionism, at least if voting data and union membership records are given any credence. And as the Roosevelt Administration endorsed labor standards legislation, made the right to organize public policy, and instituted new social insurance measures, labor, along with African-Americans, farmers, immigrants, and other groups, proclaimed their allegiance to the Democratic Party.⁹

Nor did this version of laborist class politics disappear at mid-century as in Burgmann's narrative. The goals of the postwar US labor movement can not be reduced to “equality of opportunity.” Whatever the problems with the social unionism of the UAW's Walter Reuther or the IUE's Jim Carey—and there were many—it was not primarily devoted to a pursuit of individualism or individual upward mobility. In The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945–1968, Kevin Boyle reveals a Reuther who rejected any approach to ending poverty that reduced the problem to race discrimination and that touted equal opportunity measures as a panacea. He believed it wasn't enough to hoist a few over the class wall; the wall had to come down. And Reuther was not alone in pursuing a laborist politics that emphasized the redistribution of wealth and economic security. As Ira Katznelson and others make clear, social unionism was battered about by a powerful coalition of Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans after the Second World War, but it persevered as a major part of the left wing of the Democratic Party into the 1970s, pushing for greater social entitlements, workplace rights, and restraints on capital.¹¹

Or take the ideas of the left-liberal labor women whose political and economic initiatives I detail in The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America. A multi-class, multiracial group of women associated primarily with the large industrial unions of the CIO, they led the social justice wing of the women's movement from the 1930s into the 1960s. After the Second World War, they mounted a sharp critique of individual advancement, arguing repeatedly that the vaunted “liberty of contract” so celebrated by many of the “careerist” feminists in the National Woman's Party was a myth. The power of corporations and of combined capital vitiated individual bargaining, rendering it meaningless. Offering women the same “equal market opportunities” as men would do little for those at the bottom and those with household responsibilities. The market offered an unfair advantage to those who entered it with accumulated capital. It also penalized those with outside commitments to family and community. Thus, the removal of barriers to market entry and advancement was insufficient to achieve economic equity. First-class economic citizenship for the majority of women, in their view, would never be achieved without just compensation for their market work, social wages for childbearing and childrearing, and more worker control over work time, job design, customer interaction, and other employment issues.¹²

It was not until the 1970s when labor's steep decline began that a new politics of Reaganism could arise and boldly assert its allegiance to enriching those already at the top. Labor's solidaristic class politics survived even then, however out-of-fashion its rituals and language appeared. Labor just drew the circle tighter and sang the old labor songs more loudly. It may have been “flat on its back” as Tom Geoghegan observed, but it didn't think of changing. It was still a place where, to Geoghegan's amazement, grown men stood around holding hands and singing solidarity forever.¹³

This too was what Raymond Williams feared. He wanted a vital working-class culture, one in flux and alive to the possibilities of change. He knew the dangers of cross-class interaction: how class power validates certain cultural forms and how moving in elite institutions and absorbing elite cultural values can shame those with less power and less symbolic capital. Yet reification of past class cultures can have equally stultifying effects. Cultures stay alive when they are open to change, and working-class cultural forms can flourish and even transform elite cultures in the process of interacting. The decline of classical music and the rise of hip hop is but one example. I would wager that today's working classes desire neither the folk tunes nor the class rhetoric of the past.

The labor movement today is at a pivotal moment, not unlike the situation they faced a century ago in the late nineteenth-century US. The labor institutions that survived then did so because they moved beyond a rejectionist backward-looking politics. Some, like the IWW, believed that the “wage system” was inherently flawed and should be abolished along with the capitalist class. But others, as Larry Glickman so eloquently details, redefined the nature of the struggle. Their goals became ending the exploitation of the worker rather than ending the system of paying wages. The problem was not the wage system itself but the unequal position of workers within that system. They required just compensation for their labor, the right to time for family, community, citizenship or “what you will,” and the right to some measure of self-governance in the shop. Some may scoff at these goals as mere “bread and butter” unionism—a strange disparagement since the need for economic survival can hardly be taken lightly. But we also know from the work of David Montgomery, Annelise Orleck, William Forbath, James Gray Pope, Joseph McCartin, and others, that these unionists desired and achieved not just economic but also social and political reform.¹⁴

Similarly, social movements today must move beyond “resisting global capitalism.” In other words, they must move beyond “Seattle” or at least the “Seattle” to which Burgmann pays tribute. Hers is a model where placards such as “Capitalism destroys all life” are taken as class politics and utterances such as “I like turtles and hate that fucker Bill Gates” are seen as “precise” social theory(10). If Burgmann thinks these are verbal frameworks that encourage social inquiry and can help the masses deepen their understanding of the world around them, she's got to be kidding. If only what she was describing were a “consciousness of a hitherto undreamed of kind”(14).

What we need today is not an old class politics but a new. We need a class theory that recognizes the diversity of the working classes, honors the aspirations of working people for inclusion, equity, and justice, and offers a means to those ends that cultivates the best of our natures, not the worst. It will be a multi-class movement dedicated to dismantling class hierarchies whether expressed in the workplace, in access to civic and social entitlements, or around the kitchen table. And it will not be about ending global capitalism, eradicating market economies, or offing the pigs. It will be about how to create a different kind of capitalism, how to change the balance of power in the market and in the household, and how to sustain institutions that protect the weak from the strong.