Note on Raymond Williams's cultural typology, the working class and its representation
It’s my custom to begin a post with a bunch of throat clearing and jokes and stupid shit like that but this time to keep things fresh I thought I’d jump right into the stupid shit that’s actually on my mind - Open Mode Keeps You On Your Toes, that’s the new slogan the market department came up with, let me know what you think of it over on the Open Mode Facebook page [there is no Open Mode Facebook page, that’s a joke]. Okay so yeah here goes.
I keep saying I’m going to read more Raymond Williams and not getting around to it beyond a page or three here and there, but those pages here and there keep being really rewarding. In particular I keep coming back to his categorizing culture into dominant vs nondominant, and conceptualizing the nondominant in two ways, let’s call it temporality and political orientation.
Taking them one at a time, first, temporality: Williams says the dominant - which, keep in mind, is always shifting over time itself - relates to the residual, meaning old stuff, particularly old elements of past dominant cultures (think, say, Catholicism: once a world-wide dominant force, now, well not so much) and to the emergent, meaning new stuff. Second, political orientation: Williams says the dominant - which, keep in mind, is always in an argument with itself and shot through with tensions - relates to the alternative, meaning different from the dominant in a relatively nonthreatening manner, and to the oppositional, meaning different from the dominant in a less safe manner than the alternative. These two ways of thinking about the nondominant which I’ve shorthanded as temporality and political orientation name simultaneously present facets of the world: the temporal developments - residual and emergent cultures - have political valences as alternative or oppositional, and the political orientations - alternative and oppositional cultures - are either new (emergent) or activating the old (residual) in creative ways in the present. And like I said, the dominant is itself dynamic internally and (in part, because) in an ongoing argument with itself internally. In addition, its relationship to the alternative, oppositional, emergent, and residual (bear in mind again that the first two and the second two are overlapping rather than distinct categories - alternative-emergent, alternative-residual, oppositional-emergent, and oppositional-residual - and that the alternative and oppositional is a continuum), the dominant abuts them with a sometimes rigid and sometimes permeable border: sometimes it crushes, sometimes it incorporates, often it does a mix of the two. That’s another source of the dynamism in the dominant culture.
That’s not the thought, that’s the background to the thought. Here’s the thought. In some respects this is all happening all the time everywhere in loose, leaking, informal ways - everything is in flux and motion constantly at different speeds, society’s always evolving, culture never stands still, etc etc - and other respects there are concrete institutions and individuals that sit astride some of these junction points. To put it another way, this is all ongoing production, ongoing labor, done by actual people in a wide variety of ways.
Rather than start from the whole general framework and then work to concretize it, what I really want to do is to start from some types of social positions inhabited by concrete people and use the framework to situate them. I’ve got a draft essay where I found the germ of this thought, it’s about Perry Anderson. (If you’re not familiar with Anderson, he’s a British socialist intellectual who ran New Left Review for ages, became a college professor in the United States, then went back to being involved in New Left Review while remaining a professor; that’s a reductive summary, he’s hard to summarize and very worth thinking about - one of the other essays I wrote in the last long while, which Open Mode completionists will remember I was whining about on here, was about him as well, bringing me to a total of two Anderson essays in the space of a year or two. I feel like there’s a Christmas Story joke to be made here - ‘Perry Anderson? At your age?! You’ll shoot your eye out, kid, how about a nice football instead?’ - but I don’t know how to make it work.) Anderson’s a super erudite dude and under his leadership New Left Review became an intellectual powerhouse and something in academic libraries around the world. That’s a very high value contribution to the socialist left, full stop, any disagreements one might have not withstanding (and there’s much to disagree with, to be clear!). A related contribution is that it helped make a lot of that left work more respectable in high falutin circles. The latter contribution is also doubled edged: to make radical ideas acceptable in polite company often goes in tandem with bridging them from oppositional into the dominant. In complex ways their greater acceptance - destigmatization? - works as part of making them work for the dominant as source of renewal and energy, or perhaps as guidebook to some of the parts of the rest of the oppositional that is still less acceptable in polite company.
Now, as a middle aged guy way too into punk than I should be, I want to be very clear that while if I was say anything along these lines 25 years ago I absolutely would have been calling Anderson a sellout but I am absolutely not doing so now. Instead, I’m just saying that as you play the game the game plays you, and playing the game or not isn’t really optional for the most part, it’s just a position in the social division of labor, a part one gets cast into by the social casting director. That’s to say, the uptake of the oppositional into the dominant (and the shifting of the oppositional to the alternative and son) are really as much or more a matter of social processes in motion that act upon people as they’re anything anyone does consciously, and they’re process that are inextricably intertwined with positive goods consciously pursued: of COURSE we all want a good big smart left! Building that simply will have effects like I’ve mentioned here, renewing the dominant culture to some degree despite opposing it, and so on. Yet another way to say this is that these cultural developments are all politics all the way down and it’s usually at least two kinds of politics at any given moment: pursuing a conscious goal and acting out a process unconsciously, sometimes despite one’s self. That’s just to underline that I’m not judging - really not calling anyone a sellout! - so much as trying to name what I think are real aspects of society.
I’m unsure what name to give to figures like Anderson. I want to say ‘bridge’ or something, though I also think that it’s important to not get too fixed on any particular metaphor - bridge, hinge, wall, whatever - about the relationships between the different categories of cultural life named by the terms dominant, oppositional, etc, because the relationships themselves are organized in a very wide variety of ways and those forms of organization are themselves in continuous flux at unpredictable speeds. But a name is good to have, so I’ll just say bridge.
Okay so this is the actual thought now (that was also more preliminaries, sorry - and the thought is really more of a hunch than anything else, and a pretty niche one at that, double and triple sorry I guess?), which is that I think one could probably parse the history of the labor movement around the world, as well as experts on the labor movement, either academic or in other settings like state bureaus and whatnot, in terms of these categories of dominant, oppositional, etc. One hunch I have is that for a very long time a big part of the labor movement wanted to be part of the dominant culture, its political vision was to fight its way in and get a seat at the table, and that has variously been allowed or denied or somewhere in the middle - it’s all a matter of contention organized in different ways, fights playing out according to various rules of engagement and with various wins and losses. Another hunch is that some of the time parts of the labor movement think of themselves as alternative or oppositional but are actually in the dominant to a significant degree. I’ve written about elements of this though not in these terms over at Organizing Work https://organizing.work/author/nate-holdren/ (and I’ll add for whatever it’s worth that those are some of the things I’ve written that are most important to me and which I’m most invested in and proud of) and in a way my recent essay taking the Supreme Court case of Lochner v. New York as a window into how to think about the relationship between class and violence is to a significant degree about this stuff too https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-labor-and-working-class-history/article/labor-history-and-class-violence-a-meditation-on-the-anniversary-of-lochner-v-new-york/A732309F4B31770EA5706F0FD16AA708.
A closely related hunch is that some of the key figures in the history of experts on the labor movement, including labor historians, various state personnel like those who staffed the two or three different US industrial commissions, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, various state commissions, the National Labor Relations Board, etc etc, are bridge figures analogous to Anderson. They’re easy to think of as allies to the working class and in important respects they are but they’re also tied to processes of shaping both how that class as population is perceived and represented and how class as a social relation is perceived and represented, and, closely related, to processes that help foster this or that form of active existence of the working class. That is to say, the processes of identifying or representing the working class in its multifaceted existence, in various ways oppositional or alternative or going along with the dominant, and the knowledges those processes create, are themselves in various ways alternative, oppositional, or dominant, and inform processes that intervene on or manage the working class’s character as (non)oppositional.
Far less abstractly and as an example, one of my Organizing Work essays is about the National Labor Relations Act, arguing, in part, that part of what the NLRA did is shape the kinds of unions that exist - the Act shaped the terrain and climate, so to speak, to favor certain species of unionism over others. This means analytically speaking that its a mistake to call the act ‘pro-union’ because it’s really pro- specific approaches to or practices of unionism and anti-others, and that has some pretty serious political ramifications (which ones approves or disapproves of depending on how much one agrees with me or not, which is always a good measure of brains and, more importantly, moral character. Obviously I’m joking when I say that! That this is also my genuine view is entirely coincidental, I assure you! Full disclosure, I stole that joke.)
This is all to say that labor experts are in part working on the labor movement’s own politics and the politics of how other institutions relate to the labor movement (in tiny ways, to clear, like wind shaping shorelines, which are also shaped by other more powerful forces like ocean currents; I very much don’t want to overestimate the significance of any of this). That in turn shapes what’s easier and harder to know about work, workers, and the labor movement past and present, it seems to me, and shapes the kinds of questions posed and not posed.
None of this is especially unique to the working class and the labor movement and so on either, the same could be said of many other areas of social life/power relationships/patterns of experience/whatever to call it. I’m partly fumbling here for issues of the implicit politics within knowledge making, and also trying to think about knowledge as resource partly generated by and partly put to work within institutions.
I’m not sure at the moment that I have the exact wording right, but the mighty Simon Clarke has written about how capitalism is a class society and class is a relationship of domination; further, class domination is an abstract term and a persistent longstanding general pattern in the world but one that always exists only in very particularized concrete forms - class is always, at least in part, institutionalized in specific ways - and those forms are always in flux over time at various speeds. The specific institutional forms that class domination takes at any given time and place and over time are very important for how politics and struggle exist in concrete forms, and, again, all of this is always changing. In addition, there’s an evolution over time in processes of managing class and the conflicts involved. Clarke refers, if memory serves, to institutionalized forms of class collaboration. Those serve to partially meet the aspirations of the actually existing working class, partially to shape how people act on those aspirations, and partly to shape what those aspirations actually are. Those institutions involve, in part, at least some of the time, the production and reception of some of the kinds of knowledge I was waving my hands around about a moment ago: those institutions are homes to (and influences upon) lots of bridge figures like I was going on about, and draw on the results of the work of those bridge figures sometimes as well.
I don’t think any of this sounds conspiratorial (it’s certainly not intended that way, I’m not saying the capitalist class all meet in a room wearing top hats and monocles and plan all this out), but in case it does, what I really mean to say is just very simply that in a class society certain kinds of problems, conflicts, and experiences recur, some of those become socially consequential over time in part due to conflicts and tensions playing out within the dominant culture, and given that, it’s no surprise that certain temporary understandings and, at least occasionally, solutions to those problems develop and get shared around for a while. It’s also no surprise that sometimes it’s some people’s job to think about all of that, and people doing that might not always understand themselves as doing that: one doesn’t have to know one is the kind of bridge that one is.
This is all too abstract, I know, sorry, and speculative to a big degree too. I’d eventually like to try to concretize some of this - in relation to labor history, state management of the labor movement, and labor movement aspirations - by looking much more closely at the work of the economist, public servant, and labor historian John R. Commons in the US (and maybe at the Webbs in Britain), continuities and discontinuities in labor history over time in the US (my hunch is that often there was a rejection of specific approaches to thinking about labor history and yet that labor history has often been a project of rendering the working class respectable in polite company - a phrase I mean as deliberately ambiguous, in that this can be simultaneously a project that works on the standards defining polite company and also works on the working class to some degree, or at least on what does or doesn’t get highlighted from the working class’s highly complex social existence) and more generally at the development of labor law and industrial relations as fields of knowledge and activity. Again I also suspect much of this goes for other areas of social life, other - I don’t know - structural power relationships, movements generated by and seeking to politicize elements of those power relations, and knowledge of all of the above as well. I need to stop here, but a lot of this also has everything to do with the state.
Alright good people, and the rest of you (hi Rob!), I gotta go. Keep on trucking. Over and out.