Rethinking Class and Contemporary Working-Class Studies

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-22
Author(s):  
Michael Zweig
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Labor Process ◽  
Capitalist Class ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Political Experience ◽  
Working People ◽  
Intellectual Capacity ◽  
Organization Of Production ◽  
Working Class Studies

The field of working class studies is forming in the context of dramatic changes in the labor process and crises in capitalist economies. Workers have historically been slow to adjust to such changes with new organizing strategies. As we seek our bearings among the changes in order to develop the field in ways that enhance the organizational and intellectual capacity of working people, we should hold onto a key point of continuity: whatever the new labor processes or changes in the economy, the working class continues to exist in capitalist societies, within capitalist class dynamics, in which the organization of production underlies material, cultural, and political experience. Race and class continue to be mutually determined. While each is distinct, neither can be properly understood or challenged in isolation from the other.

Counting the Working Class for WorkingClass Studies: Comparing Three OccupationBased Definitions

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-146
Author(s):  
Colby King
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Survey Data ◽  
Community Survey ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
American Community Survey ◽  
Diverse Group ◽  
Capitalist Class ◽  
Political Experience ◽  
Organization Of Production ◽  
Working Class Studies

A wide variety of definitions of the working class are in use across disciplines and even within working-class studies (Cohen 2001; Zweig 2001; Metzgar 2003; Wilson 2016; Wilson and Roscigno 2018). Responding to Zweig’s (2016) call to maintain continuity in thinking about the working class in working-class studies by recognizing that ‘the working class continues to exist in capitalist societies, within capitalist class dynamics, in which the organization of production underlies material, cultural, and political experience’ (14), I delineate several definitions of the working class and take a close look at three operationalizations of the working class by occupational aggregations, one each suggested by Metzgar (2003) and Cohen (2001) and one I define, inspired by Florida (2002). Using 2017 American Community Survey data, I compare the demographics and geography of the working class through each of these definitions. I illustrate that by many definitions, the working class is a broad and diverse group of workers who live and work in rural, urban, and suburban places, while inequalities both within the working class and between it and other social classes remain pressing issues for investigation. This paper provides a guide for understanding definitions of the working class that will be useful for working-class studies scholars from all disciplines, regardless of methodologies.

scholarly journals Functional State of Workers Data Analysis in the Labor Process

2021 ◽  
Vol 320 ◽  
pp. 03007
Author(s):  
Sergey Andreevich Faustov ◽  
Vladimir Ivanovich Salkutsan ◽  
Nikolay Aleksandrovich Chumakov
Keyword(s):  
Functional State ◽  
Physiological State ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Independent Method ◽  
The Other ◽  
Labor Process ◽  
Self Assessment ◽  
Instrumental Assessment ◽  
Working People ◽  
The One

It is shown that the state of working people, determined using the WAM technique, (well-being, activity, mood) has statistically significant correlation with the results of instrumental measurements in terms of changes in the physiological state of the same workers. It is proposed to use the WAM test as an independent method for determining the functional state of workers. The purpose of this work was to determine the ratio of the functional state of workers according to the instrumental assessment, on the one hand, and self-assessment of their state, on the other.

Doing Marx Justice

1981 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 251-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Young
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Good Luck ◽  
Capitalist Class ◽  
Labor Power ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
Labour Power ◽  
Power Costs ◽  
Additional Labor

The circumstance that on the one hand the daily sustenance of labour power costs only half a day's labor, while on the other hand the very same labor power can work during a whole day, that consequently the value which its use during one day creates is double what he [the capitalist] pays for that use, this circumstance is without a doubt a piece of good luck for the buyer but by no means an injustice [Unrecht] to the seller [the worker].[T]he surplus product [is] the tribute annually exacted from the working class by the capitalist class. Though the latter with a portion of that tribute purchases the additional labor power even at its full price, so that equivalent is exchanged for equivalent, yet the transaction is for all that only the old dodge of every conqueror who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has robbed them of.

Working-Class Fictions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Industrial Community ◽  
Working People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Exciting Wave

This chapter explores why working-class fictions flourished in the period from the late 1950s through to the early 1970s and the distinctive contributions that they made to the post-war British and Irish novel. These writers of working-class fiction were celebrated for their bold, socially realistic, and often candid depictions of the lives and desires of ordinary working people. Their works were seen to herald a new and exciting wave of gritty social realism. The narrative focus on the individual signalled a shift in the history of working-class writing away from the plot staples of strikes and the industrial community, striking a chord with a post-war reading public keen to see ordinary lives represented in books in a complex and realistic manner. The cultural significance of such novels was enhanced as they were adapted in quick succession for a mass cinema audience by a group of radical film-makers.

Coming Back Home to Live and Not Die: A Human Geography of a Working-Class Black Gay Male Navigating the Local Higher Education Pipeline

2021 ◽  
pp. 004208592098729
Author(s):  
Amalia Z. Dache ◽  
Keon M. McGuire
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Human Geography ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Gay Male ◽  
Education Pipeline ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Narrative Mapping

The purpose of this study is to illustrate how in the span of three decades, a working-class Black gay male college student residing in a post-industrial city navigated college. Through a postcolonial geographic epistemology and theories of human geography, we explore his narrative, mapping the terrain of sexual, race and class dialects, which ultimately led to Marcus’s (pseudonym) completion of graduate school and community-based policy research. Marcus’s educational human geography reveals the unique and complex intersections of masculinity, Blackness and class as identities woven into his experiences navigating the built environment.

White Working-Class Support for Trump

Contexts ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 30-35
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Cherlin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Community Study ◽  
Reverse Discrimination ◽  
Economic Factors ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
White Working Class

Why do working-class Whites support Donald Trump? The accepted explanation points to racial and ethnic resentment and anxiety about immigration, with economic factors secondary. Based on a community study, the author argues that feelings of reverse discrimination and anti-immigrant sentiment reflect both racial and economic factors. This article explains why it is difficult to conclude that either factor was more important than the other.

Combatting Bias in the Criminal Courts of France, 1870s-1913

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-168
Author(s):  
James Donovan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Chief Justice ◽  
Jury Verdicts ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
A Charge

Abstract In nineteenth-century France, liberals assumed that a conservative judiciary was frequently biased in favour of the prosecution, and socialists assumed that juries were dominated by the upper classes and too unrepresentative of the population to render justice equitably. Agitation by the left to combat these perceived biases led to the adoption of two key reforms of the fin de siècle. One was the abolition in 1881 of the résumé, or summing-up of the case by the chief justice of the cour d’assises (felony court). Liberals thought this reform was necessary because judges allegedly often used the résumé to persuade jurors in favour of conviction, a charge repeated by modern historians. The other reform, beginning at about the same time, was to make jury composition more democratic. By 1880, newly empowered liberals (at least in Paris) had begun to reduce the proportion of wealthy men on jury lists. This was followed in 1908 by the implementation of a circular issued by the Minister of Justice ordering the jury commissions to inscribe working-class men on the annual jury lists. However, a quantitative analysis of jury verdicts suggests that the reforms of the early 1880s and 1908 had only modest impacts on jury verdicts. Ideas and attitudes seem to have been more important. This has implications regarding two key controversies among modern jurists: the extent to which judges influence jurors and the extent to which the characteristics of jurors influence their verdicts.

Becoming fertile in the land of organic milk: Lesbian and queer reproductions of femininity and motherhood in Sweden

Sexualities ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 1021-1038 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrika Dahl
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Family Formation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Organic Milk ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Lesbian Motherhood ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

This article draws on popular culture, ethnographic materials and mainstream commercials to discuss contemporary understandings of the relationship between fertility, pregnancy and parenthood among lesbians and other queer persons with uteruses. It argues that, on the one hand, same-sex lesbian motherhood is increasingly celebrated as evidence of Swedish gender and sexual exceptionalism and, on the other, queers who wish to challenge heteronormative gender disavow both the relationship between fertility and femininity, and that of pregnancy and parenthood. The author argues that in studying queer family formation, we must move beyond addressing heteronormativity and begin studying how gender, sexuality, race and class get reproduced in queer kinship stories.

White Working-Class Women and the Race Question

1998 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 80-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Frank
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
White Men ◽  
The Other ◽  
White Trash ◽  
White Writers ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Working Class Women

In Towards the Abolition of Whiteness David Roediger tells the story of Covington Hall, the editor of a newsletter published by the Brotherhood of Timber Workers in Louisiana in 1913 and 1914. Roediger deftly analyzes efforts by Hall and other white writers in the brotherhood to construct cross-racial unity within an otherwise racially torn working class. He shows how Hall redrew the lines of solidarity: On one side were the degraded, of any race.On the other were enlightened workers who eschewed racial divisions, racist language, and stereotypes. “There are white men, Negro men, and Mexican men in this union, but no niggers, greasers or white trash,” proclaimed Ed Lehman, a soapbox speaker for the Brotherhood. A headline in the newsletter similarly asked readers to choose, “SLAVES OR MEN, WHICH?” Still more graphically, a cartoon commanded, “Let all white MEN and Negro MEN get on the same side of this rotten log.”

Working-Class Mobilization and the Labor Process

1989 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 707
Author(s):  
Howard Kimeldorf ◽  
Jeffrey Haydu
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Process
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document