Release Date:- 2006-03-22
Availability:- In Stock
Kind:- ebook
Class has largely disappeared as a useful category of analysis in social history, most especially for the social history of the recent past. While this is a problem general to social history, it is especially acute in the well-established field of labor history and in the burgeoning new field of middle-class studies. For the most part, labor history has focused on industrial working-class communities and, predominantly, on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where their struggles were most evident and heroic. (1) In contrast to the growth of middle-class studies, some historians fear that in the opening decade of the twenty-first century, labor history is in jeopardy of atrophying. (2) I believe, however, that if social history is to mature analytically, the ascendance of the one and decline of the other has to be reversed, if only because they are properly not opposites but twins. The postmodern focus on the language of class and subjectivity has contributed to the contemporary problem of class, even as I think it offers a way out of it. The shift from production to consumption in modern industrial (or, postindustrial) society has, through access to widely available consumer goods (although unequally so, which people often forget) shaped languages of class. Approximately three-quarters of the American population, for example, describe themselves as middle class. (3) Many of these people are, white collar workers laboring in professional, managerial, technical or clerical occupations. Many more though are industrial workers. Sociologist David Halle's useful description of chemical workers who identify as middle-class at home and as working-class in the plant makes this point, but his larger insight is that the two worlds are not distinct. (4) Modern class relations, and how we study them as historians, occupy a liminal space between complex subjectivities that are embedded in the relationship between languages of class and the changing material conditions of work and labor.
