President’s Letter

Friends,

Do you ever have trouble explaining “working-class studies” and WCSA to colleagues and friends, or to people you would like to interest in our work?  This difficulty strikes me as more pressing than ever at a time when the national conversation has turned so explicitly to issues of class.

Part of the difficulty seems to be that we are such a hybrid association: scholars, teachers, artists and organizers.  Each of us likely has a primary identification within this mix, just as academics in the WCSA who embrace interdisciplinary work still have an anchor in one discipline or department.  But this of course is the appeal for those of us who affiliate with WCSA: we learn so much from each other’s perspectives and commitments, and we discover opportunities for joint work.

Another branch of the difficulty may be the question as to whether or not working-class studies represents an identity formation, like Black Studies and Women’s Studies, as they were in their early days.  As with those formations, strands in our collective work are designed to support the academic experience of working-class students, and to enhance the visibility and study of working-class projects and cultures.  Yet we also critique the structure and operation of class society more generally, with view to reducing (dare I still say, abolishing?) class exploitation and domination.

A major conceptual difficulty is, of course, ongoing contestation over who and what we mean by working class.   We face the peculiarly American belief that if there was a working class in the US it is now largely “history,” having been replaced by a large middle class with a small sector of the rich above and the poor below.  If the traditional working class persists, it is characterized as largely white, blue collar, and socially conservative.  This is serious nonsense, of course, but the egalitarian myth of the inclusive middle has massive appeal, and it is routinely re-inscribed in popular consciousness during election seasons.  So we always have an uphill battle to establish the salience of the term “working class” itself.

When Janet Zandy and I put together our anthology of American Working-Class Literature, we aimed to correct what Jack Metzgar calls this “American class vernacular,” demonstrating that the US working class was from the beginning one of the most diverse ever assembled, by race, gender, ethnic and national origin, and that all sectors of this evolving class have represented themselves eloquently through various forms of cultural production.  We wanted the book’s cover to reflect this multiplicity through vibrantly colored artwork.  Oxford University Press, however, used only tones of gunmetal blue and grey in a design suggestive of a slab of steel.  The blue-collar, industrial referents seem inescapably connected to the term “working class”.

Which is why it is especially useful, at this juncture when – thanks to the Occupiers and their stark assertion of a divide between the 99% and the 1% – the language of class is spoken everywhere, to have a restatement from Michael Zweig of his clear-eyed analysis of the US class structure.  The second edition of Zweig’s The Working-Class Majority, published in January 2012, confirms the key finding of the first edition:  that in the US, a sharply class-divided society, the working class, defined according to workplace, economic, political and cultural power, is a majority of 60+%.  (In Zweig’s analysis, this group now includes a large percentage of nurses and teachers whose work has been substantially deskilled through corporate management practices.)

Furthermore, as the years since the crisis of 2008 have demonstrated, “the poor” are part of this majority class, in the sense that poverty (including homelessness and incarceration) is something that happens to working-class people as a consequence of the reckless self-interest of the capitalist class.  Meanwhile, of course, we are also seeing creative and widespread protest and resistance to the ongoing blatant redistribution of resources upward and of insecurity and austerity down the class scale.   Contemporary protests are generating alternative forms of organization at levels unseen since the late 1800s.

In Pittsburgh recently, at a memorial celebration of David Montgomery’s life and work— the “dean” of labor historians, Montgomery died December 2, 2011, at the age of 84 — Peter Rachleff pointed out that, according to Montgomery, the “labor movement” in the last quarter of the 19^th century included unions, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, political parties, and reform associations (e.g. for the 8-hour day).  Rachleff noted that the movement today has similar range and multiplicity of focus, including not only revitalized labor unions, but campaigns for immigrant rights and reproductive rights, for political and financial reform, as well as organized struggles over the environment, healthcare, public education, food supply, public transportation, military action, incarceration – multiple arenas in which unjust and destructive power is being challenged.

What, then, is the subject and project of working-class studies at this moment?  And how do we explain our association’s work to our many potential allies?  At the upcoming How Class Works conference, to be held June 7 – 9 at SUNY Stony Brook, we’ll have a chance to debate these issues and to connect the dots between WCSA and the movements unleashed by the Occupiers and by the Madison uprising. Looking ahead, I’m pleased to announce that in June of 2013 the WCSA conference will be held in Madison itself, where the Labor and Working-Class Studies Project is projecting a program that will highlight strategic connections among the activist, academic, and artistic strands of our work, in the context of the movements that took such visible and inspiring shape during the Wisconsin Spring of 2011.

In solidarity,

Nick Coles

Dear Friends,

It’s a pleasure to address you for the first time as president of the Working-Class Studies Association.  I’ve been reading back over introductory letters from past presidents, to get a feel for the genre.  They are archived on the WCSA website, and they make inspiring reading.  It’s clear that the association has been favored with committed and visionary leadership since its beginnings in 2004.  The opportunity to help advance the mission of this young but well-founded and growing organization is both an honor and a challenge.  In his first letter, Peter Racleff (2006 – 2007) expressed the WCSA’s purpose this way:  “At the heart of the project of the WCSA is the struggle to make visible the invisible, to demonstrate that there is indeed a working class in the United States, that it is alive and lively, full of potential and energy, not just shaped by the dominant society but able to shape the future itself.”

Other past-presidents have reflected in their letters on events and trends shaping working-class life and struggles in the present moment.   Kitty Krupat (2007 – 2008) wrote about the election campaign that led to Obama’s presidency, and the opportunity it provided for discussion of issues of race, class, gender and sexuality.  David Roediger (2008 – 2009) reminded us of the power of internationalism in a time of mass work protests world-wide, including in China. Michelle Tokarczyk (2009 – 2010) addressed the healthcare reform debate, the worsening recession, and education cutbacks as contexts for our work.  Fred Gardaphe (2010 – 2011) addressed the attack on state employees’ unions and urged the need for a united front of labor and working-class organizations.

We are now in the midst of the deepest and longest-running recession since the great depression, brought on in the US by the double disasters of financial crisis and a decade of war.  The response of the federal government and most state governments has been to impose austerity: cutting jobs, pay and benefits, as well as the services that unemployed people rely on – and of course, curtailing labor rights.  The response of workers, students, unions, and professionals of all stripes from Wisconsin and around the country has been to rise up in protest, drawing inspiration not only from deep traditions of labor and political dissent but also from the mass uprisings of the Arab Spring of 2011.

As I write this, the Occupy Wall Street protests are intensifying and spreading to other cities around the US.   Protesters are accused – along with anyone from Obama down who proposes job creation or progressive taxation – of fomenting “class warfare.”  Well it’s about time we were talking about this.   The ruling class in the US has been conducting a very conscious class war from above for the past thirty years.  Globally, they have been busy grabbing up the planet’s land and resources, converting the global proletariat into a “precariat” of impoverished casual labor, fueling (and denying) climate change, and undermining the democratic processes designed to give the rest of us a voice in these matters.  The coming years will reveal whether they have overreached and whether the resistance we are now seeing will prevail.

The slogan “We Are the 99 Percent” resonates widely in this new Gilded Age of extreme disparities in wealth, with bankers, CEOs and allied politicians representing the 1% who have captured 25% of the wealth while real income for the majority has declined.  (Interestingly, a Time magazine poll reported in the October 10 2010 issue indicates 1% of those surveyed consider current economic conditions “excellent.”)  Even The New York Times, having at first ignored the protests, recognized the justice and timeliness of their message in a recent lead editorial (October 9, 2011).  Typically, the Times makes no mention of the working class: it is the “middle class” that is being ground down and “the poor” whose ranks are swelling.

However, the protesters’ 99% to 1% breakdown echoes those in the WCSA who have been calling for a cross-class alliance of working-class and professional middle-class people against a predatory and ascendant capitalist class.  Michael Zweig has argued that clear recognition and correct naming of class distinctions in the US is necessary to identify our common interests and to focus our actions.  In The Working-Class Majority (2000 edition – a new edition is due out this Fall) he calculates working-class membership at around 62%, middle-class at 36%, and capitalist class at 2%.   Give or take a percentage point, could we now be seeing that alliance of the 98%?  Might it include recognition that poverty is something that can happen to middle-class as well as working-class people, and – a further stretch – that labor is not a “special interest”?

What can the WCSA offer to the broader movement for economic justice in these times?  Dave Roediger, in his first letter, explained: “[A]n analysis that takes class as central and presents it as a lived and concrete set of experiences in highly unequal social relationships has a better chance of being heard now than in a long time.  The shop-worn idea that workers have been “bought off” has seldom been so starkly discredited.  Equally gone is the confidence that markets magically solve things.”

Working-class studies can provide data, analysis, historical perspective and cultural expression that brings clarity to the issues and motivates action.  Just this month, for example, the Center for Working-Class Studies released its quarterly report on the “de facto unemployment rate,” compiled by John Russo and his colleagues at Youngstown State University.  It demonstrates that, when discouraged job seekers and other latent job candidates are added to the official unemployed, the de facto rate stands at 26.37%.  Including the prison population and active military personnel takes the unemployment rate to 29.17%.   As a teacher of literature, I can place data like these alongside poems like Mark Nowak’s in Shut Up / Shut Down and video from the Madison protests earlier this year, to create a fuller picture for my students of how we live now and the range of possible responses.

In the face of these world-historical developments, the steps the WCSA needs to take in the coming year to strengthen our association might seem a bit pedestrian. But they require action if we want to grow the resources the WCSA makes available and extend the association’s reach and impact.   I’ll name two tasks that emerged from lively meetings of our membership at the Chicago conference in June 2011.  (And this is the place to say “thank you” to Jack Metzgar and the rest of the team from the Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies – Liesl Orenic, Bob Bruno, Lew Rosenbaum, and Maria Dokes – for organizing such a terrific gathering.)

• We need to expand and diversify our membership.  Jack’s report on that conference tells us that of the 250 people attending about 20% were non-academics (labor and community activists, artists and writers, filmmakers, publishers), and only 13% were people of color.  Conference participation is constrained by issues of funding and logistics and doesn’t necessarily reflect membership at large.  But still, we need to figure out what the obstacles to membership are, what the benefits are, and what it would take make the WCSA as broadly based as the working class itself.

• We need to generate more activity and sharing of resources between annual conferences.  We have a good start on this with the Working-Class Perspectives weekly blog, the reports coming from the Center for Study of Working-Class Life (including the latest, on the class and geographic origins of US war dead in Afghanistan), and our partnership with the journal New Labor Forum.   But the WCSA’s own website could become a much more interactive source of knowledge and conversation, and we could learn how to better use social media for our purposes.

If you have ideas as to how we might accomplish these tasks please write me at the address below.  Other plans generated in Chicago will be taken up by the Steering Committee in the coming months and I’ll report on them in the Spring issue of the newsletter.

Meantime, if you are reading this but not yet a WCSA member, please consider joining the association via our website.   And think about submitting a proposal for the upcoming conference on How Class Works at Stony Brook, June 7 – 9, 2012.   Proposals are welcome through December 12.  For details, see the call for papers in this issue of the newsletter.

In solidarity,

Nick Coles

WCSA President