Red, White, and Blue Collar

The working class became more diverse in the 1970s—but we can’t wish away the fact that it declined as well. A response to Jennifer Klein.

The talented Yale historian Jennifer Klein, in an otherwise supportive review [“Apocalypse Then, and Now,” Issue #19], took me to task in the last issue of Democracy for having an “exclusively male” definition of culture in my book Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. In criticizing my approach to questions of how class works in the United States, Klein went so far as to call my use of masculinity and class a “tautology.”

That tautology, I would argue, is the nation’s, not mine.

Anyone interested in the slippery questions of class in America needs to grapple with Klein’s argument. She points out that I fall into the trap of talking about white guys as a false proxy for the working class in a decade in which profound changes were underway that created the “new” working class. The women’s movement, the new social upheavals in the workplace, the rise of the service sector, and the debates over affirmative action all contributed to the blossoming diversity of the working class in the 1970s. “[T]he health-care sector became one of the largest employers of women, with millions of new jobs in hospitals, nursing homes, community health centers, home health agencies, and non-profits. African Americans, women, and Latinos flooded into unions,” she argues. “The predominantly female, immigrant, and African-American working class and labor movement of today has its roots in the 1970s.” Indeed, how could I possibly portray the decade of diversity as the decade of white guys?

That’s because in America, class is as much about perception as reality. Beyond a doubt, the working class and its institutions became integrated in the 1970s as women and minorities not only gained access to better jobs, but unions also changed who they represented. That transformation is magnificently documented in Nancy MacLean’s exploration of the “revolution” in occupational diversity, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace. And, undoubtedly, any future working-class identity will be constructed out of the struggles of immigrants, women, and minorities. It is simply impossible to argue against that.

Yet there was a dual movement in the 1970s that we need to place at the center of the historical analysis: Accompanying the rise of occupational diversity was the collapse of class as a significant point of political and cultural identity. In other words, along with integration came decline. We need both discursive streams if we’re going to get anywhere, and celebrating the former without lamenting the latter is foolhardy. (Some nuance is called for as well: We have to be able to talk about diversification and decline and the diversification of decline without blaming diversification for the decline.)

Occasionally we manage to discuss rising inequality, but we never discuss what causes it: the maldistribution of class power. Today, we live in a society in which class as structure is everywhere and getting more severe, but class as an issue of identity is almost nowhere. What complicates matters is that I am not talking about the material reality of class relations as much as I am trying to understand how we think about ourselves as a society. In the case of how the public conceptualizes the working class, there is a big chasm between reality and perception. And when it comes to American history, distorted cultural assumptions will almost always trump complex reality.

Stayin’ Alive is about the history, practice, and failure of an idea (and an ideal): the last days of a society in which class (in its pale, male version) was included as part of its understanding of itself. It is also about the rise of other forms of identity that had taken root in a society that stopped thinking about inequality. With a nod to the era’s cinema, allow me to break my argument down into “five easy pieces”:

Piece One: The term “working class” is by any objective and fair measure a gender-neutral, multi-racial collective. Always has been, always will be. From the Lowell mill girls to the racialized immigrant workers of the early twentieth century to the black workers of the Great Migrations, the working class has always been a thing of extraordinary diversity. Our discursive world should be filled with working-class blacks, working-class women, working-class Latina/os, working-class men, working-class whites, etc. But it’s not. As I will argue, there’s diversity in our present state of civic life, but, sadly, there is no working class.

Piece Two: Unfortunately, objectivity has nothing to do with it. Taking cues from gender and race studies (and ditching generations of sociologists’ attempts to rigorously define “the” working class), in Stayin’ Alive I chose to explore how the term “working class” is socially, economically, culturally, and politically constructed and deconstructed in any given period. As historian David Roediger and umpteen other scholars have shown, the American “working class” has been historically constructed to be white and male. This is the tragedy of American labor history, and therefore the tragedy of American politics.

Piece Three: In the 1970s, a host of challenges beset the already limited and fragile white and male definition of “working class.” As I argue in the book, there was the possibility and hope of expanding the term in the civic imagination to include a more capacious and honest understanding of the term in the 1970s, but the idea of the working class itself collapsed (largely due to the intransigence of those very white males and their leaders to moving beyond their one-time great leap forward in major industry and organizing service occupations and embracing the new social movements). To paraphrase Bob Dylan, any working class not busy being born is busy dying.

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