Those on the US left seldom come from a working-class background. They are mostly well educated and came of political age in a social milieu that produces more professionals and managers than service or factory workers. Like most Americans, they live in homogeneous communities in reciprocally confirming enclaves, often close to their preferred amenities, such as restaurants, cafes, art galleries, museums, musical venues. Their universities had a social function beyond professional training, providing formative social experiences for future middle-class professionals and managers; living independently there, away from parental authority, gave them new perspectives, networks and sexual maturity.
US universities have often incubated social and political insurgence, particularly since the second world war; students were crucial to the civil rights movement, opposition to the Vietnam war, and the struggles for women’s rights and the rights of sexual minorities. The campus was a base camp for social movements, and a boot camp for their activists. In the1980s came the trinity of social identity — race, class and gender — as ‘identity talk’ flourished in most humanities departments, encouraged by the new interdisciplinary field of cultural studies [1].
Identity politics has also had a strong presence in the arts, in philanthropy, and the media but the university has been its institutional stronghold. Higher education has been one of the few US institutions where leftwing perspectives and politics have not only been accepted but have been able to operate reasonably freely and even exert influence, particularly in social science and humanities departments, in a period when a hard right agenda was becoming dominant elsewhere [2]. Humanities students and teachers responded to the rightwing onslaught by seeking to rid the universities, one of the few domains they could control, of racism and homophobia.
They did not have to look far: many private universities not only had a legacy of race and gender exclusion going back to their founding, but some of the most venerable (Harvard, Georgetown, Yale, Brown) had early benefited directly and substantially from slave labour and the system by which it was organised and structured [3].
Confrontation on campus
Campus politics in the identity era has tended to revolve more around social interaction, leading to confrontation over the content of syllabuses or micro-aggressions — low-level tensions or conflicts where students from stigmatised social backgrounds feel wronged by expressions they regard as humiliating or insulting, used by those in authority or peers from more favoured social backgrounds. A disagreement expressed by the dominator can often be perceived as a micro-aggression by the dominated. These conflicts cannot be avoided where students from sometimes very different social backgrounds cohabit, and many of the wealthiest private universities have recently increased their financial aid to students from ‘disadvantaged’ backgrounds. Gathering students from disparate socioeconomic backgrounds may increase interpersonal conflicts.
Solidarity is never automatic or easy. In the US labour movement, social differences and schisms have often been intentionally imposed to divide workers
University administrators have to handle institutional life adroitly to avoid problems, especially legal. Any miscommunication, wrong decision or phrase can have explosive consequences. Students, staff and administrators attend workshops on how to avoid offending sensibilities, and tolerance, difference and sensitivity have become keywords in internal memoranda. A student who wants to be thought an activist for social justice doesn’t necessarily have to organise others to act in concert, build an enduring organisation, reach out to non-students, seek points of commonality and unity with others, or even persuade others to change. They need only highlight social difference as a value in itself, and call out the ignorance and insensitivity of others.
At the most elite institutions many students and professors are from socially elite backgrounds, but even those who are not look out from their stately campus at the poverty, social degradation and exclusion outside, and feel responsibility and guilt for those excluded. In terms of race, inequality is often seen as a function of white privilege, seldom of class domination, and by publicly admitting privileges derived from race, gender, sexual orientation, anyone may be considered at least partially absolved of responsibility for having it; like a get-out-of-jail-free card. Such political practice looks like a social game where credit is accrued for admitting awareness of and shame over having privilege; the admission at least temporarily frees one from accusations of using that privilege.
The effects of such political behaviour have been widespread, particularly in social media. The anonymity of the Internet encourages ‘social justice activism’ expressed in the public shaming of others, and seeks adherence less on the basis of mutual interests than fear of public stigma. Online shaming is a social practice that gives those who do it certain social recognition and encouragement from other practitioners. As one analyst has noted, ‘the intent of shame justice seems to be to enjoy the company one has in cyberspace with so many approving others’ [4].
This is like the medieval charivari, a public humiliation ritual that censured transgressive behaviour and enforced local customs, often against community members who had made socially unacceptable marriages, or adulterers. The victim was paraded in ridiculous clothes, often facing backwards on a donkey, accompanied by townspeople making a cacophony of rough music.
Asam Ahmad has written, ‘Call-out culture refers to the tendency among progressives, radicals, activists, and community organisers to publicly name instances or patterns of oppressive behaviour and language use by others. People can be called out for statements and actions that are sexist, racist, ableist ... [call-outs] can enable a particularly armchair and academic brand of activism: one in which the act of calling out is seen as an end in itself ... What makes call-out culture so toxic is ... the nature and performance of the call-out itself. Especially in online venues like Twitter and Facebook, calling someone out isn’t just private interaction between two individuals: it’s a public performance where people can demonstrate their wit and how pure their politics are’ [5].
Identity influences the left
Identity shaped in academic settings now influences progressive and leftwing political discourse and practice almost everywhere. For example, Class Action, a small non-profit based in Boston, Massachusetts, was founded by two women from starkly different social backgrounds; one came from a prominent bourgeois family and had a sizeable inheritance; the other was a long-time peace and lesbian-feminist activist from a working-class background. Along with four others from a mix of class backgrounds, they formed a cross-class dialogue group that met for six hours a week for six years [6].
Class Action remains fairly active nationwide, conducting workshops and training sessions for philanthropic foundations, religious organisations, private high schools, social change organisations and universities (its website lists 57 higher education establishments it has worked with). The workshops, training sessions and consultancies aim to ‘build bridges between people of different classes’; help people overcome psychological pain caused by their class identity and experience; and reduce classism in employment and education.
Especially in online venues like Twitter and Facebook, calling someone out isn’t just private interaction between two individuals: it’s a public performance where people can demonstrate their wit and how pure their politics are - Asam Ahmad
This work may help people cope with a social situation for which they have only a limited understanding, but it is not clear that it will do much to improve the situation of the working class. Class is presented in a way that strips it of all the collective dynamics and social drama of actual class action, turning it into a largely therapeutic process, using group therapy to heal the psychic injuries of class. The recent invention of the word ‘classism’, on the model of ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’, relates more to prejudicial attitudes and beliefs such as snobbishness or class disdain than the expropriation of labour in the neoliberal socio-economic order. Building bridges between rich and poor will not resolve inequality.
This is not about intersectionality, too often invoked to crowd out the class perspective by asserting that all expressions of social identity and division must be included in the explanatory framework of social phenomena. Many Americans have only the most rudimentary grasp of class and are accustomed to the familiar assertion of classlessness; and so other forms of social division appear as a more obvious cause for inequality. Through this prism, police violence is an exclusively racial problem — videos on the Internet often show black men being brutalised or killed by police, violence that is part of the long history of racism in the US.
Crisis of political violence
However, as political scientist Cedric Johnson has argued, ‘the racial justice frame simply does not adequately explain the current crisis of political violence, in which blacks are overrepresented but not the majority of victims. In 2015 there were 1,138 people killed by police in the United States ... 581 were white, 306 were black, 195 were Latino, 24 were Asian or Pacific Islander, 13 were Native American, and the race/ethnicity of the remaining 27 was unknown ... The unemployed, the homeless, and those who work in the informal economy or live in areas where that economy is dominant are more likely to be regularly surveilled, harassed, and arrested. Black Lives Matter activists posit universal black injury where, in fact, the violence of the carceral state is experienced more broadly across the working class’ [7].
This points us to the limits of a framework that eliminates the possibility of interracial solidarity, and thereby rejects the overriding importance of solidarity as the primary source of social power for the working class. While successful identity claims are essential for advancing democratic participation in capitalist societies, struggles for the inclusion of previously excluded groups make less sense as the primary political strategy in a neoliberal context, where the bases of inclusion, regulated labour markets, union rights, stable immigration flows, are being dismantled. The meaning of a struggle for inclusion changes when almost everybody is being excluded, and when mutual interests might be appealed to in encouraging collective participation across social divisions. The struggle for civil rights would then become part of a wider struggle to defend and advance the social, political and economic rights of all.
Solidarity is never automatic or easy [8]. In the US labour movement, social differences and schisms have often been intentionally imposed to divide workers across labour markets, and within the workplace, because employers are aware of the potential source of workers’ power. In the US it is always a major struggle to establish a union in a workplace, to organise a strike or to negotiate a contract. Sharp social differences and distinctions of race, nationality, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and sometimes of all of these, have to be overcome to succeed. They are not often successful because the rules and laws are so favourable to employers.
Nevertheless, whenever unions have been successfully organised, the divisions and fragmentation of US society have been overcome. Labour organisers know this. Or they learn it. Or they fail. The workplace is not the only site of social solidarity in US society, but provides lessons on how a more effective solidarity might be achieved.
Rick Fantasia is professor of sociology at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. He is the author of French Gastronomy and the Magic of Americanism, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2018.
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