From Syndicalism to Seattle: Class and the Politics of Identity

Abstract

In the first half of the twentieth century the labor movement promoted the notion of separate working-class values and interests—evident for example in American and European syndicalism, British interwar Communism and Australian interwar Laborism—and was thus identifiable as a social movement. Like the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this prewar identity politics successfully mobilized imagined political communities. By contrast, the retreat from emphasis on class difference and the turn to “equality of opportunity” politics, which Raymond Williams identified at midcentury and warned against, demobilized and weakened the labor movement. With class-based inequalities increasing from the 1970s, the decline of working-class identity politics ensured that the discrepancy between the objective importance of class and its subjective significance became especially marked. However, a newly forged identity politics of the world's economically exploited has recently reemerged in the movement against corporate globalization. From syndicalism to Seattle, we have witnessed the rise, retreat and resurgence of class identity politics.

Persuasion: Infusing advocacy practice with insights from anti-oppression practice

“…While advocacy efforts have traditionally relied on discrete binary opposites of ‘good’ (the advocate’s position) and ‘bad’ (the target’s position), such framing is typically simplistic and inaccurate. While it is simple and effective to motivate people by rallying against a clearly defined ‘enemy’ (and simultaneously build shared identity and urgency for action, as articulated by Burgmann, 2005), the risks are that our analysis is oversimplified: today, we are all implicated in domination in numerous dimensions. One educator held out for a much more complex understanding of complicity and possibilities for deep transformation, advocating herself for an end to the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ dichotomies so prevalent in social movement campaigns:Lots of activism is just about condemning those who have more than I do, and being the gracious and noble helper of those who have less than I do.…”

New Forms of Transformative Education

“…In Canada, as well as in Britain and the United States, an exploration of class inequality or corporate-driven globalization allows for this to happen. This typically generates a shared experience of anger and moral outrage at its unfairness at the hands of others, an experience long understood to build energy to participate in social movements (Burgmann, 2005).…”

Building the case for the study of the middle class: shifting our gaze from margins to centre

“…The middle class serves to mediate the unrest caused between capital and the working class (Thurow, 1984) and thereby ‘dilute socialist possibilities’ (Graham, Swift & Delaney, 2003: 104). Sorel (1908, as cited by Burgmann, 2005), suggests that a large middle class serves to reduce class consciousness and its related unrest among the working class.…”

“…Within the current debates over the most effective way to theorise class, and to respond to increasing income polarisation, debates intensify over the comparative appropriateness between political economy versus post‐structural theories (Burgmann, 2005; Scatamburlo‐D’Annibale & McLaren, 2004). Most scholars recognise the strength of post‐structural theory, especially one that extends class analysis to include gender, race, disability and other aspects of social location that influence incomes and life chances (Dei, 1996).…”