Class and Its Others

273 Pages·2000·14.41 MB·English

by  J. K. Gibson-Graham

c l a s s
B U p I } S
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J. K. Gibson-Graham
Stephen A. Resnick
Richard D. Wolff
Editors
c l a ss
a nd i ts
o t h e rs
Foreword by
Amitava Kumar
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis/London
Copyright 2000 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint
an earlier version of chapter 8, which originally appeared as "Remapping Los
Angeles; or, Taking the Risk of Class in Postmodern Urban Theory," in Economic
Geography 75, no. 2 (April 1999). Reprinted with permission from Economic
Geography, Clark University.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a re-
trieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Class and its others / J. K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen A. Resnick, and
Richard D. Wolff, editors ; foreword by Amitava Kumar.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-3617-6 (he : acid-free) — ISBN 0-8166-3618-4
(pb: acid-free)
1. Working class—Economic conditions. 2. Working class—
Social conditions. 3. Social classes. 4. Communism and society.
I. Gibson-Graham, J. K. II. Resnick, Stephen A. III. Wolff, Richard D.
IV. Title.
HD4901.C5762000
305.5—dc21
00-008821
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Foreword: In Class vii
Amitava Kumar
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Class in a Poststructuralist Frame 1
J. K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen A. Resnick, and Richard D. Wolff
1. "This Job Has No End": African American Domestic Workers
and Class Becoming 23
Cecilia Marie Rio
2. Domesticating Class: Femininity, Heterosexuality,
and Household Politics 47
Jenny Cameron
3. Exploitation in the Labor of Love 69
Harriet Fraad
4. Spring Flowers 87
SusanJahoda
5. Beyond Slavery and Capitalism: Producing Class Difference
in the Sex Industry 121
Marjolein van der Veen
6. Classing the Self-Employed: New Possibilities
of Power and Collectivity 143
Janet Notch
7. Los Angeles: A Postmodern Class Mapping 163
Enid Arvidson
8. Blue Collar, White Collar: Deconstructing Classification 191
Jacquelyn Southern
Bibliography 225
Contributors 247
Index 251
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Foreword
In Class
Amitava Kumar
I have just finished teaching the first month of an undergraduate course on
Marx. The course is one in the "critical thinkers" series that we offer in my
department for those students who have opted for the cultural studies track.
This is the first time I-—or anyone else—has taught this course here. It is
impossible for me to introduce Class and Its Others without my thoughts re-
flecting, in some measure, what we have been involved in reading and dis-
cussing in our classroom.
In my case, the owl of Minerva is swooping into flight even later than
usually expected. It is nearly two years now since a copy of the New Yorker,
marketed as "The Next Issue," predicted that the next university would be
"Drive-Thru U," die next president, Elizabeth Dole (someone "who is better
at tea and sympathy than Bill Clinton"), and the next thinker—Karl Marx!
The magazine presented him to us as a now-little-read nineteenth-century
German writer whose basic insights were reintroduced in recent times by
James Carville with the phrase "It's the economy, stupid."
And the "next" fashion outrage? Ozone chic. To quote the New Yorkers
cosmopolitan astrologers: "A pink polyester minidress with a singing-cricket
sound module, a bloodstain-print animal-rights T-shirt, a raincoat with
a bondage mask, and a lacy spiderweb dress with gloves attached to the
sleeves." With such a buildup, it was only right that we begin the course
by taking up Howard Zinn's fine little play Marx in Soho. A bureaucratic
mix-up has landed the venerable but feisty philosopher in New York's
fashionable Soho rather than London. He has come back to clear his name.
"I have had it up to here," he says. The newspapers have been proclaiming
vii
viii — Amitava Kumar
that his ideas are dead. He asks, "Don't you wonder: why it is necessary to
declare me dead again and again?"
In Zinn's play, Marx reads the day's newspapers. We decided to do the
same. On the first day of class, New York Times carried an obituary entitled
"Wilbert J. Oliver at 89; Fought Funeral Color Line." Mr. Oliver had died at
a hospital in Marksville, La. The newspaper said that he had sued the Escude
Funeral Home in Mansura, La., for discrimination after it refused to provide
visitation for his deceased mother because she was black. Mr. Oliver's law-
suit in 1973 "had the practical effect of forcing funeral homes throughout
the nation to provide equal services to blacks and whites." The case had
been fought by the lawyers of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
There was a photograph of the dead man printed beside the headline.
The Times story said that Rev. August Thompson, who was Mr. Oliver's
priest when his mother had passed away, remembered Mr. Oliver as being
distraught when he was told that the funeral home would not permit visita-
tion. "He lived in what used to be called a shotgun house because it was so
flimsy that if you fired a shotgun at the house it would go right through it.
He wanted a better place for visitation for his mother."
While we read and discussed the story, I looked at the photograph several
times. What do such photographs convey anyway? "He was just an ordinary
man, one of the common people and not a crusader," the priest was quoted
as saying. So I saw in the picture the man I was discovering through this re-
port: a salesman for John Deere who, after his mother was denied visitation,
had arranged to hold the wake in "a run-down storage building on the
grounds of Our Lady of Prompt Succor Church." At first none of the lawyers
helped him. To quote Father Thompson's words again: "Life was a little
harder for him because he had lost his left arm in an accident, but none of
the local lawyers would touch the case."
Several of my students had picked up on other stories that day. There was
one about "the young and the determined" on Wall Street. Someone else
wanted to discuss the phenomenon of Bill Gates's wealth: "If you laid his
money out in $i bills end to end it would make a trail that would go back
and forth to the moon 15.8 times." But I could not shake out of my mind the
story of Mr. Oliver, a man who was ashamed to deny his mother the dignity
of a decent visitation. When I returned to class the next day I asked my stu-
dents: Is it not the shame of a poor man, his plain indignation, that we—
precisely as readers of Marx—should see as a weapon in a class struggle?
The editors of Class and Its Others, as well as the contributors, would be in-
terested, I believe, in addressing and refining the above question that I had
Foreword — ix
posed to my students. They would do so partly because they rightly under-
stand that it's never just the economy, stupid! And partly also because they
signal in this volume their clear commitment to sharpening traditional per-
ceptions of class: "We are keen to enlarge the domain of class narrative and
widen the affective register of class politics."
Why is this necessary?
The editors are in agreement with Raymond Williams who wrote that
there were diverse concepts of class present in Marxism and that they make
their appearance in "a whole range of contemporary discussion and contro-
versy . . . usually without clear distinction." However, the editors, especially
Resnick and Wolff, also share a history of negotiating these contending
meanings in order to establish a concept of class that is particular to Marx
himself. This concept is different both from the two-class theory of tradi-
tional Marxism as well as the alternative theories of differential class forma-
tions in the writings of Nicos Poulantzas, Erik Olin Wright, Barbara and
John Ehrenreich, among others. In their founding work, Knowledge and
Class, Resnick and Wolff have put forward the reading of "class as process"
in Marx's writings. In this interpretation, Marx's work is an explanation of
class processes and their relationship to the processes of interpersonal domi-
nation and property ownership as conditions of one another's existence.
The opposition to essentialist and fixed notions of class was announced in
Resnick and Wolff's declaration: "Class is an adjective, not a noun." More
recently, this dynamic, nonessentialist notion of class was taken up and
elaborated in Gibson-Graham's influential book, The End of Capitalism (As
We Knew It). Like the latter work, Class and Its Others takes on the task of
enriching our understanding of class. It does so by prompting us to see in a
broad range of subject positions the possibility of class identifications and
the promise of discerning—and protesting—exploitation in places previ-
ously repressed.
A few years ago, in their introductory remarks to the volume Marxism in
the Postmodern Age, Antonio Callari et al. had remarked on the intellectual
project of a mature Marxism that might be called "anti-economism." They
added: "Insights from poststructuralist and postmodern thought have been
woven into Marxian discourse in ways that have both challenged and ex-
tended traditional Marxism. The works of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida,
and Jean-Francois Lyotard, among many others, have raised profound ques-
tions about the centrality of master narratives of unidirectional progress"
(1995, 6). The essays in Class and Its Others, to my mind, repeat that gesture
but also inscribe a difference. They critically foreground poststructuralist is-
sues of language and articulation, and hence rescue class from its traditional
a priori status; at the same time, going beyond the duties of opening the