Living Class: Response to Scraping By

I suppose that it is little surprising that Professor Rockman's book addresses many of the issues that have played out in his seminar this semester, but I think it made it hard in class to focus on any one of the arguments he raises in the book. I also think that it made it difficult for us to discern some of the theoretical positions that Rockman took in Scraping By: since it lays out explicitly many of the themes that have been implicit in our study, it was hard to see what was special about the book.

As such I would like to focus my response on two theoretical statements Rockman articulates in the text, and then critique how they play out in his methodology. I think that one of the most essential passages in the book occurs in the introduction when Rockman writes that

For the workers portrayed in this book, class experience was waiting every February for the harbor to thaw so that low-end jobs might resume. Class consciousness was knowing the proper pose of deference to get hired. Class Struggle was trying to meet the rent and scavenging for firewood to stay warm during winter. (Rockman, 11)

Although this seems like a descriptive statement about life in Baltimore, it is really a theoretical rejection of analysis that elevate class consciousness or class struggle, as these identifiers are traditionally understood, as requisites for the existence of class phenomena. As we discussed in seminar, this theoretical motivation lead Rockman to write a highly material history detailing the ways that individuals were impacted by social order in early American Baltimore.

One might contrast this understanding of class with that of Thompson who, while also focusing on experience, emphases that the emergence of a "class consciousness" that ties members of the social group together. On the surface Rockman's work agrees with Midleton and Smith's piece that we read early this year in the belief that class is a "constitutive element of social relationships emerging from inequalities in material conditions and social and cultural capital that serves as a primary way of signifying relationships of power." (Middleton and Smith, 11) I think that Rockman expands on this understanding when he argues that class is "mutually constitutive" with other social divisions typically invoked by the terms race and gender. On this front, I think that Rockman puts forward a satisfying way to quench the puerile desire, evident in a lot of social theory, to select from "race, class and gender" a primary driver of historical events. I think that Rockman demonstrates that it is impossible to separate the effect of racial divisions, or gender divisions from one another, or from the impact of class divisions in a market society.

The danger in Rockman's approach, is that his theoretical position makes it easy to see class divisions at work, and difficult to identify situations when class is not relevant to the history. For Rockman, class emerges in the every day struggle of individuals who, by living different lives in relation to the market for labor power, create experiences segregated by social divisions. But everyone fights daily battles, and those contests will forever be shaped by divisions that will always haunt society. I think that this is defnitly a danger, but it is not clear to me whether the ubiquity of class under Rockman's coneptualizetion is problematic or whether it harms his work.

I suppose that one way of classifying Rockman's approach is as a recapitulation of Marx's famous claim that "the history of all hiterto exsisting society is the history of class struggles." I think that Rockman's affirmation that class is mutually constutive with racial, ethinic and gender divisions is accually analytically similar to Marx's argument that these kinds of disputes are simply class conflicts in disquise.

The second... Have to go to sea for a couple hours, will complete when I return.

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