Afterward- Scraping By

Afterward- Scraping By

During this week’s discussing of Scraping By, we focused on Professor Rockman’s definitions of class and capitalism and their implications on his analysis of lower class life in Baltimore during the Early Republic. As Professor Rockman explained, his study was based on a “stripped-down” construction of class, which he defined as a set of power relations within capitalism. He drew parallels with other categories of social difference based in power relations, such as gender, defined as power relations within patriarchy, and racism, defined as power relations within white supremacy. This characterization presents a challenge to conventional notions of class, which are centered on class-consciousness and identity. These dominant models posit class as the defining factor of material realities and lived experiences, leading to debates between scholars in various fields regarding the relative oppression of historical subjects. Prevailing definitions of class also produce questions about why proletarian communities throughout time and space did or did not develop class-consciousness, and why they were or were not moved to resistance.

As Rockman argued, and many of us agreed, a “stripped-down” definition of class frees historians and their readers from these futile debates. The construction of class that Rockman employs in this book assumes that capitalism creates a division between those who sell their labor and those who buy it, and that the prosperity of the latter is contingent on the oppression of the former. By virtue of their position in the political economy, those who sell their labor form a socioeconomic class and share similar lived experiences. To say that class shapes these experiences is not to negate the effects of other aspects of identity, such as race, gender, sexuality, and ability, nor is it to preference class over other categories of difference. By constructing class as an operative, but not totalizing, force, Rockman and other historians are attempting to push past the struggles of identity politics in order to explore material reality of historical subjects in classed societies. In his book, Rockman acknowledged the ways in which gender, race, and legal status created different limitations and opportunities for different people, but focused on the similar strategies that people of the same class developed in order to survive.

In addition to advancing our understanding of class in relation to other categories of difference, this definition of class moves us away from debates about consciousness and resistance. This model challenges the dominant, teleological understanding of class, in which the natural end of classed society should be working class consciousness of capitalist power relations and resistance to these structures. It shifts our attention from questions about how and why people mobilize around a shared class identity, and towards questions about their material reality within class structures. For this reason, Rockman’s book focuses on how people lived rather than how they saw themselves. At the same time, Rockman recognizes that class-consciousness was obscured by race, gender, and legal status, and that perceived differences prevent people of the same class from recognizing their commonalities. In class, he interrogated the Marxist notions of “false consciousness” projected onto workers by employees, and acknowledged the role of workers in producing these divisions. (Compensating for their class position with “wages of whiteness,” masculinity, etc.)

Despite the fact that considerable attention was given to this subject during our discussion, I am still confused about a few things. Firstly, Rockman’s paradigm reconstructs “class” to mirror definitions of other categories of difference, and insists that all aspects of identity are intersecting rather than in competition with one another. At the same time, in foregrounding other differences with similarities based in class, and acknowledging the role of various forms of social difference in preventing the formation of class consciousness, it seems that this model is still saying that class is different from all the rest. What I am still struggling with is how to qualify this difference, and how the distinct qualities of class affect our understanding of other aspects of identity. Secondly, while I do not believe it is the role of the historian to prescribe solutions to historical problems, I am not sure what to do with these new tools for analysis. This book made me question how I think about class, and pushed my understanding beyond identity and resistance. At the same time, while I think that defining class in terms of consciousness is limiting, I also think it is important to draw upon the experiences and struggles of historical subjects to desconstruct power relations in the present. I disagree with Mike’s argument that this definition of class is merely descriptive and not causal or analytic- this model clearly identifies capitalism as the cause of class formation, and analyzes how people live within class structures (without claiming class as the single or central factor). However, it seems that by ignoring how people understand themselves, we lose our ability to understand what drives people to resist. We risk forfeiting answers to important, albeit limiting, questions about how people come to see themselves as part of an oppressed class and take action. (And in doing so, we lose our ability to use this information to resist against contemporary power structures, which of course are based in the past.) How then, do we balance a history based in material reality with questions of subjectivity and consciousness?

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