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.

The Concept of Class in Early America and its Historiography

Since we are a seminar that is directly addressing the "problem of class," perhaps it is most valuable to begin our discussion with Gienapp's assertion that class divisions in early America are a "myth" produced by the New Left and the "Politically Correct" academy. Gienapp writes through a critique of a particular class based historical analysis, Sellers' work on Jacksonian Politics, but he also implies a wider attack on the use of "class" in the study of history. Because much of Gienapp's work is directly concerned with Sellers, so we must infer how he objects to class based history in general. I propose that we begin by discussing Gienapp's critique so that we can situate our discussion of the other pieces in the historiography.

But in order to understand Gienapp, we might start by looking at his own historical situation. Gienapp spends a lot of time labeling Sellers as an historian "firmly rooted" in the academic climate of the 1960's. He contends that Sellers is part of a mislead "counterculture" and that he produces a "polemical and at times bizarre interpretation of Jacksonian America." (233) But while Gienapp is quick to dismiss Sellers 1991 work as a callback to a confused 1960's, he does not recognize that he is also writing in a deeply polemic time. Across academic disciplines, the end of the Cold War was taken as an intellectual victory for American Liberalism and the market system. Gienapp is correct then when he states that Sellers' work is out of place in 1991, but he takes the current political climate as reason to dismiss class as a means of analysis. As we have discussed in class, the impact of this intellectual climate on social history was to minimize class and elevate 'multicultural' categories like race, gender and ethnicity. This is important for us to recognize because contrary to his claims, Gienapp is himself taking the easy political road.

What is more, Gienapp's piece is written for a policy journal. Although this might seem irrelevant to the subject matter, I think that the study of "policy" requires an implicit endorsement of the American political system: if one wishes only to optimize political policy, then it is necessary to believe that the American political system is, at the very least, fixable. In fact, many places in the text, Gienapp suggests that class history is not compatible with the study of American Democracy (See his discussion on page 251). I think that this kind of analysis is confined by the very paradoxical promises made by the American system that we have hitherto studied in early American History.

If we wish to identify the impact of class on American history, then it is necessary to liberate ourselves from faith in the political system in this country. The culture of equality in American politics is predicated on the expansion of political rights to those who have frequently have not had political representation. But as we have seen so far in our studies, even as America represented an expansion of democratic politics to the many, that expansion takes place without an agreement of what democracy is, or what democratic representation means. I think that the conclusion to draw from Morgan and Bouton is that the expansion of democratic rights is not a political liberation of any kind, but rather a political distraction that occurs, never at great risk, as a means of quelling inherent conflicts that do not fit into easy classification according to liberal political philosophy. This is the intellectual landscape we work from when we analyze class in early America: as long as we maintain allegiance with the American system, our historiography is subject the to the history.

With this in mind, I think that we can move on to Johnson's call for a new mode of social history. Johnson makes one of his most important points when he notes that the current understanding of agency is dependent on the historical conditions in the western world.

[The definition of agency] is saturated with the categories of nineteenth-century liberalism, a set of terms which were themselves worked out in self-conscious philosophical opposition to the condition of slavery. To put this another way: the term "agency" smuggles a notion of the universality of a liberal notion of self hood, with its emphasis on independence and choice, right into the middle of a conversation about slavery against which that supposedly natural condition was originally defined...[ending] up with a more-or-less rational choice model of human being. (115)

This argument is essential because it shows how the category of analysis, in this case agency of the enslaved, is a product of the very historical subject that it is trying to define. Johnson is referring to the fact that western liberalism predicated on a ridged individualism that requires an endorsement of a certain psychological state as "rational" and everything else as irrational or even inhuman. Johnson contends that to a historian operating within the tradition of liberalism, which defines humanity in contrast to slavery, slavery is inhuman phenomenon. Johnson's contention is that while slavery is a terrible part of human history, it is an inseparable part of our humanity. As he shows, the institution of slavery actually "makes use" of humanity through psychological terror and abuse. (116) Johnson's is a crucial insight about the categories of enslaved and free and human and inhuman in early American history.

If we are to apply Johnson's article to our efforts as historians of class, then it is necessary to make an analogous insight about the role that class plays in the liberal model of the individual as a rational actor. In reformulating Johnson's argument of agency among the enslaved to an analysis of class, we arrive at essentially the reverse. According to the American liberal tradition, humanity and equality are defined by the participation in a democratic society and equal participation in the government. Slavery, the ultimate political unfreedom, is on this view the ultimate inhumanity.

But as a critical reading of Gienapp shows, the liberal understanding of humanity as participation in the American democratic system is incompatible with an analysis of class. It is not that class is incompatible with the American political system, but rather that the liberal understanding of American politics does not leave room for class. As long as individuals are guaranteed equal political rights, they fit the liberal definition of the human condition.

More to come as an afterwards....

Morality vs Values in Bouton's Analysis

Ordinary Folk. The Common Folk. “The People.” Ordinary Americans. The Middle Sort. The Lower Sort. The Farmers. The Ordinary People. As was mentioned in class, Bouton makes a concerted effort in use ordinary language in Taming Democracy. But whether he is trying to model his diction on every day usage from the time, using words he found in the documents of the epoch, and especially if he is making the claim that he is in tune with the struggle of early Americas, Bouton makes an explicit political choice when he uses these pseudo-historical identifiers.

Like many historians, Bouton uses the language of the era whenever possible. But the terms that he borrows do not reflect pluralism. Rather, what Bouton copies from the ordinary American discourse defines in his text a working set of ideals. And rather than demonstrating the egalitarianism that he wishes to convey, Bouton actually embraces terms generated by the very historical and economic conditions that he attempts to condemn. What is more, Bouton's adoption of terms like “the little man,” “lower sort,” “the middle sort,” and also “the big man,” “the gentry,” “the federalist” Bouton reinforces a perception that these social positions are normal in society.

Stephen is right that Bouton's choice to use these kinds of terms reflects a sort of moral honesty in the analysis. However, Shephen goes on to discuss Bouton's moral language as "value laden terms” which make the analysis pure. Stephen is close to an important point. Because history is a limited endeavor that is never scientific, its practitioners often find it fruitful to flesh their own value judgments to the surface. If assumptions are explicit rather than implicit, their influence is better understood. Yet Stephen is wrong to characterize morals as mere value judgments.

Value judgments are methodologically necessary because they are a consequence of how we see the world. This relates to my point when I quoted Marx's passage on the Camera Obscura. Bouton engages historical materialism when he looks for the material and economic interests that drove the political and social movements of the time. Granted, Marx need not be followed in his entirety in order to make use of his material framework of history. But one of Marx’s most important contributions is the idea that social analysis becomes empirical precisely by admitting that value judgments are materially constructed and unavoidable in analysis. The famous version of this argument is Althusser on Marx and science. My point is that morality, as applied in Taming Democracy goes beyond the value judgments that are necessary to a sound reading of history: recognizing values is no reason to adopt moral analysis. Interestingly, a careful reading of strict Marxism finds a striking absence of moral condemnation (for those of you following at home this is especially true after what Althusser terms the epistemological break between Marx's early work and his later work). Some thinkers argue that a strict Marxism does not allow for the use of terms like "just" and "unjust," or a belief in human rights. (Althusser, Can a Marxist Believe in Human Rights?)

This is important because Bouton's "moral honesty" is not analytically sound. I agree with Stephen that Bouton is unforgiving with his morals. But his strong moral stance drives him to embrace shaky distinctions between rich and poor, farmer and gentleman, and even thick and thin. (see Morris figure!)

Bouton is right to use language from the era to show how actors on both sides defined their collective selves along whatever lines that were economically advantageous. This is the strength of his work. Further, doing this is a good way to link Taming Democracy with other works we have studied so far this semester. For example, Bouton's claims about class in Pennsylvania are compatible with Morgan's argument about the economic construction of race in Virginia because the linguistic dynamics that Bouton explores during the revolution seem quite similar to what Morgan studies in the early colonial period.

But in making a moral statement about the elite actors behind the American Revolution, Bouton makes his point less convincing and leaves important elements out his story. There is a difference between showing how the historical characters spoke (defining categories of historical practice), and using the same language as a basis for categorical analysis (adopting categories of practice as categories of analysis). The terms that Bouton uses in the book embrace binaries: rich versus poor, farmer versus gentry, federalist versus anticonstitutionalist and other similar statements. From our point of view as social historians, we are used to thinking about the "gentry" as morally reprobate. Yet Bouton takes it further when he adopts a term like "federalist," which is ordinarily morally neutral, as a moral indictment.

On one hand, this kind of approach sets Bouton apart from the typical historian of American history, who tends to maintain the prevailing value system of American political discourse. I applaud Bouton for the freedom of thought that allows him to break with the typical way of speaking and thinking. And yet, on the other hand, Bouton also goes further than a rejection of typical values; he imbues his work with moral judgment. And I think that there is an analytic plight unavoidable in the use of moral terms: if the subject is either good or evil it cannot be fully understood. This linguistic suppression is also a common tool and in contemporary American Politics. Does not a binary characterization of so-called “moral” issues often serve as the ultimate distraction from important political decisions?

Similarly, Bouton's adherence to a binary distinction between farmer and gentry actually obscures subtle pluralistic and multidimensional interactions. Bouton misses the relationships between his "ordinary" farmer folk and poor city residents they sometimes fought, between poor white farmers and blacks they enslaved, and between "Ordinary Americans" and Native Americans they displaced. According to Morgan, it was precisely this kind of a trick, imposed by the ruling class in early colonial Virginia, that lead to the development of racial slavery in America. Then, elites constructed a binary between Black and White to make the disparity between rich and poor harder to perceive.

On first read, Morgan's views on the construction of race struck many of you as morally insensitive. But I think that it was only by setting down the moral framework that he correctly identifies the real trend. On the other hand, Bouton makes explicit moral judgments that can be emotionally satisfying. And yet these moral statements obscure some important aspects of the story.

I agree in full with Bouton's rejection of the ideals behind the American Revolution. Personally I would extend it to American ideals in general. But I also think that Bouton's "moral honesty" relies on his own set of ideals and I think it damages his credibility. The irony is that Bouton succeeds in showing how the morals of the era were economically constructed tools yet he does not free his own text from moral analysis.

Slavery and Capitalism at Sea

Race, it seems, is a topic of new light in recent American discussions. Some reading that I was doing recently suggested some important implications for the subject as a whole. In an enlightened account, Emma Christopher writes Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes as an analysis of race and class aboard the ships helped to synthesize racial divisions in Northern America. An historiographical argument, the book is a persuasive demonstration of the complexity and introversion of the relationships forged out of necessity on the 18th Century Atlantic. While her's is an impressive story of the dynamics of racial politics in miniature, Christopher does not sufficiently reject race as a means of analysis.

The economic structures of the era made slave ships selective towards men with an inclination towards brutality, perversion and pain. Not only the lowest of the low on the economic ladder of society, slave ship sailors were also likely to be socially deviant. Like in any horrid enterprise, the utility obtained by the slave ship sailor was not that by his captain. On the contrary, Slave sailors frequently came out of their transatlantic trips worse off then they went into them. Some of the men on these ships were literally slaves, chartered from their owners. As Christopher shows in the text, the sailor was in many cases the man "who had no other option."

Yet there was likely another trend in the capitalism of slavery. Those men who were the most willing to accept the conditions of slavery had a selective pressure towards employment in the trade. Yet who were these men who would be willing to endure the lowest of the low, but men whose liberty was already consumed by the western economic condition. After all, slavery is only the most extreme example of a long list of human offenses that really goes back as long as human history. Surely Christopher subscribes to the notion that, as she hints many times in the book, the emergence of "Freedom" in American society was in some ways a result of the nation's entanglement with the biggest unfreedom. Here we can get beyond the normative question of about the ethics of slavery.

I challenge you to find two people who would argue on that point. What rather we should ask is a question of the norms - in contrast with the normative values - in society at the time. In many ways, the slave ship sailors were the victims of social structures of oppression. Be they white, black or Queequeg, sailors were classed as an inferior group throughout the world. The men were renegades, but they were also castaways. Castaways of a global capitalist development. Slave ship sailors were like the abused children who go on to violate future generations. They were the product of the wrong of man; it is no wonder that they were particularly good at it.

We find in Christopher the interesting observation that the slave ship sailor was often treated like a slave. But what needs to be asked is whether these men were pathologically altered by the abuse. The horrid conditions on ship must have been enough to make sane men mad. So if a slave ship sailor were of any pathological character, it seems little of a stretch to say that the conditions at sea could push him over the edge into full insanity. Like any large group of people, the sailors had to have among them some insanity. This is a statistical truth. But i argue that the profession itself may have attracted people who were willing to endure abuse from above as long as they could reciprocate it on people below.

We already know that ships and the sea attracted those of unstable inclination. Who said it better than Ishmael when he tells us that "whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses and bringing up the rear of every funeral that i meet; and especially when my hypos gets such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from stepping in the street and knocking people's hats off - then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."

Clearly Melville's version of the ocean is the kind of place that makes men go insane. But on page one, we find the direct notion that men go to sea precisely because they are insane. Next to a slave ship, Ahab's Pequot seems like a bastion of level headedness and social ethic. The sheer conditions on slavers were so foul that they must have made men crazy. But the men themselves must have been somehow tolerant of the horror.

Just like Ishmael seeks the truly insane to comfort his depression, many of these men were in a subtle way seeking the ultimate unfreedom to overshadow their own oppression. But I hold both of these are the same. The insanity and the slavery, the economic structures of control and the sailors fetish for whip and shackle, these were all part of a unified social structure that in this particular case, put the most unstable at the helm of an economic construction of the category of race.

It is little mystery that slave ship sailors divided their consciousness so between their attachment to black members of their crew, and their participation in the oppression of African slaves. Their place in the capitalist system made them both strangely resistant to and the ultimate product of the capitalist ideology.

Slave ship sailors seldom made free contracts to set away to sea. Rather, they frequently came to their start in the industry by waking up to its stench when it roused them of a hangover. As Christopher notes in the book, many slave sailors were crimped onto their first voyage by gangs of pimps and gamblers who sold the men to the captains of ships. At times, black men from all corners of the Atlantic made up to 1/5th of the slave ship crews. But even men whose skin color did not preclude them from the pursuit of liberty and happiness, these white sailors were also slaves to their profession. Their captains were also captains of a capitalist industry devoted to oppression.

But to stay competitive, a slave ship captain knew he had to pick his crew wisely. Just like Ahab knew that the best way to maintain control over his men was allow his own madness to its self consume them, slave ship captains chose to make their ships ripe with perversion. Christopher notes that even in an epoch that normalized abuses that would be prosecuted today, an even in an industry whose brutality was ritual, slave ships stood out as uniquely disturbing. As hoards of captured Africans suffered in the hold below, the sailors on deck remained in a cacophony of exploitation. Murders were common, rape was rampant, and each man lived in such a fear of his comrades that it surpassed the exhaustion of life at sea.

One prevalent trend that Christopher observes in the history is that slave ship sailors had no intrinsic reason to believe themselves different from the blacks in their crew. But these men, selected for their perversion and brewed into insanity, were convinced to draw a line where none existed before.

These were the men who chose "race" as a discourse in America. Slave ship sailors were the victims as well as the ultimate perpetrates of oppression. These men were socialized to be monstrosities by an ideology of domination. It is little wonder that these men, oppressed by the perversions of a Capitalist society, were themselves perverse. But why do we today subscribe to a category developed as an ideological project and implemented by men on a course of insanity. Slave ships may have only been a microcosm of early American society, but even if "race" had origins other than the sea, it is nonetheless a construct of mania.

The madness has corrupted American history, and I do not deny that it is still at work today. Many take this as reason to reinforce the importance of racial discourse in modern society. But why do we continue to subscribe an insane designation that descends from the very oppression we wish to overcome?