Research and Responsibility

In Monday’s seminar we spent much of the class discussing the implications of Professor Rockman’s arguments about the relationship between the success of Early Republic ‘market revolution’ and the desperate material reality that many wage workers faced. As a productive post-seminar discussion, I wonder if it is worth interrogating the mechanics of incorporating such disparate types of evidence into a coherent body of work and argument—specifically, in relation our own projects. We are all in the process of building projects based on archival materials that are, oftentimes, unwieldy and contradictory. I mention this because I think it is useful, as we conclude the seminar readings, to consider not only scholars’ arguments, historiographical interventions, and methodology, but to also pay close attention to their organizational strategies. While none of us are completing full-length monographs for this seminar, our original work should provide a contribution to the historiography. The question then, in relation to Professor Rockman’s, and others’ works, should be, not simply what is his argument but how did he do it and are there elements of this approach that might be productively incorporated into my own work?

In the case of Scraping By, Professor Rockman emphasizes the day-to-day material struggles of the laboring class of Early Republic Baltimore, and, as he suggested in seminar, he consciously stopped short of suggesting intentionality on the part of historical actors. That is, while he found it acceptable to construct arguments based on peoples’ wages and subsistence strategies, he avoided moving into the realm of psychology. How workers felt about their plight very often was not an essential component of this work; this was likely the direct result of the limitations of source materials. Catalogs of wages did not, for example, include notations about workers’ thoughts on receiving one dollar each day as compensation for their labor, and, even if they had, it might be argued that these notations would be problematic. Clearly, it might be argued that, by avoiding suggestions of relational-consciousness based on material conditions, or even—indeed—based on more overtly confessional materials, scholars can avoid stepping in to the role of historical narrator and retain some modicum of objectivity. This, I think, is a useful lesson for any project based on source materials.

However, it might also be worth considering a more incorporative cultural reading of certain evidence. If, for example, workers receive low, uncertain wages, which are spent on basic subsistence and alcohol, is the scholar necessarily constrained from suggesting certain potential psychological implications of this behavior based on cultural norms? And while this was certainly not the aim of Professor Rockman’s work, poverty has cultural implications, which transcend basic survival. Simply put, I think it is worth considering, as we complete our research objectives, the interplay of material evidence and cultural analysis based on the tactics deployed in our course readings.

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.

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?

An Afterthought…

After our discussion on Monday I was thinking about what we discussed about race relations in Baltimore and Stephen’s question about if the story could be written about a different time and place and it made me think about how gender relations also contributed to the limited amount of resistance the working poor showed to their condition (which seemed to be a consistent theme of our discussion in class). While the book discusses many situations and realities in which gender plays an important role (for example how some of the gentry was interested in the plight of seamstresses) it doesn’t go into much the relationships between male and female laborers in regards to the workplace (as opposed to the home where we learnt it was cheaper to get a wife than a housekeeper). While I don’t think further discussion of this would build more on the book’s thesis, I think it would further the discussion we were having in class about the limited amounts of resistance that occurred so I thought I’d throw it out there. Hope all is well.

Class as Economic Power Relations

Greetings!

Following up yesterday's discussion of class as economic power relations, I wanted to send citations for two short essays that try to establish this definition:

“Class and the History of Working People in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 25 (Winter 2005): 527-535.

“The Contours of Class in the Early Republic City.” Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas 1 (Winter 2004): 93-109. 

I also thought you might be interested in seeing the program for a conference this coming fall in Philadelphia about Scraping By:

http://www.librarycompany.org/Economics/2009Conference/index.htm

Framing Essay 4/12/09 for Scraping By

Kristina Kelleher

In and out of seminar in the last few weeks, we have focused a lot of our discussion around the idea of agency in historical writing. I found that Scraping By articulated the difficulties that the poor common laborers of early America faced without an over emphasis on proving or providing agency to these laborers. Personally, in many ways I found the consistent look at structures that continued to hold these laborers—black and white, free and slave, female and male—throughout the book painted a fuller picture of these laborers lives and the effects of the capitalist market system on them than other texts that focus more on providing agency for the subjects of research. I think this would be an interesting topic of discussion in seminar tomorrow so I will expound on it here further.

For example, Professor Rockman describes how in the 1770’s Maryland law made it illegal to import new slaves into the state but select people and groups were allowed resettle their slaves in the city, highlighting who had the ability to alter and avoid punishment under the law (pages 36-37.) He likewise describes how laborers were largely left off city directories (page 76.) Rockman also provides examples of how men could take advantage of women, particularly those whose sexual reputations were compromised (page 118.) Rockman also describes how white male day laborers were largely unable to secure employment in racially exclusive job sites, which evidence argues they would have preferred (page 56.) The same principle of uneven power dynamics is reinforced when he describes how the category of “free” being defined as all those who weren’t slaves and therefore could claim control over their own body, work and wages, made little sense when “married women could not own their own wages, free people of color could not testify against whites in court, and free white men forfeited wages they had already earned if they left a job prematurely” (page 242.) In my own eyes, power ought to be a central issue in any discussion of the early market economy, since free and equal power positions to enter into contracts is exactly what’s assumed by free market ideology.

Rockman does provide numerous examples of agency on behalf of common laborers, such as laborers selecting to enter the almshouse at given times—including being able to navigate the roadblocks set up for doing so, females repurchasing their year-long street grazing pigs (page 178), slave women negotiating hiring out agreements with their owners (page 124) and females taking advantage of the fact that they would not be imprisoned for debts not paid, to name a few. Yet, he also consistently reinforces what the power dynamics of the time (and perhaps today) really were. For example, he describes how a system of needing approval from a ward manager to enter the almshouse was instituted—as well as how some laborers were able to get around it (Pages 208 and 209.) It is not that I think providing agency for the poor is bad but rather I think it is important to recall how the power structures of the time and place were designed to, and often effectively did, take power and agency away from those without power, such as the common laborer. For example, I agree with Rockman’s argument when he writes that the presence of female prostitution might more aptly be seen as indicating poor women’s financial desperation than attesting to their agency (Page 129.)

On a different note, I also think we should discuss how the ideas of character and reputation (see discussion beginning on page 117 regarding women seeking domestic service jobs, for example) are seen in Scraping By, particularly in relation to what we’ve already talked and read about relating to the development of middle class ideas of respectability.

Thoughts on the Antislavery Debate

While today’s conversation was rooted in the roots and causes of the antislavery movement I found it to have a lot of broader implications to history more generally.  We spent a lot of time arguing not about which arguments we found to be the most salient, but instead what exactly it was each of the writers was saying, and what differentiated their arguments from one another.  One of my biggest frustrations with the texts we read for class was the different authors’ insistence on emphasizing distinctions between their arguments.  Every time they made a concession to one of their colleagues, the historians insisted on also making a claim about how a term was being misused, or an unfounded assumption was being made, or how the logic of a hypothetical was faulty—ultimately concluding that the author had missed the point altogether.  I think people’s frustration in the nitpicky attacks of the authors was apparent in our conversation and I think our talk brings up questions about how we should think about historiographical dialogues.

             It felt to me as though The Anti-Slavery Debate could go on forever.  Would that be productive?  If we agree that history should not engage in a futile struggle for a non-existent objective reality, should we thus expect our historians to bicker endlessly, competitively broadening the scope of historical understanding with endless possibilities?  Or instead should historians seek to work more cooperatively, not impulsively rejecting every argument that a colleague makes and attempting to collectively come to a better understanding of history?  I do not think that the various arguments were as mutually exclusive as the three historians would have us believe. Could we not blend Davis and Haskall and say that people with class interests behaved in a way that was also informed by a new perception of personal connection to slavery and a widened sense of their ability to do something about it?  I don’t have an answer.  I think that there are problems with the type of competitive writing we just read, but I also think that such competition compels history forward and weeds out poorly constructed interpretations.  The answer perhaps lies somewhere in between.  I think it would be worth talking about the way the job of the individual historian relates to field of history in general, and the work of other practitioners within it. 

            At the end of the discussion Walter Johnson was brought up and I think that these works relate very much to his observation that in our attempts to understand the history of a collection of “rational” individual actors we assume a self-interested liberal subject.  One of the biggest objections that Davis and Ashworth had with Haskall’s argument was that it only explained what made abolition conceivable and actionable, not what actually compelled individuals.  Davis asked us to look at the interests of the abolitionists.  In order to explain why this particular group of people came to find this deeply entrenched institution reprehensible at this particular time we have to look to their individual interests—which means we have to think about how supporting something like abolition could indirectly serve to reinforce and maintain power, status, and material wealth of the supporters.  I think this tendency provides compelling evidence for just what Johnson was talking about.  While I don’t agree with a lot of what Haskall has to say, I did appreciate the fact that his argument did not assume the motivating force of every historical actor.  He argues that the market made it possible for people to think of slavery as something worth protesting and that some individuals thus did.  While I don’t think it is wrong to interrogate groups of people’s interests, I think we should be aware of the fact that “interests” usually implies the self-interested motives of a liberal subject, which can be a very restricted lens to view the world.