College Library Browsing #3

 “Class – the New Critical Idiom,”by Gary Day, 2001

(This is the third in a series of 4 looking at purely academic books, as I’ve run out of books by public intellectuals or left authors.)

The title is somewhat of a joke, as the concept of ‘class’ is several hundred years old.  It refers to the ignoring of class by bourgeois politics and post-modern and corporate academe.  In this book Day does an historical analysis of the development of modern classes in England, bolstered by the literature of the time.  His focus on England starts with the medieval chivalric period, continuing through the English Renaissance using Shakespeare, then to the English Revolution and “Paradise Lost;” the rudimentary capitalism of the 1700s shown by way of Fielding, Defoe, Johnson, Pope and Adam Smith; the Industrial Revolution and Scott and Dickens; to capitalist modernity in its various forms - and then post-modernity.  The latter has been defined as being ‘incredulous over meta-narratives,' which means it doesn't like systemic thinking.  Too bad. 

Day uses the concepts of status, ‘station’ and culture to make more subtle distinctions within class, while highlighting literature as a double-edged sword regarding various stages of English society. It is double-edged in the sense of being both conformist and/or subversive.  In the process of identifying class, he doesn’t use the concepts of "class in itself" and "class for itself," thus making class more invisible in certain periods.  So there is a bit of a wobble in his thinking, especially when he discusses the English Revolution, which set royalty against the rising bourgeoisie, and later in the 1700s when the market began to take hold in England.  He thinks that if the working class is not a majority, then class does not exist – something that E.P. Thompson disagreed with.

While many academic Marxists concentrate on culture, this book uses culture as a background to describe material class in detail.  Under capital the two main classes are those who sell their labor and those who profit from it; those who create surplus value and those who bank or invest it; those who have to work for a living and those who can live off their inheritance, investments or rents.  As Day notes, even in early capitalist times, there were many gradations within each class - different statuses, compensation and skills - with a middle class / petit-bourgeoisie of various ‘stations’ as well.  This has not changed.  Class complexity is actually one of the key sociological difficulties in labor organizing.

DYADS

What are Day’s unique contributions? He sets up similar dyads in the transition from feudal relations to capitalism.  Basic divisions of plebeian and patrician; ‘ploughman’ and nobility; ‘commoner and ‘gentleman;’ debtor and creditor; upper and lower class and labor and capital - like a picture slowly coming into focus.  For language, it is either verbose and rhetorical or plain; words are real or deceptive; there are appearances and then there is reality; there is a separate mind and a separate body.  He links these splits to the growth of the money economy and the division of labor, both which introduced alienation into society and a metabolic split with nature. His examples in literature show the writers grappling with how the money/exchange economy was intruding into the old society of ironclad ‘natural’ roles.  Everything becomes a material transaction.  This was in the transition from land wealth to money wealth, the latter creating the modern concept of individualism.

Day explains how in the 1700s poetic heroic couplets were limited hierarchical forms of poetry imposed even on plebian writers, while the picaresque novel was an expansive and plain look at the wide impact of capital in society, though the earliest portrayals of proletarians was limited to servants. (Upstairs, Downstairs; Downton Abbey!)  The novel is considered the literary form of the bourgeoisie, usually focused on personal /individual /family issues.  This developed into the mainstream bourgeois novel we know today, though film seems to be supplanting it at this point. Day deals with the omnipresent literary topic of chastity, births out of wedlock and illicit love affairs as dire issues related to the retention of property and inheritance - a topic still plumbed.  See the series "Bridgerton" for this.

THE PROLETARIAN CLASS APPEARS IN FORCE

In the 1800s class becomes prominent as the aristocracy and the capitalist class joined hands in various ways.  Engels writes of the English proletariat and Tom Paine manifestos for them, while others – Walter Scott or the Romantics – dream of a long-lost medieval English isle or a time before machines. This reactionary yearning for medievalism or deep ecology is with us even today. The reverberations of the French Revolution in the 1790s in England increased English government and business oppression but also class cohesion and understanding.  Chartist proletarian writers attempted to propel working-class political rights like voting, but they still accepted capitalism. Attempts by writers like Dickens to emphasize the humanity of both rich and poor ignored the economic and unequal nature of their actual relation.  As if both were stranded on a desert isle with no hope of escape! This is part of the ongoing failure of humanism as an ideology.  The beginning leisure industry promoted crude and conformist music hall fare among workers while the aesthetic movement promoted pleasure for the upper classes.  As Marx pointed out the commodity form must be obscured, so Day thinks these examples show there is an inherent bias in capitalism against clear representation. Diversion, misrepresentation, misdirection and invisibility are those tools.

MODERNISM

Day sees the advent of modernism in the 1900s to be mostly about raising form over content; separating itself from ‘the masses’ as ‘high’ culture, and concentrating on the individual, all steps away from the naturalistic/realist model of writing and more proletarian ways of thinking.  He cites T.S. Eliot, Virginia Wolff and E.M. Forster as evidence.  This is part of how the abstract money and exchange economy intruded into literature, reflecting the capitalist division between mental and physical labor, promoting a dynamic away from a class understanding by writers who more and more identified as purely 'mental.'

Day reviews some English proletarian writing and films in the 20^th Century, citing Robert Tressell’s “Ragged Trousered Philanthropists” and a few proletarian novels and films of the 1930s – though none challenged the class structure.  On the other hand Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier” explained the passivity of the working class due to its conditions of life.  In the ‘50s and ‘60s the middle class grew, blue collar jobs declined and new industries emerged.  Instead of class solidarity, the focus for culture and politics became working class culture and its unique consumerism.

Like many British leftists, Day’s idea of the working class is limited to blue collar work, not white or 'pink' collar or retail workers.  Day undermines the myth that British workers were becoming middle class as statistically untrue; and illustrates how the made-up Thatcherite term of "underclass" was intentionally deceptive.  The culture industry emerges fully during this period as a pacification program, but Day points out that workers, especially young ones, don’t kowtow to this hegemony automatically, even making end-runs around it.  Day ends with a discussion of anti-class methods like post-structuralism and "micro-struggles" and micro-aggressions.

This book is an excellent example of how class influences culture, especially writing, but also delves into the vagaries of class stratification.  It could be valuable for writers, historians and Marxist sociologists, but with limited use to anyone else.

Prior blog reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left:  “Citizen Tom Paine,” “The Young Karl Marx,” “Factory Days,” "Chavs" or words like “Engels” or phrases like ‘proletarian literature,’ ‘proletarian fiction’ or ‘working class literature.’

And I got it at the University of Georgia Library!

The Kulture Kommissar

March 10, 2021