Robert Putnam's "Our Kids": Compelling Argument Poorly Argued

There’s an epidemic out there. Poor kids these days don’t have a chance, and it’s getting worse.

Robert Putnam, with the help of an uncredited assistant (on the cover, at least), gathered storied of young adults and melded those stories of haves and have-nots with larger statistical trends to tell the story of how the educated class is ,moving away from the uneducated class. There are copious charts and graphs.

I really wanted to like this, since it covers a lot of the same ground as the recent Charles Muarry Book “Coming Apart,” and for ideological reasons I don’t want to read Muarry. The problem is that there’s no hook. The kid’s stories should be what grips you and pulls you into the text, but it doesn’t work. I think there’s too many so I can’t fully live their stories, or perhaps Putnam and company are better analytical thinkers than storytellers for generating pathos. Whatever it was, I was unengaged. It was good enough to finish, but it did not compel me to write marginalia. If you have to read this for a class, it will be readable but it might not pull you in if it is leisure time reading.

The Forces of Capital Are Strong: Micah Uetricht's "Strike for America"

I didn’t read this when it first came out. I figured that living in Chicago and participating in the rallies  and being on the CORE Facebook group gave me a sense of the strike that would be hard to replicate in a little book. I was wrong. Uetricht lays out the background and the events of the strike in the first half of the book in a depth that I was unfamiliar with. For that I’m grateful that I read it

                He then lays out the future of CTU and unionism as a whole, and I wish I didn’t read it now, because with Rauner in office in Illinois, the strike now feels like a high-water mark of what is possible in respect for the service professionals in Illinois – this book is a reminder of what could be with proper unity (and voter turnout) against the forces of “reform” that want to marketize every personal transaction.

                Structurally, there are some issues. Uetrucht likes to repeat scenes, which is odd, given the brevity of the book. There are multiple events given paragraph-length treatments more than once. Since It only takes a couple of hours to read, perhaps that should have been more heavily edited. There’s also three separate points where the reporting turns to first person. Since so much of it is not in first person, the inclusion of the authorial “I” is a bit jarring. I do get it though. I was at rallies for the teachers as a former teacher (nonunion though) myself. I felt solidarity with them, and the feeling around town was electric. I had my own red shirt that brought cheers and fives from strangers. It is that feeling of unity and solidarity that I wish we could feel all the time, and not just as teachers fight for respect from an elected government. In spite of those flaws, this is a worthy read.

"Cubed" by Nikil Saval: A Novel History of the Place of Work

This is one of those books that ended up getting a good bit of press because it was a novel way of looking at something that is an everyday thing.

The way that white collar workers do their work didn’t just happen that way, but it was a result of deliberate choices – from the architecture of the buildings that the work is done in to the furniture that the workers sit on. I hadn’t thought too deeply about it, thinking that the way things are was just a bit like the way things were, only with computers. I was wrong, and Saval tracks the changes, focused on the United States from the industrial revolution on. The white-collar worker has not been devoid of the standardization and alienation that the blue-collar worker had and rebelled against. The white-collar worker just never saw their white-collar chains; instead, they looked up, hoping to move up the ladder (no matter how false that metaphor is or was). 

The potential for striving has, writ large, been the barrier to class to recognition of the white-collar worker for generations. The lack of upward mobility except for into the white-collar ranks is what led to unionism and workers improving their lots. The myth of upward mobility in white-collar terms is a form of social control that is not readily seen.

Saval tracks this, and it makes me think if this has been a deliberate move. As production has been mechanized, there are fewer production workers and more support staff in ancillary roles to production. As more workers move out of production and the workforce is more and more professionalized, white-collar membership is the mass of workers. It is the cube that keeps them apart and alienated. Maybe it is a prison of sorts.

 Me?

I’m not part of this at all.

My office has a door.

"Chavs" by Owen Jones: Deserved More Attention in the States

I wrote a couple of friends from the Isles to explain what a Chav was to me. It’s a term we don’t have here in the states, and I was looking for an equivalent. The best I got was that it represents rednecks and white trash. The coding in the states is a little deeper. Most of our hate is race based. There is some class based hatred and demonization, but for us the race has been the easiest component of othering a population. We do have class-based hatred, with politicians speaking out against welfare queens and food stamp recipients, but I can’t hear those appeals without hearing the dog-whistle that goes along with it.

That I had to ask people about what the title of the book really means could be why it didn’t get the best play on this side of the Atlantic. The class-based othering that goes on, as depicted by Jones, is alien to me in terms of class. I think it is part of the unique histories of our countries. The English ended slavery earlier than we did and we imported our race-based exploitation to our shores where they kept theirs off shore in the various colonies. It was only with decolonization after the Second World War that I am aware of huge race based hatreds. Unless you count the Irish. They have always been dehumanized.

So it was with a pretty blank slate that I read this book.

There is a lot of explanation of how England turned during the Thatcher era, and it coincides with what I know about this country with Reagan, but only more so. But it is not just Thatcher-bashing. Jones looks at the whole of contemporary British society in terms of the demonization of the working class. It is familiar, and it makes me think a couple of things. First, is it right as a leftist to point fingers at Thatcher and Reagan if they seem to just have been agents of larger structural change that was happening in the western world? Would the devastation of the unions and the bifurcation of society between “Makers and Takers” have happened even if there were different characters in those roles? Is neoliberalism just how capitalism adjusts to productivity gains, siphoning the gains to the upper class and eliminating the middle class?

Secondly, what is the role of racial hatred in the states with regard to the class based hatred that Jones chronicles? Is it an impediment to class based identity? I’m not sure if Chavs can supply the answers to these in the context of either country, but it does lay the groundwork for the structure of thought needed for analysis. I look forward to reading his more recent release. Maybe it will get some resect on these shores.