“Red for Ed” Arizona teachers’strike rally, April 26, 2018. Photo by Gage Skidmore. Creative Commons, 2.0.
Civil society…is the political terrain on which the dominant class organizes its hegemony, and the terrain on which opposition parties and movements organize, win allies, and build their social power.
—David Forgacs, The Antonio Gramsci Reader
But community-based strategies can’t succeed unless they pay attention to the trenches of American class formation.
—Ira Katznelson, City Trenches (1981)
In the most recent article in this five-part series, which is about trying to find a durable basis for a center-left social and political solidarity, I took some time out to introduce James C. Scott’s self-described “paper-thin theory of hegemony.” My aim in doing so was to bring the concept of hegemony firmly back down to earth after having considered Chantal Mouffe’s “post-structuralist” account in the previous installment.
The contrast I have continually drawn across the different parts of this series—between the implicit “thin theory of hegemony” informing Theda Skocpol’s call for a renewed civic nationalism on the one hand, and the “thick hegemony” of Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic democracy on the other—ended up in an unexpected convergence. In her more recent work on Left Populism, Mouffe has lately been exploring the prospects for establishing “a new hegemonic order within the constitutional liberal democratic framework” since she admits that what she calls autonomous struggles, when taken in the aggregate, “amount to a system of differences that can’t form a properly hegemonic bloc.”
Once this “thin hegemonic consensus” was exposed, it became possible to begin to think about what an explicitly counter-hegemonic project might look like, as opposed to just calling for a return to some version of the prior, twentieth century American liberal class compromises. Genies don’t go easily back into their bottles.
It’s worth noting that at the time of publication, the book didn’t seem to get very many critical notices; among those that it did get, however, the Kirkus Review was particularly scathing.
James C. Scott’s dismantling of the case for hegemonic incorporation via false consciousness, therefore, in which he locates social resistance to power in hidden transcripts found below the level of the public record of conforming behavior, was offered up in order to bring us into the vicinity of a breakthrough with respect to how to think about the trenches of civil society. Scott’s “paper-thin” version of hegemony reinforces a fulsome picture of what it means to employ the metaphor of a “war of position” and “trench warfare” to describe the working of hegemony.
The war of position is not univocally about the persistence of the capitalist state via the complex network of trenches through which the dominant class’s hegemony thickly permeates the civil society. As I quoted from David Forgacs in an earlier post, “Gramsci’s picture of civil society is at once the political terrain on which the dominant class organizes its hegemony, and the terrain on which opposition parties and movements organize, win allies, and build their social power.”
But what does it take, therefore, to shape resistance into an effective counter-hegemonic practice? To answer this in a way that can unite both liberal de-polarizers and social movement activists and Leftists (people ready to contest openly for political power) we still need a way to re-think the unique dynamic of American class consciousness in relation to the trenches of civil society.
Ira Katznelson’s City Trenches
Ira Katznelson’s City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (1981) offers us some interesting resources for this just-stated purpose. It is also one of those very untimely and very hard-to-pigeonhole books that, I have to admit, I tend to find delightful for just these reasons. I first picked up a copy of City Trenches when I arrived at the New School as a graduate student in 1990. Katznelson had just stepped down as Dean of the Graduate Faculty, a job he’d held for most of the previous decade. He went on from there to Chair the American Political Science Association, and is to this day regarded by many as sort of an informal Dean of American social sciences generally. But City Trenches sat on my shelf for thirty years, accusing me, because I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. What I suspected all along has turned out to be true. The book wasn’t just sitting there, unread. It was gestating on my shelf.
It’s worth noting that at the time of publication, the book didn’t seem to get very many critical notices; among those that it did get, however, the Kirkus Review was particularly scathing.
Kirkus characterized the book as a case study about how a New York neighborhood (Washington Heights-Inwood) coped with the urban crisis of The Sixties and failed to establish a class-based politics. Per Kirkus, the case study “lacks any particular thesis,” and is surrounded with “a lot of oversized theory.” Also, they wrote, “what Washington-Inwood has to do with medieval cities is never firmly established.” In general, Kirkus didn’t see what the urbanist case study and the sections on the history of class consciousness had to do with one another. “The two parts,” Kirkus concludes, “disappointingly, add up to very little.”
Katznelson begins City Trenches with the media and political phenomenon of The Sixties that came to be known by the umbrella term “the urban crisis.”
At the most basic level, City Trenches presents itself as intervention in the sociological literature on the American urban crisis of the late sixties and early seventies. In doing so, City Trenches also presents its major case study for the purpose of understanding the failure of a counter-hegemonic project by means of an urban, community-based politics. This is what Kirkus missed—at the deeper level, City Trenches is also a sustained critical meditation on class consciousness, one conducted in relation to the problem of the trenches of American civil society. As such, along with its other concerns and preoccupations, City Trenches deploys the case study in order to conduct what is really a serious and thoughtful re-reading of both Marx and Weber, one conducted self-consciously after Gramsci.
Because the Kirkus reviewers didn’t grasp the explanandum, they also did not grasp the explanans. If you don’t regard the failure of urban unrest to produce significant counter-hegemonic power as an actual problem requiring a solution, then the book will appear to be “in search of a thesis.” After all, who (other than disappointed leftist intellectuals) seek an explanation for why something didn’t happen?
Urban Crisis & City Trenches
Katznelson begins City Trenches with the media and political phenomenon of The Sixties that came to be known by the umbrella term “the urban crisis.” The range of phenomena to be understood in crisis terms, Katznelson says, included “physical and social threats, revenue problems, housing abandonment, skewed economic development, poverty, disorder, dirt, welfare cheating, unionization, and uses of space.” Along with this underlying set of material concerns, there was also black political ferment, the re-discovery of white ethnicity, municipal employee militancy, coalitions to resist public works, riots, transit shutdowns, garbage strikes, and massive civil disobedience.
From the start, Katznelson wants us to understand that this popular discourse about crisis, conducted about the older American cities “in the media, in political confrontations, in corporate board rooms and in…private conversations” was not raised to this level of popular visibility and given a name primarily because of the aggregate threat it signified to working and poor people. Born out of “the very processes that had sustained the postwar boom (uneven economic investment and development) “urban crisis” became a political issue because these things started to threaten the routines of middle-and-upper class America. Initial attempts to domesticate urban problems, by treating them as special or technical phenomena, were quickly overwhelmed by the sheer density of turmoil. The responses that were then fashioned, ranged ineffectually from “overt repression to attempts at appeasement.”
Katznelson goes on to say a variety of things about how and why the urban crisis in American cities came about, how it was framed as a problem, and how and why the sense of crisis eventually abated, at least to some degree (neither worst fears nor greatest hopes were realized). But his real concern is over the strategies of resistance that were deployed by subordinate groups in the midst the urban crisis, and how “the massive literature of urbanism” which describes the play of these city politics, does so too narrowly, with the boundaries and rules of said politics taken as a given.”
What exactly are the boundaries and rules to which Katznelson is here referring? Asking what he means by this brings us to the central problematic of the book.
Per Katznelson, the ubiquitous assertion of “American exceptionalism” has too often been associated with explanations for the miraculous unimportance of class as an element in American political life.
Per Katznelson, “American urban politics has been governed by boundaries and rules that stress ethnicity, race, and territoriality rather than class, and that emphasize the distribution of goods and services while excluding questions of production and work place relations.” And the centerpiece of these rules has been “the radical separation of people’s consciousness, speech and activity and the politics of work from the politics of community.”
This has been operative even in situations where blue collar workers live in immediate proximity to their factories, he says. In South Chicago, mammoth steel mills loom over the surrounding communities. In the mills, he writes, these workers see themselves as labor, and they are quite militant. “Yet as soon as these workers pack up and go home, they cease to see themselves this way. On the East Side and Hedgeswisch, in Irondale and Slag Valley, they are Croatians, Mexicans, and Poles.”
Urbanists, he writes, have paid too little attention to this, so “something must be said about the boundaries that define the limits of the contest prior to the playing of the game itself.” If we do not tackle these questions, we will not be able to understand why the events of the sixties constituted a crisis or how so energetic a crisis was resolved quickly without the kinds of changes that authorities had feared so much.”
Katznelson says that City Trenches thus has two tasks: “to account for the distinctive conventions of American urban politics, and to show how these informed the behavior of city residents during the period of the urban crisis and its resolution.” Thirty years on, I can still imagine the reviewers at Kirkus squinting hard at this and scratching their heads.
City Trenches, or the Patterning of Class in America
Katznelson’s issue with “the vast urbanist literature” on urban crisis is that it does not problematize what he calls “the patterning of class in America,” but rather accepts this patterning as somehow outside the problematic under consideration.
The issue is not trivial, he writes, because it goes to the heart of how almost all of American historiography and social science addresses the following questions: to what extent, and in what way is the American experience distinctive? How does American society cohere? Why is there no socialism in the United States?
Per Katznelson, the ubiquitous assertion of “American exceptionalism” has too often been associated with explanations for the miraculous unimportance of class as an element in American political life. Katznelson actually agrees with those who say that the American experience of class has been exceptional–but he will depart sharply from these leading explanations for it.
So setting aside the Marxist assessment that there is nothing exceptional (because the US workers had “trade union consciousness” and lacking revolutionary consciousness, are all about fighting for more rights and privileges within the capitalist system) Katznelson identifies three basic American positions about what has been special about class in America:
First, there is the argument from class divisions: this is the claim that there have been historical conditions that have kept the American working class perpetually divided. The American working class, racially and ethnically and culturally fragmented, torn by the traumas of migration and proletarianization, and living in separate communities, has been perpetually hampered from realizing the solidarity necessary for a unified social and political movement.
Second, there is the argument from social mobility: American capitalism has been so bountiful that residential, occupational, and inter-generational mobility has limited the appeal of working-class political movements.
Finally, there is the argument from a shared value system: Things like the “absence of a feudal past,” or “the frontier experience” or “rugged individualism” are pointed to as having fashioned Americans, well-before industrialization, into a people resistant to class interpretations. Perhaps you remember these arguments, as I do, from AP history in high school.
For his part, Katznelson finds each of these types of explanation for American exceptionalism to be only partially convincing.
With respect to the first one (polyglot working class), he says that inasmuch as generation after generation of migrants have joined unions, and have shared common experiences both as migrants and as workers, it’s hard to believe that these divisions have been really that decisive. With respect to the argument from social mobility, he says that US mobility rates are not as distinctive as these people would have us think, and anyway, there isn’t a necessary relationship between “high mobility and low threat to the social order” since growth and mobility are just as often causes of dislocations, tensions, and even crises. Finally, in relation to the “distinctive shared values” arguments, Katznelson is also dismissive—while the American experience lacked a feudal past, immigrants in some sense brought it with them; and as for the frontier experience, it offered less opportunity than Frederick Jackson Turner claimed for it.
It is through this historical patterning of class, therefore, that class itself comes to be “experienced and talked about as only one of a number of competing bases of social life.”
Katznelson’s problem with all of these arguments, taken together and separately, is that they seek to understand American exceptionalism in various ways in order to explain an apparent “absence of class consciousness.” But what instead needs to be explained, Katznelson counters, “is not the absence of class in American politics, but its limitation to the arena of work.”
His central argument is that the “boundaries and rules” of American urban politics are a product of a unique patterning of class that occurred during the initial period of urban industrialization through the civil war period, one that persists into the present. American workers, he writes, might have come to see themselves (as workers did in England) not only as workers at work, but also at home; or they might have seen themselves (as workers did in Belgium or Holland) as ethnics at work and ethnics at home. But this is not what happened. In the US, Katznelson says, “most members of the working class thought of themselves as workers at work but as ethnics belonging to this or that residential community, while at home.”
It’s important to point out that as he is describing all this, Katznelson also makes explicit references to Gramsci’s trenches—the determinative patterning of class, he says, can be understood in terms of Gramsci’s account of the “clusters of ideas and behaviors that make up the network of trenches that crisscross the civil society,” defining “the war of position” in the overall societal hegemonic conflict. Here we see Katznelson fully comprehending the meaning of the trench warfare metaphor—it is used in order to point out how “the terrain imparts a logic to the war itself…defines both the place and the content of the conflict.”
For Katznelson, this historical patterning of class in the experience of civil society, characterized by a divided consciousness in which people act on the basis of shared solidarities at work, but on ethnic and territorial affinities in residential communities, is comprehended by Gramsci’s metaphor of “trenches in the war of position” conducted in and through the civil society. It thus provides the metaphor with its specific content, at least for American society. It is through this historical patterning of class, therefore, that class itself comes to be “experienced and talked about as only one of a number of competing bases of social life.”
Each kind of social conflict, Katznelson writes, “has its own separate vocabulary and institutions: work, class, and trade unions; community, ethnicity, local parties, churches, and voluntary organizations.” Despite the way in which class provides the “boundaries and rules of the game, “ordinary political language treats class as only one of a larger number of competing bases of affiliation.”
So while it is true that in other places, labor movements have had success by strategies that involved linking the struggles of workers where they labor and where they live, in the US, “the urban class system of city trenches has defined what is exceptional about class and race, and made it very difficult for the emergence of socialist or social democratic or labor parties.”
This point is one of the central insights of City Trenches–as Katznelson writes, “…capitalist accumulation has been the source of both the simplification and the differentiation of the class order.”
Given these circumstances, and the further decline of union membership, and also conservative attacks on the welfare state, it makes sense that subordinate groups would turn to “Alinsky-ite” community politics— to opportunistic conglomerations of local self-help, consumer, environmental, and neighborhood organizations (among other things).
But this account of “the trenches” of urban civil society also serves, Katznelson thinks, to explain the limitations of this sort of community politics. While it has sometimes seemed that the activity of community-based mass movements, Katznelson says, “provides the main possibilities for a creative politics of the Left,” he thinks that community (social movement or identity-based) politics that make “the place of residence rather than the place of work as the main locus of insurgent activity” are ultimately a losing game. This sort of politics came up short in the 1960s; since it was a failure that he says “exacted a high price,” he feared an unreflected community politics in the 1980s (at the time he was writing) was likely to have the same result.
Community-based strategies for social change in the United States, he writes, “cannot succeed unless they pay attention to the country’s special pattern of class formation.”
Once More into the Trenches, with Karl Marx & Max Weber
According to Ira Katznelson, the inability of political organizers on the Left to come to grips with the patterning of class in America (because we are living in the very trenches we seek to understand) resulted in the failure of urban unrest in the 1960s to generate an effective, counter-hegemonic political project. In order to learn from this failure, Katznelson says, we need to understand the ways in which this practical failure has also come to expression as a theoretical one.
In the long running arguments between Weberians (of both the community studies and general sociological type) and Marxist theorists, there is actually a shared consensus, Katznelson says, about the split between labor and community. Both sides tend to accept it as a given, and to treat work and community as relatively autonomous. Katznelson takes pains to identify two parts to this consensus, rooted Marx and Weber, but in different ways:
First, both agree that the initial differentiation of labor and community comes about historically by way of a decisive break with the pre-industrial, pre-capitalist past—in the early stages of bourgeois society, increasing trade leads to the increasing subjugation of industrial production to exchange value—and subsistence use value is pushed into the background. With the dissolution of communal relations by the substitution of money relations, communities are transformed from those of mutual inter-dependence and solidarity to “congeries of isolated individuals pursuing their interests in the marketplace.” Where the individual comes to “carry his social power, as well as his bond with society in his pocket,” Katznelson writes, the social connection between persons is transformed into a relation between things.
Second, Katznelson says that both Marx and Weber actually agree about the way that capital accumulation patterns the various dimensions of work, community, and politics, shaping lived experience in ways that impact what people think and do. But the depth of this insight has more or less been lost by both traditions, Katznelson says. This point is one of the central insights of City Trenches—as Katznelson writes, “…capitalist accumulation has been the source of both the simplification and the differentiation of the class order.”
Too often, he writes, “the processes of the simplification of the social structure entailed in capitalist development (the reduction of meaningful relations to that of just capital and labor) and the processes of differentiation (including those of the split between work and community) are seen as competing explanations of the nature and place of class.” As an example, he calls out the French liberal sociologist Raymond Aron, for trying to “set social differentiation over and against proletarianization and pauperization.”
On the one hand, Weberian social science has insisted upon the importance and autonomy of community life, embarking on a search for the generic community, and often doing so out of historical and relational context, with definitions clustering around either group solidarity or territoriality. Sociology tends to view society as a whole as the sum of its differentiated parts, and focusing on space, has stressed that communities are first and foremost, places.
On the other hand, in the Marxist tradition, he says, treatments of the residence community are “mostly conspicuous by their absence.” Marxists tend to accept the division of labor and community as a given because Marxist theory relegates community to the superstructure, and also because Marxism, as a philosophy of political praxis, is focused more upon what workers might do (revolution) rather than what they actually do.
For Katznelson, this spurs us to identify a missing third term, which he elects to call “Class3.”
Katznelson wants us to understand that the failure to recognize that our various notions concerning class (in relation to other aspects of social life) are themselves an effect of class is what has led both intellectual traditions, from a perspective that’s really only possible after Gramsci, down the class consciousness rabbit hole.
City Trenches & the Problem of Class Formation
How then to understand class formation in a way that takes into account the unique patterning of class in America?
In the final sections of the book, Katznelson takes another run at grasping how the city trenches of American class formation can be understood, following David Forgacs, as “the terrain on which opposition parties and movements organize, win allies, and build their social power.”
Seeking an answer, Katznelson returns to the debates between sociological neo-Marxists and traditional Marxists concerning class formation. On this pass, the principal contestants (who also share assumptions despite their disagreements) are Nicos Poulantzas and Erik Olin Wright.
Poulantzas is presented as a “class in and for itself” Marxist, for whom the working class is measured according to the standard of the revolutionary proletariat—the working class that is structurally called forth by the inherent contradictions of capitalist accumulation at the level of the mode of production.
Wright, on the other hand, in a bid to avoid economistic reductionism, makes a series of distinctions–between petite bourgeois and capitalist, between workers and the bourgeoisie within capitalism, and between individuals who occupy unambiguous class positions, and those who do not, given certain notions about who is a worker and who is a capitalist.
Katznelson gives Wright credit for foregrounding his own priority insight that “capitalist accumulation has been the source of both the simplification and the differentiation of the class order,” as well as for seeking to understand real, existing social relations. Nonetheless, he writes, his approach also “eliminates a series of important questions about the causal connections between the trajectory of capitalist accumulation and it’s contradictions on the one hand, and the patterning of work on the other.”
Per Katznelson, both Wright and Poulantzas tend to collapse two distinct levels of analysis:
- First, there is what he calls Class1: This is the process of capitalist accumulation at the level of the mode of production. As such it is mostly a heuristic, a conceptual term employed within a historical-philosophical or moral-practical critique of society understood in universal and developmentalist terms. Katznelson also characterizes this as an “experience-distant” concept, with no real phenomenal referent.
- Second, there is what he calls Class2: This refers to a pattern of social relations lived objectively by actual people in real social formations. This level of analysis differs from the above by being what he calls an “experience-near concept.”
Once we are performing some form of concrete social analysis (at the level of Class2) Katznelson says, and we recognize that both workplace and residence community relations (along with political relations) are shaped by the dynamics of capitalist accumulation (Class1) then we are entitled to ask anew what is meant by class formation.
For Katznelson, this spurs us to identify a missing third term, which he elects to call Class3.
To date, the “RedforEd” movement, has popped up in places like West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, North Carolina, and Kentucky along with Chicago and Los Angeles.
Taking his inspiration from the famed socialist historian E.P. Thompson, he says that beyond the structural account of class formation by capital accumulation and the contradictions of capitalism (Class1), and beyond the historical patterning of class that occurs in all nations in distinctive ways (Class2), there is also class formation as a “process of self-making, although under conditions which are given.”
In the context of class understood as Class3, classes are “formed groups sharing dispositions.” Classes are thus bodies of people who have a disposition to behave as a class, to define themselves, in relation to other people, in class ways. At this level, class becomes a historical category, describing people in relationships over time. Drawing on Thompson, Katznelson says that at the level of Class3, we get class not as a thing, but as a happening.
So this turns out to be Katznelson’s answer. Class3 classes are potentially historical groups–they are potentially so, because their potential is realized only at the level of organization and action, understanding that the ties between disposition and action are radically contingent ones. As Katznelson writes, the precise character of class formation cannot be deduced from an analysis of Class1 or Class2. But it is only when classes are formed (Class2) that classes may be said to exist as potential historical groups.
As Katznelson writes, “the connection between class as objectively structured experience at work, in communities, and in political life at different places and times (Class2) and the creation of dispositions of either a class or a non-class kind (Class3) constitute the process of class and group formation.”
Across the Country, Teachers are Going Red for Ed
If Katznelson’s sketch of an answer to the question of class formation is essentially correct, and class is both a given (defined by the terrain, i.e., the trenches of civil society) but also a process of self-making on the part of potentially historical groups making a contingent connection between shared disposition and action, then it should be possible to overcome the “split personality” of the patterning of class in America. It should be possible to shape resistance into an effective counter-hegemonic practice.
Some encouraging examples of just this sort of political action can be found in the recent spate of teacher strikes that have been happening across the country, where suburban and rural teachers are walking out, in many cases wearing red, and even “RedforEd” t-shirts. Per a recent article in Racked, the choice of red symbolizes the emergence of a new kind of intersectional solidarity. Red stands irreducibly for worker solidarity in the face of violence; red is for public schools in the red; red is for red-state conditions (austerity and its twin, unequal taxation). In short, red is for a re-focused labor movement that does not restrict itself to just winning contract concessions from management, and which does not see itself as separate from community and electoral politics.
In a June 2019 article in the Boston Review called “Why the Labor Movement has Failed—and How to Fix It” this new wave of teacher strikes is situated within a broader arc of change within labor strategy that can be traced back to sometime around 2011. According to the article, it started with SIEU strategy to organize service industries like low-wage fast food workers, and when Jobs with Justice joined with the National Domestic Workers Alliance to transform the long-term care system and empower care workers by including the care recipients and the families. But it can also be seen in Occupy Wall Street, in the explicit effort to create alliances between unions and community allies against rising inequality and the practices of predatory finance capital.
As early as 2012, Colorado teachers went on strike with an innovative bargaining campaign in partnership with community groups, and specifically targeted austerity and financial mismanagement, calling for smaller class sizes and better facilities beyond wages and hours and other narrow work issues. To date, the “RedforEd” movement, has popped up in places like West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, North Carolina, and Kentucky along with Chicago and Los Angeles.
One can see how teachers are leading the way and overcoming the patterning of class and the trenches of American society, by pursuing broader social justice aims, not just through lobbying and community organizing for legislative action, but through collective action at work, and with the support of the community. Teachers occupy a unique social position—they are workers with a history of organized activity and collective bargaining, but they are also fully embedded in communities, because schools themselves are community institutions, and educating the young is a function widely recognized as a last bastion of the common good (despite deep incursions by for profit charter schools and neoliberal tech incursions to re-think it wholesale).
The potential effectiveness of this brand of intersectional workplace politics strikes me as the real deal. It marries community organizing with labor organizing, and it does so in ways that unite working class, middle class, and identity-based political groups. It is populist, and potentially quite disruptive. It re-defines socialist politics for a twenty-first century America by hitting them where it hurts, and it can’t easily be minimized in the ways that lobby groups water down or render harmless progressive legislation into “win-win” for penitents and monied interests.
Summing It All Up!
It is always quite a bit easier, in my view, to write critiques of society and politics than it is to polemicize effectively about what is to be done. This is because effective polemics rest on something even harder still—theorizing about what is to be done. An added complication is that the potential audience tends to split into two camps, those who see the value in grounding praxis in theory (the theorists) and those who see the value in a straight-up action orientation (the activists). It’s hard to get these two camps to move beyond mutual impatience. Activists generally only write theory when they are in prison. Theorists only tend to act when they feel the boot upon their own necks.
Because I want to see the democratic Left be able to win, my topic has been the prospect for an effective counter-hegemonic practice. And since this has been my topic, my priority has been to try to understand the conditions for a durable, center-left coalition politics, one where liberal centrists from wealthy suburbs and minority groups and identity politics groups, the working poor, and Leftists are not simply shouting at one another, and saying “you should not believe what you believe, you should be like me.” How then to get liberal-centrists to sign on to a counter-hegemonic project, when they are among the beneficiaries of advanced technological neoliberal capitalist hegemony, live in relatively intact and homogeneous communities, and mostly worry about job loss from market fluctuations and falling home values?
It has been my contention that proponents of a reinvigorated civic nationalism (who call for return to politics, become active in community) and proponents of radical democracy (who see the need for a populism of “us versus them”) can and should find a basis for common cause, rather than continue to talk past one another. For this to occur, American civic nationalists, committed to a constitutionally patriotic, democratically thin concept of the common good, need to move beyond nostalgia for the not-so-good old days and choose to marry themselves to a movement for radical democracy. By the same token, the radical democracy camp needs to recognize that the American experiment calls forth a civic nation based on liberal political assumptions that cannot be circumvented if democratic values are to continue to prevail. And it needs to move beyond economistic labor organizing and community-based civil disobedience unmoored from the fight for class equality.
The starting point for this five-part series on counter-hegemony was how troubling it was for me to watch Theda Skocpol and Chantal Mouffe both speak at the Bard College Hannah Arendt Center Conference on Citizenship and Civil Disobedience last year, and then realize that I had no way to locate their sets of compelling remarks in any common frame of reference.
The new paradigm for labor organizing described above addresses the effects of the trenches of American civil society by combining labor and community organizing in new and effective ways–it has the potential to meet these counter-hegemony conditions by being at once community-based and also laser-focused on radicalizing democracy for greater equality and cross-class fellowship. It creates a set of conditions that I think could actually satisfy both Theda Skocpol and Chantal Mouffe, assuming also some key insights from James C. Scott and Ira Katznelson.
