Amazing Grace

To me the most telling part of Jonathon Kozol's essay "Amazing Grace" was the issue on the incinerator.  Kozol is spending time in a particularly impoverished part of New York City.  As we might expect all the signs on there: the neighborhood is largely Black, schooling is inadequate, drug abuse is rampant, and AIDS presents a real threat to the population.  He discusses at one point how there was supposed to be the installation of an incinerator in a more affluent section of Manhattan.  However, in the end, the project was moved to the section of the city he was studying.

The important question is "why?"  Kozol mentions briefly that the parents were able to organize resistance to the incinerator.  From the reading, what can we infer these parents from Manhattan had that parents of the children from Harlem did not?

First, they had the free time to be able to organize themselves.  This means they were either working less or working hours that allow them to organize effectively.  Such hours would be a 9 to 5, typical professional hours, and a regular schedule rather than a "flexible" schedule that most low wage workers have.  Second would be ability or access to skills.  The parents from Manhattan have the means to organize meetings, talks, pickets, or whatever else they need to do in order to push back against the incinerator.  This case study shows us who is socialized or has access to learning such skills.  Finally, there is education.  The parents in Manhattan are educated enough to understand that an incinerator in their neighborhood is bad, causes asthma and other diseases, and would generally lower their quality of life.

At the same time, however, Kozol's study presents an outlook that can be taken to an unfortunate place.  By looking at the working class as helpless, uneducated, and incompetent, we can assume that they are not capable of improving their own condition.  This is why, I would argue, we need a historical perspective as well, which would look at working class self-activity and show us examples of times that people resisted incinerators (or whatever else) on their own terms.  The conclusion from the former outlook, based on only a single case study of conditions, could lead one to believe that what working class people need are condescending saviors -- people who have the skills and can come in a save a community.  A modern day Saul Alinsky, if you will.  However, looking at the class from a historical perspective (pace Marx, Thompson, Hobsbawm, or Zinn) we can see that despite it all (lack of education, institutional skills, time) have been willing and able to change their conditions.  Typically it has been professionals who tail already existing movements of the working class in terms of enacting reforms -- some prominent examples in modern American history could be the labor organizing of the 1930s and the New Deal legislation or the Black movements in America and Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s.

On "The Forest and the Trees"

Johnson's introductory chapter covers the construction of the social.  As he says in chapter two of his book "we exist in a box."  However, how is that box made?  It is here that he fills us in.  (I should note that this chapter does come before the one of culture in his book, though for class we read chapter two first, in case non-classmates happen to read this and are confused).  At any rate, I think Johnson's work is a good introduction to the concept that of the social.  What I think is important in Johnson's work is that things are not simply relative (as a classmate said last week).  We reproduce the social through our actions, and it produces us.  Marx said, "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."(1)  The universals that we experience are part of a experience larger than ourselves and to reduce this down, then, to "relativity" almost suggests that these are not real.  However, they are very real social forces that continue to shape us.  An individual does not simply opt out of this.

How, then, do people who come into conflict with the social struggle inside it.  There are two methods -- one is to abolish the social existence and create a new one.  The other is to seek representation within the social, to carve out a new social space.  It is in the latter where conceptions of "identity" are formed.(2)  I would suggest that the former can only be achieved through collective struggle.  As the graphic above suggests, one way we might do this is to create a counter-hegemony, to battle against the current culture with a new culture.

An important part of the equation is one that Johnson does not adequately touch, and something that we simply haven't talk about in class.  We have talked about the box we live in, but we haven't been able to explain what that box is.  I would suggest, following Marx and Gramsci (as well as others), that this box has two important elements: a base and a superstructure.(3)  I would call the box capitalism, because we live in a social system that is fundamentally different previous political-economic-social structures.  It was created through an prolonged process from the 1500's (roughly) up to this day.  And while there are important system of oppression (for example, patriarchy) that existed before this system, we experience it now fundamentally different than we would have in a society underpinned by, for example, feudal social relations.(4)

It is important, I think, to understand the present epoch we live in, because I do not agree with Max Weber that education is something that should be "value free."  The point of education is to find social antagonisms, understand social antagonisms, and abolish them.  My point here is not that Johnson is useless, far from it, but that I don't think his ideas go far enough in digging into what constitutes the social, what social relations are and how we enact them.

(1) Karl Marx, Preface to A Contriution to the Critique of Political Economy, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm.
(2) A Michel Foucault noted in his work The History of Sexuality, the notion of "homosexual" as an identity did not exist before the Victorian era.  Surely there were people who were had same-sex and what we might today call "queer" relations, but as an identity the concept of "homosexual" did not exist before this time.  A problem with modern Gender Studies has been taking modern identities and looking back in history to find examples that legitimize their place within the modern civil society.  These attempts, in my opinion, are ahistorical and wrongheaded.  See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, New York City, Vintage 1990.
(3) Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm. "In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness."
(4) See Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, New York City, Autonomedia 2005 and Maria Della Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Falling Wall Press, 1975.