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History

Community, Class, and Comparison

By Elizabeth Faue

Despite its occasional romantic tendencies, new labour scholarship is mapping collective action within working class communities.

Beginning in the 1960s, the field of labour history in both Australia and the United States underwent a rather startling transformation, shifting its focus from historical studies of national economies, labour parties, and institutionalised labour movements to the social, cultural and political history of the working classes.

Catalysts for this shift included the revitalisation of left politics, the reemergence of social movements for sexual and racial-ethnic equality, and the maturation of cultural Marxism. These political and intellectual influences directed labour historians to ask questions about the multiple identities of workers along gender, racial, ethnic, and religious lines and to explore working class experience in communities and localities. While much of this scholarship neglected formal spatial analysis, it expanded the genre of the community case study and increasingly saw 'class' as contingent, historically specific, and culturally expressed. To examine the processes of class formation in depth and detail, to explore how working class men and women created class politics (in both informal and formal ways), and to study class formation and transformation longitudinally, researchers took their questions to the records and historical memories of working class neighbourhoods, union towns, and small communities. Used in twentieth century contexts, 'community' became understood as working class 'communities of interest' within larger urban settings. In both union cities and company towns, class relations looked different when viewed from the grassroots.

Among United States labour historians, there was little reflection on what 'community' meant. Rather, 'community' often operated as a kind of spatial selection, a way of keeping the material and the study within manageable boundaries. Specific communities (even as locales of nationally significant strikes or unions) served as background for exploring the general meanings of class and community. There were criticisms.

Historian Theodore Hershberg argued that 'urban' (what we might define as 'community') acted only as a dependent, not an independent, variable in social history. In labour historical terms, we might rephrase his criticism and argue that labour historians were concerned with how the specific characteristics of communities (population, composition of labour force, industrial base, etc) provided the preconditions of or barriers to class mobilisation rather than investigating how class created or re-created the forms and meanings of 'community'. Recent studies continue to shortchange spatial analysis and leave unexamined the ambiguous and divergent definitions of 'community'. While the tension between social integration and social conflict captured in class identity and politics occasionally surfaces in studies of residential segregation and housing policy, there is a disconnect between 'community' (or locality) and the formal worlds of work and politics in labour history that simply reinforces the reification of 'community' as either romantic refuge or bastion of bigotry.

As a historian of labour and working class history in the United States, I confess to being only passingly familiar with the development of Australian labour history and at a disadvantage in reading these essays. Yet, the retelling of Australian labour historiography in Greg Patmore's introduction and in Lucy Taksa's theoretical overview resonated with my own understanding of how 'community' works within the boundaries of working class history in the United States. Like many American and Australian social historians, my research has been located at the intersection of urban and labour history and negotiates that difficult terrain. Focusing on how labour and working class mobilisations straddled both workplace and community means understanding and critiquing the tendency of many labour and social historians to endow 'class' and 'community' with the same nostalgic character that Ferdinand Tonnies and Emile Durkheim did a century ago. 'Community' in particular has served as a rough equivalent to traditional solidarities and communal sentiments, one pole in the dichotomy of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft which Lucy Taksa describes in her essay.

Despite its occasional romantic tendencies, new labour scholarship has mapped out taxonomies of collective action within working class communities. The meanings and forms of working class resistance have stirred productive scholarship ever since Herbert Gutman published his studies of local working class mobilisation in the nineteenth century United States. In his earliest essays, he argued the relative strength of working class power in rural communities. The isolation of urban workers, he argued, served as a barrier to the communal solidarities required for the emergence of unionism and class politics. While his interpretation has faced serious challenges, Gutman's work pointed the way toward considering how the dynamics of community helped to create class politics.

In studies of small cities and towns, there has been a continued emphasis on communal solidarity, often highlighting the possibilities and contradictions of cross-class coalitions and inter-class conflicts. Much more frequently, 'community' in labour history has described urban working class 'communities within communities' that served as bases for collective action and political mobilisation. Informed by urban sociology, the new labour historians of the 1960s and 1970s saw such class communities as both naturalised and residual, bulwarks against the encroachments of capitalist class relations. They failed to capture the dynamics of change in either community or class relations or to see how both class and community were socially constructed solidarities.

The essays in this thematic section on Labour History and Local History make a significant contribution to the effort of de-constructing and analysing the varying and variable meanings of 'the local' and 'community' in labour and working class history in Australia and internationally. They include six case studies of labour in small communities and cities of under 30,000 in population over the course of the twentieth century. The locales range from the rural and agricultural communities of Dungog and Wagga Wagga to the largely industrial towns of Lithgow, Ipswich, Port Kembla, and Broken Hill. They exist on a continuum of class politics from conservative bastion and divided class community to union town. In each case, the authors address the fundamental dynamics of community building, social integration, social differentiation, and conflict in the course of describing class relations in specific contexts.

A major theme of the essays explores the question of who creates, sustains, and preserves 'community' in its social and political expressions. The essays focus as well on how class relations either are subsumed by or replace the dynamic identification of individuals and groups with the sense of place and of belonging inherent in our notions of 'community'. Strachan, Jordan and Carey's study of Dungog offers us the schematics of community creation and the role of women's paid and voluntary labour. Patmore's study of Lithgow, Eklund's of Port Kembla, and Eather's of Wagga Wagga focus on fragmentation within and exclusion of the working class. Bowden's reveals the fluidity of relationships between and within classes, and Ellem and Shields examine the dynamics of creating class solidarity, even when it entails the exclusion of an important sector of the working class (in this case, married women).

Integral to the concept of 'community', as Lucy Taksa reminds us, is the dynamic of social differentiation and exclusion that defines who is and who is not a member of the community. Working class enclaves could, in creating solidaristic bonds, practice the same politics of exclusion by which local elites locked workers out of politics. They relied on social ostracism and hostility to ward off outsiders in times of economic competition and employed violence toward strikebreakers and others who chose to segregate themselves from the working community. Patmore's essay is particularly interesting in this regard, as he takes on contradictions in the politics of localism that both impede class identification and limit the appeal of class politics.

At the same, local loyalties could and did protect the job claims and economic rights of local workers. Except in the most limiting cases, local community elites often have had to accommodate working class needs and demands. An elite paternalistic ethos born in the early twentieth century limped along through the century's end and faced, in small and large ways, an increasingly organised and self-conscious working class. The promises of employer paternalism and welfare capitalism, as research on US communities has shown, stifled class politics at various points; but they also, when broken, gave rise to renewed class conflict and mobilisation.

The sporadic, intense, and locally specific labour strife of the Great Depression in the United States had, at its base, anger at employers and governments who defaulted on the implied social contract between companies and workers and thus violated community solidarities.

The connection between community action and working class mobilisation leads me to the other major contribution of these essays, which is to illuminate and explore the centrality of gender to class and local identity and labour politics. As Taksa argues in her theoretical overview, the importance of gender to class dynamics informs how she and others understand and analyse 'community'. Not surprisingly, women played a central role in building community through voluntary labour and in shaping labour politics through boycotts and community mobilisations in nearly all of the towns and cities studied.

Over all, the essays seem to have taken their original charge to consider gender relations in each community to heart as the authors effectively integrate gender into their localised understandings of community and class dynamics. Collectively, these local studies argue for the important role of working class women in creating and sustaining the material and affective bonds of community and the evolution of class and community solidarities. How well working class women were incorporated into the class politics of these small communities had an important impact on the success or failure of class politics and the possibility of sustaining working class interests in the wider community.

Where women were excluded, the politics of class suffered, as shown especially in the failure of labour candidates in Ipswich, Port Kembla, and Wagga Wagga and of shop boycotts in Broken Hill. In Broken Hill in particular exclusion of married women led to a precipitous decline in women's union membership. The uneven gender politics of the local Communist Party also kept women from full participation until at least the mid-1930s. Where women were incorporated in labour organisation, however, they often succeeded where men failed. Eather notes that while labour candidates repeatedly failed in the climate of the Cold War to be elected, women members of the Labor Party succeed in gaining seats by running as independents. As Eather argues in his essay:

The viability of the labour movement generally and the establishment of more positive networks in the city might have been achieved if the [Australian Labor Party] and the unions had accepted and encouraged greater participation of women.

These findingss give rise to questions about the masculine meanings of labour and class within unions, political parties, and communities.

The essay which comes closest to my own understanding of the dynamic relationship between gender and class in communities is Bradon Ellem and John Shields' study of Broken Hill. As in their community study, my work on the Minneapolis labour movement asked how labour leaders met the challenge of remaking an 'Open Shop City' into a 'Union Town' during the heyday of radical American labour in the 1930s. Crucial to labour's success was the inclusion and incorporation of various subcommunities and groups within the working class. A powerful and rejuvenated local Teamsters' union (General Drivers local 574) had grasped the dependence of this commercial city on urban transport. The rapid unionisation of drivers and warehouse workers gave them the opportunity to intervene, through local solidaristic action such as boycotts and strike support, in labor conflicts throughout the city and region, including the garment and knitwear industry, clerical work, metalworking and electrical manufacturing, and even among relief and unemployed workers. Bolstered by a vibrant Farmer-Labor party political coalition in the state and locally, the labour movement transformed most manufacturing firms into bastions of unionism. And yet, there were lapses in their campaigns. While bureaucratisation and centralisation of labour nationally explain the decline in labour efforts locally, a prime culprit in limiting the effectiveness and reach of labour both economically and politically was the marginalisation of women, continued opposition to married women's work and participation, and neglect of the vital growth sectors of the economy, namely clerical work, retail, and service employment, where women predominated. As Ellem and Shields suggest of their community:

There was nothing particularly unique about the approach of the Broken Hill labour movement to matters of gender at this juncture. Indeed, working women experienced marginalisation in many working class localities in inter-war Australia, including other mining localities.

The pattern of women's marginality to organised labour and within a labour-defined politics, which Ellem and Shields find widespread in Australia, also finds echoes in work on local labour party organisations in Britain. The active role of male-dominated, and often exclusive, trade unions, especially in areas of male industrial employment, impeded the recruitment and mobilisation of women in working class party politics.

The question is how these themes have been explored and play out comparatively in the United States. Labour historical scholarship continues to be split between workplace and union studies and those which focus on the community bases of working class organisation. It is important, however, to make problematic the pesky assertion that community and local politics are, by nature, more conservative and confining than national labour organisation and politics. The idea that anything which distracts from a focus on the relations of production or traditional political economy is an abandonment of class may be wholly a product of impoverished understandings of class, which tend to see community as oppositional to, not formative of, class identity and solidarity. As a result of this narrow equation between 'class' and 'work', some studies conflate 'community' with gender, ethnic, racial, and other more 'parochial' concerns; others argue, as does Ira Katznelson in City Trenches, that American workers are workers at work and ethnics at home. The contempt for community recently expressed in a forum on alternative community-based unionism in the 1930s and the equation of local unionism and working class politics with racism further compounds these errors.

As the essays in the thematic section have suggested, the use of 'community' obscures the complex meanings, experiences, and identities associated with place, space, locality, and political unit. If at one point, 'community' represents the close material and social bonds of a specific locality, at other times and places it serves (in both scholarly reckoning and in historical experience) as a symbol of the social bonds of specific groups and subcommunities in an urban setting. At other times, working class 'community' harboured different ethnic and cultural enclaves. Much research on the working class in the United States more comfortably resides within immigrant and ethnic history with its questions of cultural assimilation, accommodation, and resistance than in labour history, a fragmentation that provides yet another twist on community and class in working class history. In speaking of community in labour history, the question might well be 'which community'? At the same time, as both place and feeling, 'community' becomes inseparable from the study of how working class men and women understood their lives, built loyalties, and expressed class identity.

The direction to which we are led is the one implicit in Lucy Taksa's essay, namely to start to disentangle the levels, dimensions, meanings, and metaphors of 'community'. It is important to differentiate and delineate the material and physical community (whether as an autonomous geographic unit or as a subdivision of urban settlements) from the sentiment of 'community', its social space, and community as metaphor or strategy within working class history. Because the thematic section does not include studies of larger urban areas, or working class enclaves within cities in Australia, a first task might well be to ask if and how small, self-contained communities express, manage, and incorporate class identity and conflict differently from working class 'communities within communities' in major urban centres. Second, a more formal and far-reaching spatial analysis of class within communities could be further pursued within labour history. A special issue of Social Science History, to be published in spring 2000, addresses public space and the public sphere in working class history. Essays there address the threefold division of space in Henri Lefebvre's work as lived space, perceived space, and conceived space; the working class uses of the street from commerce and labour to protest, class and racial/ethnic divisions in housing and public accommodation, urban public policy, and the working class public sphere as both physical and cultural space. These questions are at the heart of understanding how class and community intersect but also how class conflict, class solidarity, and class exclusion help to build or undermine 'community' for workers and the wider society. They help to reconfigure the many-layered meanings of 'local' and 'community' on spatial lines.

The issues which continue to haunt labour history in the United States include addressing how size, structure, and form of 'community' in both large cities and small ones are linked to class politics in community and workplace in the twentieth century. Much of the work here has been fairly unselfconscious about how communities are constructed or how discussion of 'local' solidarities in class terms might obscure or mask community dynamics in class solidarities. A major debate over the nature of unionism and labour radicalism in the 1930s, for example, has focused on the relative importance and meaning of grassroots labour militancy and the significance and consequences of bureaucratic unionism. As critics of 'We Are All Leaders', an anthology recently published on alternative unionism, noted, most of the studies centred on small communities which might have been atypical. The author thus neglected to address labour movements in major urban areas and industries. While this charge was only partly true, what it revealed was the failure to explore how that unionism was aided, abetted, or impeded by the size and character of local communities and working class 'communities of interest' in major cities. Regional differences have, in many ways, been more attentive to variation in organisation than studies of local movements.

The focus of 'We Are All Leaders' on 'community-based' local labour movements versus workplace-oriented national unions implicitly had argued that there was a point at which 'community' is not just a place or sentiment but a strategy of class organisation. The labour movement built on its connections in the community during the decade of the Depression, and it ignored local organisation and communities at its peril. In a recent article, historian Joseph Turrini demonstrated how a major organising drive in steel foundered on insensitivity toward community dynamics. As he argued in his study of the 'Little Steel' strike in Monroe, Michigan, nationally appointed organisers stumbled in their ignorance of community divisions and strengths, a mistake that was not repeated a few years later when a local plant was organised under different auspices. Turrini writes, 'The neglect of community could and did prove fatal to the efforts of national unions, despite their resources, a factor SWOC [the national Steel Workers' Organizing Committee] never understood'.

The study of working class communities and the working class within communities continues to stumble over how 'community' and a sense of belonging can both impede and further class identity and solidarity. We might take our cue from Lucy Taksa's call for us to understand community 'as a web, a social formation that changes over time depending on individual choices as much as on a variety of social pressures'. That approach, which concentrates on social relations both within and without the arena of production, helps us overcome the somewhat artificial divide between labour and local history, as class can and does participate in both fields. While we have a clear understanding of the limits of localism for working class and labour mobilisation, we need to take into account the ways in which class and community politics have simultaneously shaped each other. If class relations are limited or made possible by the character of local allegiance and the extent to which local elites dominate local institutions, so too are communities (both as social webs and as places of the heart) created from the decisions of the working and middle classes to participate in communities, invest in their institutions, and identify their lives with the lives of their communities. Even within a working class 'community of interest', the dynamic of belonging and exclusion can determine success or failure, based on how well represented the various parts are within the whole. For critics who emphasise the limits of localism for class solidarity, the old American saying that 'all politics is local' might serve as a reminder that distance and size do not guarantee success or depth. Local politics, like local class alliances and organisations, can harbour prejudice, mask political and social exclusion, and lay claim to legitimacy on the basis of 'natural' affinity. What the essays on Labour History and Local History suggest is something quite different. The politics of both class and community were and are the products of human desire and labour. The tension between and dynamism within class and locality as socially constructed identities underwrote much of working class experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and laid the bases for complex and conflicting politics in the national landscapes of both Australia and the United States. Much more needs to be done to understand them, and this thematic section shows us one way.

Elizabeth Faue teaches at Wayne State University in Detroit, USA and she is the author of Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945, which was published in 1991, and Writing the Wrongs: Eva McDonald Valesh and the Politicial Culture of American Labor Reform (forthcoming). She is

the co-ordinator of the North American Labor History onference, which meets annually in Detroit.

   Contact History editor Dr Lucy Taksa

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