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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
Gary Cross's article is a valuable and welcome attempt to extend the scope of labor history. to give attention to issues of popular culture and consumption that have been brought to current prominence especially by work in the field of cultural studies. Clearly this move reflects wider changes in society, in which the hegemony of commodity production appears to be exercised as much through the attractions of advertising and the shopping mall as through the disciplines of the factory and office. But as Cross is able to show, these are not new issues. Working-class movements have long sought to resist the power of capitalism and class domination through the social linkages of alternative class cultures as well as through bargaining and political strategies, though in the consumerist age these forms of cultural resistance are easily forgotten. Cross is right to suggest that these issues and struggles - whatever their outcomes have been – are important to labor history. His central idea of exploring the antinomies of money (conferring power within a market system) and time (allowing partial withdrawal from it) as alternative kinds of class demands, is an interesting and potentially fruitful one.
1. This is a serious issue for the entire theory of Fordism and post-Fordism, valuable as its explanatory scope appears to be. A devastating critique of the empirical basis of Aglietta's version of this model (“The Regulation Approach: Theory and History”) has recently been published by Brenner, Robert and Glick, Mark in New Left Review 188 (07–08 1991)Google Scholar. Some earlier and more tentative reflections of my own on these themes (“The Politics of Post Fordism; or. the Trouble with ‘New Times’”) appeared in New Left Review 175 (May–June 1985).
2. OECD, Employment Growth and Structural Change (1985)Google Scholar. Data on working hours are provided in part V.
3. On the great boom of the postwar period. see Armstrong, P.. Glyn, A. and Harrison, J.. Capitalism since 1945, rev. ed, (London, 1991)Google Scholar. and Marglin, S. and Schor, J.. The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Post-war Experience (London, 1990)Google Scholar.
4. See Therborn, Goran, Why Some People Are More Unemployed Than Others (London, 1986)Google Scholar.
5. The British antipathy to corporatist regulation of working hours was recently thrown into high relief at the European Community summit at Maastricht, where a “Social Charter” (now Chapter) providing for a maximum working week of forty-eight hours, and for protection of part-time workers, of which Britain has a disproportionate number. proved unacceptable to the British Conservatives. “We did not defeat trade unionism in Britain,” they said, “in order to have it imposed on us from Brussels.” This episode seems to reflect more than anything else the broad European consensus that limitation of working hours and conditions is now an agreed part of labor-market policy, even in this post Fordist era of deregulation.
6. The most important theorist in Britain of “cultural democracy” as a fundamental claim of the working-class movement was of course Raymond Williams, also an influential figure in the development of “cultural studies.” His seminal text, The Long Revolution (London. 1961)Google Scholar, links together many of the different elements of cultural contestation (education, the popular press. literary forms, and mass consumption) as aspects of a continuing struggle. He showed in this and other works how it was possible to give full weight to the cultural dimensions of class conflict without being either elitist or patronizing about working-class culture.
7. An example of the multisector approach to social movements is Walby, Sylvia. Theorising Patriarchy (Oxford. 1989)Google Scholar. This impressive text constructs a theory of patriarchy and feminist responses to it by identifying four major structures of domination, further subdividing these into the private and public modes of oppression which occur in each. This book combines a functionalist approach to issues of societal classification, a Weberian interest in strategies of domination, and a neo-Marxist conception of social transformation transposed from a class to a (mainly) feminist register.