Graham Cassano

Remarx: Labor, Desire, and the Wages of War

Thorstein Veblen, like W. E. B. DuBois, mobilized the concept of psychological wages to explain working-class identification with the capitalist social and economic system. But while DuBois wrote about the wages of whiteness, Veblen concentrated, instead, upon the symbolic “benefits” provided by American nationalism, arguing that nationalism serves to reunite a community ruptured by inequality. This essay first examines Veblens theory of nationalism as a form of social solidarity. In the concluding sections, it looks to organized labor for some possible alternative visions of community, politics, and “the people.”Thorstein Veblen, like W. E. B. DuBois, mobilized the concept of psychological wages to explain working-class identification with the capitalist social and economic system. But while DuBois wrote about the wages of whiteness, Veblen concentrated, instead, upon the symbolic “benefits” provided by American nationalism, arguing that nationalism serves to reunite a community ruptured by inequality. This essay first examines Veblens theory of nationalism as a form of social solidarity. In the concluding sections, it looks to organized labor for some possible alternative visions of community, politics, and “the people.”

The Corporate Imaginary in John Ford's New Deal Cinema

This essay examines the critiques of capitalism offered by John Fords New Deal Cinema. During the period in question (1935–48), Fords films offered three distinct political stances that reflected forces and transformations in the American political unconscious: in the early and mid-1930s, he built his criticisms of economic distress on a restrained corporatism that advocated a moral capitalism; in the late 1930s and early 1940s, this corporatism was radicalized by events outside the cinematic apparatus; and in the late 1940s Ford, like many working Americans, abandoned the critique of capitalism for an anticommunism that repressed class conflict in the name of a new and reinvigorated nationalism. This argument attempts to understand Fords transformation by looking at the relation of his cinematic production to the history of the organized and unorganized laborers who constituted much of his audience.

A Collective Effort to Improve Sociology Students’ Writing Skills

Nationwide, academic sociologists at all types of higher education institutions face the challenge of working to improve students’ writing skills. In this article, we describe a collective effort by a group of faculty members in one undergraduate sociology program to implement several effective writing-improvement strategies. We advocate aiming to improve students’ writing by working together on a united front rather than working in isolation. After explaining the origins of the collective emphasis on writing that emerged in our group and briefly outlining the writing-improvement strategies that we utilize, we use student survey data to reflect on major themes before concluding with a discussion of the merits of our collective approach.

Working Class Self-Fashioning in Swing Time (1936)

This article argues that the Depression era musical, Swing Time (1936), provides access to understanding some of the forms of socially constructed desire that shaped working class solidarity in the 1930s. In the first part of this article, I explore the roots of Swing Time’s critique of vested forms of desire in Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. I argue that Swing Time offers an extension of Veblen’s theory by analyzing the power of mass communication to rewire social circuits of desire. I then explore the meaning of the stylistic realism and the language of protest operating in Swing Time’s narrative. From this I conclude Swing Time offers a critique of capitalism precisely in order to affiliate itself with a new, working class oppositional culture. But in affiliating itself with this oppositional community, Swing Time accepts and reinforces the language of racial privilege circulating within the ‘white’ working class. With a final critical act, however, Swing Time symptomatically reveals the invidious character of white privilege, as well as the fact that the cultural heritage of the (white) working class (swing music itself) comes from the theft and plunder of African American originality.

Race-Making and the Garrison State

This essay explores the implications of Paul Massing’s findings that CIO union members were slightly more resistant to authoritarianism than AFL affiliated unionists. I begin by sketching the contours of the different forms of union consciousness produced by the AFL’s craft unionism and the CIO’s industrial unionism. Then, paying special attention to the ‘ethnic’ constituency of CIO unions, I argue that the CIO offered a particularly egalitarian vision of union democracy, at least until the onset of World War II. In the second half of the essay, I examine cinematic representations of race and the manner in which those representations corresponded to a changing racial consciousness among American workers. I end with a discussion of the contours of Cold War unionism, the decline of union democracy as a result of the wartime ‘no-strike’ pledge and Taft-Hartley, and the manner in which the American union movement displaced exploitation onto a racialized ‘Third World’ work force.

Reification, Resistance, and Ironic Empiricism in Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money

This essay examines Georg Simmels Philosophy of Money in relation to certain themes in the Marxian philosophical tradition. It first examines Simmels thoroughgoing and antiessentialist epistemology of exchange. It then looks at a contrary movement taken by Simmels thought, in which he seems to posit an absolute objectivity in an almost Kantian vein. Finally, it explains Simmels position through a look at his theory of capitalist reification and the necessary and ironic resistance that reification implies for a critical theory of society.

The Persistence of Republicanism Class War Talk, American Style

The authors argue that there have been moments in American history when a class analysis entered into popular discourse. What has been “exceptional” about American history is the manner in which that class analysis emerged. When Americans speak the language of “class” and “class warfare,” it is often clothed in the rhetoric of labor republicanism. That is, rather than offering a systemic analysis of capitalist processes, American labor republicanism offers a class analysis that sets a small set of bad acting “elites” and their dependents against the mass of American workers. The authors trace this discourse from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 description of “economic royalists” to Lou Dobbs’s nativist attack on “corporate elites” and undocumented workers. As the United States enters a new period of “class awareness” and economic crisis, this republicanism returns to haunt public discourse.

Introduction: Returning to the Popular Front

During the 1930s, a rudimentary culture of solidarity was emerging among U.S. workers. That culture was fueled by the economic downturn, but misery itself is never enough to provoke transformation. A new vision of community was emerging through the work of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, revolutionary activists and organizers, and the artists, writers, and theorists associated with the Popular Front. In order to confront the new realities given shape by our “Great Recession,” perhaps it makes sense to think once more about that moment of promise, with its failures and its successes.

Choosing our Ancestors: Thorstein Veblen, Radical Institutionalism and Sociology

‘Imperialism is dynastic politics under a new name, carried on for the benefit of absentee owners instead of absentee princes,’ argues Thorstein Veblen (Veblen, 1997[1923]: 35). This critique of imperialism is the electric current that charges Veblen’s understanding of capitalism, from some of his earliest publications to his final book. Already, in the last pages of his early masterwork, The Theory of Business Enterprise, he offers a diagnosis of America’s abiding pathology:

Introduction: Flint and the Racialized Geography of Indifference

In this introduction to the Critical Sociology symposium, “The Flint Water Crisis and the Failure of Neoliberal Governance,” the authors outline the social and cultural conditions for the racialized underdevelopment of Flint and Detroit in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. We begin with an examination of the racially coded rhetoric of Oakland County manager, L. Brooks Patterson, and the manner in which those racial codes reveal the deep roots of white suburban anxiety and racism in the history of economic and spatial apartheid in Michigan. Turning to Flint itself, we draw upon Andrew Highsmith’s recent history of the city, Demolition Means Progress (2015), and examine 20th century red-lining, school segregation, and neoliberal policy decisions as they interacted, effectively rendering Flint’s African American population invisible and, finally, through emergency management, nearly powerless. We close with a survey of the articles within the symposium. Each contribution to the symposium finds that even within the structural and political limitations imposed by neoliberalism, residents and activists continue to find productive spaces for resistance.