Critical Failure of a 'Critical Theorist'

VLADECK, BRUCE C.

Critical Failure of a 'Critical Theorist' False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness By Stanley Aronowitz McGraw-Hill. 465 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Bruce C....

...Remarkably, Aronowitz avoids the pitfalls books like False Promises are most subject to—dogmatism and partisan blindness...
...From the "standpoint of totality," biography and autobiography can be powerful tools, in fact the apotheosis of "critical theory" —Sartre on Flaubert and on himself come immediately to mind as evidence of how an individual life and social philosophy can be intcr-meshed in an especially compelling way...
...Of course, when a writer is dealing with an important subject, wordiness is hardly the worst of sins...
...Thus he provides one of the most honest descriptions yet advanced of racial and ethnic divisions within the radical movement...
...Aronowitz tends to let his concern with inclusiveness run away with him, however, making his book overlong by half...
...Alternatively, the evidence may go too far in the wrong direction for a congenitally optimistic radical to draw the conclusions he desires...
...Reviewed by Bruce C. Vladeck Staff member, New York City Rand Institute This book represents the boldest attempt at radical theory by an American in several generations...
...Tens of pages at a clip, for example, are eaten up by such digressions as an undistinguished history of the American cinema over the past 20 years...
...But Aronowitz knows that this situation is largely the result of the free play of democratic processes within unions...
...Based on the data in Aronowitz' book, neither of these possibilities can be rejected out of hand...
...Aronowitz' description of factory work, of union activities and of Newark politics in the 1950s and '60s is far more rewarding—his eye for detail serves him well in describing what working in a shop is like...
...one puts down the book feeling that its author quit when he did only to conserve trees...
...In addition, Aronowitz' emphasis on Eros, on play and on the oppressive effects of mass culture shows that he has read, and understood with enormous sophistication, that most maddening of "critical theorists," Herbert Mar-cuse...
...The contention, for instance, that local unions are dominated by older workers, concerned with pensions and fringe benefits, while young workers, who are interested in job safety and the size of their paychecks, are ignored, may well be correct...
...That is, they are stated, explored at great and often gruesome length, then recapitulated...
...If the purpose of theory is the creation of clarity out of chaos, Aronowitz does not take us beyond the chaos...
...Aronowitz, on the other hand, appears unequal to the task...
...The primary virtue of "critical theory" is its ability to generate new ideas and insights out of apparent contradictions...
...Aronowitz's two central theses—that the American working class is fragmented as a result of its heterogeneous and, until recently, largely immigrant composition, and that the seemingly inexorable drive of the labor movement is toward business unionism?are not merely propounded, they are developed like themes in a bad sonata...
...In other words, Aronowitz has taken seriously Gyorgy Lukacs' dictum that the core of radical Marxist thought is the "standpoint of totality," the conviction that all the components of cultural and social existence merit attention, affect one another and can be fitted into a general framework...
...Although Aronowitz has brought together a vast quantity of information, ideas and history, his synthesis is ultimately hollow: Talking about theory is no substitute for thinking...
...The inadequacy of False Promises is best demonstrated by a series of rather poignant passages relating Aronowitz' own life history?his East Bronx childhood, his alienation from his not-too-Left parents, his experience as a young industrial worker with a wife and child to support...
...But there can be no rationalizing False Promises' deeper, more serious failing...
...Yet, again, the information is never tied together with analysis...
...The second chapter of False Promises contains the umpteenth description of the now-legendary Lords-town strike, but it is far and away the best one available because Aronowitz never allows theory to interfere with his narrative, and because he manages to see through the propaganda of both sides...
...He willingly admits that some of his opponents might not (in motive at least) be as evil as they appear, indeed that sometimes he might even be wrong...
...Similarly, once Aronowitz gets hold of a good idea he is extremely reluctant to let go of it...
...In any case, the failure of False Promises is all the more disappointing because Aronowitz set his sights so high, because he seems particularly well-equipped for the undertaking, and because the job needs so desperately to be done...
...Perhaps the realities are too multifarious to permit analysis of any kind...
...And rather than ignore facts which tend to weaken his arguments, or avoid them through ad hominem rhetoric, Aronowitz genuinely tries to be thorough, to consider all the evidence...
...There may be powerful reasons why no one has been able, for at least several generations, to produce a successful radical theory of the American working class...
...Aronowitz may be too honest to ignore competing and conflicting realities, yet he seems incapable of reconciling them within a broad perspective...
...Complexities and contradictions emerge from his mass of verbiage, but they remain complex and contradictory...
...leading a reader to suspect the author has substituted aphoristic crypticism for careful explication...
...and instead of resolving the issue, reaching some kind of definite conclusion about conflicting rights, he simply examines and reexamines the problem from every possible angle...
...This quality is the hallmark of such masters as Sartre and Lucien Goldmann...
...Aronowitz' portrait of his early family life, though, is closer to secondhand Mike Gold by way of Sam Levenson...
...Stanley Aronowitz has sought to analyze the nation's working class —broadly defined to include any worker who does not share in the ownership of the means of production?from a perspective that embraces both history and culture, politics and everyday life...
...He also has a fine eye for detail...
...And his recital of Jean Piaget's child-development notions could have easily, for the purposes of the discussion, been compressed into a paragraph...
...and in works of social theory, in particular, it is terseness that is more likely to be a shortcoming...

Vol. 57 • April 1974 • No. 7


 
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