REVIEWS

...without a widely recognized press or media voice...

...Under our class system, no basic challenge is raised by workers (or by their unions) to the economy...

...It is his frustrated inner need for freedom, dignity, self-realization that today constitutes his deprivation...

...Mass...

...What do I know...

...Elimination in our "post-scarcity" society of "the whole scheme of individuals recognized and respected by virtue of ability...

...The kids in the Watson School didn't feel betrayed only because others were getting approval, but because they felt the Freds andVincents were using their power and that approval not towards aiding them, but towardsescaping the situation and progressing by themselves...

...To expect the worker to revise his idea of the good life as a means of changing the class scene, while scanting the nature and magnitude of the industrial presence, is like expecting the black family to readjust its home life as a means of changing the race scene...

...Cast as a nonentity, the worker hankers after a "respect" that ought to be his by birthright...

...Nobody cares anymore...

...The conflict between "individuality and fraternity," between the need to prove one's worth and to identify with one's fellows persists...

...is no more germane to their immediate plightthan those academic discussions that used to take place over "disposition of leisure under the new automation" at a time when actual work hours were zooming...

...THERE is MUCH truth in Sennett's argument but it is a limited truth...

...That ability is the badge of individual worth, that calculations of ability create the image of a few individuals standing out from the mass, that to be an individual by virtue of ability is to have the right to transcend one's class origins— these are the basic suppositions of a society that produces feelings of powerlessness and inade quacy in people like Rissarro...

...Offering a theory of how and why the worker is brainwashed, it attacks the method employed...

...A metamorphosis of values simply cannot by itself accomplish the revolutionary humanism urged here...

...Rather than acknowledge feIIow feeling—i.e...

...Sennett's assumption of earnings forever sufficient unto the day, of picture-windowed plants whose only sin is their banality, reduces the worker's battle to one in his own—and the worker's—mind...

...q...

...In their pithy and often rueful recitals he reads a pervasive self-doubt, planted in them by the very system they strive to live by...

...against anyone, black, longhair, egghead, who threatens it The college graduate son, in the isolation of his office cubicle or his ranch house, looks back sometimes with nostalgia to the authenticity of Pop's job in the mill, the kinship of the tenement...

...The fault lies also with the creative mode of the times...

...I made it on my own!'" From the beginning Sennett dismisses the potent notion that, with the dispersal of urban nationality groups into the mixed white sub urbs, we can in time expect a mainstream of American workers to turn to issues posed for all in common by corporate hegemony...

...The benefit of their labor accrues to persons unknown...

...A proposal to eliminate the ability standard (or the work ethic...

...They even foot the bill for the unemployables of the system, a philanthropy once reserved for the conscience of the rich...

...Why don't they rebel...

...Blue-collar and white-collar, they are oriented toward escape from the anonymity of their work stations, and toward fulfillment of the American dream: the individual triumphant...

...From their earliest schooldays, Sennett traces out a tangled composite in which people desiring to do right humanly are conditioned to their own human diminishment...

...Mechanic, bricklayer, foreman, janitor, salesman, bank clerk, all have gone beyond the problem of bringing home the bacon and into the problem of acquiring the creature comforts that have become the staples of our time...

...The answer lies partly in the distinction between the worker's and intellectual's mode of operation...

...The uses of ability, of development, of culture are political questions about which the rulingclass in any age sets the standards...

...Perhaps Sennett was trying to avoid the obvious, but by avoidance he conceals...

...But what makes good poetry does not necessarily make good social science...

...They work hard, they provide for their families, they try to give their children an education that will set them on the road to upward mobility...

...Any pride they may take in their skill is preempted by company sleights of cost-cutting— in their own eyes, they are putting out garbage...

...The writing is Sennett's and the emphasis is his, save for an alltoobrief afterword by Cobb who differs from Sennett in the lessons he draws from their researches...

...When the structure of society appears aspermanent or beyond human control...

...transformation becomes individualized...

...Their pride in their independence is penetrated with fear of ever becoming a burden on others, with mistrust of interdependence, with a sense of impotence—and the gut cry, "Everybody's out for himself...

...But what about the foreman's other worry: risk of a wildcat flareup...

...elite" refers to people who havebecome so complex they must be treated asspecial cases...

...The prospect Sennett suggests of universal participation in the necessary drudgeries with everyone otherwise free to develop his own potential—desirable as it may be—could seem almost hallucinatory to the worker at a point when the squeeze is on him from all sides for more productivity...

...The selection immediately engenders a conflict of interest between those who instinctively identify with their peers and those who must divorce themselves from the rest in order to get ahead...

...And the premise of a postscarcity, postindustrial United States that can "afford inefficiency," even if it were to hold up, makes no sense within the global overview of both underdeveloped and shrinking resources...

...In a telling instance, a factory foreman disparages himself for not driving the line harder...

...The men and women who create the wealth of the nation are regarded in our culture as a peripheral element...

...The problem confronting an affluent capitalist society is not how to make more things, but how to get rid of what it has...

...Thus the principles of democracy and the Enlightenment, designed to break class barriers, furnish, in Sennett's view, the perfect new instrument for class division...

...refers to the kind of work where people do not feel they express enough that isunique in themselves to win others' respect asindividuals...

...If he had been less intent on excluding a "materialist" frame of reference, if he had steeped himself in the detail and morphology of the job in which his subjects were daily engaged, if he had allowed for reshiftings of attitude made possible by the process of events, his diagnosis would have gained in dimension, direction, and persuasiveness...

...The organization of lives in terms of socialproduction for private profit forms the groundon which the factory, the office, the schoolsystem are organized...

...Just as "blood" served in the past to legitimatize the power of the aristocracy over other men's labor, so today we have "the badge of ability...

...The worker deals mentally and physically with a reality outside himself...

...Sennett's focus is on the definition of those values and the psychic damage they wreak...

...Whatever their income or political leaning, they remain in the same position: they own neither the machinery they work nor the materials they work on nor the plant they work in...

...Circumstances, the structure of society, remain and youmove and as a result you leave situations, classes, structures as they are...

...In fact, the removal of merit ratings might leave the faceless worker on the factory floor feeling more faceless than ever...

...He would have been spared at least a suspicion now and then of hundred-dollar misunderstandings...

...Sennett neglects however, as Cobb points out at the end, to take into full account the impact of the production system...

...Though no longer oppressed by sheer physical degradation and fear of want, he is nevertheless still subjected within the class structure, more so than ever, but now by a species of mental manipulation: through his acceptance of endemic American value standards...

...More vital to ask why the wrong start in the first place...

...The shame, anxiety, anger, frustration, and fragmentation depicted here derive primarily from 'an external situation...

...Assured of the necessities, the worker cannot be regarded as motivated solely by a "calculus of material well-being...

...On the factory floor they are "hands," of less importance than the equipment because more easily replaceable...

...With this definition of class distinction, the only one in the book, Sennett pinpoints the signal quality needed for class transition...

...Jonathan Cobb's interpretation of their material touches upon the crux of the matter...

...weakness"—the alienated worker, as Sennett interprets it, will downgrade his own capabilities...

...The fact that the United States has arrived at a condition where so much more can be produced than what is needed means the country might also afford to stop the divisive process of evaluation without threatening survival...

...The intellectual deals with materials that reside in the mind, to the point sometimes where he can come to believe that reality exists only as the mind perceives and molds it...

...The common ground of worker and intellectual, inferentially then, lies in rejection of a value system that might be termed the Horatio Alger syndrome...

...It would be too easy to say of this one that it started off on the wrong foot and flourished, brilliantly, on its own logic...

...The instrumentation of the writer must be judged by its ability to approximate what it is trained upon...

...From this the interviewees emerge as neither hairy apes nor ineffable little guys nor data printouts but as full-scale personalities in the grip• of contrary drives...

...In family relations, courtship, friendship, Sennett extends the behavior by which the worker winds up in an emotional cul de sac...

...Their satisfaction in having advanced out of the pov erty and chaos of their background is under mined by shame at not having gone farther— and by the painful admission, "I didn't have it in me...

...All the lumps of the system are paid for out of their pocket...

...He is inwardly reluctant, Sennett feels, to humiliate the assemblers...

...Striving to keep up with an ever-rising standard of living, he is driven to defend the class structure he supports and to vent his frustrations—"After all, who am I to protest...

...In our country, with its presumption of class fluidity, they are without schooling in working-class history and tradition...

...From among 150 interviews Sennett excerpts directly from some 25...

...The Hidden Injuries of Class reveals the worker once again as victim of the system rather than beneficiary, but in terms that owe more to the Movement criteria of the late 1960s than to the continuing realities of the industrial world...

...That American workers are inwardly harassed is true enough but surely it is not just or mainly because they feel themselves to be failed Horatio Alger heroes...

...The aspiration of the new suburbanites, he reminds us, is not fixed in this direction...

...It can only be resolved by competition for promotion, at the cost of community, or by refusal to compete, with consequent self-despisal...

...Somehow a whole historic phase has been leapfrogged...

...Sennett constructs his theory of class injury on the premise that we in the United States have achieved a "post-scarcity" society...

...Later the authority of the teacher is assumed by management...

...In the "land of opportunity," they are "the failures...

...The meat of the matter is missing...

...Ability"—the rod that divides the sheep from the goats in kindergarten becoming intime the rod of self-chastisement—is the villain of Sen nett's piece...

...Their deference to the high-perfor mance professional who has "earned the right" to dignity and freedom of choice, even when they regard his expertise as phony, indicates the 'technique by which they have been brought BOOKS not only to acquiesce in their own denigration but to accept the blame for it...

...And so, implicitly, the vision of the intellectual dissident of a few short years ago is joined with a rationale for working-class dissidence in the years just ahead...

...Deasy, "What is an American's proudest boast...

...We can now of ford a diversity, rather than a hierarchy of talents...

...Nor does this book raise such a challenge...

...The law of look-out-for-numberone— in self, family, ethnicity—flows naturally from a class system based on monopoly control and money, not ability...

...The great need now and in the foreseeable future is for expansion of supply...

...As with Al Capp's Salomyburger, everything's in it but Salomy...

...It is hard to believe that in a work on the hidden injuries of class these least hidden sources of injury, which ought to have served as a point of departure, should go almost ignored up to the postcript...

...To paraphrase Joyce's Mr...

...They do not have the political identification of a Labor party in which they can see themselves as kingpin...

...His solution...

...Labor books of drive and excitement are too rare to be caviled at...

...MANIFESTLY, the belief that "only the few more richly endowed have the right to rule" suits the ends of corporate domination...

...In short, they do allthat is expected of them as citizens and this, according to Sennett, is their undoing...

...Whatever cushioning their unions have won for them, they have little real assurance of present or future security...

...For he too in his brave new world is a BOOKS nonentity who must fight for the main chance or remain in the lower career echelons blaming himself for his inadequacies...

...he is no Hegelian idealist...

...Probing beneath the lingering hardhat stereotype, the book is devoted in the main to extrapolation from interviews—conducted under a Ford Foundation grant—with residents of Boston's ethnic ghettos and their children in suburbia...

...Katya Gilden New Twists in an Old Wound THE HIDDEN INJURIES OF CLASS, by Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb...

...In the early grades they experience the arbitrary judgment of an authority who sorts out the few who will "make something of themselves" from the many who are "nothing special...

...In the community they are equally unimportant, not to be compared with citizens of influence...

...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...

...Viewing the purpose of "the hidden scheme of values" as perpetuation of "the inequities of nineteenth-century capitalism—on new terrain," he finds the emotional burden it imposes particularly concentrated in the ethnic manual worker, whose dilemma, he suggests, may serve to illuminate a general condition...

...An excess of subjectivity, relying maximally on the perceptual-verbal gifts of the observer and only minimally on the substance observed, has spilled over from BOOKS our literature into other areas of writing...

...This failure, I believe, is the key to why an analysis conceptually complex, closely reasoned, rich in allusion, offering many valuable insights, ultimately seems to float in a vacuum...