Date: Mon, 4 Mar 1996 16:45:04 -0500 (EST)
From: Jon Beasley-Murray <jpb8-AT-acpub.duke.edu>
Subject: _Learning to Labour_


I'm almost finished reading this book (by Paul Willis, 1978) and happen 
to think it's great.  I idly wonder if anyone agreed or disagreed with 
this judgment.

I think that this was Willis' PhD thesis from the Birmingham Centre for 
Contemporary Cultural Studies.  Sadly I think it's long out of print.

The first paragraph or so, just to give a taste:

"The difficult thing to explain about how middle class kids get middle 
class jobs is how other let them.  The difficult thing to explain about 
how working class kids get working class jobs is why they let themselves.

It is much to facile simply to say that they have no choice.  The way in 
which manual labour is applied to production can range in different 
societies from the coeercion of machine guns, bullets and trucks to the 
mass ideological conviction of the voluntary industrial army.  Our own 
liberal democratic society is somewhere in between.  There is no obvious 
physical coercion and a degree of self-direction.  This is despite the 
inferior rewards for, undesirable social definition, and increasing 
intrinsic meaninglessness of manual work: in a word its location a the 
bottom of a class society.  The primary aim of this book is to cast some 
light on this surprising process."

Essentially Willis' argument focuses on reaction-formation on the part of 
a segment of working class youth during the schooling process, which 
inverts the mental/manual hierarchical opposition in an articulation with 
patriarchy, casting mental work as feminine and manual work as macho.  
This subaltern masculinity is both a critical resource and a 
self-fulfilling prophecy.

Sorry if the above paragraph is cryptic and distorted, but it's only 
meant to be the briefest of summaries.

I wonder about the datedness of the book, especially given the new face 
of much working class labour in the West, at least, with the rise of 
structural unemployment and the growth of the service sector.

Just a thought or two...

Take care

Jon

Jon Beasley-Murray
Literature Program
Duke University
jpb8-AT-acpub.duke.edu
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons


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