Antinomies of Class: Jack Metzgar’s Bridging the Divide

Abstract

Jack Metzgar is on a mission. His first book, Striking Steel (2000), aimed to repopularize unionism through an auto-ethnographic retelling of a postwar strike. His second, Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society (2021), shoots a little higher. Again deploying self-analysis coupled with decades of classroom ‘‘focus groups,’’ it presents a simple argument: ‘‘There is a genuine working-class culture that . . . needs to be recognized and appreciated in a much less imperial middle-class culture’’ (p. 14). To bolster this, he synthesizes a growing body of research on the cultural dimensions of class, from Lamont (2000) and Lareau (2003) to Bettie (2003), Streib (2015), and Silva (2013, 2019), among others (Jensen 2012; Leondar-Wright 2014). What emerges is a nostalgic yet piercing interrogation of the subterranean differences between the two largest economic groups in U.S. society. Though not a sociologist by trade, Metzgar speaks to issues at the heart of our discipline. And while ‘‘rigorously nonintersectional,’’ Bridging the Divide is by no means reductionist (p. 128). Instead, it aims to uncover the elements of workingclass culture and inter-class friction that apply beyond the white, male, cis-hetero stereotype, offering these as potential components for more multidimensional analysis. Arriving after the transformations of neoliberalism and amid growing political, social, and environmental turmoil, Metzgar’s book helps return focus—perhaps unintentionally—to the structural question of working-class agency. For to acknowledge categorical differences in class perspectives, as Bridging the Divide does, rather than individual ones along a spectrum, is to imply the problem of resistance—whether the subordinate group will challenge or accept the status quo. Bridging the Divide doesn’t really grapple with the latter, concluding instead with a bet-hedging ‘‘Two Good Class Cultures’’ (p. 187). But in its summary holism, pushing beyond careful empiricism, Metzgar’s monograph poses a Kantian antinomy that transcends the dominant perspectives on class since the 1980s. Before that, working-class life preoccupied sociologists. It animated disciplinedefining works by Mills (1948), Bell (1960), Marcuse (1964), and Burawoy (1979), among others. Most of these authors concluded that workers were unlikely to lead large-scale social upheavals that would level hierarchies and restructure economies. Yet their collective ability to shape social and economic policy within the confines of capitalism was presumed, both practically and scientifically. Deregulation, deindustrialization, and deunionization—as well as the collapse of the Soviet Union—changed this. Starting in the late 1980s, mainstream sociology turned away from questions of class. It was not alone. Led by Fukuyama (1992), mainstream social science bent toward postindustrial, post-Cold War triumphalism with a postmodernist flavor (Wood 1999). The work of Giddens (1990) and Beck (1992) offered macro-theoretical reframings; Milkman (1987) and England (1992) reappraised the gendered dimensions of class while Collins (1990), Crenshaw (1989), and Roediger (1991) did the same for race; Reich (1992), Sassen (1991), and Florida (2002) reinvigorated Gouldner’s (1979) ‘‘new class’’ thesis; and sociologists of work, building on Hochschild’s (1983) concept of ‘‘emotional labor,’’ began theorizing what they saw as the ‘‘contingent’’ (Leidner 1993), Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society, by Jack Metzgar. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2021. 240 pp. $43.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781501760310. 310 Review Essays