Workers' Culture (Arbeiterkultur)

Definition

Workers' culture is, in Wolfgang Kaschuba's chapter, the second of the two modern "symbolic orders" of lower-class life (the first being popular culture). It is a producer culture, constituted "directly in material cultural praxis," whose core value is "identity via work": "the salient formative factors are 'identity via work' and the direct linking of the results of material and symbolic reproduction" (Kaschuba, p. 178). It is expressed not only in the culture of the workers' movement but in the everyday symbolic grammar of the shop floor — horseplay, pranks, body language, "the demonstrative communicative styles of gesture, body language, and voice" (p. 175). Kaschuba argues that workers' culture is not simply a "successor" to popular culture but interlaced with it — "proletarian culture may also have been 'in many respects the successor and heir to the older plebian culture'" — and that its basic patterns persist as a proletarian habitus into the present (pp. 174–176, 192–193).

Key Thinkers

• Wolfgang Kaschuba — the chapter "Popular Culture and Workers' Culture as Symbolic Orders" (no author page yet — see log).
• Alf Lüdtke — the parallel account of shop-floor cooperation and Eigensinn.
• E. P. Thompson — the moral economy and plebeian culture from which workers' culture descends.
• Pierre Bourdieu — the "class habitus" and "class-specific body" with which Kaschuba analyses workers' culture.
• Luc Boltanski — the "social use of the body" and the physical habitus.
• Raymond Williams, Barrington Moore — the value and injustice dimensions.

Related Concepts

• Popular Culture — the prior symbolic order.
• Moral Economy — the normative inheritance.
• Eigensinn — the shop-floor practice that expresses workers' culture.
• Habitus — the class-dispositional mechanism of its transmission.
• Alltagsgeschichte — the historiography that studies it.
• Workers' Culture — the concept's own page.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — Kaschuba's chapter (pp. 169–197): "Identity via Work" (pp. 178–181), "Individual Habitualization" (pp. 181–186), "Body Experience and Body Language" (pp. 186–189), and "On the 'longue durée' of Workers' Culture" (pp. 189–193); Lüdtke's connected discussion of workers' modes of life (pp. 11–12, 19).

Open Questions

• Is "workers' culture" a historical formation now ended, or, as Kaschuba argues, a "longue durée" structure still visible in a "proletarian habitus"? His answer leans to persistence, against the "end of the proletariat" thesis.
• How does the culture of the workers' movement relate to the everyday culture of the shop floor? Kaschuba argues research long privileged the former at the expense of the latter.