Class Consciousness in Country Music :: Music Musical Class Essays

family Consciousness in Country MusicThe line mannikin consciousness, like any term which attempts to define group mentality, is fewwhat imprecise. This miss of precision, of course, lends itself to the provocation of scholarly dispute. Historians of the labor front line in the United States digest written volumes about both the meaning of class consciousness and the unbelief of whether American workers possess it, however defined. While there be whatsoever demurs, most historians, including the non-Marxists, gain accepted a Marxist interpretation of the term class consciousness.1 Generally, Marxists insist that class consciousness is composed of both elements, a recognition by a particular group that they meet a common, usually subordinate, position within a society, and a payload to changing that position through some type of political activity. Class consciousness, according to an oft-cited definition by the English Marxist historian E.P. Thompson, happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared) feel and tell the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determine by the productive relations into which men are born or enter voluntarily.2Regardless of how class consciousness is defined, most historians of the labor movement in the United States, Marxists and non-Marxists alike, agree that American workers never developed it. Their explanations of why this is so, however, vary. Some of the more acceptable explanations for this lack of class consciousness among American laborers are the racial and ethnic minorities within the work force, the greater well-disposed mobility of the American worker compared to that of his European counterpart and the generally higher remuneration received by American workers, which it is claimed, allows them to join the middle class. Recent historians have identified as a cause republican virtues nourished by the American Revolution which established a political democracy in the United States before the coming of the Industrial Revolution.3 The failure of American workers to blend class conscious in the Marxist sense does non, however, indicate a willingness to accept the status quo. Rather American workers were acutely aware of their inferior economic and social status. The method they chose to improve their status was trade unionism, not politics. Trade unionism sprang from what Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor termed class awareness, a camaraderie among workers devoid of political consideration. This class awareness of American laborers, historians contend, is perspicuous in the long, arduous and ultimately successful struggle to build a trade union movement.