Know Your Enemy - On Barbara Ehrenreich (w/ Alex Press & Gabriel Winant)

Matt and Sam are joined by writer Alex Press and historian Gabe Winant to discuss the life and legacy of socialist feminist icon Barbara Ehrenreich.

Duration: 1h 35m
Broadcast on: 12 Sep 2022
Audio Format: other

This episode was unplanned, but when Barbara Ehrenreich died on September 1, 2022, we felt an urge to honor her memory and the profound influence she has had on the American left, socialism, feminism, and our collective thinking about class struggle. From her work in the women's health movement of the 1960s, to her theorizing (with ex-husband John Ehrenreich) of the "professional-managerial class" in the 1970s, to her explorations of Reagan-era yuppie pathologies, and her renowned exposé of low-wage work in 2001's Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich has been an essential and nuanced guide to the inner-life of American class conflict in the latter half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.

To undertake this journey through an extraordinary body of work, we're joined by two brilliant writers who have both — in their own way — taken up Ehrenreich's profound ethical and intellectual challenge: Alex Press, staff writer at Jacobin magazine (and KYE's favorite labor journalist); and returning guest Gabe Winant, University of Chicago historian and author of The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care.

As Gabe writes in his stunning obituary last week, "Ehrenreich’s specialty was to reveal her readers to themselves by showing them the other. Her humor and projection of personal vulnerability were particularly deft techniques for asking the reader to see their own position, often through identification with Ehrenreich: she invites this, beckoning you to follow her into her subject, and then suddenly wheels around on you—and you are caught out."

We hope this episode can manage something of that technique for the listener, that you might find yourself "caught out" too, thinking deeply about where you fit into the story Barbara is telling — and what it might call on you to do, fight for, or think harder about. Enjoy.

Further Reading:

Barbara & John Ehrenreich, "The Professional-Managerial Class," Radical America, March 1977.

— "The New Left and the Professional Managerial Class," Radical America, May 1977.

— "Death of a Yuppie Dream," Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Feb 2013.

Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, The Feminist Press, 1973.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, Pantheon, 1989.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Metropolitan, 2001.

Barbara Ehrenreich, "Preface to Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History," U of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Gabriel Winant, "On Barbara Ehrenreich," n+1, Sept 9, 2022.

— "Professional-Managerial Chasm," n+1, Oct 10, 2019.

— "The Right Kind of Worker," Know Your Enemy, May 2022.

Alex Press, "On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich." Dissent, Oct 22, 2019.

David Rieff, "White Bread, White Dread (review of Fear of Falling)," LA Times, Aug 20, 1989.

This episode of Know Your Enemy is dedicated to Barbara Ehrenreich (1941-2022) and all those who loved and learned from her.

All right listeners, welcome to episode 61 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sippman, your podcast co-host, and I'm here with my friend Sam Edler Bell. Hello, Matt. Sam, this episode we're about to share with listeners is one we didn't expect to record, but it came together quickly because of the sad news that Barbara Ehrenreich died on September 1 at the age of 81. Barbara, of course, was the well-known left-wing writer, journalist, activist, who's probably most famous for her book, Nickel Undimed, but also in recent years, her papers with her former husband, John Ehrenreich, on the professional managerial class, PMC, became a major flashpoint in the discourse. So, I'm sure a lot of our listeners will know something about Barbara Ehrenreich, but hopefully this episode takes it a little deeper. Yeah, I've always been a huge fan of her work. I've read a bunch of her books. I reread some of them quickly when we decided we were going to do this episode, and definitely the PMC wars of the past couple years, especially during the Bernie primary in 2019, 2020, was really a big flashpoint on the left. That term is sort of used as a kind of term of abuse on the left, usually one PMC calls another PMC, a PMC, as if that precludes them from speaking about socialism or something. But also on the right, Ehrenreich's work has been sort of taken up in a usually quite dishonest and tendentious way, similarly to try to demonize some kind of woke middle class elite. I think that in the course of this conversation, you'll hear that we dispel a lot of the misapprehensions about what she meant by that term, and also how her theory about that term continued to inform her later books, even when they stopped being in a kind of explicitly Marxist idiom. And to have that conversation, we had two amazing guests. That's right, we had, back on the show, our friend Gabe Winant, who was on the show just a few months ago to talk about his great book, The Next Shift, The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care, he writes for a lot of different publications, including N+1, where he wrote a great obituary about Barbara that was just published. And also our friend Alex Press, who's a staff writer at Jacobin, her labor reporting, I'm sure you've read it, but her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, book form, among other places. And these were great guests, in part because Gabe had recently gone through a lot of Aaron Reich's papers, her personal papers, which figures mightily in this conversation. And Alex, of course, did a well-read, well-regarded interview with Barbara for Descent, just within the last couple of years, about some of these topics. So they were people who knew Barbara's work extremely well, and even knew her, in a sense. Yeah. We sort of suspected that they would be the perfect guest for this episode. And then as the episode unfolded, I became even more clear that Aaron Reich's whole approach, her thinking, her writing, is really, you can see it in the work of both of these brilliant writers today. Yes. And as someone who came to the left later in life, this was the first time I really spent a lot of time with Aaron Reich's work. And just for listeners, if you haven't done that, listen to this conversation and consider it, I found it a very moving in light of her death, especially experience, but also a very bracing one intellectually. Yeah. I was so impressed, and this conversation, I think, will give you a sense of why.

Transcription truncated.

Matt and Sam are joined by writer Alex Press and historian Gabe Winant to discuss the life and legacy of socialist feminist icon Barbara Ehrenreich.