<論説>メトロポリスの誕生とアメリカ労働者階級

Abstract

世紀転換期に形成され、階級とエスニシティによる居住空間の分離を特質とするメトロポリスにおいては、当時の高い社会的流動性の下で周辺部において持家を獲得できた熟練層と都心部にとり残された半・不熟練層との間に、ライフスタイルの上でも意識の上でも亀裂が生じた。労働者が集中した都心部で対抗的労働者階級文化が形成されるが、これを忌避した工場は周辺部へ脱出し、この結果生じた労働者居住地域の分散は労働者相互の交流を阻害した。また、労働者は労働の場でのビジネス・ユニオニズムと生活の場でのマシーン政治という異なった組織原理によって引き裂かれ、ウォード制から市単位代議制への移行に代表される都市政治の構造改革は労働者の政治的発言力を封じ込めた。メトロポリスのアメリカ労働者階級は、階級的連帯を志向するパースペクティブと力量とをもてなかったのである。

In the process of transition from the implosive and socially intermixed "walking city " of the nineteenth century to the explosive and segregated metropolis of the twentieth, the skilled workers could afford to move out of the core and purchase their homes in the newly developed outer rings of the metropolis. And yet the less skilled workers were left in the slum areas of the inner city, being separated and segregated spatially as well as socially from those skilled workers in the outer rings. At the core of the metropolis where most workers had concentrated, oppositional working-class culture began to emerge at the end of the nineteenth century and forced manufacturing plants out of the central business district, but this exodus of factories into the periphery resulted in the dispersal of working-class districts, thereby separating workers of one area from those of another and diminishing chances of solidarity. Moreover, the metropolitan workers were mobilized as workers at work but as ethnics andresidents at home. They were thus unable to connect their struggles at the place of work with those at the place of life under the unified principle of class. And, as a result of structural reforms of city politics, especially a substitution of city-at-large election for the decentralized ward system, the political influences the working class had retained were reduced to a great extent. The American metropolitan workers at the turn of the century had great difficulties in developing class perspectives and consciousness as well as political strength.