Yes, per Williams w/c is defined by activity. But (partially by extension) w/c is also defined by *deficit*. Activity (manual labor especially, going back to Greece) corrupts. W/C activity takes place because of what the practitioner, the w/c individual, has not attained. Deficit. Definition by what you don’t have, haven’t attained, can’t access.

And I think the rhetoric of the working-class academic is a concerted effort to transcend that deficit model. The trouble is–as I think you’re hinting at–that particular rhetoric ends up not engaging with/glossing over w/c activity.

What I was getting at is the extent to which these contradictions are ever with us. The terms are divisive. The definitions are perpetually contested. Does that level of contestation allow for a “rhetoric” (a working-class rhetoric) that is even remotely stable? I’m trying to think about poetics as an ideology, as a practice, hell maybe even as a set of genres that can contend with the contradictions in a way that a “rhetoric” can not. More later.