The first sentence of Jim Berlin's last book Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures says that "English studies is in crisis." Berlin lists the predictable forces at work: the onset of "theory," postmodernism, "political correctness," the accumulative disequilibrium of an expanding canon, identity politics. Berlin invokes these forces, of course, to do more than account for the perceived crisis state. He believes the current crisis warrants a revived role for rhetoric in English studies, a restored and updated version of civic rhetoric. One of Berlin's key arguments throughout the book holds that rhetoric should take its place alongside poetics in the "business of the polis" and the "communal engagement" of reading, writing, and speaking he wants to see at the center of the English curriculum.

Berlin's case for rhetoric in Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures will be familiar to those who know his earlier work. What I find striking about his last book is that Berlin frames the "crisis in English studies" in terms of "major changes in the work activities and demographic makeup of the society for which college students are preparing," as well as in terms of current intellectual and political trends (xii). The cultural dislocations of the global economy and the post-Fordist restructuring of the workplace weigh as heavily on the perceived crisis as the usual academic suspects.

In "A Closing Word" at the book's end, Berlin returns to the mundane, workaday world and the role of English teachers in the subject formation and credentialing of undergraduates. Berlin wants to locate our work studying and teaching writing not only as academic specialists but also as factors in the school to job transition. From this perspective, the English curriculum and its pedagogy of evaluating and ranking students are meant to construct marketable, recommendable students—ethical subjects with particular skills and dispositions toward reading and writing that fit the prevailing economic relations and cultural realities.

There is an important tension at work in Berlin's treatment of the school to job transition that is worth exploring. On one hand, the notion that writing courses amount to "rhetoric for the meritocracy" has been a standard caveat at least since Richard Ohmann's English in America explained how composition prepares students for the corporate world. On the other hand, Berlin seems to insist that part of the role of writing instruction should be to prepare students for the world of work. Berlin is not proposing that the curriculum be given over to vocationalism, but at the same time he says, "I do not think we in the academy can simply ignore the advice of employers." In the next sentence, he comes close to sounding like such new age management gurus as Tom Peters and Peter M. Senge: "We must finally provide a college education that enables workers to be excellent communicators, quick and flexible learners, and cooperative collaborators" (50). None of the current sages of the postindustrial workplace could have put it any better.

What are we to make of Berlin's advice here? Has he been coopted by the allure of the post-Fordist workplace? Lost his Marxist bearings? Turned class collaborator? I don't think there's much danger. To my mind, what makes Berlin's advice so surprising is that writing teachers and theorists on the left have largely resisted the notion of work and the school to job transition altogether. Those are issues we have conveniently segregated in business, technical, and professional writing courses, keeping the first-year course "pure" and "critical."

My view is that in Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures, Berlin is challenging us to develop ways to think about how our activities as writing teachers are necessarily and unavoidably caught up in the school to job transition. And he offers some ways to do so. Preparing students for work, Berlin says, "can never be a simple accommodation to the marketplace." Instead, it should provide "an understanding of the operation of the workforce as a whole." In short, we need a "curriculum that places preparation for work within a comprehensive range of democratic educational concerns" (51).

Berlin evokes a social-democratic citizen-worker as the subject of rhetoric, a figure rooted in the earlier radical democratic traditions of John Dewey, Fred Newton Scott, and Gertrude Buck and distinct from the scientific meritocracy, on one hand, and the minority culture of liberal humanism, on the other. What Berlin seems to be getting at here is that citizenship and civic rhetoric depend in part on how work enables individuals to participate in the operations of society. Work provides a critical connection to others and to institutions. In the traditions of the labor movement, trade union militants are always the best workers, the leaders at the point of production where the class struggle takes place daily.

In many respects, we are suffering from a media blitz by baby boomers that has cast each successive generation as somehow lacking in relation to the movement of the Sixties. Since the mid-Seventies, young people have been routinely characterized as careerist, vocational, obsessed with jobs, apolitical. We have grown accustomed to representing work and careers as private and individual matters, counterposed to the public and the interests of the larger community. One of the great strengths of Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures is that Berlin wants to resist this privatization of work, to merge labor and citizenship in the notion of economic democracy, where production is geared to social needs instead of private profit and workers control democratically organized workplaces.

To my mind, this vision of citizen-workers in an economic democracy provides an important corrective to current emphases in cultural studies approaches to teaching writing that tend to see students above all as consumers—of styles, images, narratives, media messages, cultural products. But the merging of citizen and worker also produces some difficulties that are worth mentioning. The term "citizen" combines uneasily with the term "worker" because the identity of the former is based on geography while the identity of the latter is based on a relation to the means of production.

The notion of the citizen emerges in the French Revolution as the mutual recognition of individuals and groups who understand themselves to be independent from church and court, a "people" with their own separate interests, identities, and institutions. Citizenship was not conferred but claimed by the masses who took over the streets and defended the revolution against the nobility and the properties classes.

As the radical force of the citizenship is institutionalized, however, it calls up its opposite—the alien, women, children, the criminal, the unpropertied, the illiterate, the insane, the lumpen, the undocumented. Since the allegiance of the citizen is to the people and the nation, loyalty begins and ends with the geography of national borders, enforcing the difference between naturalized citizens and illegal immigrants. Citizenship, in other words, is perpetually in danger of a First Worldist orientation, where the key question is territorial and the defense of national integrity. This contrasts sharply with an internationalist perspective concerned with the common interests of working people caught up in a global division of labor that cuts across national boundaries.

When the term "citizen" and "worker" come up, it is good to remember what Karl Marx said: "Working people have no country." The proletariat is an international class whose interests cross national lines.