My sympathies are with Maria G here. I can't help but feel that Yoshie and Carrol are nurturing an old fashioned prejudice against working people underneath their modish anti-racism.
So when Carrol says that white workers are scabs, it sounds to me like someone saying 'black people are muggers'. Carrol cites an instance of nationalistic chauvinism (one of many he could have cited) as evidence. But in the same way I could cite an instance of a black person committing a street crime - it still would not support the contention that all white workers are scabs.
You have to ask yourself why does the word 'scab' have any emotional weight? Is it not because a labour movement that was in large part white and male, in the US and in Europe, made a virtue of solidarity? Indeed it is much more common in the history of industrial relations that immigrant labour has been used to break strikes, than indigenous. Then union militants fought hard to counter the notion that black or Irish people were all 'scabs', and to maintain a class solidarity. Of course you could always point to the many instances when the argument went the other way, and solidarity was organised against outsiders. But wouldn't the conclusion be the same - that no section of the working class ougth to be seen as intrinsically scabby?
Yoshie points to the considerable backward prejudices held by the white, male working class and their failure to embrace progressive causes. Yes, it is a great tragedy that working class people are not born revolutionaries. Like everyone else, they have to be won to that position. None the less, it is the case in Britain and I suspect in America too, that organised labour has been consistently to the left of every other section of society.
In Britain women have consistently polled higher support for the Conservative Party than men (a trend that has only weakened now that the Labour party has become very conservative itself). Indeed the argument that swung Lloyd George to support women's suffrage (long supported by the parties of the left) was that the women's vote would dilute the labour vote - an attitude that was confirmed by the backing of the suffragettes for conscription. Women have generally polled more hostile to gay rights and to organised labour. Clearly the more socially conservative attitudes of women are related to their exclusion from the workplace and relative isolation. Such attitudes are generally falling away now that women in Britain make up the majority of those employed. But in no sense have women been any more progressive in their views than men.
Yoshie is right to say that prejudice should be challenged in the white, male working class. But it would be a shame if that was merely a rhetorical pose designed to write them off as inveterate racists, sexists who can be safely ignored. At a time when the older smoke-stack industries have been torn apart and white men's wages are being forced down as their jobs are being scrapped, it seems a bit too convenient that we should choose this moment to denouce their backward prejudices. -- Jim heartfield