>There are a number of Marxist and Marx inspired labor economists
>(e.g., Darity, Williams, Mason, Botwinick, Cotton, Shulman) who argue that
>white male workers do have an objective material self-interest in racism
>and patriarchy.
>
Mathew puts the case well. He could add that the 'white skin advantage'
version of the argument is the basis of Thoedore Allen and David
Roediger's fascinating (though flawed in my view) books on the Wages of
Whiteness and the Invention of the White Race. Clearly there is some
basis in Engels' writings on the role of Irish labour, Marx on the
labour aristocracy in England, and Lenin on the negative impact of the
crumbs off the imperialist table on the European labour aristocracy to
these theories.
However, I would argue that they are in Marxist terms, a confusion of distributive advantage and the social relations of production. Looked at in terms of income distribution it is clear that white skin is an advantage. Andrew Hacker demonstrates as much and even puts a price on it with this experiment with some graduate students: 'How much would you need to be compensated for being turned black?' he asked. The students responded somewhere in the region of $1 million (as I remember it). More prosaically the income differences for wage earners are about half as much again for white workers - a considerable advantange (again this is from memory).
But to look at the question solely in terms of differential incomes between races obscures another set of relations, those between the class of employers and employees. Before there is a distribution of goods between races there must be a distribution of social roles between classes, in the realm of production. The division of the social product between wage and the various forms of surplus value is as if not more unequal than that of incomes between races.
The differentiated incomes within the working class are without doubt a relative advantage for whites. But it is a relative advantage within a system of exploitative labour. The absolute advantage falls to capitalists. Whites workers win out against their black 'competitors', but only at the more profound cost of dividing their forces in the face of their exploiters. The price of going along with racism is profound for the working class. It means that they have lost the ideological independence that would allow them to resist attacks on their living standards. The failure of the white working class to resist the racialised politics of the eighties was a precondition for the assault on their own living standards.
Mathew is right to reject the idea that racism can be nothing more than false consciousness. Consciousness is never just consciousness, but must always have some material basis. Except in the limited sense that capital finds its historical justification in the development of the productive forces and of the means of consumption, working people have no interest in sustaining capitalism. I would not go so far as to say that white wage labourers have a vested interest in a differentiated labour market - no more than that they have a vested interest in their own exploitation.
The idea that racism is principally a working class problem has been the stock-in-trade of academic thinking on the matter since Gunnar Myrdal derived racism from the closed shop and backward prejudice (or just a hangover from slavery). The effect of that narrow analysis is that the ideological meaning of racism is obscured: racism is an ideology that falsely unites working and ruling class in a common racial endeavour, in opposition to outsiders. Working people have every reason to distrust the idea that the employing class will look on them kindly because they are the right colour.
In message <SIMEON.9805271148.B at oem-computer.jmu.edu>, "Rosser Jr, John
Barkley" <rosserjb at jmu.edu> writes
> However, I do note that if one wants to get crudely
>technical, Marx himself can be interpreted as arguing that
>productive labor is only that which results in material
>output,
Only as a misinterpretation. Marx's differntiation between productive and unproductive labour does not argue that only productive workers are working class, nor does it refer to material output, but to 'value', in his critical theory of value. -- Jim heartfield