Identity politics

Andrew Kliman Andrew_Kliman at email.msn.com
Thu May 28 05:25:58 PDT 1998


I've been following this thread with interest. A few comments:

(1) It seems to me that the relevant dichotomy is between absolute and relative gains (from discrimination), not between short- and long-run gains. Indeed, the meaning of the short/long distinction isn't at all clear to me, and I suspect that, without some implicit equilibrium model undergirding it, it may not mean anything.

(2) That white working people gain relatively to Blacks from discrimination is tautologically true.

(3) It may seem paradoxical that absolute losses to white working people go together with relative gains. Yet these are two sides of the same coin. "Divide and conquer" is precisely about privileging some workers relative to others in order to pit them against one another and thereby make them all lose in absolute terms.

(4) I haven't read all of the literature that Mat Forstater cites, but the most obvious facts seem strongly to indicate that Black and working people have common (though not "identical," whatever that may mean) interests. For one thing, over the past 20-something years, the deterioration of Black working people's standard of living has coincided with that of whites'. Moreover, the movements of Black and white employment rates, unemployment rates, income levels, and poverty rates are all very strongly correlated (the simple correlation coefficient from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s being 0.8 or greater for all of these measures).

(5) I think it is also important to distinguish between actual and perceived interests. The persistence of racism among white working people is undoubtedly due largely to a perception that their interests are opposed to the interests of Blacks. (And this in turn is related to a focus on relative gains, which are readily apparent from anecdotal evidence, and on the micro level.) But white working people can be wrong about their actual interests.

(6) Rakesh raised an interesting point concerning "people hav[ing] an interest in their relative standing, independently of the absolute level of their wages, or ... a reduction of the latter [being]compensated for by an improvement in the former...." I think, however, that this depends on the exclusion of alternatives. A tradeoff between A and B is meaningful only if there's no alternative C that is better than both of them. Thus, IF there is no alternative to capitalism, THEN we've got to take whatever they dish out. There's a fixed pie at any moment, so all we can do is fight each other for the biggest piece. "Winning" the "game" is then not a matter of achieving absolute improvements -- which are beyond one's control -- but of beating the other "player."

(7) This is an entrenched and recurrent thesis of bourgeois ideology. E.g., the notion that wages increases must lower employment rests on the assumption of a fixed total wage bill. E.g., the notion that immigrants, women, etc., "take jobs away from" native or male workers rests on the assumption of a fixed level of employment.

(8) From (5)-(7), it follows that (a) the struggle to end racism requires that this ideology be combatted, and (b) that combatting this ideology requires the development, concretization, and articulation of a VISION of a new, human, society (not class-conscious politics alone). This is a task that the Left should be engaged in, but it has all but abandoned the effort. Thus, it bears its share of the blame for the persistence of racism.

Andrew ("Drewk") Kliman Home: Dept. of Social Sciences 60 W. 76th St., #4E Pace University New York, NY 10023 Pleasantville, NY 10570 (914) 773-3951 Andrew_Kliman at msn.com

"... the *practice* of philosophy is itself *theoretical.* It is the *critique* that measures the individual existence by the essence, the particular reality by the Idea." -- K.M.



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