thread themes on outlawing fascistic racist speech

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Fri Oct 30 17:20:52 PST 1998


Jim Heartfield's criticism of Ch Murray was an excellent one (he is truly one of the best writers I have had the pleasure of reading) though I just can't agree that the Bell Curve represented the endpoint of a racialized punitivism in practice: since its publication in 1994, we got welfare cuts, family caps, more punitive laws towards immigrants, the crime bill, assault on affirmative action, etc. That is, everything Murray called for--except the use of IQ tests for screening job applications.

And as James Galbraith does show, the most widely accepted explanation for wage inequality has centered, just as Murray's explanation does, on the demand that technology and "organizational complexity" (whatever that means) now put on skill, so those on the losing side are thought to be guilty of sloth, self indulgence, and whining. Or perhaps bad genes. "While no serious economist would take that last leap into racist fantasy, the underlying structure of the economists' argument has undoubtedly help to legitimize before a larger public, those who promote such ideas." (p.264)

The equivalent to such arguments in Marx's time was of course the compensation mechanism to which he devotes several pages of critique in Vol I, though now bourgeois economists (including even Robt Lekachman in the Age of Keynes) admit that it does not work perfectly because of the mismatch between the skill demands of the good new jobs and the capacities of the technologically unemployed. At any rate, it is insightful of Galbraith to underline that race is often implicated in this debate, though of course I am still working on the critique of the Keynesian and post keynesian answers to underemployment equilibrium.

One other thing. As I wrote in my whiteness post at the early stages of this list, I also very interested in how anti racist activists and scholars contribute to the reification of race. When I am done with that critique, I fear that I will have very few friends left even if I take to using prozac or other feel good junk.

best, Rakesh



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