<< JKSCHW at aol.com wrote:
>
I can't swer athi si R's
> approach,
Sam: Hey Justin, Swahili? Esperanto?
Justin: Oops, how about, failure to spell check. Sorry.
> Justin: Again, I can't recall hia argument in detail. But the point would be
> to show that divide and conquer is individually rationally for capitalists.
Sam: I think one should be on guard against undue functional explanation in
examining the relationship between capitalism and race(ism). Sure the
capitalist/ruling class benefits from racism but that isn't saying much.
Justin: Quite right. I was too abbreviated. Roemer is skeptical of functional explanation--for so than I am (See my Functional Explanation and Metaphysical Individualism, Philosophy of Science 1993--a defense of functional explanation against Elster's attack on the device.) Because Roemer is skeptical of functional explanation, he doubts that it is explanatorily helpful to point out that racism (for example) might be in the interests of capitalists as a class. He wants something to provide a mechanism by which what might be in the group interests of some group might be realized in the actions of individuals who make up that group. Accordingly, Roemer uses techniques of neoclassical economics to show that racism is in the individual interests of capitalists, or at least the likely outcome of things that are in their individual interests, and so are likely to be realized in the outcome of their actions. Hope that makes clear the general strategy for dealing with cheap functional explanation that Sam warns us against.
Sam: Class is a more powerful unifier than race and
culture is a divider.
Justin: Not on the evidence we have so far.
Sam: Recall David Roediger's work that the US white working class has
itself benefited from racism by means of a kind of "psychic income".
This might suggest that the ruling class aren't interested in race per
se but benefit from it as an unintended consequence of the poorest class
in the US also being a racial minority. I guess this would be the 'class
not race' view.
Justin: This is Marx's line, in fact. See his discussion of how the yellow press seizes on and inflames existing anti-Irish prejudices; or consider that religion for Marx is the opium of pain that people naturally feel in heartless world, not a cynical trick foisted on them by secretly atheist priests and aristocrats.
Sam: Just something to consider. Part of me feels that
capitalists don't care much about the color of your skin or cultural
background just if you work hard and cheap.
Justin. This is the Friedman/Nozick line that capitalism is antiracist that started this thread. It is true in a sense. Capitalism has tendencies towards reducing everything to no-color abstract labor. These tendencies are in a sense egalitarian. Marx alluded to this element of capitalism when he said things like Workers have no nation, etc. But that is not the only tendency in capitalism. That is why the work of people like Roemer and Roediger is important. That works helps explain why racism flourishes and persists in the face of the (apparently) leveling wind of capitalism.
--Justin