Why Decry the Wealth Gap?

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue Jan 25 06:09:38 PST 2000


Doug Henwood wrote:


> Brett Knowlton wrote, quoting Cox & Alm:
>
> >So, I'm going to ask again. Does anyone know whether these guys are simply
> >cooking the numbers, or do they have a point?
>
> My first reaction is the same as the last time you brought this up
> here - so what? Immigrants are people too. They have to obey laws,
> pay taxes, and live in this lovely society.

Yes. We are dealing, I think, with the mysticism of numbers. Left thinking has (or should have) from the beginning two points of departure: real people (regardless of juridical status) who think, feel pain etc. on the one hand, pure abstract positions in the social division of labor on the other hand. As a person, there is no detectible difference between an immigrant and a "citizen" (citizen being a wholly artificial category, not pointing, directly,

to any material reality). To somehow suggest that it makes a difference whether the person suffering is or is not a "citizen" is nearly criminal.

On the other hand we (leftists) try to see the social order as a whole, in all it dynamism. So we have the abstract division of labor. The social order constitutes and is constituted by the slots in that division -- unemployed, convict, software engineer, hamburger flipper, dependent of retired worker. And again, "immigrant" does not exist here either.

Immigrants only appear when we turn from understanding the fundamental dynamic of our society (capitalism) to strategy and tactics of struggle. Brett's

position is of someone standing outside the struggle, indifferent both to concrete people and to the dynamics of his social order, mesmerized by the numbers of an econ text. So, whether they are cooking the numbers or not they have no point. Because the numbers they play with tell us nothing about either real people or social dynamics.

Carrol



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