>Messsage du 18/11/2000 16:09
>De : <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>A : <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Copie à :
>Objet : White Men & Freedom Essential to Capitalism
>
> Chris Niles posted:
>
> >I basically agree with you on this point. That said, i don't think
> >Doug missed the point, only that his point needs to be significantly
> >qualified. i think it is true that in a very nasty, very competitive
> >society, white men are indeed unwilling to give up gender and "race"
> >priviledges. Their are still social, economic and poltical benefits,
> >ranging from petty to significant to tremendous, accorded white men.
> >The problem is that increasingly, white male priviledge, especially
> >for poor and "middle-class" white men, is less about what you get
> >and more about what does NOT happen to you.
>
> Actually, for the majority of white men, perhaps, being white has
> always been a matter of what is _not supposed to_ happen to you.
The
> metaphor of "wage slavery" captures this ambivalence: a white man is
> _not supposed to_ be a slave, but capitalism does _enslave him to a
> paradoxical freedom_: free from the means of production; free from
> lifetime & heritable personal subjection to the master class; and
> free to go bankrupt, become unemployed, and starve. In contrast, it
> took _a very long time after the emergence of capitalism_ for blacks,
> women, etc. to achieve this paradoxical freedom of wage labor; and
> many women & people of color in the world have not gained even this
> minimum bourgeois freedom.
>Of course. But that does not speak to the obvious fact that white men still get significant goodies from claiming their whiteness, such as better or unionized jobs or a relative pyscological ease with your person: Or to put it another way, i'm 34 years old and quite confident in my abilities but i am always consciouss of my blackness in an all-too-often unfortunate way. That's something that "white" boys don't really know about and CAN'T know about until they act publically and effectively against the white race in a way that will result in white folks making them feel quite black.
>
> >The nature of alienation from self--which is what being "white" is
> >all about, not to mention being a white prole--is that depending on
> >the social and historical circumstances, white men are sometimes
> >more conscious of thier priviledge and sometimes less so. The
> >"racist"/"not-racist" paradigm that the left uses to understand
> >these people is analytically impoverished and, therefore, useless in
> >any effort to build a movement against the tendendy that both
> >victimizes them and that they represent.
>
> White men who are racist think that the root cause of alienation lies
> not in the aforementioned paradoxical freedom of capitalism but in
> the marginalized & oppressed who either have only recently &
> precariously attained the freedom essential to capitalism (women,
> blacks, etc. in rich nations) or have yet to do so (illegal aliens in
> rich nations; the impoverished masses on the periphery; etc.); racist
> white men think that we -- not capitalism -- are the source of his
> woes, without understanding that we have it even worse than them
> under capitalism.
Who is "we"?
White men who are not racist know what the real
> cause of alienation is.
My experience with the so-called left is that the vast majority of white men who constitute its ranks range from utterly clueless to deeply sensitized but quite significantly confused about race. I think you will find rough agreement about that among the so-called people of color agitators, certainly among blacks, though folks will disagree as to the reasons why...
chris niles
the new abolitionist
>
> Yoshie
>