I'm still confused about Chris's position.
If the white working class has a material interest in perpetuating racial oppression, then his appeal to 'renounce whiteness' could be a moral one.
Why should the white working class act against its own interests (accepting what seems to me quite wrong: that they do indeed gain by collaborating with racial oppression)?
Doesn't this appeal to renounce whiteness succumb to precisely those errors that Engels describes in Utopian and Scientific Socialism: namely that it is an appeal to moral action without identifying the material foundations for such an action?
Conversely, one might make the case that collaboration with racial oppression was an ideological barrier to the working class's true interests. Evidence for such an interpretation is hardly thin on the ground. Chris might think that having a car is tantamount to membership of the capitalist class, but I would suggest that it is nothing special, and quite compatible with being exploited.
If the working class has no substantial community of interests with the ruling class, then it has no need to guiltily 'renounce' its supposed privileges. Rather it has a real material interest in challenging racism. Such an approach has the advantage that it is not based on moralism.
In message <3a23f2c53a310eed at areca.wanadoo.fr>, Christopher B. Hajib- Niles <cniles at wanadoo.fr> writes
>and yes, one should target their idealogical and political heat at the capitalit
>class but we should not forget that those pretty cars are buying allegiance
>and, indeed, destroying the environment and human life. we certainly should not
>be blaming 'everyday folk' for being auto-dependent (nor imposing gas taxes and
>the like on them) but they should at least know what auto-dependency entails and
>how their status as wage slaves conspires against their ability to do anything
>about it. no one who hopes for a better world should promote the fetishisation
>of working class innocence.
>
> we
>hate capitalism; we hate race; we know the two are deeply entangled; we know the
>two phenomenah, in their various guises, have conspired in much evil; let's
>focus on destroying both as necessary to fundamental, revolutionary change.
-- James Heartfield