>Messsage du 29/11/2000 03:31
>De : <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>A : <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Copie à :
>Objet : Race, Force, & the Market (was Re: renouncing whiteness)
>
> If,
> >as I think, the class war produces racism and similar social
> >pathologies,
what you earlier called the one-sided class war does indeed produce what you call "racism" and what i call "white people" but working people are not just stupid dupes of capital. they do plenty to reproduce the white race on a daily basis, rather consicously i might add. that does not make them evil, just pathetic in their efforts to take advantage of whatever advantages they THINK they have in a nasty, competitive capitalist system.
> I'm not interested in explaining all the forms which racist practice
> takes, though.
yes, that would be a waste of time--if not impossible--something better left to sociologist than radicals. the white race (your "racist practices") will endlessly reproduce itself in contradictory, more or less destructive ways until it is destroyed.
It makes political sense to attack the biggest
> post-Emancipation/post-Civil-Rights problem -- criminal justice --
> first and foremost, for redlining, housing discrimination, workplace
> discrimination, media discrimination, etc. have by now become either
> derivative of or secondary to the production of blacks as the
> _criminal race_. Why? Once blacks achieved first emancipation &
> then voting & civil rights, + affirmative action, there was & is no
> other state apparatus than criminal justice that was & is capable of
> reproducing race as an ensemble of social relations.
sorry, yosh. gotta disagree with you there. it is certainly true that the criminal justice system reproduces racial mythology at a ferocious pace. but so does, more subtlely, the education system, and the financial system, which is what much of what you listed above is ultimately about. black folks are still, by and large, bad for property values, no matter their class status. the media is utterly dependent on racial mythology for profits and in its production considerations. the black middle-class is largely a product of their employment, directly or via contracting, by federal, state, county and local government offices (the corporate world hires lots of black women but mostly for clerical positions)...
it is worth noting that the electoral process reinforces the white race (voters have no critical control over capital that reproduces white privilege, southern strategy, privileged acess to electoral system for whites with money and connections, election rules, etc.). so did the civil rights laws (relatively tough laws and regulations thtat appear to resolve problems but have little or no enforcement mechanisms) and so has affirmative action (mainly benefited white professional woman).
It took force (= primitive accumulation = enclosure + enslavement) to
> create the Market. And it takes force (= warfare + criminal justice)
> to reproduce the Market.
ok.
>
> That is why every classical & neo-classical economist (as well as
> most firm believers in the efficiency of the Market & inefficiency of
> the State) argues not that the State should be abolished in favor of
> the Market but that the State's role should be limited to national
> defense & law enforcement.
>
well said.
chris niles
> Yoshie
>