In message <F173xWn9R6mJB526tr50000811c at hotmail.com>, Justin Schwartz
<jkschw at hotmail.com> writes
> Why can't white workers have different and contradictory sets of
> interests? As whites they benefit by the subordination of blacks,
> browns, etc., in a number of ways: (1) their wages are higher; (2)
> they reduce competition for jobs and other opportunities where
> prejudicea nd racism forecloses blacks and other minorities; (3)
> they enjoy white skin privilege and concomitant feelings of
> superiority over blacks and other minorities, and solidaritry with
> whites. Just for starters. But as workers, a divided working class
> undermines their ability to organize against capitalist
> exploitation, to develop class solidarity and exercise class power.
> A similar dynamic operates with sexism, perhaps no less savagely.
To my mind this is a concatenation of two different methodological approaches.
The first (false) one is the zero-sum game of neo-classical economics, which concentrates upon distribution to the exclusion of production. according to this focus on distribution, by definition, whatever white people have, they have at the direct expense of black people. The assumption is that the sum total of goods is finite and fixed, and one person's possession is necessarily at the expense of the other. Therefore, white people have jobs. political power, respectability and resources at the expense of black people.
The other (true, I suggest) method is the one that takes relations of production as its starting point. Where one class performs surplus labour over and above its own needs, and this labour is annexed by another class exploitation takes place. The ruling class gain is at the working class expense. What then of race in such a view?
Well, you can take two routes. Either the working class exploits black people, living of their surplus labour, in which case it is no longer a working class but an exploiting class. There are conditions where that could be the case, as in British Kenya, for example, where there was no white working class, only a Kenyan working class, with a white exploiting class living off it. Is this analogous to the condition in America or Britain? I don't think so. I don't see working class people employing black servants as the norm.
The other route would be to see the working class divided on race lines with whites enjoying a differential advantage over blacks in employment and income. In such a case, they are better off relative to blacks, but only in the context of their own exploitation. In such a case, do they gain by black disadvantage? No. The exploitation of black people is not the source of white wages. White workers are not living from the surplus labour of blacks. Their wages represent a proportion of their own product.
This is more than a schema, it seems to me. What are wrongly seen as privileges for whites, turn out to be a massive disadvantage. Doubtless American and British elites tried to persuade white people that they were better off as a result. But such ideological appeals were nut substantially justified.
In message <3a24d3793a69aed9 at tamaris.wanadoo.fr>, Christopher B. Hajib- Niles <cniles at wanadoo.fr> writes
>you'll have show me how everything i've written can be reduced to a moral
>demand. i don't get it.
And then, tacking in the opposite direction
>my politics have always been informed by
>ethical and moral concerns.
Or better still
>so yes, anti-whiteism is a political principle based on a moral view alienation
>and the violence that stem from it are not good things.
I guess it is a moral demand, then.
I think the point on which this question turns is this:
Do white workers act against their material interests in renouncing whiteness, in which case it is a moral demand;
Or do they act in their class interests in challenging racism, in which case it is not.
Philanthropic acts, are, by definition, acts on the part of those whose income exceeds their consumption, and the preserve of privileged classes.
Is the renunciation of whiteness an act of philanthropy, on the part of a privileged class, or is opposition to racism one of self-interest on the part of an exploited class? I suggest the latter.
Chris seems to me to fudge the question of whether the working class is exploited or privileged. On the one hand
>
>they live largely miserable lives,
(well, I don't know if most working class people would agree that their lives are miserable. Hard, maybe? Perhaps things are different in America.) But anyway that seems clear enough.
> only in the narrowest sense
>does the white working class have a material interest these days in
>perpetuating
>racial oppression.
This though sounds like a fudge. 'Only in the narrowest sense'? This is the use of language to fudge meaning. In what sense? Does the working class have a material interest or doesn't it?
>with de-industrialisation and post-cold war unions, being a
>white worker ain't quite what it used to be.
I'm not sure that it ever was the privileged existence that you envisage. American workers in the boom years after the second world war were the most exploited in the world, ever. (I mean of course exploited in the specific sense that Marx gave it of the ratio of surplus labour given up to the capitalist class relative to that dedicated to their own reproduction.)
(One might ask, from whose perspective are US workers paid too much?
>From the standpoint of their employers, of course, for whom every cent
paid out in wages is one less on the profits.)
>
>the best revolutionary politics has "soul
>power." that is, it appeals to people's sense of right and wrong without
>moralizing. who wants to be involved in some dry ass struggle where all people
>whine about is not getting their piece of the pie? yuck.
Yes, petit bourgeois politics is all about 'justice' and such higher concerns, while working class demands have tended to be about bread and butter.
I guess, you revulsion at 'dry ass struggle' and 'whining' about a 'piece of the pie' betrays a contempt for working class organisation. Of course, some people are lucky enough to have their immediate needs already catered for, and so can reflect on such higher concerns as 'justice' and 'soul power' - without moralising, of course not. Oh no, not moralising at all, you selfish proletarians, you!
Both Justin a Chris take it as axiomatic that the white working class gained advantage from black people.
Justin says
> White workers and white
> bosses have an interest in racial domination.
Chris simply poses it as a rhetorical question (with the mystifying parenthesis
> (again in the most narrow
>material sense)
As if it was beyond doubt
>
>you don't think that the white working class gained
>by collaborating with racial oppression?
No, of course I do not. The white working class is an exploited class that surrenders the greater part of its product to its masters. How is that 'gaining'?
Chris expands
>
> that's what's at the
>core of american history:
Big assertion!
>white workers have always been bought off with a
>combination of what they get
You mean that they are paid to work. Do you want them to starve to death? By 'bought off' I guess you mean that their great privileges have prevented them from overthrowing the oppressor.
To my mind the failure of the working class is not due to an objective limitation (ie that they are in fact privileged, not exploited). Rather it is due to the subjective failure of working class leadership. I mean that the left has failed to develop the persuasive arguments for revolution. (Imagine how 'renounce your whiteness' would go down!) And in failing to convince, sadly, leftists have preferred to blame the working class for their supposed privileges than re-examine their own appeals.
Chris is characteristically vague about what the privileges are, exactly:
>(better but not gaurenteed access to the american
>dream)
Is that American Dream, or Not? Easy to take refuge in the complexity of 'better but not guaranteed', to avoid being precise. Furthermore, the shorthand use of the ideological appeal of 'the American Dream', simply participates in that mystification. There is no American Dream.
OK, so if its not material success, what is the advantage that white people get:
>and what what won't happen to them because they are NOT black
Oh great. Work all your life - except when we lay you off - and you get the privilege of ... not being clubbed over the head. Some privilege.
Chris suspects that his own argument that white people gain is pretty thin:
>
>if what you mean by white workers not gaining is that they got petty shit in
>return for collaboration with racial oppression, then yes, i would agree.
Well, its mildly contemptuous to call working class property, 'pretty shit'. Modest, maybe. But this is all a bit vague. Did they get something for collaborating or not? If they were paid to collaborate, then of course they are indeed guilty. But if, on the contrary, they were not given extra, but exploited then they might have been foolish to go along with the class that was exploiting them, but they are hardly gaining by it.
Let's follow Chris:
>but
>remember: lots of white working folks have always expected something from this
>country because they are white: this is the key to understanding those "angry
>white men" in middle-america who think they lost their jobs because of
>immigration and affirmative action.
This seems a bit superficial to me. For a start, the working class reaction against the recession of the early nineties was not massively racist - except in the overheated imaginations of the liberal intelligentsia. Yes there was some reaction against immigrants, but that was not the whole story of working class response (though it might well have been of some sections of the ruling class, who tried to galvanise such feelings).
Secondly, Chris is unreasonably hostile to the view that America owes a living to the working class. Indeed America does owe a living to the working class, black and white alike. Substantially the wealth of American society is a product of its working class. Why would working class people not resent being laid off while the rich never had it so good? Of course that feeling can take on a racialised form, in which immigrants get the blame for loss of jobs. But the initial resentment at losing jobs is quite proper.
>
>again, you really have to be deep in the historical dark not to see what white
>folk got and/or expected to get from being white in this country in order not
>to
>see the material foundation for an anti-white politics.
As far as I can see working class people expected too little, not too much. They ought to get the whole product of their labour, and were instead fobbed off with just a small proportion of it.
>>
>> Conversely, one might make the case that collaboration with racial
>> oppression was an ideological barrier to the working class's true
>> interests.
>
>this is exactly what i am saying. how has this not been clear?
No, I think you are not clear. The view that the working class lost out by its ideological acquiescence to racism is quite distinct form the view that the working class gained by its material interest in whiteness.
>i think that white folk are better off challenging the white race.
Better off as in can expect a higher standard of living? Well, I could agree. But better off in foregoing the privileges of whiteness, no, if there were such things then they would be worse off, wouldn't they?
> its about destroying a bullshit identity that has
>nothing to do with biological reality or culture and everything to do with
>relative privilege, entitlement
But if there are privileges attached (which I don't accept), then it is not bullshit, but plain common sense.
> if we destroy "racism", whatever that is, and we still have "white"
>people, we are fucked.
I think this is potentially confusing. How could it mean anything but the extermination of the white race?
>white people are, by defenition, lost: there ain't no
>white culture, no white food, no white spirituality, no white literature, no
>white music, no white dances style, no white art, no white language, no white
>theater;
And thank goodness for that. Who would want a culture that was race- specific? I think most people - unless they are on the defensive - would prefer a universal culture and literature that was not hidebound by race.
> yet there are lots of "white" people who cling to this silly identity-
>-
Do they? Perhaps in a position of defensiveness, such prejudices come to the fore. But for the most part, I see the mass of working class people admirably indifferent to the nationalistic and racial appeals of such tub-thumpers as Pat Buchanan. How many votes did he get?
>questions: apart from what happens when you walk out of your door in the
>morning, do you consider yourself a member of the white race? would you be
>offended if some serious, non-moralizing political folk (black or white or non-
>white) incorporated anti-white themes into their struggle? would you shy away
>from that struggle or embrace it?
No, I don't identify with whiteness. Like most people, it has the ring of old-fashioned racism. And like most, I am in aspiration, if not in fact, a citizen of the world. Working people have no country or race and therefore, nothing to renounce.
-- James Heartfield