Conservative Promotes Racial Divisions to Undermine Welfare State

Gordon Fitch gcf at panix.com
Sat Jul 21 06:18:09 PDT 2001


Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema:
> .... It is crucially important for the
> left to develop progressive proposals for family policy, social
> welfare, and the legal institutions of the family that promote
> universalism and challenge the presumption of the family as primary
> nurturer.

I take it the non-anarchist Left is referred to here. The anarchist Left already has a proposal for family policy: to allow people to form such attachments as they please, without interference or coercion, especially by the State.

If my reading isn't entirely fiction, "the family" as the Republicans conceive of it didn't even exist until a few hundred years ago, and can be preserved as a social formation today only if imposed by the use of force.

In fact, most people, most _Republicans_ do not live in the model family; it is something to be invoked, if possible, on the lower orders as a sort of punishment or "correction". I would prefer it if the Left did not become involved in this nasty charade.

Wojtek:
> ...
> I think it is the other way around - the revulsion toward underclass and
> welfare dependency is the factor causing racism....

Chuck Grimes:
> ...
> Racism in this context then becomes a kind of moral crutch. First we
> need do nothing since They are beneath concern, and whatever we did
> consider doing, is all wasted effort anyway. ...

Racism is much more active than that. As Yoshie pointed out, its cutting edge is police activity. If we look at the whole world, we can add military operations. Millions of less obvious decisions and judgements are made every day to shore it up and preserve it, as we know from employment and real estate statistics, investigations and experiments.

Racism is a resonant frequency of class war. If a society is structured around class war, then boundaries like race, religion, gender and so forth are likely to become fault lines with winners on one side and losers on the other. Once such a fault line is established it tends to replicate and reinforce itself, because the existence of the fault line is of advantage to the winners. Hence, it is part of the function of being a winner to feel "revulsion" toward the losers, and think of new punishments for them -- see above.

The use of State-bureaucratic mechanisms to abrogate or mitigate the punishments (as, for instance, by producing a more liberal definition and treatment of "the family" than that given by right-wing Republicans) does not seem likely to succeed, since it preserves class and the State. And indeed when we look at the recent history of the U.S., we observe failure -- not practical failure, but political failure. After a while those who had an appetite for winning remember their appetite.



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