--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote: >
>
> (1) Why do empirically-minded leftists not rest
> content with an
> empirically observable & theoretically
> unobjectionable proposition
> that a good number of white workers _think_
> anti-racism is _not_ in
> their interest?
Because they are quite possibly *correct* to think this way, in the sense that this view may correspond to an economic reality that the clique of workers who are white are able to prosper at the expense of the rest of the working class, and that they do better by membership of this clique than they would by identifying themselves with the working class as a whole. Again, it's the difference between properties of sets and properties of their members. If I own a Picasso, and you want me to part company with it, you can either tell me that it's stolen, or tell me that it's a fake. If you decide to ignore the distinction and "rest" with the belief that I just want to keep the painting, then you're ignoring an immensely important piece of information.
> Why refuse to make a distinction
> between real
> interests of the working class and ideological
> beliefs held by some
> workers?
I disagree with this characterisation; unless "ideological" is doing a hell of a lot of semantic work in this sentence, it seems to me to be the opposite of the truth (and in fact, it appears to me that "ideological" is actually doing no work at all). What people are doing is to point out that some workers hold the belief that the "real interests of the working class" are opposed to their own interests as individuals, and may be correct in this belief. And of course, the fact that the "real interests of the working class" may be opposed to the actual material interests of some of its members seems to raise a pretty serious theoretical problem for any sustained assertion that "the white working class" is an entity which does not exist. Again, I may be working on the wrong level here -- I'm still troubled by "ideological".
>
> (2) There are many things that are persistent
> besides racism.
> Capitalism is persistent, imperialism is persistent,
> protectionism is
> persistent, individualism is persistent, rape is
> persistent, war is
> persistent, malnutrition is persistent, ill health
> is persistent,
> bald-headedness is persistent, etc. How do we
> explain their
> persistence? By concluding that capitalism,
> imperialism,
> protectionism, individualism, whatever is persistent
> is in the
> interest of this or that segment of the working
> class?
Baldness is not something that the working class can do something about. Very few of the other items on your list are actions of any part of the working class, considered as such. Racism is a particular project of part of the white working class, and therefore it makes very good sense to ask whether their reason for doing it is that they gain something by it, because that is a very common reason why people do things. This analogy is not analogous.
dd
===== "Imagine the Duchess's feelings You could have pierced her with swords To find her youngest son liked Lenin And sold the Daily Worker near the House of Lords" -- Noel Coward
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