--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote: > Daniel Davies wrote:
>
> It appears to me that "white male workers without
> college degrees"
> (to take just one "clique" you might come up with)
> have not prospered
> under neoliberal capitalism, even if they subscribed
> to the most
> economistic definition of "prosperity" within the
> narrowest limits of
> capitalist ideology (which says better real wages =
> working-class
> prosperity).
Well, that's probably a much broader group than I'd be happy making generalisations about. The kind of insider/outsider models that (I believe) underpin the benefit from white racism thesis, tend to operate at the individual plant level, or at the industry level at a pinch. Some plants or groups have benefited, others haven't.
> Have racism & sexism declined? Is it
> correct to think
> that their relative decline must have come from the
> relative advance
> made by women & people of color? What should be
> their correct
> response? Reaction against feminism & affirmative
> action?
I don't know. But perhaps Matt Cramer or one of the techie types would like to pitch in with a few words about the H1B visa issue.
>
> >Again, it's the difference between properties
> >of sets and properties of their members.
>
> What makes "white workers" a set with a shared
> economic interest in
> racism that overrides any other economic interest
> (to say nothing of
> the interest of the working class) when "white
> workers" come with
> endless differences in income, net financial worth,
> occupation,
> education, avocation, social geography, social
> power, health,
> religion, etc.?
I don't think I need the assumption that the interest in racism overrides *any* other economic interest. I just need the assumption that, in a material number of cases, it overrides one particular economic interest; the economic interest of white workers considered qua workers (rather than qua whites) in maximising the size of their negotiating group when attempting to extract concessions from capital.
> (Do white male college professors
> and white male
> homeless day laborers have a shared economic
> interest in racism that
> should override any other economic interest? Do
> white male homeless
> laborers benefit in any way if white male college
> professors exclude
> female & colored professors from their departments?)
No, but male gynaecologists benefit hugely by excluding females from the field; they'd be almost certainly out of customers otherwise. I used to work with three guys who held down jobs as analysts of SouthEast Asian companies, and not one of them so much as spoke Chinese. Celine Dion wouldn't be a star if the recording industry didn't need a white Whitney Houston, and so on.
For any given (race, sex) pair, college professors don't have many economic interests in common with homeless labourers. You could reproduce Boushey's study showing that there were separate wage curves for college professors and homeless labourers, and it would be equally valid. The benefits of racism are extracted plant by plant, office by office, and those plants and offices add up to the whole economy.
Boushey's study doesn't imply that the benefits of racism accrue to white workers across industries in the way you suggest; all it needs is for the benefits to be present within every industry (actually, only within the majority of industries).
>
> Isn't the endgame of cliquish thinking sovereign
> individualism --
> every worker is a clique of one?
Perhaps, but if one goes the other way, the danger is that one starts to assume class consciousness that simply isn't there. In any case, I'm suffering from word-blindness again -- "sovereign" individualism appears to be on the cusp of a perfectly harmless methodological individualism, which just insists that an interest has to be _somebody's_ interest, and something more pernicious.
>
> >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.
>
> "Their own interests as _individuals_." Again, it
> appears to me that
> individualism is a foundational assumption of
> posters who have
> disagreed with me.
Only in a non-pernicious sense. It's a very weak form of individualism to assert that the reason that a group acts in some way is that its members gain from acting in that way. It certainly doesn't preclude other levels of analysis and again, the opposite approach carries the danger of assuming the problem away.
>
>
> What is ideological from the vantage point of the
> Marxist tradition
> surely differs from what is ideological from other
> vantage points, so
> it is no wonder that the term is troublesome. (I
> realize I don't
> know what _your_ standpoint is since you often argue
> from the vantage
> point of the devil's advocate. :-))
>
More like the holy fool, I'm afraid. As a pointless archaic affectation, I occasionally like to use the phrase "I don't understand" to mean that I don't understand something, as opposed to its modern sense of "you're talking rubbish", and this was one of those occasions. "Ideological beliefs" in context appeared to refer to individuals' beliefs about their own interests (which were opposed to the "real interests" of a class, with an ambiguous relationship between the interests of the class and those of its members) and I wasn't sure whether the classification of the beliefs as ideological was a reference to yet another of the vast bodies of theory that I haven't read and don't understand.
d^2
===== "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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