>In the tiny company I work in, my co-workers are mostly white and male.
>All the programmers + the sysadmin here are white and male - and they
>living decidedly cushy lives compared to the vast majority of the white
>working class (and make suggestions like 'we could pay the cleaner an
>extract R5 (less than 1 dollar) to clean up the coffee cups we use').
>Every couple of weeks they get one of their white, male programmer
>friends to visit, in the full knowledge that we are likely to hire
>more programmers in the next couple of months. (I happen to only know
>one black, male programmer, and no female ones) Thus, the old
>boys club is maintained.
>
>This 'old boys club' clearly operates in the interest of my white,
>male co-workers. Clearly it does not operate in the interest of
>*all* white workers (else I wouldn't come across so many of them
>working as security guards, begging, etc.), but for these particular
>white males, it maintains a comfortable little circle.
At 11:14 AM +0200 3/12/01, Peter van Heusden wrote in the
"reparations & exploitation":
>Also, the worship of productivity is in my mind at least a factor in
>presenting the ideal programmer as a truly 'One Dimensional Man' - in
>the context of the Internet, and 'free software', programmers encounter
>each other purely as a set of text and an email address - this erasure
>of the social functions to maintain an ideal which is individualised
>(and as kelly could abundantly point out, gendered, racialised,
>'classed' (if that's the right word), etc.) In turn, this feeds into a
>kind of identification with the job which is exploited by managers,
>what I've called in the past '2nd order Taylorism'.
Your posts, taken together, suggest that white male programmers, however comfortable they may feel in their "old boys' club," are actually trapped in individualism & "identification with the job" that make them unable to fight Taylorism. The presence of racism & sexism is an index of the absence of class consciousness for the programmers in your story and other "comfortable" workers. Once again, it seems to me that racism & sexism are a losing proposition for workers and a great benefit for bosses.
Yoshie