--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote: > (regarding Peter's excellent points)
> 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.
But do the numbers add up here? You seem to be suggesting that if they give up their comfortable, well-paid jobs and join the struggle against Taylorism, they can expect a payoff to themselves which will outweigh the short-term costs. Is this a reasonable assumption, for well-paid First World computer programmers? It strikes me that the socialist utopia would have to be one *hell* of a fantastic place to make this particular net-present-value calculation stack up, or alternatively to be much less costly to achieve than most people think.
I also think that three problems are being conflated here:
1) akin to the Prisoner's Dilemma, possibly white workers are adopting racism as the best strategy available to them given the assumed behaviour of other white workers. If they could somehow be persuaded to develop class consciousness, they could win concessions from capital, and would be better off.
2) white (male) workers have got such a disproportionate share of what is available that any realistic division in which white workers do not get much more than their fair share will leave white workers worse off. Therefore, white workers will always be a reactionary force unless they can be persuaded in the interests of justice to accept a decline in their living standards.
3) some groups of workers (plants, industries), delineated either by possession of specialist skills, or by their own exclusive behaviour, are in the position described above; their rewards are completely disproportionate, and any equitable distribution would leave them worse off. White males are disproportionately represented in these groups, and among the means they use to delineate and restrict access to those groups are practices which are racist and/or sexist in intention or effect.
I think that so far, we've been arguing about whether 1) or 2) is the case, whereas Peter's post (plus my comment about the Chinese stock analysts who don't speak Chinese) suggests that 3) is more likely to be the case.
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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