Beware of any argument that ends with the conclusion that working people are blinded by ideology and 'false consciousness,' if for no other reason than the fact that it is guaranteed to lead working people to ignore whichever self-appointed vangaurd makes it. But in addition to being politically suicidal, it is also very poor social theory.
While I am convinced that there are very real differentials in the rate of surplus extraction among different groups of workers [male vs. female, white vs. people of color], and while I believe that it is sufficient that the dominant group be less intensively exploited than the subordinate group for there to be a material interest on their part in maintaining those relationships of domination and subordination, which then must be weighed against other material interests, I am even more convinced that it is an error to allow the question to be defined in such a narrow, productivist fashion.
Take the relationship of class and race. Neither white workers nor workers of color are likely to understand their social position in society, and thus their interests, through such a narrow, point of production lens. They will be concerned not only with their wages and working conditions, but perhaps even more so with such matters of social consumption as the quality of life in their neighborhoods and communities [safety and the rate of crime <drug use, prostitution, street crime>; violence at the hands of police; the quality of municipal services from garbage collection to fire protection, from public transportation to the repair of roads, from a supply of inexpensive, good quality housing to the supply of decent, competitive retail stores, from the number of good libraries and museums to the number of parks], as well as the quality of the education and health care to which their families have access. Given the extent to which we still live in a de facto segregated society in the US, with quite separate spheres of social consumption, both the white worker and the worker of color are going to see rather significant differences in all of these areas, and identify different interests based on them. This is _not_ my friends, a case of mistaken identity, of false consciousness of true interests. Insofar as there is a faulty conceptual apparatus here, it is that which defines social class purely in terms of the point of production, and thus fails to understand why both white workers and workers of color might come to such conclusions.
One can still take the classic socialist position here that if workers of all races banded together and fought for better conditions for all workers, the lot of all workers would be more improved than any one race of workers could obtain on their own. But this situation is a classic 'prisoners dilemma,' and if they are rational calculators [interests are, of course, a matter of rational calculation], each subgroup of workers will have to calculate what is the likelihood, given both the existing networks of cooperation and the history of competition and group fighting, of successfully building that full class alliance, as opposed to the likelihood of achieving lesser but nonethless real gains for their own particular subgroup. It is not by pure happenstance that the most culturally homogeneous working classes have been the easiest to organize as a class. Note that in more multicultural nations, there is more likely to be full class institutions in the workplace realm of production [such as trade unions] than in the neighborhood/community realm of social consumption. Neighborhoods and communities in the US, for example, tend to be much more racially and ethnically, than class, cohesive. Working people of all races tend to make rather realistic, non-romantic calculations when confronted with dilemmas of this sort, since the results of those calculations have real impacts on the quality of their lives.
The best work on social class, such as E. P. Thompson's opus, has rejected the narrow productivist notions of social class in favor of rich historical analyses which examine all of the ways, in relations of production and in relations of social consumption, in the economy, in politics and governmental action, and in culture and civil society, which are classes are constituted. Only when one examines class in its full complexity, can one understand the multiple of ways in which class and other relations of social identity intersect.
Now the task of those on the left is clearly one of building institutions and networks which build cooperation and community among working people of all races. But one is best situated to accomplish that task when one has a full appreciation for the difficulty of the undertaking, and a decent respect for the choices working people find themselves forced to make in their daily lives.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20010312/95091b32/attachment.htm>