joanna wrote:
>
> Culture Lab wrote:
>
> >> Why turn the spotlight on to those people?
> >
> Because they run the world and because, in their case, the disproportion
> is clearly obvious. A case might be made for someone being twice a smart
> as someone else or twice as hard working. But when the factor becomes
> 1,000,000, it's clearly hogwash.
Not true. It's the presence of inequalities _visible_ in daily life (between the janitorial staff and the analytsts, for example) that endlessly reconfirms the legitimacy of all stratification. Everyone knows that the likes of Gates or Rockefeller depended on chance, but the assumption is that it was people in the 'higher' levels of the general population (i.e., lawyers, software engineers, M.B.A.s who were able to grab that chance when it came along.
K is completely right in her post. It really is a waste of time to whine about Gates or Rockefeller. They come in only as instances in a general analysis of capitalism; for political organizing, focus on the unreality/'unfairness' of differences within the working class. Italy approached something like a revolutoinary situation back in 1969, and the core of the struggle was the demand to eliminate differential pay at the Fiat works. (This is oversimplified, and I forget the details of the Italian struggle now, but it points in the right direction.)
Carrol