Just making sure everyone heard this:
On Apr 18, 2006, at 10:08 PM, Carl Remick wrote:
> There is no activity more natural or more central to the mechanism of
> capitalism than setting desperate marginalized groups against each
> another.
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Which has been demonstrated in discussions amongst LOBsters. As I said, the government has the immigration policy it wants : Fenced, but porous borders where a game of social Darwinist cops and workers is played, a kind of hide and seek. First though, the workers must pass the desert or sea endurance test--sink or swim. If they are cunning and agile enough, they can then work for very low wages for an employing class composed of people 'who nod, nod, wink, wink' to documentation required on an I9 because they can--because there is no penalty for acceding to documents which can be easily purchased on a black market which everyone knows exists.
The real problem is, as usual, with the employing class and their power over us. Punitive measures would need to be focused on them, not the working class, who only have their skills and time to sell to make a living. But, as Tovarich Cox points out, LOBsters don't make foreign and domestic policy in this bourgeois democracy--the capitalists' politicians do.
It's a class issue. The workers' skills are but commodities under this system and they won't ever be anything else under the wages system, no matter which nation State one goes to or is from. Most workers sense this fact. But, because they are not clear about how the system works, they tend to individualize the problem and reduce it to a kind of racist/nationalist form of identity politics which ends up helping the employing class to divide and rule them. They sense the question of supply, demand, price, wages and their own means of making a living. Unfortunately, under the haze of a thousand reifications, they remain unconscious about their class interests and the location of their material power : in classwide organization.
Best, Mike B)
Read "The Perthian Brickburner": http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal
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