Willy Greenfields wrote:
> Can you argue a point without resort to such sleazy
> devices?
As much as I hate to concede on anything, you're absolutely right. My reaction to Bill Bartlett was uncalled for.
There are a lot of people, demagogues like Oskar Lafontaine, for whom affirmation of class identity and white-skin privilege go hand-in-hand. But I don't think that is the case with Bill.
So I apologize to Bill Bartlett, I don't think you are a racist or a defender of white privilege. I just think you are two charitable in your appraisal of the European underclass.
> I made no judgement about these "kind of
> people"
Well, I will make a judgement. I agree that some educated middle-class disgust is evident in the Steingart piece (this is Der Spiegel, after all), but I think the emergence of this phenomenon, especially as one factor explaining the electoral success of the NPD in Meck-Pom and Saxony, is worth considering.
> The article you point to if read properly points to
> the failure ofUnification and the failure to deliver
> the goods in Eastern Germany no?
Yes, it also points to that. No question. The dismantling and assimilation of the DDR, euphemistically referred to as the "reunification" of Germany, was a massive act of structural violence. But one's response to this is not pre-conditioned.
Many of my relatives were also disadvantaged by "reunification." But they would never vote NPD. If anything, they vote PDS and read the junge Welt and talk about how much better things were in the old days and how the "politicians" and "capitalists" are responsible for their lot. This left-wing populism is not great, because it does not proceed from the starting point of a critique of the imperatives of commodity production and the structural violence which guarantees it, but this is still galaxies removed from cheap appeals to hostility against foreign workers and the East Coast (read: Jews).
Call me scholastic and dogmatic, but I think that this gets at the heart of the distinction Marx made between the reserve army of labour, and the lumpenproletariat.
The former, as members of the working-class, are subject to the same ideological mystifications and foreshortened understanding of capitalism as anyone else who lives in this society. The latter, however, are generally the social base of counter-revolution and reaction.
Admittedly, there is a fine line between unemployed workers and the structurally unemployed. Especially as the organic composition of capital increases. And I certainly don't want to engage in any sort of idealization of wage labourers as perfect revolutionary subjects.
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