"And there emerges by the early 19th century, still not necessarily theorized fully) a common ideology (I use the word to indicate non-theorized common sense)of indivuals throguh their own activities finding/creating their own place in a social order with no visible basis. (The treatment of the Irish under Elizabeth and under Cromwell, along with the reaction Joanna tells of the Virginia planters are, I would say, part of the immediate pre-hisotyr of racism, which comes into its own only in earl 19th-c U.S., and becomes only fully developed after the Civil War and the abolition of formal slavery.
And it is not primarily an ideology of the capitalists but of the working class: perhaps the most powerful of working-class ideologies. Capitalists sometimes consciously use this ideology, and sometimes consciously fight against at least some of its implicatoins."
Sorry Carrol but this just doesn't make sense to me. It is convenient but nonetheless suspicious that you denote the lack of racism between white and black among the settlers as "pre-history", thus insisting that working class ideology proper is racist and just something the ruling class exploits despite the evidence that Zinn forwards that this racism was historically created by the ruling class.
More generally, I'm really bothered by the transformation of "common sense" into "ideology," because I have a hard time consenting that the working class, strictly speaking can have any kind of ideology.
In fact, the ideology of racism, as it was constituted in the late nineteenth century was squarely built with reference to Darwin's chain of being, blacks being placed closer to animals than humans in that evolutionary chain. Now, this appropriation of Darwin is very far from being a working class operation.
It's kind of like saying that anti-semitism in Europe is a working class ideology. It just isn't. I'm not saying that the working class doesn't act out racist and anti-semitic programmes. But to say that they originate this ideology just doesn't ring true. It seems a false move, making them the subject of a process of which they are the object.
I mean, how do you have anti-semitism without the xtian church?
Sign me puzzled....
Now this bit:
"And class struggle consists not primarily of struggle of worker against capitalist but of struggle _inside_ the working class to dissolve this oppressive ideology and way of thinking."
can still make sense without the inference that it is the working class that creates the ideology of racism.
I mean, just looking at how matters stand today, would you say that it is the working class that is behind the prisons, the schools, and the ghettos?
I'm very confused...
Joanna