Date: Thu, 15 Jan 1998 15:57:17 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-FEM: Roediger


Thanks for a very thought-provoking post, Rakesh. But I am wondering about
the following:

>I would add however that there are many divisions
>within the working class--the lines of nation, gender, craft and unskilled,
>industry and agriculture, employed and unemployed. There is a tendency by
>the race traitors to fetishize the racial divide in their analysis of
>obstacles to working class action.

There are many divisions that can't be reduced to race, but I am thinking,
in the light of your continuing work to criticize the propagation of the
concept of the underclass, that it is true to say that in the U.S. the
division between the employed and the unemployed has been racialized
through the ideology of the underclass, at least for the last couple of
decades. The same can be said--to a certain extent--for the concept of
"skill," which relates to the ways in which the ideas of "socialization"
and "employability" are put in the service of what you call an
eliminationist program against blacks.

So to the extent that those ideologies that racialize what is in reality
non-racial (or not exclusively racial) divides, would we not have to
account for how they might affect the scope and nature of working class
action?

Yoshie