File spoon-archives/marxism-feminism.archive/marxism-feminism_1998/marxism-feminism.9801, message 29


Date: Thu, 15 Jan 1998 21:03:37 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: M-FEM: Racism, the Unemployed, and Labor Discipline


I think Roediger is mistaken in trying to explain neoliberalism mainly by
racism of white workers. As Rakesh has argued, the idea that capital puts
economic limits on the nature and extent of whatever reforms is certainly
missing in Roediger's analysis. So his criticism of Roediger as soc dem or
Popperian seems right after all.

But I still think it important to look at how working class racism would
end up costing many white workers their ability to link the interests of
the employed and the unemployed, because racism forces them to buy the myth
that unemployment and welfare are black "underclass" problems (or "white
trash" problems). The complex of feelings that revolves around the false
dichotomy of "dependence" on public assistance versus "independence"
through paid employment is racialized, fostering an ideology that makes it
difficult for white workers to understand that putting people off welfare
and into the labor market is against the interests of all workers,
including themselves. One can even go so far as to say that working-class
racism makes white workers more willing than otherwise to accept *harsher
labor discipline*.

So what I am saying here is that understanding working-class racism is
important to the extent that it diminishes workers' ability to organize
themselves on the basis of true solidarity.

Yoshie






   

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