Date: Thu, 25 Sep 1997 08:22:55 +0200
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-I: Who's holding the knife?


An exchange between Tony H and James F:

>>So what if workers manned the railroads in Nazi Germany? Do we blame
>>bank workers for crises in the currency markets? Miners for BHP's and
>>CRA's rape of PNG? "Selfish" worker demands for higher wages, for
>>unemployment?
>No,  we usually do not blame bank workers for crises in monetary
>markets but then again bank tellers aren't systematically murdering
>Jews.

James forgets here the *coercion* used against workers to make them obey
the dictates of their masters. Fear of getting the sack (ie shame, poverty,
family tension, homelessness, starvation -- with variations depending on
welfare safeguards), fear of slander or direct assault or assassination,
etc. People carrying out orders under compulsion like this (historical
long-term compulsion) are hardly "willing" tools.

And that's just employment.

If we think of *military* coercion, the pressure is worse. As in Finland
during the wars with the Soviet Union. The troops, often red workers, were
caught between the guns of the national enemy, the "Russians", and the
class enemy, their own officers.

Two modifying aspects.

1 There are always, everywhere a number of actually willing traitors and
bigots, the kind of people who volunteer for the front line of repression
so they can get to torture and kill their perceived enemies, very similar
to those workers who scramble for bureaucratic privilege and power. These
are high profile but untypical. We're talking about the masses.

2 There are situations like colonialism or mass migration, where one group
of the exploited is played off against another by the exploiters so that
one of the groups for a whole historical period sees itself as superior and
actively participates in the exploitation and oppression of the other
group. This gives rise to the labour aristocracy, to institutionalized
racism such as that practised by working class whites in South Africa and
the US, and so on. It's a classical and huge case of divide and rule used
by capital against the general class interests of labour.

As long as there is no mass political alternative of a revolutionary
socialist character, there will be confusion about who is responsible for
what in cases of this sort, as bourgeois theories of ethics and morality
all start from the individual and not society. They are intended to confuse
and to put the moral demands of the state outside reasoned and political
debate, and they succeed on a mass scale.

If the question is restricted to "who holds the knife", we get nowhere.
We've got to force acknowledgement of the more important questions of
"where does the knife come from?", "who is it used against, and why?" and
"what is making the individual holding the knife do so?". The question we
should all be looking at here is the natural follow-up: "what's keeping the
knife-holders from turning their knives on their own oppressors?" The
answer won't be "traditional pan-Germanic racial hatred of the Jews" or
anything like it.

Cheers,

Hugh








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