Date: Sat, 24 Aug 1996 21:51:55 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: labor aristocracy


Louis P noted the new editorship at *Monthly Review*:

>. It is not a place where there is regular dissemination
>of the sorts of ideas that Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff were coming up
>with in the 1960s. Paul Sweezy is  85 years old and in very poor health.
>His contributions to the journal are very limited nowadays. I anticipate
>that the MR post-transition will much more closely resemble Socialist
>Register. Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster have both been
>heavily involved with the production of recent issues.

My post was not meant as a 'crack' against Sweezy by suggesting that MIM
was the reductio ad absurdum of his and Baran's theoretical position.  What
I was reacting against was an inability or even a refusal to extract if not
a rational kernel then at least a real concern in MIM's line about the
'white' labor aristocracy. Perhaps I have an interest in keeping 'race' on
the table as I am making a career out of it (Ph.D. candidate in Ethnic
Studies).

 No doubt an exaggerated estimation of the labor aristocracy also has its
roots in what Louis Godena suggests: "This view enjoys a wide currency
today,  both among third world revolutionaries and privileged, though
alienated,  expatriates here.    It may compensate, politically,  for
revolutionary impotence at home."

However the idea that whites enjoy some  priviliges, including non-material
ones, and evince no solidaristic sentiment is not foreign to American
minorities themselves who continue to endure horrific levels of racism from
the most personal interactions to the most public spectacles from crack to
border wars.

After all please do consider what is suggested by the simultaneous
publication of *The Bell Curve*, *AlienNation* and *The End of Racism*.

 After all, our darkened Aryan author who sets out to give a cultural
explanation for 'racial inequality' can only in the end grant the
reasonableness of Murray and Herrnstein's thesis--this after 500 pages of
argumentation, which, in insisting  on the basis of one physical
anthropologist by the name of Vincent Sarich that classification by race is
a natural fact,  cannot thus challenge genetic explanations for the social
inequality of incoherent social constructs.

Or as Lawrence Hirshfeld has recently put it: "A more direct attack would
involve questioning whether race *could* regulate the biological
distribution of psychological traits like intelligence (leaving aside
whether intelligence is a sensible concept in itself).  Obviously, if race
lacks biological coherence it could hardly control the inheritance of *any*
property not specifically tied to the category's definition....The one
collaborative and putatively 'mainstream' appraisal of current wisdom in
psychometrics about race, and intelligence, signed by 52 leading and
not-so-leading scholars, never doubts that racial comparisons are a
sensible way to explore *biological* differences." (*Race in the Making*.
MIT, 1996).

MIM is quite within the mainstream here as elsewhere, for they too reify or
at least do not sufficiently "deconstruct" those very racial categories
which are used in  biological explanations of social inequality--I would
recommend that MIM checks out John Vandermeer, 1996. Reconstructing
Biology: Genetics and Ecology in the New World Order. Wiley Press (a
brilliantly lucid introduction to  a unified science of society).

What am I getting at here?

First, let's face squarely that the conflict between labor and capital has
been as real as the conflict (and  painful social distance) between Irish
and English proletarians, Algerian and French workers, and among Black,
Mexican, Asians and whites in this country. And as real as the conflict
between men and women workers.

For my part (and I lay this out for the purposes of critical discussion) I
do believe that American workers have accumulated a whole set of prejudices
(the muck of the ages)  resulting not only from a history of  racism,
including in  the present discursive and reifying form of the official
racial classification of the population,  but also from the unique position
American capitalism enjoyed after the war.

In terms of this latter factor, I am not saying that the wealth of the
American working class has been 'undeserved'; after all, a proper Marxian
analysis may be able to show that real wage increases only followed upon
increased rates of exploitation in value terms; perhaps the American
working class was at some point the most exploited of all, as Michael
Kidron argued decades ago.  At the same time, American  usage of global
resources, "deserved" or not,  is absurd and clearly non-universalizable:
this country is indeed sometimes best viewed as a weed choking all life in
the global garden.

  Moreover, real wages do matter;  some gains were won for some workers;
the golden chain was loosened a bit more due to hegemonic status; American
debt financing has created some illusion of prosperity without class
struggle; and these real gains came easier than they had in the 30s or any
time before.

 Yes, American minorities themselves also won gains from this ascendant
dominant capitalism, though it required considerably sharper and, just as
importantly, non-economistic  struggle while  considerable less benefit was
derived from the social wage or low interest home loans or whatever (see
Rickie Lee Solinger on the differential treatment of white and black single
mothers by the state--*Wake Up, Little Susie*).  Moreover, the price of
empire often fell hardest on 'racialized' minorities.  That is, their sense
of struggle has been much less attentuated in my opinion; they maintain
many fewer illusions of a halcyon era.

And now that gains will not come so easy we must rebel against those (not
few) who try to remind us on the basis of post war history of the virtues
of a 'reasonable frame of mind' and encourage a fantastic faith in quick
and easy political solutions to our problems.   That really was the main
point of my post, not to write off the American working class as corrupt
and parasatic.

I was trying to explore the reasons why the American working class is
especially vulnerable to the alienation of its own powers to electoral
political parties--which can promise so much and demand so little sacrifice
and struggle. This sort of bourgeois idealism however does have some roots
in even the working class (this is my hypothesis), and it shouldn't be
indulged (this is my argument).

In fact I tend to agree with Mike Davis that American minorities will play
a leading role in the upsurge of radicalism among all workers....as long as
they are not sidetracked of course by the nationalism  and petty bourgeois
schemes MIM promulgates along with the all the mainstream post-LA riot
commissions.

In MIM's book, this makes me a still obnoxious social democratic Trotskyite.

But I am just a man, an insignificant presence against the wide sky and
plains of this nation of ours.

Rakesh






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