Date: Fri, 30 Aug 1996 02:02:34 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: RE: Labor & Racism: Construction Trades


>>>An important task of Marxists and progressives in the labor movement is to
>>>squarely face this phenomenon--which has its echo throughout much of the
>>>labor movement.     There is much truth,  unfortunately,  to the
>>>charge--leveled by MIM,  Rakesh,  and others,  that the labor movement in
>>>America is,  indeed,  permeated with the privileges and the perogatives of a
>>>"labor aristocracy",  acting hand in hand with the employers and against the
>>>interests of the world's (largely impoverished) workers.


Louis (G) has raised raised important questions about the political impact
of a labor aristocracy, croneyism and racist practices in the US labor
movement and, perhaps most importantly, about the struggle of real
industrial unionism against the exclusivist practices of craft unions.
However, I would like to again emphasize my differences with MIM and all
those who would put maximum emphasis on struggle against the labor
aristocracy or simply whites.

I think a greater problem is actually the class consciousness of the
multiethnic proletariat; this seems to me more a problem than a corrupt or
parasatic labor aristocracy or even white racism.

In my maze of footnotes, I have already made reference to some findings by
Vincente Navarro; he provides a powerful analysis of how government
statistical production has contributed to muting class consciousness in
this country, while abetting race consciousness:

"In the 1986 data, the mortality rate of heart disease was 2.3 times higher
for blue-collar workers than for managers and professionals.  This class
differential is much greater than white/black mortality differential: the
heart disease mortality rate was 1.2 times greater for black males than for
white males and 1.5 times greater for black females than for white females.
And the class mortality differentials between, say, blue-collar or service
workers and corporate lawyers increased during the 1980s--even more than
did the race differentials.

"The key point here is that the growing class mortality differentials,
which are ignored by the government and the media, are primarily
responsible for the growing race mortality differentials, not the other way
around.  This is because the overwhelming majority of blacks (and other
minorities) belon g to the low-paid sectors of the working class."

*Dangerous to your health: Capitalism in Health Care* Monthly Review, 1993:107-8

Once we truly identify with our class-- especially the vast majority who
historically  has only been able to rely, in lieu special skills and
priviliges, only on its own direct action and solidarity for their own
defense-- we will soon discover that not only does this class sustain the
whole edifice through its labor, no matter how much bourgeois ideology
denies this as well,  it also endures the system's greatest degradations
and horrors.  It is not an accident  that  this class has often been
comprised of rightless migrant workers and racialized throughout American
history and discriminated against.

Rakesh




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