Racism

[Questionable]

I have a hard time understanding the dynamics of racism, how is functions in a capitalist society, what it's role is, etc.

Does anyone have any suggestions for understanding the topic? Something a bit more deep than "it divides the working class," please. I know that, but how and why?

[Was tun, wenn's brennt?]

Racism is ignorance that serves to further ignorance. When you're glued to your TV watching contrived bullshit like COPS of the evening "news" you're subject to scare tactics and smokescreens meant to keep your mind occupied with complacency and ignorance; "fear the black man who will rob your house and rape your wife", "fear the 'illegal' who is here to 'steal' your job, "fear the Muslim who only wants to kill you because they hate you and your freedom", "and most importantly, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain".

It's very appealing to many people to believe that they, by the luck of being born into whatever race, are the epitome of cultural perfection and any and all problems they face are not of their own doing. No, all your troubles and woes are the fault of an inferior race or religion etc. Since many people are weak and need all the ego stroking they can get, it is easy for them to get behind that; it builds them up while putting others down. Needless to say, they are more that happy to worship and idolize the talking head that spoon-fed them such information and will waste no time disseminating the information to other minds susceptible chicanery.

The puppets will pay no mind to the puppet master while they're suspicious of and believe they're better than all the other puppets around them.

[asiankaos]

I can only speak for America, and this is only my opinion, but I feel here it does its most evil in institutionalized racism.it is used to keep the men on top on top. Through crime,education and through economic racism. I dont think it's so much as we hate(insert race) as we are on top lets do what we can to stay there. That's what I came up with off the top of my head.
But this is an interesting topic.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

I highly recommend J. Sakai's "Settlers: The Mythology of The White Proletariat", and, for a more recent recent reassessment, in light of black presidents and brown CEOs, Butch Lee's "Night Vision: Illuminating War & Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain". Both are available from the excellent distro Kersplebedeb.

I'm on my way out, but will try to summarize some of their key points if I have time later.

[Questionable]

I highly recommend J. Sakai's "Settlers: The Mythology of The White Proletariat", and, for a more recent recent reassessment, in light of black presidents and brown CEOs, Butch Lee's "Night Vision: Illuminating War & Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain". Both are available from the excellent distro Kersplebedeb.

I'm on my way out, but will try to summarize some of their key points if I have time later.

You know I appreciate your quick response and I'm not trying to shoot you down or be close-minded, but I've partially read Settlers and I know what Sakai and Lee are about, and I don't really care for their views. I was looking for more of a classical Marxist approach to the issue, not postmodernist privilege theory.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I have a hard time understanding the dynamics of racism, how is functions in a capitalist society, what it's role is, etc.

Does anyone have any suggestions for understanding the topic? Something a bit more deep than "it divides the working class," please. I know that, but how and why?Well it's a huge thing in society, like sexism, and so it serves many purposes, has many manifestations, and is flexible and can change - so having a hard time understanding it, is natural - it's a huge question.

I'd say for US racism it's partly a divide and rule thing, but that's a totally inadequate explanation. I think another general way to look at it that's a little more precise is that it's primarily about the control of labor in most cases (aside from maybe native american racism which was originally different because the goal was removal, not control of people). Dividing the working class in terms of stratification allows a tiered workforce where groups can be pitted against each-other in economic competition (a race to the bottom in wages) or more generally in social competition (we have to fight for "our piece of the pie" and it's easier to fight a marginalized group than to take on the ruling class to do that).

But also direct control is important and so anti-black racism around slavery is pretty overt in this sense. Then after the Civil War when efforts by blacks to win more political and economic power were defeated, white supremacy was used to ensure an impoverished and politically powerless rural farming population through oppression and restrictions on black people. With black migration in the 20th century to urban areas, and a larger labor militancy, racism was a way in which the ruling class could exclude the new deal from the entire population while giving enough reforms to win some labor peace. So agricultural workers, domestic workers, and because of segregation black workers in general, were legally outside of some of the New Deal era liberal rights (job security, fair hiring, access to unions, access to post-war housing loans that allowed massive mobility for a lot of the white working class). So most northern post-war anti-racist efforts were to try and extend the reforms of the New Deal era to the black population - they were partially successful and so things like legal segregation, red-lining, hiring discrimination, were pushed back.

But racism was re-resurrected as a way to push back against the later anti-racist reforms (and they had to change tactics and the kinds of political frameworks they used... from white supremacy to "individual (property) rights" language, from segregationist language to "law and order" language. But it also goes well beyond just a backlash or a change of language. In the post-war era racism was used to create a lower tier of industrial and service workers who could be paid less and kept disenfranchised more or less and could sometimes be used as a social wedge to divide workers against other groups of workers economically or politically. But the new wave of racism happened at a time when Keynesian reforms were no longer wanted or seen as valuable by the ruling class and there was less need of a blue collar unskilled workforce. New rights and remaining government jobs allowed realativly amazing mobility for a larger minority of blacks than before, but at the same time for black people who didn't achieve mobility, prospects became much worse. Casual racism meant that as jobs moved, the "first fired" principle went into effect, but more structurally, jobs moved away from urban areas where blacks had migrated to while jobs were re-located in "right-to-work" areas in the South or Southwest. The effect was that many blacks lost avenues to any mobility or even self-sustainability and the neo-liberal response to this has been to basically control this "surplus" labor group of potential black workers. So literally thousands of potential workers sit in prisons, are kept out of the labor market because of their ex-con status, and are now prevented from receiving welfare and other support, and are politically disenfranchised if it was a felony. The class effect of this has been to make the entire class more precarious, to undermine and then "reform" (privatize) or outright eliminate government reforms and education and health services. The oppressed position of blacks in the US (and other groups to varying degrees) acts as a weight on the whole class and if there's one thing going for us today, I think it's that unlike the postwar era, it's much more apparent that the attacks on black people are an overture to cutbacks on everyone - not that a lot of white people see it that way at the moment, but if anti-racism efforts begin to hit at the roots of prisons and policing and at education and job inequality, then all the other entanglements of neoliberal capitalism begin to become more apparent too.

Anti-racist efforts in the 60s, exposed and pushed liberalism to it's limits and led to some more radical alternatives and strategies to begin to take shape. I think a movement today would inevitably (and probably more rapidly) come into direct confrontation with the whole neoliberal framework and possibly capitalism itself depending on how such a movement developed.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

You know I appreciate your quick response and I'm not trying to shoot you down or be close-minded, but I've partially read Settlers and I know what Sakai and Lee are about, and I don't really care for their views. I was looking for more of a classical Marxist approach to the issue, not postmodernist privilege theory.

I don't want to shoot you down, but if you partially read Settlers and concluded that it was "postmodernist privilege theory" I really think you need to give it another go. As far as a Marxist approach goes, Sakai says explicitly, in reference to Settlers, that:


It wasn't about race, but about class [. . .] Like many radicals who struggle as organizers, I had wondered why our very logical "class unity" theories always seemed to get smashed up around the exit ramp of race.

[. . .]

Well, what we've been saying all along is that "race" in modern capitalism was originally changed from an undefined difference into a disguise for "class". Capitalism, after all, always prefers to restructure class differences in drag of some kind (all the better for their manipulations). Like Northern Ireland, where there is supposedly a "religious" or "ethnic" bloody conflict between Catholic Irish Republicans and Protestant Loyalists.

If you can find a more thoroughly Marxist take, I'd love you to point me in its direction. Unfortunately, when it comes to race, many (if not most) Marxists are happy to ditch Marxism and adopt the understandings of bourgeois sociologists.

[Questionable]

He can say what he wants, I know what he's selling. He also said this:


So Settlers was researched backwards. i knew what the conclusion was in the mid-1970s, that white supremacy ruled the white working class except in the self delusions of the Left. "No politician can ever be too racist to be popular in white amerikkka", is an amazingly true saying.Or this:


While there are numbers of Euro-Amerikan workers, they no longer combine into a separate proletarian class. The old white industrial proletariat of the 1930s has been dissolved by promotion and privilege, and its place taken by the colonial proletariats. The abnormal and historically brief contradiction of proletarian class conflict within the settler garrison has been ended. Just as in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, the U.S. oppressor nation is again a non-proletarian society that is purely capitalistic in characterIf I remember correctly, the book also contains anti-Semitic remarks about how Russian Jewish immigrants were less deserving than other immigrants because they were immediately obtaining a lavish lifestyle.

I've read the interview your quoting, and Sakai is indeed talking about class. But in his analysis whites are not a part of the proletariat class in America, and are in fact a direct enemy of it, having become one with the bourgeoisie a long time ago.

I know both Sakai and Lee are outspoken Maoist Third-Worldists. Not only do I dislike third-worldism, I dislike Maoism as well, so there is most likely little I can learn from these individuals. Am I being close-minded? Perhaps. But I don't think it's the bad kind of close-mindedness.

Thanks for your time anyway.

[TheEmancipator]

In Europe, "Social Darwinism", a movement started by imperialists at the start of the 20th Century, meant that people believed that it was the strugggle of races and peoples (instead of classes, as Marx outlined) that would eventually determine who was top dog. The people bought into it for the same reasons they have always bought into racism : scapegoating and sense of superiority.

I remember some German Social Democrat at the turn of the 20th calling Social Darwinism and Anti-Semitism "Socialism for Idiots", since they base their thought on some kind of emancipation into a utopia too (by eliminating other races instead of classes), and we all know the history some parts of the proleteriat/petit bourgeois have of using racism as much as the bourgeois class.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

In Europe, "Social Darwinism", a movement started by imperialists at the start of the 20th Century, meant that people believed that it was the strugggle of races and peoples (instead of classes, as Marx outlined) that would eventually determine who was top dog. The people bought into it for the same reasons they have always bought into racism : scapegoating and sense of superiority.

That definitely sounds like ideology determining reality rather than than the other way around. How is it that "scapgoating" is sufficient to conjure into being vast material cleavages within the ranks of the working class? Are people just suckers, or is their something deeper at work? To a consistent materialist, the answer should be obvious.
People "buy into" racism because the racial stratification of class is real: the key roles of (settler-)colonialism and imperialism in the primitive accumulation that is necessitated for capitalism as a real historical system have created "race" by creating real material divisions. That is to say, for example, the racialized character of the prison industrial complex doesn't exist because people are subjectively racist, but, rather, people are racist because of the prison industrial complex, and the other institutions that produce race as such.

[cyu]

More at http://www.revleft.com/vb/lenin-wrong-anti-t182006/index.html

[#FF0000]

I would really like to see answers to OP's question. Most of my knowledge on racism comes from academic sources and papers and studies and things like that -- it'd be good to know about a book that talks about these issues and can lay it down for people without that background.

[SouthLondoner]

Has their been any marxist critique on the wealthy Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea who have a very strict immigration policy ?
Most privilege theories seem to be very american centric.