Re: [Marxism] The State of Racism

["Sayan Bhattacharyya" <ok.president+marxmail@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 8/12/07, Joaquin Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote
>
> To survive, capitalism MUST BE a system NOT JUST of capitalist CLASS
> supremacy, but also of MALE and WHITE supremacy. Because, to prevent the
> coherence among sellers of labor power, the worker must enter not just as a
> seller of abstract human labor, but as the seller of white labor, or male
> labor or even Black or Latino labor but within an imperialist country. If
> labor power is allowed to become generic, then the worker --all workers--
> really have nothing to lose but the identical chains they all wear. Hence
> the KEY QUESTION -- how do you stop labor power from becoming generic? And
> that, it seems to me, requires making certain goods and services, or sectors
> of the economy, monopolies of the imperialist countries, which allows for
> superprofits. And, of course, it is absolutely essential to prevent the
> emergence of a world market for labor power.

Joaquin,

It certainly seems reasonable to suggest that for capitalists _as a
class_ this is important to achieve (i.e. preventing labor power from
"becoming generic").

But, in order to achieve this, capitalists would need to coordinate
this among themselves. Why? Because this is something that matters to
capitalists _as a class_, but does not matter so much to individual
capitalists.

The _individual_ factory owner is better off hiring and paying any
skilled labor they can find, be it black, white, male or female, as
long as the job will get done well.

So, you'll probably have to posit some mechanism whereby the necessity
for capitalists to maintain racial discrimination _as a class_
translates into  hiring decision patterns of _individual_ companies.

There is an incentive to discriminate at the level of capitalists as a
class. We will need to figure out how that incentive (absent a  wilful
conspiracy) translates into incentives to discriminate, for individual
firms.

For big firms, obviously there may be an incentive: their work forces
are large, and maintaining racism helps keep their own work forces
divided. But do smaller firms have this incentive?

In this connection, the following story, about a small firm at a small
town that has a small-sized labor force, makes *very* interesting
reading. It is from last week's NY Times. What do you make of the
behavior of the factory owner described in this article? I'd love to
know your views. The article is:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/magazine/05Immigration-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin>

-Sayan.

________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism