On Sun, Sep 1, 2024 at 10:53 AM, abraham Weizfeld PhD wrote: > > Of course Class is the determining factor although oppression is not > limited to class alone.
We’re all in agreement that some workers are doubly and even triply oppressed by their race, gender, and sexual orientation, but the point is surely not to reinforce or celebrate the diverse identities which separate workers from one another but to stress what we all have in common. Pride in one’s ethnicity or other particular identity does not necessarily lead to prejudice against those who don’t share it but it often can. With others on the list, I withessed it in the labour movement. As a shop steward in a Toronto Steelworkers local, I was patiently having to remind workers making derogatory comments about “Paki's” and other immigrant workers on the shop floor that they had more in common with their fellow union members than they did with the bosses. I was not often successful but sometimes was. Even when there was no obvious prejudicial intent, it represented a false consciousness. Here I’m reminded an of my old friend Monty from Toronto. Monty had grown up in the Montreal Jewish working class neighbourhood popularized by Mordecai Richler. He was irreligious but identified strongly as Jewish by virtue of his ancestry. He had difficulty when challenged reconciling his perceived kinship with the Seagram’s magnate Samuel Bronfman and the other bourgeois members who lived apart from his community in the wealthy enclave of Westmount with the real kinship we enjoyed with our mutual friend, Bill, who hailed from Trinidad, but I was never able to persuade him that class mattered more than the inherited identity he accepted without question. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#31926): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/31926 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/108206308/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
