Re: Re: Re: s Racism in the Interest of White Workers?

[Carrol Cox]

Margaret Coleman wrote:
> 
> I agree that from an objective position racism is irrational and does not
> provide a long term benefit to anyone -- but, I think that many, many workers
> (I hesitate to say majority) see that it is in their short term interests to
> practice discrimination. 

I think that perhaps we should consider whether most people (anywhere,
anytime) go about calculating their interests in this way. This
discussion keeps coming back to attempts to "sum up" the attitudes or
situations of millions of isolated individuals into some collective
empirical generalization. But isolated individuals don't exist. Neither
does anyone exist in any one context. (I've been reading Ollman on
abstraction and on how no one abstraction is very useful.)

Carrol