Raghu writes:
Yes, most of us on this list are part of this "labor aristocracy", and we do owe part of our privileged position to imperialist exploitation. It is an uncomfortable fact, but not something we can wish away.
================================== We also owe our relatively privileged positions to other factors, not least class, race, and gender which powerfully affect education and income levels. Something else to feel guilty about? What value is there in that? If anything, it leads to pilloring oneself or, more importantly, one's peers as "racists" or "sexists" or "aristocrats", doing more to inflame rather then overcome the divisions which presently exist within the working class. The early Marxist intellectuals or workers never assumed this burden of guilt - a shallow and ineffective indulgence of liberals - even as they acknowledged, with Marx and Engels, the dead hand of the past weighing in multifarious ways on the working class.
We can argue about the appropriateness of characterizing more highly skilled and paid workers as aristocrats until the cows come home. At the end of the day, the important question which needs to be answered in connection with this stratum of the labour force is a practical one: Do we support the right of these worlkers to form trade unions and to bargain collectively even though the likely effect is a further widening of wage inequalities with less "privileged" workers at home and abroad? I can say I do so without reservation, although I might well reach a different conclusion if I regarded them - as has been argued here today - as a parasitic elite which shares responsibility for the exploitation of foreign workers with their employers and the state. That's not to say these and other workers shouldn't be encouraged to support the equivalent of affirmative action to redress the historic inequalities resulting from imperialism - ie. open borders for immigrant workers, and trade union and other efforts to raise working class standards abroad. But they should do so not from an installed sense of guilt as repentent oppressors, but in solidarity as fellow workers, and it's in that spirit that I would approach them. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
