me: >> In the US, we learned a long time ago that _de facto_ discrimination >> and segregation can be just as bad as (and sometimes worse than) _de >> jure_ (overt) discrimination and segregation.
raghu: > No doubt. But it is important to acknowledge that de-jure > non-discrimination represents revolutionary progress compared to what > preceded it. In that sense, Obama is not completely wrong (though > tactless and insensitive) when he said the fight against racism is 90% > won. It is important to put the present circumstances in the context > of just how much worse things used to be. 90%?? where in heck did that number come from? such things can't be quantified. Obama should know that. I hope he piled on the qualifications. He likely did, since politicians are good at that. Of course things used to be worse (on the racial front). But the improvement came because people fought tooth and nail against both _de facto_ and _de jure_ racism, not because they acted as cheer-leaders about the amount of progress made so far. And of course, there can be regress, if the other side mobilizes. Back when the US courts decided that busing for racial integration was a great idea (in the 1970s), for example, it produced a major wave of reaction, including "white flight" out of the public schools. The latter made segregation worse in many situations. me: >> The imperial system changes over time, going from looting colonies >> (the initial stage in Leopold's Congo, for example), forced-labor >> colonies (early Haiti), and settler colonies (the US, Israel, New >> Zealand, etc.) to neo-colonialism and then to dependency, with some >> areas being stuck in the "earlier" stages. This occurs due such >> phenomena as diminishing returns to looting and (more importantly) the >> efforts by the locals to win independence. raghu: > I rather think the diminishing returns is a more important reason for > the end of colonialism than any resistance by the locals - even though > that is a rather bleak and pessimistic assessment. The British didn't > leave India until they had bankrupted and reduced to abject poverty a > formerly proud and prosperous territory - no matter how hard the > locals resisted. Passive resistance, I am afraid, is just no match for > a technologically sophisticated military force that is sufficiently > ruthless. It's hard to say that one factor is more important than another, especially since popular resistance was part of the reason for diminishing returns. But one thing is that the greater extent there was a popular anti-imperialism movement, the greater the ability to replace the colonialists with some kind of reasonable government (instead of chaos, the Emperor Bokassa, etc.) The Indian Congress Party was able to avoid chaos, etc. more than most, for example, despite the fact that the British threw an extremely disruptive partition (the split with Pakistan) at them. The countries that were less organized internally by and large ended up with the shortest end of the economic stick and being totally marginalized or totally dominated. me: >> My gut feeling is that imperialism is "progressing" toward a situation >> where it's pretty much the same thing as global capitalism, divided >> primarily along class lines (though gender and ethnic hierarchies >> persist) with the development of a global capitalist ruling class and >> a global proletariat. (NB: this does not say that local states are >> going away: order must be maintained!) raghu: > Such a global capitalism, I should say, for all its evils, would still > be a big step forward from the old-style racist imperialism. Equal > opportunity exploitation is a big improvement over discriminatory > exploitation. It's not equal opportunity: those who suffer from racial discrimination have a hard time accumulating assets (financial or of other sorts). They thus are underrepresented in the "dollar voting booth." They have fewer opportunities. Worse, we should remember that what people call "race" is really ethnicity, a social creation. With growing financial gaps between the rich elite and the poor masses, we also see growing cultural and linguistic gaps. A new "race" or (more likely) a large set of new "races" can result, with as little communication with the elite as we see between dominant racist and dominated populations. In England, as I understand it, racism was not very important until recent decades (when large numbers of people from the Commonwealth came in). Then, it was all about class (so that Cyril Burt the ultra-fraudulent IQ researcher was talking about class differences in IQ, not racial ones). But there were strong linguistic differences by class and little communication between classes. (Please correct me if I wrong, all you Brits out there.) me: >> I don't see at all how fixed investments in China undermine >> imperialism. raghu: > Not if it remains confined to China alone, but if it extends to other > developing countries, then imperialism will be truly finished. As > someone said, most developing nations would love to be exploited by > greedy capitalists and to some extent this is indeed true. It is > better to be exploited than to be left out of the system altogether. it's still capitalism: the fact of the reserve army of labor's existence is what makes people say that it's better to be exploited than to be non-exploited. Those "left out of the system" play the role of threatening those who are able to find paid work, so that they work to produce not only their wages but property income. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
