Is there a material basis to racism, patriarchy, etc.?

Racism, patriarchy etc are methods of social control and as such usually work in favour of the current system. Their ideological content can make them become inefficient, in which case, South Africa for example, the iron laws of capital eventually bring them down.
There are material bases for this.

'Our' leaders profit from us and they use racial genealogical etc stuff to make us think that we are best off with them. When two groups met in the past forms of nationalism etc were necessary to maintain the original group. People need an identity and the best way to construct it is by creating an 'other'. It is hard to define ourselves, it is easier to define ourselves negatively against this other.

In terms of patriarchy, I think that by giving each man a 'woman to oppress' we provide a safety release. Control of marriage etc, means women can be used/exchanged etc. Patriarchy commodifies women.

There is to an extent, better working conditions in the west are largely due to exploitation of workers in developing countries.
Racism is of course a diversion for workers.

Of course, but racism comes from nationalism.
I'm not making my point well or I'm wrong

Consider the way hiring has traditionally worked in the building trades in the USA. The trade unions tend to be fiefdoms, presided over by a particular leader and his cronies. It's a kind of patronage machine because the leader, such as a business agent or president, controls access to resources such as: entry to apprenticeship systems, the hiring hall, contacts with foremen and contractors with which they have collusive relationships, etc.

For example, in New York City black and Latin construction workers did break into the industry in the '70s and '80s, mainly thru a major social movement called "The Coalitions", where they invaded construction sites to press contractors to hire workers of color. But the best jobs are the "company men", the people hired directly by the contractors, and who get to work regularly, and get access to overtime, and make big bucks, often over $100K. Meanwhile, the black, Latin and female workers who've gained access to the jobs in the last 20 years typically work either non-union or thru the hiring hall, where they work only sporadically. They rarely get hired as "company men." The "company men" are overwhelmingly white guys, sometimes relatives or of the same ethnic group of the union officials or contractors or other entrenched members.

So, the hiring success depends on access to the right personal network, a good ol' boys network. People who are relatives, friends, neighbors of officials, contractors, or other entrenched workers in the trades have the primo access. It's a kind of affirmative action in reverse, affirmative action for white guys. White construction workers who are questioned about this may say it is only "natural" to want to help your relatives and friends. Even if they are sincere, that only shows that the racism is structural, not necessarily a product of overt conscious racism. So, talk about racism as an "ideology" isn't an adequate explanation. It doesn't recognize that racism, especially in the USA, is structural, it's an actual pattern of power, of differential access to advantages.

Now, it may be true that the advantages that white workers gain from this is very small compared to the major gains that could be gained if the working class were united across color barriers -- the American working class could win things like longer vacations, comprehensive social health care. And it is certainly true the working class can't fundamentally challenge the dominating classes without achieving an inter-group alliance that overcomes these barriers.

In the construction industry a radical workers movement could fight this system by requiring that, say, 90% of the jobs go thru the hiring halls, with strict non-favoritism. But the current top-down scheme (huge regional "locals", like in SEIU) being imposed on the Carpenters union (UBCJA) -- the largest building craft union in the USA -- will work against this.

So, there are material advantages to racism, but they are much less than the material advantages to overcoming it.

t.

I would say that there is definitely a material basis to patriarchy. Wouldn't a fundamental tenent of patriarchy be the appropriation of domestic labor? Thus even the lowest paid worker in a developed capitalist economy and a subsistence farmer, whether from oppressed ethnicities to political leaders, if male all expect to have their food prepared for them, their clothes washed, the house cleaned, etc.

I’m sorting out my thoughts as I type… so don’t fault me if I sound like an idiot or a pretentious prick. Anyway.

Before we address the question we should clarify what sort of "racism" we're dealing with here. Here in the states you have the weakened "idealogical" racism of white supremacists, the "structural" racism that Scat so well describes, and what I call "structural-cultural" racism. By cultural racism I mean the preponderance of privilege that is allowed someone because of their integration into mainstream bourgeois culture. In Britain this doesn’t come up so much due to vast white majority. But here in the US I feel that, as the capitalist class has structured people of color as an underclass(es) onto themselves, they have created a cultural divide whereby the ruling white cultural hegemony ie bourgeois hegemony keeps out the “dark” riffraff.

So while in homogenous cultures you would have a “working class” “business class” cultural dichotomy, here in the US we’ve developed a “white” and “black” dichotomy. As cohabitants in this nebulous national unit of white culture, whites have privileged access to favors from the ruling class and receive the fewest lashes from the folks up top. Meanwhile people of color are relegated to their own cultural ghettos, isolated from the ruling class, treated like abject shit, and policed like an occupied third world nation.

I’d say that a lot of the “privilege” whites receive materially is that they are brought up as part of a common culture with the predominantly bourgeois class, which gives them the aforementioned benefits. There are obvious exceptions; there are tons of minority capitalists and tons of dirt poor whites. Yet those rich minorities always tend to become assimilated into the white dominated bourgeois culture. And despite all their whiteness they still aren’t equal. I remember reading about a black city council member getting roughed up by police officers during the WTO riots. The guy was dressed in a suit with all the proper ID and the cops beat him anyway. On the flip side, extremely poor whites become an isolated culture onto themselves (redneck stereotypes?). Yet they retain some general privilege because of their whiteness.

I guess you could say that it’s sorta similar to the caste system in India. Class is the prime factor, but caste still acts as a cultural tagalong reinforcing class divisions. So there are still poor Brahmins and rich Sudras but, the apparatuses of power favor Brahmin access.

That said these benefits are still scint compared to the benefits from concrete solidarity. Just like the craft unions are isolated and defeated, the white working class can’t hope to win privileged labor. I would also say that white privilege continues to decrease as neoliberalism seeks to causualize most sectors of traditionally protected (predominantly white) employment. Just look at the Northwest strike as a good example.

no mad one, it ain't a "class thing." I was describing the hierarchy internal to construction labor, not the differences between the contractors and workers in general. The "company men" are still workers, not bosses. i was talking about HIRING. hiring is a condition that wage-slaves must face.

we could look at other industries where there is a skilled trades element, and we'd be likely to find a very informal sort of "who you know" method of hiring, and you'll find the skilled guys, making the most money, are much more likely to be white guys.

if i'd wanted to follow my father's trade, as an electrician, it would have been easier for me to get into an apprenticeship program -- there are only a few slots and the union leaders control access to that -- or get registered in the union, due to my father being a member and shop steward.

in a society that is relatively segregated, "who you know" ends up being people who look like you.

consider the history of ILWU local 13, in Los Angeles. In the '30s, at the time of the big West Coast maritime strike in 1934, the great majority of longshoremen were white. during World War II there were a lot of openings due to the massive wartime boom at that port. a lot of black people moved to California (L.A. and San Francisco) then to get jobs. But at the end of the war, there was a big drop in traffic and in need for longshorement, so to ensure that people had enough work, rather than spreading the hours too thinly, the ILWU local decertified 500 longshorement. Now, almost all of them were black, because they used seniority to do that. The black longshoremen protested that this was unfair. But Harry Bridges, despite his being a leftist and ILWU being committed officially to racial equality, upheld the decision of Local 13, because it was based on the seniority principle. By the agrement they signed with the Unemployed 500, the unemployed black longshoremen were to get the first new slots when traffic picked up.

But what happened is that local 13 began letting friends, relatives, neighbors get registered before the laid off black longshoremen. That was a racist act, it betrayed their agreement. But the longshoremen said, oh, it's a "natural thing" to want to give jobs to your relatives and friends. Well,yes, but they all look like you, so in practice it's racist.

In other words, their behavior was the same as the building trades unions, despite the ILWU's official commitment to "racial equality" as a "left" union.

And, by the way, the Mexican longshoremen didn't stick up for their black colleagues. There were only a handful of Mexican longshoremen at the time of the big 1934 strike, but they were accepted by the white guys, and they were able to get their friends and relatives into the union. In fact, local 13 eventually became a majority Latino local, and still is, but that left the black longshoremen unemployed.

t.

good post syndicalistcat, sounds just like how shit worked in Northern Ireland, were sectarian discrimination was more often than not of that nature.

There's no matierial benefit from racism and sexism on the white worker, but they are inexorably tied to capitalism as a channel for white workers (the majority) to vent their anger upon the minorities.

Having an easier time getting a job, and a better paying job in particular, is a material benefit. see my comment earlier.

t.

It may have been silly to have put it on another thread, where it wouldn't be noticed:

I think I should have used "reproduction" instead of "procreation", leading to production vs. reproduction relations, which is wittier.

yeah but the results are still the same structural racism, and lets not forget that these structural differences are what fuel racial discourses.

The brute facts of procreation are biological rather than social, as are the brute facts of physical sustenance. Patriarchy is no more innate than capitalism.

biology isn't something untouched by the social, it might not be reducable to the social but it's clearly bound up in it.

Agreed, but that would be more of an indirect benefit, right?

As i've argued elsewhere it's a benefit whilst one views/ thinks within the zeo sum politic of capitalism, a benefit that can only remain so whilst you acquiese to your own oppression.

Mad one: "Maybe "class" was the wrong word, but I'm having trouble seeing exactly how what you're talking about there qualifies as racism in any normal sense of the word. The structural biases you're talking about there are against newcomers, against people without family already in the business, etc., it just happens that in the US that is often black people, IYSWIM."

A material basis for racism means a material benefit deriving to people who are white which gives them a reason to support racism. It's a mistake to think of racism as conscious or overt race prejudice. That's how right-wingers in the USA regard it. They use the diminishing of overt expressions of race prejudice in the USA since the '60s to say the problem is solved, so we don't need things like affirmative action.

The building trades were notoriously a bastion of racism in the unions in USA. But we don't need to suppose that the over prejudice is the cause; we can regard it as an effect derived from the sort of circumstances i described. What i described is a pattern that materially benfits whites.

The pattern of hiring one's relatives, members of one's own ethnic group, or neighbors (in a society with segregated residential patterns) creates a pool of better paying jobs reserved for whites. The same is true for bringing into the union one's relatives, friends, neighbors.

To say that racism is *structural* is to say there is a pattern of advantages and disadvantages, of power, along "race" lines. This means it doesn't depend upon or isn't reducible to conscious race prejudice. This is why the conservatives in the USA are wrong to suppose that racism has become so less of a problem in the USA just because overt expressions of race prejudice have declined. Black people face an employment situation that is actually much worse than in the '60s, despite equal employment opportunity laws.

And being better able to get a job or a better paying job IS a direct benefit. I don't know what you mean in saying it isn't "direct."

t.

Doesn't it seem odd, madashell, that the unspoken assumption that white workers would only have white friends and family, or that they would only recommend their white family and friends, is a prerequisite for your idea that "only helping one's family and friends" is natural? Is having only those racialized like you as friends and family 'natural'?

The white workers who did have black friends and family, btw, and recommended them and tried to get them in without a doubt faced all kinds of pressure, from verbal to physical violence to social isolation and ostracized.

I won't go into the fact that race is clearly not reducible to an economic basis, the implicit use of material here, but where inter-racial sex remains a taboo and serious social problem and overtly racist ideas remain deeply entrenched, but in new forms of expression (work ethic, fiscal responsibility, credit-worthiness, dependency, individualism, etc.) the point deserves mention.

Chris

yeah, i'm in total agreement with you here, but I think some of these differences come from historical experiances in the US, Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

well, revol is right in the sense that England was a very important early source of the structural basis of racism, through its colonialist development policies, as e.g. the transfer of presumably loyal Scots subjects to have a stronger base in Ireland, thru divide and conquer (between two celtic peoples).

And the English elite were quite willing to enslave their own Anglo-Saxon people as thru the Elizabethan Poor Law, and this became the earliest basis for the use of slave labor to develop plantation agriculture in North America. The development of the slave trade was in response to demand from European colonialist development projects in the Americas. Initially, in the 1600s, there wasn't yet developed the modern racialist ideology. The book "Mulatto America" points out that in Virginia in the 1600s, when most slaves were still from the British Isles, there were inter-marriages, sexual relationships, between white and black slaves, and mixed chldren. After the big revolt of white and black slaves in Virginia that almost overthrew the colonial government, the UK government decided it needed a middle layer, between the plantation owners and the slaves, and opted for African-only slavery. The theory of African inferiority came to be more clearly articulated only in response to this, to justify it. It also was used to justify enslavement, murder and displacment of the indigenous American Indian population.

But I've noticed in debates with European anarchists a tendency to assume that there can be only two alternatives: either racism is purely in the realm of ideology and culture and "attitudes", or it is reducible to the economic. But there is a third alternative. The third alternative is to view it as a structure that tends to be self-perpetuating. It does tend to work thru the clas system, but it isn't reducible to the economic system.

When I say that racism is a structure, I'm saying it is a pattern of advantage and disadvantage, of behaviors, that can be even unconscious or subconscious in individuals. The disadvantaged situation of black people in the USA inherited from slavery becomes a reason for their disparagement. But that pattern of disadvantage is itself a structure.

t.

the ulster scots presence in the North East is alot more complex than that, involving many waves of immigration, aswell as strong cultural and economic links.

anyway that's off the point and i've been liking the vast majority of posts so far, so i don't want to risk another discussion with a north american and irish history.

revol: "the ulster scots presence in the North East is alot more complex than that, involving many waves of immigration, aswell as strong cultural and economic links."

no doubt you know more about it than me, since it's not something I've studied, nor have i ever been there.

t.

It is an ideology that can often be used for class purposes but one of the problems with ideologies is that they override logic, whilst in many cases capitalism requires that we do precisely that in others it does not.
For example discrimination in South Africa meant that companies could not fully exploit black workers, this went against the interests of capital.

Lots of behaviours become widespread without any basis.

jef costello exhibits exactly the viewpoint among Euro anarchists i have a real problem with. It's a viewpoint totally at odds with the American reality.

Racism most surely ain't (just) an "ideology." The "ideology" of racism was invented to defend practices, institutions. I already described in some detail a particular set of practices, in the hiring process, where the result is racist, but where it doesn't assume any particular "ideology" on the part of the parties involved. This idea that racism is reduced to overt conscious prejudice is used by American conservatives to argue there is no longer any problem of racism in the USA due to the decline in overt, conscious expressions of racism (overt agreements with the ideology of European superiority). But structural racism in fact persists. If anything the hiring situation faced by young black men today in the USA is worse than in the '60s.

(Hopefull this ends up in the racism discussion. t.)

I think it's a case of europeans not fully grasping how racially divided the US is, and partly a reaction to the american habit of racialising everything.

I mean i'd always "knew" that race was deeply divisive in the US and tended to have a high corelation to class, but I think like many the images of Katrina really hit home. Saying that there are huge parts of the US with grinding white poverty.

it's interesting that Spike Lee was quite explicit that Katrina was more a class issue than a race though.

If you think euro anarchists not grasping the racial element to the states is bad, you should try dealing with americans activists who try to understand irish history in terms of race.