Black people in Japan speak about how they feel freer in Japan than in the USA - Page 8 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15269489
ckaihatsu wrote:This is yet-another *tangent* of yours, wat0n, where you want to think-up enough for just *one more post*, for the sake of *posting* itself, apparently.


The only thing I'm saying is that income redistribution can be done in different ways, with some being better than others. I don't really disagree with redistribution, but I want to be efficient in doing so.
#15269491

'additive prioritizations'

Better, I think, would be an approach that is more routine and less time-sensitive in prioritizing among responders -- the thing that would differentiate demand would be people's *own* prioritizations, in relation to *all other* possibilities for demands. This means that only those most focused on Product 'X' or Event 'Y', to the abandonment of all else (relatively speaking), over several iterations (days), would be seen as 'most-wanting' of it, for ultimate receipt.

My 'communist supply and demand' model, fortunately, uses this approach as a matter of course:

consumption [demand] -- Every person in a locality has a standard, one-through-infinity ranking system of political demands available to them, updated daily

consumption [demand] -- Basic human needs will be assigned a higher political priority by individuals and will emerge as mass demands at the cumulative scale -- desires will benefit from political organizing efforts and coordination

consumption [demand] -- A regular, routine system of mass individual political demand pooling -- as with spreadsheet templates and email -- must be in continuous operation so as to aggregate cumulative demands into the political process

http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=1174


I'm also realizing that this model / method of demand-prioritization can be used in such a way as to lend relative *weight* to a person's bid for any given product or calendar event, if there happens to be a limited supply and a more-intensive prioritization ('rationing') is called-for by the objective situation:

Since everyone has a standard one-through-infinity template to use on a daily basis for all political and/or economic demands, this template lends itself to consumer-political-type *organizing* in the case that such is necessary -- someone's 'passion' for a particular demand could be formally demonstrated by their recruiting of *others* to direct one or several of *their* ranking slots, for as many days / iterations as they like, to the person who is trying to beat-out others for the limited quantity.

Recall:

[A]ggregating these lists, by ranking (#1, #2, #3, etc.), is *no big deal* for any given computer. What we would want to see is what the rankings are for milk and steel, by rank position. So how many people put 'milk' for #1 -- ? How many people put 'steel' for #1 -- ? How many people put 'milk' for #2 -- ? And how many people put 'steel' for #2 -- ? (Etc.)

*This* would be socially useful information that could be the whole basis for a socialist political economy.

So, by extension, if someone was particularly interested in 'Event Y', they might undertake efforts to convince others to *donate* their ranking slots to them, forgoing 'milk' and 'steel' (for example) for positions #1 and/or #2. Formally these others would put 'Person Z for Event Y' for positions 1 and/or 2, etc., for as many days / iterations as they might want to donate. This, in effect, would be a populist-political-type campaign, of whatever magnitude, for the sake of a person's own particularly favored consumption preferences, given an unavoidably limited supply of it, whatever it may be.

tinyurl.com/additive-prioritizations



https://web.archive.org/web/20201211050 ... ?p=2889338
#15269492
Classism and racism are not mutually exclusive.

In fact, racism is the metric we use to place people into their “appropriate role” within the class system.

This was even discussed in a recent thread on this very forum where most of the peop in this thread participated:
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=183362

Rather than assume that this information is being deliberately ignored, I will assume that it was simply overlooked by accident.

Remember, the whole point of anti-Black racism in the USA was to create a large marginalized work force, and this need for the cheapest labour possible has not gone away.
#15269495
Pants-of-dog wrote:Classism and racism are not mutually exclusive.

In fact, racism is the metric we use to place people into their “appropriate role” within the class system.

This was even discussed in a recent thread on this very forum where most of the peop in this thread participated:
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=183362

Rather than assume that this information is being deliberately ignored, I will assume that it was simply overlooked by accident.

Remember, the whole point of anti-Black racism in the USA was to create a large marginalized work force, and this need for the cheapest labour possible has not gone away.

Indeed, and in 19th century Britain it was the Irish working class who occupied that position in the UK. As Marx pointed out, the English workers resented the Irish workers and were usually openly hostile to them because they thought they sold their labour-power too cheaply, and they were too willing to be used as strike-breakers by the employers. The Irish workers, of course, had no choice in the matter, as it was a matter of work for any pittance they could get or starve.
#15269497
wat0n wrote:Well, nobody said racism and classism are mutually exclusive. But, I think one could simply wonder: Members of which group have lives that are more like those of poor African Americans, rich African Americans or poor whites aka white trash?

Indeed so. But this merely tells us that solving America’s problem with racism is necessary but insufficient - America’s problem with classism will remain. It does not tell us that America’s problem with racism is unimportant or can be subsumed into its problem with classism.
#15269503
Potemkin wrote:Indeed so. But this merely tells us that solving America’s problem with racism is necessary but insufficient - America’s problem with classism will remain. It does not tell us that America’s problem with racism is unimportant or can be subsumed into its problem with classism.


At the very least it tells us one can't treat African Americans as a homogeneous group, including when it comes to racism (be it by individuals or by institutions).

This is even truer when taking into account that there is a whole body of anti-discrimination laws. Rich people in general are going to have a far easier time getting legal remedies if their rights are violated than poor people are for obvious reasons.

I wouldn't be surprised if most racial gaps were substantially reduced after controlling for income and other factors.
#15269509
It has been argued that the negative impacts disproportionately experienced by BIPOC people and communities is due to classism and therefore can not be due to systemic racism. This assumes that classism and racism are mutually exclusive.

Since history shows us that classism, capitalism, and racism are heavily intertwined in the USA (and all the other British colonies), we know that merely showing the effects of one does not disprove the effects of the other two. In fact, most of these negative impacts disproportionately experienced by BIPOC people and communities are caused by a mixture of these. Some of course, will only be caused by one or two.

To focus on the situations where a black person has superseded one of these obstacles to a significant degree and assume we can generalize from their experiences is to ignore the fact that the systemic impacts of classism and racism are mutually supporting.

So if you want to get rid of one of these, it means getting rid of the others as well.
#15269521
Pants-of-dog wrote:It has been argued that the negative impacts disproportionately experienced by BIPOC people and communities is due to classism and therefore can not be due to systemic racism. This assumes that classism and racism are mutually exclusive.


This is a straw man.

The claim is not that they cannot be due to systemic racism but that they are not due to systemic racism as some claim.

Pants-of-dog wrote:Since history shows us that classism, capitalism, and racism are heavily intertwined in the USA (and all the other British colonies), we know that merely showing the effects of one does not disprove the effects of the other two. In fact, most of these negative impacts disproportionately experienced by BIPOC people and communities are caused by a mixture of these. Some of course, will only be caused by one or two.


But this does not mean that one cannot distinguish between effects. There are two population groups that allow us to distinguish between the role of class and race: Poor white people and rich nonwhite people.

Pants-of-dog wrote:To focus on the situations where a black person has superseded one of these obstacles to a significant degree and assume we can generalize from their experiences is to ignore the fact that the systemic impacts of classism and racism are mutually supporting.

So if you want to get rid of one of these, it means getting rid of the others as well.


To consider the situations of both rich black people and poor white people in any analyses on this matter provides us with comparison groups that allow us to distinguish between the effects of class and race.

I would also be unsure that getting rid of one would necessarily imply getting rid of the other. They are correlated, yet distinct phenomena. After all, didn't the US actually have lower income inequality in the 1960s and earlier than today, despite the fact that the process of proscribing systemic racism federally was (at best) at its early stages at the time? Doesn't this show an explicitly institutionally racist society can actually have less income inequality than a society where racial discrimination by public and private institutions is legally forbidden and discrimination by individuals is at least heavily punished by civil society?

I will note the statistics on this matter are often pointed out by American progressives themselves to complain about how high socioeconomic inequality - be it in income or wealth - is today. Isn't there a contradiction between belief and claimed facts here?

What I can imagine, though, is that a conscious effort to root institutional discrimination out by legislation and providing the material means for people to get remedies would help in that regard, but addressing social issues like poverty, crime, etc requires their own specialized solutions that specifically target each problem. There could be positive externalities from one to the other (i.e. an anti-poverty strategy may help lower crime, forbidding the government from discriminating against African Americans may make it easier for them to leave poverty) but these are not guaranteed to be large at all (i.e. one cannot guarantee ending poverty would end crime - in fact, this is unlikely to address middle and upper class crime, particularly white collar crime, although violent crime also exists in middle and upper class America despite the stereotypes -, ending governmental discrimination against African Americans does not guarantee they will be able to overcome poverty if there are other causes for it besides ongoing discriminatory treatment by government bodies).

You also mentioned capitalism as a cause somewhere, but it seems whatever equalization taking place under socialism is at best temporary:

Alesina et al (2021) wrote:ABSTRACT

Can efforts to eradicate inequality in wealth and education eliminate intergenerational persistence of socioeconomic status? The Chinese Communist Revolution and Cultural Revolution aimed to do exactly that. Using newly digitized archival records and contemporary census and household survey data, we show that the revolutions were effective in homogenizing the population economically in the short run. However, the pattern of inequality that characterized the prerevolution generation re-emerges today. Almost half a century after the revolutions, individuals whose grandparents belonged to the pre-revolution elite earn 16 percent more income and have completed more than 11 percent additional years of schooling than those from non-elite households. We find evidence that human capital (such as knowledge, skills, and values) has been transmitted within the families, and the social capital embodied in kinship networks has survived the revolutions. These channels allow the pre-revolution elite to rebound after the revolutions, and their socioeconomic status persists despite one of the most aggressive attempts to eliminate differences in the population.


Note the above considers basically class only as the Chinese population has always been largely Han.

One could also consider the USSR, where there was a rather explicit racial/ethnic discrimination and one could consider class as well if one thinks of the old Nomenklatura as a "class", which it seems consisted of former tsarist officials who joined the Communist Party and submitted to its rules. It seems something similar happened in China as well.
#15269625
wat0n wrote:
This is a straw man.

The claim is not that they cannot be due to systemic racism but that they are not due to systemic racism as some claim.



I don't think you're really *listening*, wat0n -- racism and the class divide are *not* mutually exclusive, rather they're *overlapping* and mutually-*reinforcing*.

People who have social-minority status (BIPOC primarily) have typically been *disadvantaged* in their lives by one or the other social-minority demographic that they've been born into, or both.
#15269626
ckaihatsu wrote:I don't think you're really *listening*, wat0n -- racism and the class divide are *not* mutually exclusive, rather they're *overlapping* and mutually-*reinforcing*.

People who have social-minority status (BIPOC primarily) have typically been *disadvantaged* in their lives by one or the other social-minority demographic that they've been born into, or both.


I already addressed this.

No, they are not mutually exclusive but just because they overlap it doesn't mean one can't tell them apart. Hence why it is a good idea to give special consideration to poor whites and rich blacks (or rich nonwhites in general).
#15269650
wat0n wrote:
I already addressed this.

No, they are not mutually exclusive but just because they overlap it doesn't mean one can't tell them apart. Hence why it is a good idea to give special consideration to poor whites and rich blacks (or rich nonwhites in general).



'Special consideration' is difficult to consider here because you're trying to posit a facile *equivalency* between these two particular demographic categories, poor whites and rich blacks / nonwhites.

Please recall that you *accept* a means-testing policy approach -- that would cut *against* the status-quo divide-and-conquer demographic treatment that tends to prevail today.



What I’ve strived for throughout my career is to provide a historical materialist account of race and class, and American society. One of the major problems I combat is the idea of class as culture. Looking back at the first two decades after World War II, one of the most meaningful but damaging interventions that American social scientists made during that period is rendering class invisible by reconstructing it as a category of culture.



Merlin Chowkwanyun [1] and I did an article a few years ago in the Socialist Register that’s a critique of disparitarianism in the social sciences, by which this or that disparity has replaced the study of inequality and its effects. As Walter Benn Michaels [2] said, and as I have said time and time again, if anti-disparitarianism is your ideology, then for you a society qualifies as being just if 1 percent of the population controls 90 percent of the wealth, so long as that within that 1 percent 12 percent or so are black, etc., reflecting their share of the national population. This is the ideal of social justice for neoliberalism. There’s no question of actual redistribution.

What are the stakes that people imagine to be bound up with demonstrating that capitalism in this country emerged from slavery and racism, which are treated as two different labels for the same pathology? Ultimately, it’s a race reductionist argument. What the Afro-pessimist types or black nationalist types get out of it is an insistence that we can’t ever talk about anything except race. And that's partly because talking about race is the things they have to sell.



https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/1 ... d-d20.html
#15269654
ckaihatsu wrote:'Special consideration' is difficult to consider here because you're trying to posit a facile *equivalency* between these two particular demographic categories, poor whites and rich blacks / nonwhites.

Please recall that you *accept* a means-testing policy approach -- that would cut *against* the status-quo divide-and-conquer demographic treatment that tends to prevail today.


Sure, and precisely because of that those comparisons are important. Means testing becomes far easier to justify if it's the best way to close the gaps in opportunities in American society. That's something that one can only hope to figure out by considering those two groups i.e. poor whites and rich nonwhites.
#15269670
Classism and racism do not only overlap but are also mutually supporting each other.

It is difficult to imagine a solution to the existing wide gap in opportunities without discussing dismantling classism and racism, since these two problems both have inequality of opportunities as a necessity.

Consequently, discussing how to address one without the other seems odd.

While I can see how analyzing rich BIPOC communities or poor white communities may help those who want to clarify the differences between the two, any concrete action would require dismantling both classism and racism.
#15269672
This does not explain what I mentioned earlier:

wat0n wrote:To consider the situations of both rich black people and poor white people in any analyses on this matter provides us with comparison groups that allow us to distinguish between the effects of class and race.

I would also be unsure that getting rid of one would necessarily imply getting rid of the other. They are correlated, yet distinct phenomena. After all, didn't the US actually have lower income inequality in the 1960s and earlier than today, despite the fact that the process of proscribing systemic racism federally was (at best) at its early stages at the time? Doesn't this show an explicitly institutionally racist society can actually have less income inequality than a society where racial discrimination by public and private institutions is legally forbidden and discrimination by individuals is at least heavily punished by civil society?

I will note the statistics on this matter are often pointed out by American progressives themselves to complain about how high socioeconomic inequality - be it in income or wealth - is today. Isn't there a contradiction between belief and claimed facts here?

What I can imagine, though, is that a conscious effort to root institutional discrimination out by legislation and providing the material means for people to get remedies would help in that regard, but addressing social issues like poverty, crime, etc requires their own specialized solutions that specifically target each problem. There could be positive externalities from one to the other (i.e. an anti-poverty strategy may help lower crime, forbidding the government from discriminating against African Americans may make it easier for them to leave poverty) but these are not guaranteed to be large at all (i.e. one cannot guarantee ending poverty would end crime - in fact, this is unlikely to address middle and upper class crime, particularly white collar crime, although violent crime also exists in middle and upper class America despite the stereotypes -, ending governmental discrimination against African Americans does not guarantee they will be able to overcome poverty if there are other causes for it besides ongoing discriminatory treatment by government bodies).


Reiterating a claim does not make it stronger.

The "racism" part seems to be done for the most part. It's the income inequality part that seems to need to be worked on, and there are many ways to do so with very different associated costs.
#15269675
If anyone wishes to show a clear and distinct negative impact from classism that is not due to racism that BIPOC people have to deal with, or an issue of racism untouched by classism, or even a concrete example of something useful we can learn from looking at rich BIPOC communities or poor white communities, it would be useful for the discussion.
#15269680
Pants-of-dog wrote:
If anyone wishes to show a clear and distinct negative impact from classism that is not due to racism that BIPOC people have to deal with, or an issue of racism untouched by classism, or even a concrete example of something useful we can learn from looking at rich BIPOC communities or poor white communities, it would be useful for the discussion.



If only there was a way we could somehow *perceive* the relevance here. Perhaps a rudimentary *description*, or 'sketch', would suffice, for each.... Is anyone here a *journalist* or an ethnographer -- !

(grin)
#15269684
Pants-of-dog wrote:If anyone wishes to show a clear and distinct negative impact from classism that is not due to racism that BIPOC people have to deal with, or an issue of racism untouched by classism, or even a concrete example of something useful we can learn from looking at rich BIPOC communities or poor white communities, it would be useful for the discussion.


Sure.

We can learn, from looking at rich BIPOC communities, that affirmative action largely benefits them. For most positions where affirmative action is pursued - particularly government positions -, poor BIPOC need not apply since they generally lack the other objective criteria needed for hiring (e.g. having earned a postgraduate degree), as a result, those are mostly available to those who are rich or upper middle class at least. The only exceptions are those who are very talented and were able to access merit scholarships that are often available specifically for low income children/teens (and sometimes targeting nonwhite ones in particular), which are usually a minority.

On the other hand, by looking at poor white communities we can see what do they have in common with poor BIPOC communities and thereby learn about the common issues faced by both and which would be good to take into account for coming up with an anti-poverty strategy since it's unlikely those are caused by racism (systemic or individual).

ckaihatsu wrote:If only there was a way we could somehow *perceive* the relevance here. Perhaps a rudimentary *description*, or 'sketch', would suffice, for each.... Is anyone here a *journalist* or an ethnographer -- !

(grin)


The relevance is that social policy costs several billion dollars and, for the sake of proper spending of taxpayer money, it is in the taxpayer's interest that they are targeted appropriately.
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